How the World Got Wired · The Day Everything Tipped

The Complicated Part

Now I have to be careful, because this is where the story gets harder to tell honestly.

A lot of adults will tell you that the Netscape IPO was a kind of original sin — the moment when American technology stopped being about building useful things and started being about getting rich. They will say it created a culture of greed that has only gotten worse since. They will point at all the failed dot-com companies, all the ruined retirement accounts, all the founders who walked away with millions while their employees walked away with nothing, and they will say: this is what August 9, 1995 set in motion. Without that day, none of those bad things would have happened.

There is truth to this.

A lot of other adults will tell you that the Netscape IPO was one of the most important productive events in modern economic history. They will say it unleashed an enormous wave of capital — money — into building the actual physical infrastructure of the internet. The cables on the seafloor you read about in Chapter 7. The data centers you’ll read about later. The companies that survived the dot-com crash and went on to do extraordinary things. Amazon. Google. Many others. None of them, these adults will say, would exist without the wave of investor enthusiasm that Netscape unleashed.

There is also truth to this.

Both groups of adults are partly right. The Netscape IPO did both things. It poured an enormous amount of money into useful infrastructure that is still serving you today. It also poured an enormous amount of money into wasteful nonsense that vanished within a few years and took people’s savings with it. It made some young people very rich for reasons that had something to do with their own work and something to do with pure luck — being in the right room at the right time when the bankers came knocking. It also funded the engineers who would build the systems that ran your grandmother’s video.

This is, in fact, the most honest summary I can give you of how much of the modern economy works. It is not all good. It is not all bad. It produces wonders and disasters at the same time, often from the same actions. The kids who eventually grew up to read books like this one have a complicated job: to look at the world as it actually is, to see both the wonders and the disasters clearly, and to decide, when they themselves are grown, what they want to keep and what they want to change.

A simpler version of this story — one where Netscape was either a triumph of capitalism or a betrayal of it — would be easier to tell. I do not think it would be true.

What It Felt Like

I am going to end this chapter with one more small image, because I want you to feel what August 9, 1995 was actually like in the world.

Most people, on that day, did not know it was happening. They went to work. They picked up groceries. They watched their children’s baseball games. They watched the news that evening and saw a short story about a company called Netscape that had just done very well on Wall Street. They might have nodded. They might have turned the channel.

But in certain rooms — in offices in Silicon Valley, in trading floors on Wall Street, in basements where people were already trying to build their own internet companies — the world changed quietly that day. Something became possible that had not been possible before. Some signal was sent that hundreds of thousands of ambitious young people, all over the world, would respond to over the next five years.

If you look at a chart of the United States stock market — the NASDAQ in particular, which is where most technology companies trade — you will see, starting in mid-1995, a line that begins to climb steeply. It climbs and climbs. By the spring of 2000, it has more than tripled.

Then it falls. Hard.

The next two chapters are about that climb, and that fall, and the people who lived through both.

Chapter 11 is about the climb — the years when an entire country, briefly, lost its mind about the internet.

It starts with a sock puppet.

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