Dot.con
The Greatest Story Ever Sold
John Cassidy, a wonderfully
accomplished writer, something rare in this field of comment, has written a deeply
interesting work on the world of finance. He has covered a major recent development, that
of computer technology and the Internet, and extends his subject to some centuries of
optimism, excess and insanity. We can take comfort from the certainty that the most recent
aberration will be better understood than some in the past and our debt will be to John
Cassidy's dot.con. It is the Very best We Will have' JOHN KENNETH galbraith, author of The
Great Crash 1929
Today it seems extraordinary
that just a couple of years ago many intelligent people believed that the marriage of
computers and communications networks would bring eternal peace and prosperity. Now the
Internet bubble has burst. John Cassidy's dot.con sets out to understand why.
The speculative boom of the
1990s wasn't just about young entrepreneurs trying to get rich quick. Everyone was along
for the ride from politicians to pundits, from investment bankers to the
ordinary punter enticed by the prospect of instant wealth. The Internet boom and bust
reflected something about almost all of us, and what we thought about ourselves, as the
twenty-first century dawned.
During this heady period John
Cassidy gained a reputation for consistently intelligent and sceptical reporting on the
Internet economy. His unwavering sense of the dubiousness of the boom, and his pursuit in
interview of all the key individuals involved, from Alan Greenspan down, has proved
amazingly prescient, dot.con brings this tumultuous episode vividly to life and shows how
it was that the most harebrained and impossibly imprudent schemes could once have seemed
so attractive.
John Cassidy has written
extensively on the economy for the Sunday Times and recently as a staff writer for the New
Yorker.
372 pages