The curtain opens in Soho in the early 2000s, after the first dot-com crash but before Google, Apple, and Facebook exploded, when it seemed that New York City, rather than Silicon Valley, might become tech's center of gravity. There, within a few square blocks, Nick Denton's merry band of nihilists at his growing Gawker empire and Jonah Peretti's sunnier team at HuffPost and BuzzFeed were building the foundations of viral internet media. Ben Smith, who would go on to earn a controversial reputation as BuzzFeed's editor in chief, was there to see it, and he chronicles it all. Traffic explores one of the great ironies of our time—the internet, which was going to help the left remake the world in its image, has become the motive force of right populism. People like Steve Bannon and Andrew Breitbart and Chris Poole, the creator of 4chan, all initially seemed like minor characters. But today, any reasonable observer might wonder if the opposite wasn't the case. To understand how we got here, Traffic is essential and enthralling reading.