Net Slaves: True Tales of Working the Web - Softcover

Lessard, Bill; Baldwin, Steve

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0071352430 ISBN 13: 9780071352437

Publisher: McGraw-Hill, 1999

Synopsis

Exposes the dark side of the booming technology industry which has thousands of poorly-paid employees working extended hours in cyber-sweatshops.

About this title

From the Back Cover

"The ultimate corrective to Internet IPO mania." --Entertainment Weekly. "On NetSlaves you won't read about getting rich. Instead you'll read false promises and broken dreams." --Fast Company. "The ultimate chronicle of Net failure." --WIRED News. Yes, the Internet is "HOT." Just ask the workers who've been burned by it. Behind the industry propaganda and media hype are thousands of individuals trying, against the odds, to make a decent living while they keep everything going. In the dark corners of the Web, they labor: a freelancer owed thousands of dollars by a giant corporation; a tech supporter tethered to his tasks by cell phone and beeper 24 hours a day; a "perma-temp" worker, kept by caste from health benefits and a decent wage even after years of full-time work; an "online editor" whose Max Perkins dreams dissolve in mind-numbing chat room censoring or HTML coding; a content provider, pink-slipped as soon as the Web-based start-up she works for starts making a profit. These, then, are the NetSlaves, and their stories are what has been missing from all the gleeful talk of the future of the Web.Based on interviews with workers from across the spectrum of Internet-related jobs, the book offers humorous and not-so-humorous eyewitness accounts of the grueling hours, poor management, dehumanizing pressures and paranoia-inducing stresses faced by the women and men on the e-business frontier. To read it is to enter a shadowy world of Fry Cooks, CyberCops, porno spammers, doomsayers, golddiggers, code-packers and moles. This world isn't the creation of some cyberpunk novel: It's real. These "horror stories" are all true. And this is also true: You don't really know the net until you've met the NetSlaves.

Reviews

Readers who can't bear another glossy magazine profile of Internet IPO kids will welcome this tour through the writhing underbelly of the tech biz. Lessard and Baldwin, who founded a site called www.netslaves.com in 1998, set out to document the depravity and desperation of the Internet economy, which they call the most widely misunderstood business phenomenon of our time. Far from the glamorous world painted by the few Internet winners, the authors contend, the business of technology is largely strapped to the four million or so backs of carpal-tunnel-prone freelancers and real-life Dilberts. To illustrate their point, they provide a guide to the new media caste system, which converts standard industry roles into a hierarchy of "garbagemen," "fry cooks" and "cab drivers." Case studies of disgruntled tech support operators and HTML code writers make for bitterly funny reading. There's cybercop Kilmartin, who burns out after patrolling a Web community for obscene references to goats and blenders, and freelance coder Jane, who was blamed for uploading the wrong verdict to a major O.J. Simpson trial Web site. The sources' names have been changed to protect them from their employers' retribution, but company names are disguised thinly enough to make the book a kind of industry roman ? clef. The billionaire software tyrant "Royster G. Pfeiffer" lords over his Washington-based office campus (which is packed with resentful "perma-temps"), and there's the crash-prone Internet browser developed by "NetScathe." On the whole, this insider's look at the industry offers an amusing antidote to the media's chronic case of Internet hype. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Just in case you thought that Internet IPOs result in instant wealth and fame for everyone involved in the venture, you might want to read this sobering inside look at what really goes on behind the closed doors of cyberspace. Lessard and Baldwin, experienced technology writers (PC Magazine, The Industry Standard) and creators of the netslaves.com site, have written the Information Age equivalent of Studs Terkel's Working. They focus on the realities of the cyber-sweatshop culture of e-commerce, showing that most Internet careers are nasty, brutish, and short. They base their perspective on interviews they conducted in 1998 and 1999 with numerous techies at various levels of the electronic businessAitinerant web freelancers, support technicians, venture capitalists, web commerce speakers, and the CEOs of high-tech Internet companies. The real world of web involvement at these different "levels" is revealed in matter-of-fact discussions. Essential for anyone with eyes glazed over at the prospect of accumulating vast riches from the Internet, this is a good purchase for larger public libraries.ADale F. Farris, Groves, TX
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: McGraw-Hill
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0071352430
• ISBN 13: 9780071352437
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 248