cover image Net Slaves: Tales of Working the Web

Net Slaves: Tales of Working the Web

Bill Lessard. McGraw-Hill Companies, $19.95 (246pp) ISBN 978-0-07-135243-7

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.)