Marisa stayed on. It hurt to lose her partner in crime, but the idea of leaving Word was unimaginable. “It was the fulfillment of every creative dream, and urge, and idea, that I’d ever had,” she says. “To pass that up, I just felt would be like cutting my heart out.”
THE DEATH OF THE WEB AS WE KNOW IT
At the tail end of 1996, Jaime Levy threw her last CyberSlacker party. She went all out for this one, upgrading from her loft to the Clocktower Gallery in Tribeca and asking some of her more illustrious Alley friends to come onstage and “do rants.” As New York avant-garde stalwarts like Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed mingled in the crowd, Nicholas Butterworth, a former punk bassist whose music Web site had been bought by Viacom, wailed for fifteen minutes into the mic. “It’s the death of the Web as we knew it,” he screamed. “It’s over! And wasn’t it good while it lasted? Who was there, who was there in 1995? Reaping it in—the money, the fame, the parties, all of it flowing in. . . . It was beautiful! Everyone here, all my friends, doing creative things with a capital C . . . the dream was to be a media assassin, to be a guerrilla—and to be paid! Well, let me tell you something: you now have a choice. You can be a guerrilla, or you can get paid. You cannot do both.”
Jaime chose to get paid, but she ended up being a guerrilla.
She left her mark on Word. The magazine kept her flash, her “pooper-scooper” interactivity, and her choice hires. Beyond Marisa, there was Yoshi Sodoeka, who filled Jaime’s shoes as art director. Yoshi “was one of these Japanese kids that had come to the United States because he wanted to do punk rock, originally.” Like basically everyone else at Word, he’d never worked in publishing, but he had designed interfaces for kiosks back in Japan. The result was a pop graphic sensibility that earned the magazine its share of copycats and Yoshi his share of lucrative job offers, all of which he declined (“He’s an artist,” Marisa says admiringly). Yoshi was the first to make icons a core element of site design; even today, his art direction holds up.
Word had an office in Midtown, in the Graybar Building above Grand Central Station. Compared to other Silicon Alley workplaces, it was relatively anonymous. “We were essentially artists and bohemians, not trying to be hip,” Marisa remembers. She instinctively mistrusted the playground offices of their peers: all the Ping-Pong tables, beanbags, and fancy conference rooms felt suffocating. Of course, Word was a product of the boom, too. Marisa doesn’t remember if the site even made money, because although its sales department sold ads at around $12,500 a pop in the early days, it largely functioned as a “sexy PR toy” for its parent company.
“For us, the creative team, it was like we were pulling a long scam,” one longtime Word employee, Naomi Clark, explains. Despite Word’s heartfelt authenticity and its experimental design, the site existed “as a sort of trophy wife for these much less glamorous Internet businesses that were in the process of selling infrastructure and T1 lines.” At the height of the bubble, all that really mattered was to generate some healthy interest before an IPO. “Going public was the business model, period,” Marisa concedes, and Icon CMT wanted to “get the killing and get out” just like everyone else. Like many online publishing concerns with no clear revenue model, Word was precarious from the outset.
By the late 1990s, technology investors finally hipped to the fact that although “content is king”—this being the unofficial mantra of Alley types in the early years, so much so that Word staff printed ironic T-shirts reading CONTENT PROVIDER in big block type—the increasing volume of free content on the Web would drive advertising rates into the ground, and nobody was going to pay for subscriptions to digital magazines. Word was brusquely shut down by its parent company in March 1998, prompting a flurry of obituaries. A competing online magazine, Suck.com, pondered its “D. B. Cooper–ish disappearance.” Wired called it the end of an era. But by September, it was back from the dead.
Here’s where the story gets weird. Being a trophy wife on the arm of an infrastructure company was one thing, but the holding company that bought Word for two billion dollars in 1998 made industrial-grade fish meal. “It made so little sense,” Naomi says, and laughs. “They had a slightly misbegotten idea that they could start up a media business, and having some sort of known brand names in the mix would be useful for that.” Such odd bedfellows are less startling in the woozy context of the bubble. Their new owner, Zapata Corporation, was founded as an oil company in Houston in 1953 by a young George Bush before being retooled into a food processing business by a second owner. In the tech bubble, it was reinventing itself once again as zap.com, a Web portal for the content coast. Zapata’s CEO, Avram Glazer, took out full-page ads in the New York Times—ZAP WILL BUY YOUR WEBSITE—and entered into negotiations to purchase thirty. Word was their marquee acquisition, signaling to Alley investors that Zap was a serious Internet company.
Marisa hired back her staff, all the “underachieving subgeniuses who smoked too much pot and took too much acid in high school.” The band was back together. Even Fred the Webmate returned for a second season. In the new installment, he was back at work, too, pacing the halls of a corporate office, working data entry. Visitors could still chat with him, only now the conversations took place while Fred hid in the bathroom, drank Cokes, and did push-ups in the office kitchen. He claimed to be happy and said he’d have a better job soon, but his mood swings were still violent. Maybe Fred would never really get what he wanted.
But on the eve of Y2K, on its last, glorious lap around Silicon Alley, Word did.
ELECTRONIC HOLLYWOOD
In 1998, Jaime Levy was invited back to NYU to give a lecture to students about Electronic Hollywood, the company she’d started a few years after leaving Word. She tells me what she told the university: “I was like, okay, why don’t we call it ‘How to spend a half a million dollars in one year and all I have to show for it is this stupid cartoon’?” She went down to campus “totally depressed, probably between my cold-turkey cleanouts,” with a mind to tell everyone about her mistakes.
The years after Word had been an object lesson in not believing your own hype. Jaime had assumed that when she left the magazine, she’d find another high-paying creative gig, but the landscape had changed. The bankers and investors had really come to town by then, and the cyberpunks were combing their hair and cashing out. Gone were the creative pushers, replaced by people making commercial Web sites, making—and she says this often, relishing it—Tampax dot com. At thirty, Jaime wasn’t precocious anymore. As she tried to scrap together freelance gigs, her annual salary plunged. She borrowed money from her dad for therapy. She spent a year designing a series of dystopian chat rooms based in a post-apocalyptic version of San Francisco, decorating them with images of burned-out tech companies, radioactive burritos, and zombie drug pushers. In a 2000 Dateline profile, she calls it her Kurt Cobain crisis. Then along came that half a million.
She benefited from someone else’s stroke of entrepreneurial success. A friend she’d met back in the Cyber Rag days at an electronics trade show sold his company to Microsoft; newly flush, he invested enough money in Jaime for her to open her own shop, which she named after one of her later floppy disk magazines. Electronic Hollywood was what she called a “production studio for the Internet,” a multimedia agency that produced interactive Web projects, video content, and animations for the highest bidder. It wasn’t a huge company, but the office was a digital kibbutz, a coworking space long before there was a term for it. When clients came in, they’d see twenty or so weirdos in the conference room: friends who rented desks and threw down programming and design help whenever Jaime needed an extra hand. The office was a fake-out, but it worked.
For Jaime and the early true believers, the fake-out always worked because the objective reality of their industry was impossible to pin down. Clear across the country from the Silicon Valley chip pushers, knowing how to code HTML made you a guru, and there was no shortage of corporate clients willing to
pay top dollar to have the Web explained to them. For a 1998 “Silicon Alley Talent Show” at Webster Hall, where a group of the early true believers performed to raise funds for upstart Web projects, Jaime expressed this ongoing hustle in a rap:
Back in the day when new media was new
I could bullshit my employer ’cuz no one had a clue
I was making e-zines on my Mac II
I was totally wired, not like the rest of you . . .
I’m the biggest bitch in Silicon Alley
I’m better than the nerds in Silicon Valley
Bill Gates calls me up when he needs advice
’Cuz I’m Jaime Levy and I’m cold as ice . . .
Now I’m a CEO running the show
I said: now I’m a super HO running the show
Now I’m just waiting for that big IPO
Not long after, she gave her dejected lecture at NYU, having gone from a braggadocious CEO to a depressed startup founder in less than a year. In Silicon Alley, ultimately, even the biggest bitches weren’t impervious to the market.
How do you spend half a million dollars in one year, anyway? You start with five hundred thousand dollars in venture capital. You hire your brother. You hire your ex-boyfriend. You sign a five-year lease on an office space with a T1 line—an expensive, high-speed Internet connection. You hire your friends. You rent desks in the office to even more friends, cheap, in exchange for help on projects here and there. Every other startup in Silicon Alley is gunning for a big-money IPO or making Web sites for banks, but you focus on content. You pick up some commercial projects on the side, making interactive toys for companies like Kraft, Tommy Hilfiger, and Bounty. But all your real effort goes into your pet project, the thing you think will pull you out of the tech bubble: a sixteen-episode Flash cartoon series. Because you used to throw a great party by the same name, you call it CyberSlacker.
CyberSlacker is a semiautobiographical cartoon about an East Village hacker chick. In three-minute episodes, it tells the continuing adventures of a peroxide-blonde misanthrope named Jaime—“but I go by CyberSlacker online”—as she navigates the surreal New York tech scene. In one episode, CyberSlacker tries to get a programming job. First, she calls IBM, where Jaime worked for a year in 1993, but the milquetoast nerd on the other end of the line gives her the creeps. Next she calls MTV, where a spiky-haired bro answers the phone: “Welcome to MTV’s online spankin’ new media division-aro, you ready to party?” Finally, she tries a Web development company, Blowfish, a thinly veiled reference to the hotshot Alley startup Razorfish. “I’m just looking for a job somewhere normal,” she tells the secretary. “Someplace where everybody’s not in some new media Silicon Alley trendy freak-out.”
Jaime recorded the voice-over for CyberSlacker herself, and the series is so specifically referential to New York’s technology community in the late 1990s that it’s become a Rosetta Stone for people like me. At Blowfish, stock prices spool along the walls, and even the receptionist evangelizes about all the dollars looking for a home online. Everyone in the office wears matching Steve Jobs mock turtlenecks. The CEO yammers random Internet buzzwords. He thrusts a container of the company’s “secret sauce” into her face: it’s “Blowfish’s own pioneering broadband solution-oriented end-to-end flavor enhancement to spice up the Internet,” he says. But CyberSlacker sees that the emperor is naked. Her retort: “It looks like a jar of salsa on top of an old PalmPilot.” She smashes the secret sauce and goes on an anti-capitalist tirade.
For the early true believers, the Alley obsession with making money was beginning to feel offensive on a spiritual level. After Jaime’s own hot flash of entrepreneurial fever, she learned not to trust anyone who chose a quick buck over interesting work. She turned down a one-third stake in Razorfish in 1993; it went public in 1999 and was worth $1.8 billion, employing nearly two thousand people in fifteen offices around the world and wanting so little for work that it sometimes fired clients for not being cool enough to be represented by the agency. Their slogan was “Everything that can be digital will be.”
Things did not go so well at Electronic Hollywood. The overhead was too expensive, and Jaime quickly realized that she should never have hired her friends. She eventually had to fire her own brother, who’d moved from the West Coast to work for her. Her ex called Electronic Hollywood’s investor to tell him personally that Jaime was smoking pot in the office. “Everyone else either quit or turned against me,” she said. “We pissed away almost all the money.” But Jaime held on to the CyberSlacker cartoon as her potential ticket out of the Alley’s trendy freak-out. She wanted to have something to show for all that money. She was certain she could take CyberSlacker to television. In the echo chamber of the Alley, Jaime plugged her ears, and looked for the exit.
SMALLEST VIOLIN FOR THE FUCKING CYBERKIDS
Jaime never did get that big IPO, and the CyberSlacker cartoon didn’t make it to television. To her great misfortune, Jaime founded her company on the eve of the stock market crash. Not long after rapping about being the “biggest bitch in Silicon Alley,” Jaime felt the air change. “Something was coming to a head,” she remembers. “It had already been too many years of too much money for no business model, no return on investment.” In late March 2001, the financial newspaper Barron’s ran a story listing two hundred Internet companies running out of money, and within a month, the market was losing between one and three hundred points a day. On March 12, 2001, the NASDAQ dropped below 2,000 points, almost a year to the day from its all-time peak of 5,048.
The cover of the Silicon Alley Reporter that month said it all: a black-and-white photo of the Hindenburg, consumed by flames. The party was definitively over. “Within two months,” says Jaime, “everybody fired everybody.” Pseudo, the live-streaming service that had bankrolled Josh Harris’s lavish parties, shut down, leaving 175 employees to wander dazed into the light of day; a former art director, quoted in the New York Times, said, “We ate from the trough of the venture capitalist pigs . . . now I’m crawling back to the corporate dog bowl.” Razorfish, the Web design agency Jaime had satirized in her CyberSlacker cartoon, didn’t fare any better: as the company’s stock teetered on the brink of delisting, Razorfish ousted its founders, and a sociologist visiting its Soho offices in 2001 compared it to “one of those tombs built for Chinese emperors,” with hundreds of empty office chairs like “rows of terra-cotta soldiers.”
Electronic Hollywood cleared out its soldiers, too, leaving only Jaime and her office manager, Maria. Their main equity was the office space itself: with six months left on the lease, Jaime needed the $20,000 deposit back if she was going to have any chance of surviving the crash. She booted the cyberpunk squatters and moved Electronic Hollywood to a small room in the back, renting out the rest of the building. “This is going to be our game plan for the next six months,” they told each other. “Just survival. Keep this small space, which is all we need.” But there was no work, Jaime was burned out, and Electronic Hollywood was down to one client. She and Maria committed to finishing off the lease and moving on with dignity.
The money had never been real, and now it really wasn’t. The crash turned multimillion-dollar stock holdings into worthless paper; the big Web design firms, Razorfish and Agency, lost 90 percent of their value as it became clear to investors that having a Web site was not equivalent to having a business model. Every company doing business or making content for the Web was fighting for its life.
Marisa Bowe saw the crash coming a mile away. Being from the Midwest, she’d lived through the collapse of the steel industry. For her, being part of the breathless atmosphere of the bubble was a rush precisely because she knew it would pop—it was like being on the inside of history. Her two favorite novels, Guy de Maupassant’s Bel Ami and Honoré de Balzac’s Lost Illusions, take place in Gilded Age France, and to be living through such a folly herself felt like a crazy stroke of luck. “Normally someone like me w
ould be on the outside just reading about it in the newspaper,” she says, “but through a weird combination of circumstances I actually knew people who were getting rich, and just to be on the inside of it was like living in one of those novels that I loved. It was just incredible.”
Jaime Levy didn’t take it so well. The crash represents a hard line in her life of hustle, bombast, and creative entrepreneurship. When the Alley fell, so did the community that had forged and made credible her reputation. The print media outlets that had hastened the rise of the dot-com kids with breathless profiles vaulting them to celebrity status caught none of them on their way back down. The fallout was brutal. The big talk, the parties, and the flash that had defined the excitement of the boom suddenly looked like so much excess—and the early true believers, with their fast money and promises of a boundless information future, like charlatans.
And then, like a kick in the guts: 9/11.
People think 9/11 was one day. “That’s bullshit,” Jaime says. “It was one entire year, every single day, walking outside your apartment in the East Village and there’s like, a family posting signs: ‘Have you seen my mom?’” There were “obituaries every day, people walking around in gas masks.” The reality-altering scale of the attack didn’t just make Jaime’s problems seem irrelevant—it made them seem petty, even cruel. “Smallest violin for the fucking cyberkids who all of a sudden aren’t getting paid money to fucking have sushi parties,” she says. “Three thousand people lost their lives, including firemen, and the city’s covered in smoke.” There could be no greater reality check.
As one historian put it, the collapse of the city’s great monuments, “coming after the collapse of its grandest illusions, had the epic quality of myth.” It crushed the soul of New York and poisoned those who rose to help the helpless. It damaged nearly thirty million square feet of office space and cost 138,000 jobs, sending the city’s economy into a tailspin—by 2003, unemployment in New York would hit a staggering 9.3 percent. For many, it was the unequivocal end of the road. At thirty-four, Jaime said good-bye to Electronic Hollywood and moved back to Los Angeles. She got an apartment in Silverlake and a car. She started over. The stink of the crash was on her, and when she started applying for jobs again, she omitted from her résumé her tenure as the CEO of a dot-com. Instead, she told interviewers that she’d been a front-end designer at her own company.
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