Net Slaves: True Tales of Working the Web

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

"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.