Totally Wired

The story of the dotcom bubble, its tumultuous crash, and the visionary pioneer at its epicentre...
The Social Network meets Hammer of the Gods via Warhols FactoryIndependent
Effervescent...vivid...this is a book whose time has comeSunday Times

One morning in February 2001, Josh Harris woke to the certain knowledge that he was about to lose everything. The man Time magazine called The Warhol of the Web was now reduced to the role of helpless spectator as his personal fortune dwindled from 85 million dollars…to 50 million…to nothing. In the space of a week. If the mania attending those events is hard to recall, its because when the crash came, the dreams and expectations of those surreal few years were swept away with near Biblical inclemency. More than a decade later, they seem shrouded in a kind of pre-Millennial mist; might never have happened. How easy to forget that at the end of 1999, the world seemed to be spinning off its axis as a new one evolved before our eyes, with anything imaginable seeming to be possible, in real time...

In his bestselling book Moondust, Andrew Smith looked at the lives of the nine remaining Moonwalkers, how their exploits helped shape an era and how that era left its mark on them. In Totally Wired, he goes in search of the truth about one of the most extraordinary and mysterious events of the 20th century, the dotcom bubble of the 1990s, and draws a direct line from there to where we are now.

A brilliant exploration of madness and genius in the early days of the webGuardian