Totally Wired

The dotcom bubble, its tumultuous crash and the visionary pioneer at its epicenter.

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 almost nothing. In the space of a week.

During the mid-1990s a group of young people found themselves lords of a new realm called cyberspace. In the ensuing online web-rush all rules of sound finance were abandoned and the unthinkable appeared to be happening: twenty-somethings were taking over. And unlike the imagined youth revolutions of the 1950s, Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, this one was remaking society for real.

But no. Three months into the new millennium investors, as if waking from a trance, looked down and panicked and in one of the most spectacular financial crashes ever seen, fled the dotcoms until the entire sector had simply...vanished. Three trillion dollars was lost to the economy in what became the signature event of the 1990s, while the dotcommers melted away to nowhere, apparent victims of their own hubris and greed.

The internet was a joke. Was over. Those five weird years might never have happened. Or had there been more to them than met the eye?

In his international bestseller 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.

Author: Andrew Smith

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Released Date: 2012

ISBN: 9781847374493