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Hello! Welcome to my first book review. This will likely go live while I am at HOPE XV (the 2024 Hackers On Planet Earth conference), which I am enjoying so much. I'll definitely write a post about it once it's all over, but suffice to say I will have a lot of stickers, merch, etc to show for it :) I've also been reading a lot of great books lately, so if I have time, I'll upload another review soon. On to my review for How The Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone by Brian McCullough!
This book has a great two-in-one effect: if you are under the age of thirty, you'll appreciate the author's attention to detail and writing ability when discussing topics like the dot-com bubble or the emergence of Netscape. If you're any older than that... you'll still appreciate this, but seeing McCullough ascribe the word 'history' to things you saw when surfing the web in your friend's dad's computer room in 2003 might make you feel a little dismayed.
In any case, as someone who's twenty-one, I really liked this book. I am too young to remember Netscape, crazy dot-com IPOs, or Amazon as a bookstore, and seeing how the Internet has grown and evolved is deeply interesting to me. Surprisingly, the main theme of this book is not the technology developed during this time, but the wider mentality of Internet users and investors: the great rush towards something new, the rapid and colossal breakthroughs and failures. McCullough does a very fine job at curating and presenting historical events to show how the functionality and culture of the Internet has not only fundamentally changed, but has done so multiple times in its young history.
Highlights? The writing. McCullough is an expert at walking the delicate balance between quirky pop culture fluff and dense esotericism, both of which could have described this account in the hands of a less-skilled author. In particular, his chapter on the dot-com bubble in the context of the American stock market in the 1980s-2000s is so compelling and I would recommend this book for that section alone. I also thought that McCullough's section on eBay was great-- his discussion on founder Pierre Omidyar's libertarian politics and eBay's early user base of collectors of niche items was a great vehicle for describing the demographics and philosophy of the Internet at that time.
Misses? Only the last chapter, which recounts the invention of the iPhone. The issue comes from Walter Isaacson's 2011 biography of Steve Jobs, which is as definitive and comprehensive as any book on iPhone-era Apple or Jobs could get. Between the lack of new information and the somehow less strong writing compared to other sections, this chapter feels like a retelling of Isaacson's book. It's not bad, but also not nearly as interesting as the rest of the book, so it is a shame that this was the last historical event McCullough chose to recount.
Mixed feelings? This book was published in 2018, which shows in the book's only slightly wary techno-optimism. This is the real two-in-one of "How the Internet Happened": it is a well-researched account of how the Internet has both exhibited and hugely affected human behaviour since the early 1990s, and it is also a product of its time that inadvertently reveals how we and the Internet have changed since 2018. I would love it if McCullough published a new edition with discussions on social media, decentralised platforms, and the pandemic, but I also worry about what it would reveal about our culture: how we have become more cynical and more pessimistic so quickly. Until that edition comes out, I will reread "How the Internet Happened" and watch again as the world moves fast, breaks things, and gains new connections.