Andrew Smith - Totally Wired: The Rise and Fall of Josh Harris and the Great Dotcom Swindle

Copyright 2012 by Andrew Smith

Cover photograph: Neil Emmerson/Getty images

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First published in Great Britain in 2012
by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, A CBS Company

Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America

First Grove Atlantic paperback edition: March 2019

ISBN 978-0-8021-2934-5
eISBN 978-0-8021-4697-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

Black Cat
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011

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For H C E

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are

Bright Lights, Big City
Jay McInerny

T he last time I saw Josh Harris, he was on his way to Vegas to try his hand at professional poker. By this time Totally Wired was written, and I knew him well enough to understand both why he loved the game and why what one ex-colleague called his strange juxtaposition of a personality made him so good at it. Nonetheless, six months later a collection of former employees swirled together like an online dust devil to bail him out of rent arrears at the flop house he lived in, after a losing streak threatened to pitch him into the street. I marveled first that former subordinates cared to do this so long after their often complex entanglements with the man they all just called Josh, then again at how little cowed he was by the experience; the way he was back at the table within a week, peppering my inbox with amused reports that read more like scenes from Arthurian legend than missives from a grubby casino on The Strip. I wondered if anyone at those card tables had the faintest notion of who they were sitting next to or how he came to be there. Then I wondered if anyone, anywhere, really understood this man at all.

When we next spoke I asked Harris a question I had framed in a variety of ways before: Did he ever regret not having been more covetous of his money?

No, never. Not once, he answered without even a hint of hesitation.

Really Josh? Really, I said.

No. All part of the process.

And the funny thing is in that moment, when Josh had divested himself of almost everything and his prophesies about our blind lurch into cyberspace sounded unhinged or redundant to most, I believed him unreservedly for the first time. This was not because he had reached rock bottomwho could know where that might be for Josh, or even what it would look like? Rather, it was because the rule of thumb in his world had always been that the more improbable something appeared, the more likely it was to prove true, and as the new millennium gathered pace I noticed this principle applying more and more disquietingly to my own world. By now Id realized that while the one-time dotcom impresario could sound willfully crazy around the margins, he never lied and was almost never wrong about the steadily more bizarre relationship between our virtual and corporeal selves, which he saw with the clarity of an alien.

As I write, the twenty-first century has been shaped by a quartet of great derangements. The still-enigmatic Dotcom Crash of MarchApril 2000 seemed simultaneously to mark the true end of the twentieth century and intimate that its trajectory hadnt been what we thought. Sixteen months later, 9/11 confirmed that this febrile new epoch would not be the tech-directed march toward distributed affluence, cultural connection, and data-driven rationality presumed through the 1990s.

When the economic sky fell in circa 2008, no one who had watched the increasingly occult dance of capital and technology with anything like critical distance should have been surprised. But in a debt-fuelled, novelty-distracted fog of simulated wealth, few were able to maintain such a distance. Eight further years on, the electoral paroxysms of 2016 implied the inception of an entirely new reality, whose origin and impact we are still straining to explainor even describe.

The Dotcom Crash, 9/11, the banking crisis, and election of Donald Trump: this book was researched and written (and first published in the UK) over a period of five years between the third and fourth of these upheavals. I imagined it was about the first. In preparing for this US publication, however, something unexpected happened: as my editors and I examined the text with an eye to updates we quickly saw that post-2016 it read as a completely different work. If Totally Wireds ostensible charge was to fathom one of the most perplexing events of recent memorythe calamitous and near-wholesale destruction of Web 1.0it was now clear that the specter of 2016 (or something like it) haunted every word and was why the Crash of 2000 had seemed important in the first place. Here was what the outlier Josh Harris had been trying to warn of, latterly with me trailing in his mischievous, paranoid wake. As the decade unfolded, it became clear how much even he hadnt fathomed.