After the first dot-com crash but before Google, Apple, and Facebook exploded, it seemed that New York City, rather than Silicon Valley, might become tech’s center of gravity. There, 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. This book 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 all initially seemed like minor characters in the narrative in which Nick and Jonah, were the stars. But today, anyone might wonder if the opposite wasn’t the case.