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Title: Netslaves 2.0: Tales of Surviving the Great Tech Gold Rush by Bill Lessard, Steve Baldwin, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Allowrth Press ISBN: 1-58115-284-1 Publisher: Allworth Press Pub. Date: March, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.91 (11 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Making me glad I missed it
Comment: I was in college during the madness of the dot-com boom, just aching to be part of the stock-option party. By the time I left, the bust was beginning and things were seemingly all down hill - I felt as though I had missed something magical.
After reading Netslaves 2.0, I realized something. I was an idiot. Bill Lessard and Steve Baldwin have removed looked past the facade of of 24 year-old CEOs and free-money stock-options and dreams of reinventing the world and revealed just how miserable life at the average dot-com was. The book is hillariously funny, but its comedy in the Mel Brooks sense: "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall down a manhole and die." The lives and experiences of these dot-com worker-bees while on the surface had me laughing out loud, they also anecdotally reveal the systemic problems of the cheap-money craze between 1998 and 2000.
Rating: 5
Summary: Even The Losers Get Lucky Sometimes
Comment: NetSlaves 2.0: Tales of Surviving the Great Tech Gold Rush, is a must read for anyone who has risked it all in the hopes of building a better life, only to fall flat on their ... Thankfully, this book is not about 24 year old dot com millionaires crying about their lost fortunes. As Tom Petty says, "Baby, even the losers get lucky sometimes," and this is a collection of stories about hard working underdogs that are worth caring about.
Charles is a young ambitious college student who loves the idea of creating an online zine. Instead of handing out a Xeroxed packet of articles to his 10 closest friends, he knows that the Internet will give him a whole new audience of readers from around the world. His passion even leads to a job at the ultimate destination for tech-nerd-intellectuals, Wired. Unfortunately Charles falls in love with the wrong girl at the same time that the Internet bubble is bursting, so Charles must find his inner resolve in order to survive physically and emotionally.
What may make NetSlaves 2.0 a frustrating read for some is the fact that most of the characters in these stories do not find a happy ending. That may leave readers wondering why the authors have bothered to bring these stories to the page at all. The reason may be that Bill Lessard and Steve Baldwin simply want these stories to be heard. They have also chosen to use a mix of fact and fiction when telling these stories which may add to this frustration. The reader is sometimes left wondering how much of each story is fact or fiction.
NetSlaves 2.0 rings true because it highlights the willful ignorance that many had as they jumped on the Internet bandwagon. One of the least sympathetic characters in the book is Gene. Gene is a 12-year Proctor and Gamble marketing man who is on the brink of a mid-life crisis. Instead of buying a red Porsche and spending his evenings down at the strip club, Gene decides to pin all of his hopes on the Internet. It seems obvious from the start that his dreams of getting rich quick will never come to pass but it's still painful to see him lose his wife, kids, and house. Gene does manage to stumble upon redemption as he comes to accept his fate and bounce back to minor entrepreneurial success.
The most compelling story in the book is the Matrix-esque tale of Vincent who finds himself in possession of something extremely valuable to his employers. The drama unfolds as the company resorts to illegal tactics in order to protect their corporate assets. Vincent is standing on strong legal ground, as he tries to protect what is clearly his intellectual property, but the ultimate challenge will be coming up with the money to fight a company with nearly limitless legal resources.
Netslaves 2.0 is a quick history of how the Internet debacle occurred and the lives that were changed in the process. Bill Lessard and Steve Baldwin chronicle the daily lives of some of the individual net slaves while also looking at a larger world that includes paranoid AOL execs pawing through employee emails in order to silence rumors that could hurt the company's bottom line. It is an enjoyable ride from the height of dot com mania to the crash of economic reality.
Rating: 5
Summary: Considers the lasting impact of the Internet demise
Comment: The dot.com rise and fall has been examined numerous times from the standpoint of economic impact; but its human cost has been left behind. What became of American tech industry workers in the fallout of the industry? NetSlaves 2.0 considers the lasting impact of the Internet demise on the workers, their aspirations, and others.
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Title: NetSlaves: True Tales of Working the Web by Bill Lessard, Steve Baldwin ISBN: 0071364803 Publisher: McGraw-Hill Trade Pub. Date: 30 September, 2000 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: 21 Dog Years : Doing Time @ Amazon.com by Mike Daisey ISBN: 0743225805 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 17 June, 2002 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
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Title: F'd Companies: Spectacular Dot-Com Flameouts by Philip J. Kaplan ISBN: 0743228626 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: April, 2002 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: Starving to Death on $200 Million by James Ledbetter ISBN: 1586481290 Publisher: PublicAffairs Pub. Date: 07 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: The Perfect Store: Inside eBay by Adam Cohen ISBN: 0316164933 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: 03 June, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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