In the beginning was the internet

"A raucous, whimsical, sad and very funny book . . . Totally Wired is a fascinating account of what could have been, what briefly was, what almost lasted."

Wall Street Journal

"Exhilarating . . . One of the most fascinating portraits of a startup founder in recent memory . . . Totally Wired examines just how thin the line is between brilliance and madness"

Shelf Awareness

"The decline and fall of the first iteration of the internet, told with verve and style . . . A valuable history for tech heads, entrepreneurs, and trend watchers alike."

Kirkus Reviews

"A brilliant exploration of madness and genius in the early days of the web"

The Guardian

"Dark and compelling. The counter culture tremor from which the social media earthquake erupted."

Daily Mail

"Effervescent and vivid. This is a book whose time has come."

The Sunday Times

"Fascinating . . . a slice of life never to be repeated, peppered with enjoyable anecdotes."

The Observer

"Essential and thrilling . . . a vivid, engaging portrait of a gigantic, contradictory, infuriating character who helped create the present . . . A brilliant, funny, important book."

Frank Cottrell Boyce, 24 Hour Party People

"In his first book, Moondust, Smith interviewed the nine astronauts who had walked on the moon; here he talks to the early internet pioneers to piece together another pivotal moment in human history."

Financial Times

"The first great analysis of the internet era."

The National

"Telling the story of the rise of the internet and its all-pervasive influence on our culture, what emerges is both utterly absorbing and highly entertaining."

The Oldie

"A high-energy romp through the digital boom and bust that has lessons for today . . . The Social Network meets Hammer of the Gods via Warhol's Factory."

The Independent

"Fascinatingly weird . . . terrific."

The Guardian

The wild rise and crazy fall of the internet 1.0 . . .

One morning in February 2001, internet pioneer and entrepreneur Josh Harris woke to 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 fortune dwindled from 85 million dollars, to 50 million, to nothing, all in the space of a week.

Harris had been New York’s first net millionaire, a maverick genius so preternaturally adapted to the fluid virtualities of the new online world that he saw it with a clarity almost no one else did. He founded the city’s first dotcom, Pseudo.com, and paved the way for a cadre of net-savvy twentysomethings who rode a wave of tech euphoria to unimagined wealth and fame for five wild years, then losing it just as suddenly to the Great Dotcom Crash of 2000. Long before the crash, however, Harris’s view of where the web would take us had darkened. He used his wealth to underwrite a series of lurid social experiments aimed at illustrating his worst fear: that the internet would warp the fabric of society until we all had no choice but to become...him.

In Totally Wired, Andrew Smith seeks to unravel one of the most opaque and mysterious episodes of the twentieth century, in which the seeds of our current reality were sown. The narrative moves from a compound in the wild south of Ethiopia, through New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas, London and Salt Lake City; from the dawn of the web to the present, taking in the rise of retro-truth, troll society and the unexpected origins of the net itself, as our world has grown uncannily to resemble the one Harris predicted—and had urged us to reject.