Totally Wired

The Rise and Fall of Josh Harris and The Great Dotcom Swindle

By: Andrew Smith

Narrated by: Adam Lofbomm

Josh Harris had been New York's first net millionaire. He founded the city's first dotcom, Pseudo.com, and paved the way for a cadre of net-savvy 20-somethings to follow, riding a wave of tech euphoria to unimagined wealth and fame for five years, before losing it all in the great dotcom crash of 2000. Long before then, however, Harris's view of where the web would take us had darkened, and he began a series of lurid social experiments aimed at illustrating his worst fear: that the internet would soon alter the very fabric of society - cognitive, social, political, and otherwise.

In Totally Wired, award-winning author and journalist Andrew Smith seeks to unravel the opaque and mysterious episodes of the 20th-century dotcom craze, in which the seeds of our current reality were sown. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Harris and the former pioneers who worked alongside him in downtown Manhattan's "Silicon Alley", the narrative moves from a compound in the wild south of Ethiopia, through New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas, London, and Salt Lake City, Utah; 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 evade.

©2012 Andrew Smith (P)2019 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

As an old friend of Josh's this is not too shabby

As someone who worked with Josh for years at Jupiter and was a good friend of his back in the day, honestly this wasn't too bad. There was some minor embellishment to the stories here and there, and the "Launder My Head" video was actually made in 1990-1991, not 1993 (I was one of the talking heads and voiceover people in it so I know) but overall this is an interesting and good account of the runup and breakdown of Pseudo and a pretty good account of what was going on with Josh during that era. Personally, I can say nothing but good about the guy though between 1998-2002 things got a bit... weird.

The start of the social media experience online.

If you ever want to figure out the start of the streaming reality matrix we have put ourself in the. Read this book. Josh Harris is the social onine founding father, the legend no one talks about.