Do you remember FuckedCompany.com? More to the point, have you visited it recently? When it launched in May 2000, just after the dot bomb detonated, Philip Kaplan's "dot.com deadpool" quickly became the place to survey the wreckage and count the cost.
It's not hard to see why. It ran some great stories, it was funny and it felt authentic: Kaplan was/is a programmer and the site was powered by his and his users' outrage at what the "suits" were doing to the net and the willingness of the media and public to buy the dotcom myth.
He started to get as much media coverage as his targets, becoming a poster boy for the times (forget the dotcom kids, say hello to the notcom kid). He wasn't the only one. Just as there were Wall Street analysts who became stars by boosting the dotcoms (Henry Blodgett, Mary Meeker), so there were financial pundits who became celebrities by aggressively marking down e-commerce companies.
In June 2000, Ravi Suria, a bond analyst at Lehman Brothers in New York, suggested Amazon.com would run out of money in six months and became a media darling in the process. FC got so much favourable press, you can't help wondering whether Kaplan wasn't tempted to cut and run for an initial public offering.
That was never really a possibility. But he did imitate his dotcom targets in one way. He scored a book deal. F'd Companies - Spectacular Dot-com Flameouts (published by Simon and Schuster) is out in the US and due here in August. Reading the book reminded me that it was ages since I'd checked out FuckedCompany. It's still the same, sort of, but more than a little beside the point now. The book, however, still rocks, as Kaplan might say.
In slangy prose that mixes short sentences, SCREAMING CAPITALS, relentless sarcasm and lots of masturbation jokes, it profiles a selection of failed dotcoms, detailing why they crashed and how much they lost. The figures are mind-boggling, as are some of the ideas. As Kaplan asks, who really believed that people would trade in their dollars for a "stupid-ass" alternative currency called Flooz? F'd Companies is one of the better post-dotcom books.
Its simple structure (basically a list of failed net companies) builds up a sense of the madness of the times. Read it alongside the sober economic analysis of John Cassidy's Dot.Con and you'll get a picture of the dotcom era. Nevertheless, F'd Companies leaves a sour aftertaste. Despite Kaplan's scorn for dotcom rip-offs, he's up to something similar himself (his book repackages and resells material freely available on his site).
But it's more than that. You can't help feel ing that Kaplan is wasting himself a little. In the margins of his book, he hints that he really wanted to do something interesting online. But he got sidetracked. Fair enough. The dotcoms were an inviting target. But why is he still there taking potshots?
Why is FuckedCompany.com still going? One reason might be that people find it so difficult to get some perspective where the net is concerned, so there's still a market for his schtick. In the late 90s, they believed that everything dotcom was bound to make money, despite evidence to the contrary. During the past two years, people have swung the other way, believing that everything connected to the net is bound to fail, ignoring all evidence to the contrary.
Wall Street isn't immune to this. Recently, the New Yorker's James Surowiecki pointed out that Ravi Suria's gloomy predictions about Amazon have generally been proved wrong but that doomsayers get an easy ride because they fit with the mood of the times, the feeling that all dotcoms are, to quote Kaplan, fucked companies. But surely it's time to get over this. Kaplan's funny, but rather self-indulgent, book ought to signal the end of the line for notcom negativity. The truth is, for all their criminal wastefulness, the dotcoms did do something good. They helped turn the net into a basic fact of life. Big deal, Kaplan might say. And he'd be right. But that's the point. The net is no longer the greatest thing ever, or the worst thing ever.
It's just there, a boring everyday reality. That's a good thing, because no one now thinks they can get rich quick online. So the financial scam artists and the media whores are going to go elsewhere. And the field is clear for people who want to be there, for the geeks and hackers to get on with things quietly and do something that isn't motivated by the desire to turn a quick buck.
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