cover image DIGITAL HUSTLERS: Living Large and Falling Hard in Silicon Alley

DIGITAL HUSTLERS: Living Large and Falling Hard in Silicon Alley

Casey Kait, Stephen Weiss, . . HarperCollins, $26 (256pp) ISBN 978-0-06-620923-4

"Oh my God, what happened?" laments a key figure in this informative account of the rise and fall of startup millionaires in "Silicon Alley." Consisting almost entirely of interviews with the digerati of New York City's version of Silicon Valley, this oral history by dot-com veterans Kait and Weiss (of Salon.com and RedFilter.com, respectively) opens circa 1995, when only geeks had e-mail and skeptics believed that the Internet would go the way of the CB radio. But soon dot-com exploits landed on the front page and money started to rain down from venture capitalists. Perhaps the culmination of the mania was the legendary three-month bash for New Year's Eve 2000 thrown by Pseudo.com's Josh Harris (a manic figure who emerges as the Caligula of Silicon Alley). But on April 17, 2000—a date that the dot-commers speak of the way their parents refer to the Kennedy assassination—the NASDAQ began its downward spiral. Within a few months, TheGlobe.com began paying its employees with free pizza instead of cash; other startups dissolved their Web sites. It's a sad story that the wistful dot-commers describe as a Garden of Eden–type morality tale: in the beginning the Internet was pure and good, then it was invaded by capitalists who corrupted it for their own sinister designs. Kait and Weiss astutely avoid passing judgment on such beliefs (even when a colleague is admiringly described as the "Henry James of Silicon Alley" and another claims he'll be bigger than Andy Warhol). A good read despite the naivete and arrogance of its dramatic personae, Kait and Weiss's book provides a timely elegy for an extravagant, dying culture. (July)