My love affair with technology began at an early age. On my seventh birthday, my parents bought me a second-hand ZX Spectrum and, in a foretaste of my life to come, I immediately set about learning how to use it to get attention. It’s a sign of how rapidly technology develops that my crappy Spectrum, with its 48k of memory, already had 12k more storage power than the computer that had guided the Apollo 11 moon landing eighteen years earlier¹ With power like that, there seemed to be no limit to what I could do.

While my other computer-owning peers would sit for hours while their tape drives squawked away loading ‘Manic Miner’ or ‘Bubble Buster’ I was more fascinated by learning to write my own programs. The first of these consisted of just two lines of code² that made the word ’shit’ appear again and again on my screen, to the huge amusement of my friends and the irritation of my parents, who obviously had more educational motives for bringing a computer into the house.

From that day on, the possibilities offered by technology to both subvert the norm and get attention had me hooked.

Years later, at secondary school, I convinced my English teacher, Mr Coen, to teach me desktop publishing, ostensibly to work on the official school magazine, but in reality to produce an alternative underground version – complete with less than flattering articles about teachers and fellow pupils and distributed via the publicly accessible shared hard drive that was supposed to be used for collaborative coursework. That particular stunt got me banned from the school computer room for half a term.

And then, in 1997, I discovered the Internet.

Throughout history, every fame-hungry media dickhead has found his preferred medium for pursuing fame and wealth (in that order). For Tony Parsons – and Hitler, for that matter – it was books. William Randolph Hearst chose newspapers. Don Imus and Howard Stern preferred radio. For Nick Griffin it’s inflammatory leaflets. For Tracy Emin it’s art. Or at least an approximation of it. With the Internet I had found mine – and it was a doozy.

Of course, every time a new medium is invented there will be people who claim that it’s more revolutionary than anything that has come before; that it’s going to change the world as we know it; that – to use a wanky phrase beloved of marketers – it represents a ‘paradigm shift’.

Sometimes that’s undeniably true: Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press, for example, turned books from luxury goods beyond the reach of all but the very wealthiest of men into the ultimate mass-market educational tool.³ And then there was television – which brought images of the farthest reaches of the world into every living room.

But no matter how revolutionary the medium, there was always the same barrier to entry for anyone hoping to take advantage of it for the pursuit of fame and wealth: distribution.

Thanks to Gutenberg, anyone with a brain and access to a basic printing press could write and print a book, or publish an underground newspaper or pamphlet. Increasingly affordable and lightweight video technology enabled almost anyone to make a film, even if it was just a grainy home video of their dog on a skateboard (awwwww… ) or, more usually, a grainy home video of them having sex with their significant other (ewwwww… ). Your friendly neighbourhood electronics shop could sell you everything you needed to set up your own pirate radio station… and yet…

…and yet…

…and yet…

Getting your book or skateboarding dog porn epic in front of a big audience, getting your radio station heard beyond your immediate neighbourhood, was an expensive business. Prohibitively expensive in fact – to the point where only the very wealthy could afford to reach an audience much beyond their front door.

The same was true for entrepreneurs and inventors. Creating a new product or service was the easy part; finding someone, or somewhere, to sell it meant either trekking up and down the high street convincing shop owners to stock it, or spending a small fortune on setting up your own shop.

And then came the Internet. That rumbling sound you heard was the paradigm shifting.

Suddenly – almost overnight, it seemed – anyone who could get in front of a computer connected to the web could create a website that could be accessed by anyone else with a similar computer, anywhere else in the world. In a blink, the cost of communicating with a single person was exactly the same as reaching the entire world. For almost no money down, we could all be publishers or entrepreneurs and the only criterion for phenomenal success was to create something that lots of people wanted to see, hear, read or buy. The Internet created the ultimate media and marketing meritocracy.

It won’t surprise you to learn that, during the mid- to late nineties, I wasn’t the only person to have realised this.

In fact, so astonishingly popular did the Internet become in those years that the period became known as ‘the Internet Boom’. Barely a nanosecond passed without some hot new website crashing on to the scene, vowing to put its traditional rivals out of business thanks to its bold new business model (‘we’re going to sell dollar bills with adverts on them for 75 cents!’) and a company name that had seemingly been coined by an eighteen-month-old baby…

Boo!

Yahoo!

Kozmo!

FooDoo!

Awwww, look, baby just created his first Internet brand. Wipe his chin would you, darling?

In the UK all the national newspapers moved online (starting with the Daily Telegraph, swiftly followed by the Guardian and then all of the others⁴ ), offering round-the-clock news reporting and the opportunity for readers to interact with their ‘favourite’ journalists. Shopping moved online, too, with brands like Amazon and the travel site Expedia vowing to put traditional high street rivals out of business by offering a dizzyingly wide selection of products along with heavy discounts.

1997 saw the arrival of Winamp, the first popular MP3-playing software, bringing high-quality, easy-to-download music to the web for the first time and allowing up-and-coming bands a way to distribute their music at zero cost. By huge coincidence, 1997 is also the year widespread Internet piracy was born. Go figure.

One by one, every other medium – radio, television, even full-length films – became digital, making them available to wider and wider audiences. The fact that no one was making any kind of money out of any of this was totally irrelevant. Media experts (most of whom were building start-ups of their own) were quick to point out that no one made money out of any new medium in the beginning anyway. The mantra was – to borrow from Field of Dreams – if we build it, they will pay… something… eventually.

We hope.

Please.⁵

Actually, saying that no one was making money from new media was slightly unfair: there was one group of media entrepreneurs that was making tons of money on the web, almost from day one – pornographers. By moving online and taking advantage of the global marketplace, rather than one bound by the cost of distribution and troublesome local laws, even ultra-niche publications like ‘busty coffee-drinking housewives who fellate penguins’ became not just viable but potentially hugely profitable.⁶

As I watched this revolution taking place, what excited me the most wasn’t the potential to make huge sums of money with very little outlay or even the troughs full of hardcore pornography that were now at my late teenage fingertips. Although that was excellent.

No, what excited me – attention whore that I was – was the possibility of using this new, incredible technology to achieve fame.

Instant, phenomenal fame – on a global scale.

1.1

With each new medium comes a raft of new stars. Stars like ‘Stooky Bill’.

In October 1925, Stooky Bill became instantly famous when an image of his decapitated head was chosen by John Logie Baird for the first public demonstration of his new invention – television. Stooky Bill, you understand, was a ventriloquist’s dummy. No footage of the demonstration survives today, but, judging from the still photos of the event, Stooky was a natural in front of the camera. Literally the world’s first talking head.

Sixty-six years later, in 1991, the Internet equivalent of Stooky Bill turned out to be something even more inanimate, if that’s possible: a pot of lukewarm coffee. Located in the Trojan Room of the Computer Science Department of Cambridge University, the coffee pot (name unknown) became the first object to be broadcast live across the Internet, twenty-four hours a day. The motive behind this massive technological innovation? Staff at the university couldn’t be bothered to get up from their desks to see if there was any coffee left. Such was the lack of other online programming at the time that the coffee pot became an instant celebrity, with people logging in all over the world to see if there was any coffee available at the Trojan Room of the Computer Science Department of Cambridge University. Sometimes there was! Other times there wasn’t! To achieve that level of success today, the coffee pot broadcast would need a text message-voting element and a behind-the-scenes show on ITV4 with Ant and Dec.

It took five more years – until April 1996 – for someone to realise that there were even sexier things to webcast around the globe than pots of lukewarm coffee. The sexier thing’s name was Jennifer Ringley, a red-headed, nineteen-year-old junior at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. Jennifer’s big idea was to rig up a webcam in her dorm room and to point it at… herself… broadcasting her own life, live and uncensored twenty-four hours a day. No matter whether she was studying, sleeping, eating or (with increasing regularity – she knew her audience) having sex, it was all shown on camera – uncut, uncensored and without a producer, director or broadcaster between her and her audience.

With such groundbreaking openness, which would soon lead the way to Big Brother and reality TV in all its sick and exploitative forms, Jennifer very quickly became even more of a star than Stooky Bill and the coffee pot put together, with up to four million people a day tuning in at the peak of her popularity. Jennifer even crossed over to mainstream television, appearing on The Late Show with David Letterman and starring as a fictionalised version of herself in an episode of Diagnosis Murder.⁷ Now that’s fucking fame on a stick.

Jennicam, as the ‘experiment’⁸ was called, lasted until New Year’s Eve 2003 when Jenny shut down her camera and disappeared from the radar almost as quickly as she’d appeared on it, amid rumours that her new boyfriend objected to – uh – performing on camera. The speed with which most of the Internet forgot about Jennicam highlights another important lesson of cyber fame: it may be easier to achieve than other types of fame but at the same time, more so than any other medium, the flame is fleeting.⁹ The moment you stop stoking the fire… Pft.

Fade out. Total darkness.

But still, for me in late 1999, nineteen years old and just starting at university, the pull of Internet fame and fortune was too hard to resist. I wanted in. But how?

Less photogenic than Jenny, or even Stooky Bill, and lacking the entrepreneurial nous to build the next Amazon.com, I decided to stick with about the only thing I’d ever been slightly good at: writing words.

Buying every book I could find on web design and working day and night in my first-year digs, I created a site called Zingin.com, which was basically a sweary, sarcastic version of the then all-powerful Yahoo! directory. In those days Yahoo!, founded by Stanford students Jerry Yang and David Filo, was still primarily a directory of useful and entertaining websites, rather than the jack-of-all-features it has since become. The site employed a huge team of human reviewers who trawled the Internet and manually categorised zillions of sites to make them easier for surfers to find. Unfortunately the sheer volume of sites the poor saps had to review meant that Yahoo! site descriptions rarely went into more detail than ‘Site offering details of train times for Newcastle, UK’. The Yahoo! description of my own personal website was ‘Official site for this UK writer’. It’s a wonder I didn’t get more traffic.

Zingin.com would be different: instead of trying to review every site on the web, I would just choose the ones I liked, in various categories – shopping, money, family, entertainment… and so on – and then write proper reviews of them, some stretching up to a hundred words. But the big difference is that the reviews I wrote on Zingin.com would be funny, sarcastic even, and they wouldn’t be afraid to swear at you, when the need arose.

The site also featured a weekly round-up of the weirdest corners of the web written by a guy called Tim Ireland who has since gone on to become one of the UK’s highest profile online political campaigners. It was Tim who forced Tony Blair to get a publicly accessible email address and who came up with a brilliant scheme to convince elected representatives to start blogging, by setting up dozens of fake blogs in various MPs’ names and writing them himself until they agreed to take over.

For all its scatological obsession, the content on Zingin was really pretty tame, particularly by today’s weblog standards, but it was funny and snarky enough that it soon built up a healthy audience of a few thousand visitors a day and a subscriber base of over fifty thousand for the daily email newsletter I also sent out, containing all of that day’s new reviews.

On the back of this modest success I was able to sell advertising to some of the scores of new ecommerce sites springing up every day, which helped to supplement my student loan rather nicely.

In fact, the success of the site led to an unforeseen problem: how to conceal the source of my new-found disposable income from my university friends? Only a small number of my housemates were privy to the embarrassing secret of what I got up to for hours on end locked in my room – the Internet was not exactly the coolest hobby to have in those days, dot com boom or not. As my income crept up and up and my expenditure became more and more conspicuous – a new mobile phone every couple of months, an increasingly elaborate Scalextric layout snaking around my shared living room and kitchen – I found myself facing increasingly awkward questions from my other friends. Out of desperation I resorted to scaring them off by hinting that it would be better if they didn’t pry too closely into where my money came from, lest they somehow become ‘involved’. This was quite true, of course: no one wants to be sucked into the murky world of writing knob gags on the Internet for pocket money.

My plan was to use Zingin to get my name known among my Internet peers, and also among publishers and editors, in the hope that I could follow Jennicam’s transition to traditional media. And from there? Possibly a book deal, or a gig on a magazine or newspaper. Until the web became more socially acceptable, it would remain very much a stepping stone to something more respectable; something I wasn’t embarrassed to tell my friends about.

Miraculously, my plan actually started to work – and even sooner than I’d hoped. At the start of my second term, totally out of the blue, I got an email from Clare Christian, a commissioning editor at the publisher Prentice Hall¹⁰ who had found Zingin.com while browsing the web for material that could possibly be adapted into books. The reviews on Zingin.com had made her laugh and she wondered if I’d like to write a series of eight Zingin-branded web guide books, based on the eight sections of the site, for her. As it turned out, I would.

I was still recovering from the shock of becoming a soon-to-be-published author when I received a second surprising email – this one from a business partner of comedian-turned-TV impresario Griff Rhys Jones. He wondered whether I might like to be involved in a web-TV project they were working on. A thousand times, yes. This was incredible – I’d built it, they’d come, they’d liked it and now, only a few months after launching Zingin.com, I was going to be paid to write a series of books and develop a web-TV programme. I loved it when a plan came together.

Unfortunately, while I may have craved sudden success, I wasn’t very good at the nuts and bolts of delivering on it. One telephone conversation early on in my relationship with Clare Christian stands out as particularly embarrassing when it became apparent that Clare was under the impression that I was a proper grown-up editor with a proper grown-up company and a team of writers, rather than a twenty-year-old chancer working out of his shoebox of a bedroom. On the Internet, they say, nobody knows if you’re a dog. The conversation went a bit like this:

Clare: ‘We’d like you to write eight books. Do you think your team could handle that?’

Me: ‘My… team?’

Clare: ‘Yes, your team of writers. How many sites would you say you guys have in your database?’

Me: ‘Database?’

All the big directory sites had vast databases, stored on huge banks of computers, containing all their reviews. When you visited Yahoo! and clicked to a certain category of review, these databases would send a list of relevant sites to another computer, which would

slot them all into a nice neat web page to be displayed on your screen. This meant you were always getting the most up-to-date listings. Zingin didn’t have a database. Instead, I had to build each page of the site, and each review, by hand and upload them on to the web using my mobile phone connected to a creaking old laptop. When I wanted to add a new review, I had to cut and paste it on to the page before uploading it back to the site.

Clare: ‘We’ll need the finished manuscripts in a couple of months if that’s okay.’

Me: ‘That’s fine. No problem at all.’

Gulp.

Clare: ‘Great! Any other questions?’

Me: ‘No. Oh, yes…

…just one…

…roughly how many words does a book have?’

But idiot or not,¹¹ I was still a writer – a proper paid writer, much to the delight of my parents who had high hopes of me becoming a hot-shot lawyer. But I was sure that in time they’d get over the disappointment. I had arrived. I was to be the author of eight books.

Now all I had to do was write the damned things.

After two months chained to a keyboard, mainlining Red Bull, followed by another few months of editing, correcting and approving, the day of publication arrived. I travelled up to London to visit the flagship Borders bookshop to see the books in situ. Clare had phoned me a few weeks earlier with the good news that the book-selling giant had agreed to take thousands of copies of the book. So many, in fact, that they wanted Prentice Hall to print the Borders logo on the cover so that the chain could pretend the series was actually produced in partnership with them. Naturally I was thrilled and couldn’t wait to get down to Borders as soon as the books were in stock. Sure enough, on walking into the computer section, there I saw my books: stacked high on the end of every shelf, and covering numerous tables dotted around the shop. Wow! They must really love the books if they were piling them so high around the shop.

It was only months later that I discovered the truth: books are usually distributed to bookshops on sale or return, with the publisher taking all the risk for how well a particular title sells. The co-branding had been a brilliant wheeze by the sales team at Prentice Hall to limit this risk: once a book cover has been overprinted with a retailer’s logo, the retailer can’t return it, even if it wants to. By offering Borders a special edition of the book, printed with their logo, Prentice Hall had ensured that the thousands of copies they’d agreed to buy would never be returned. No wonder Borders were piling them high in every corner of the store – they had to shift the whole lot otherwise they’d have to pulp them. Two years later, I was still spotting them in bargain bins: for some reason people didn’t want to buy out-of-date web guide books, even for 50p each. But what did I care? Thanks to Borders, I earned my advance before the books were even published and every other copy sold meant a few pence of royalties straight into my pocket.

1.2

With almost two years left of my law degree, and with no intention of doing anything so idiotic as actually attending lectures or studying law, I had plenty of time to come up with my next bid for online fame. The Griff Rhys Jones TV project had stalled after a couple of meetings when everyone involved realised that the idea – to pipe broadband comedy programming into the nation’s workplaces under the noses of bosses – was a bit of a non-starter. But I had become quite good friends with Rhys Jones’s partner in the project, a comedy writer called Charlie Skelton, and he, Clare and I frequently met to brainstorm possible projects we might work on together. It was during one of these meetings that Clare proposed the idea of starting a comedy magazine – something like Private Eye, but for the Internet generation.

My days as a school magazine publisher had taught me that printing magazines and distributing them was a royal pain in the arse and, anyway, if it was to be a magazine for the Internet generation then shouldn’t it actually be on the Internet? The Zingin.com newsletter had attracted a ton of subscribers and had a distribution cost of basically nothing so why, I suggested, didn’t we start a weekly comedy ezine, sent out by email? And, in a nod to Charlie’s failed office comedy project, we could target it at bored office workers, sending the email to them on a Friday afternoon to cure the crushing boredom of those final few hours of the working week.

And with that, The Friday Thing was born.

To promote our fledgling publication we came up with a brilliant ruse: an online petition to have Friday afternoons declared a national holiday. British people worked harder than any other Europeans (we made up) and so it was only fair that our working week should end at noon on a Friday. We created an official website explaining our demands, registered a web address – letsgetitoff.com (snigger) – and sent a press release to the media. Clearly we had tapped into a seam of strong feeling among the nation’s overworked journalists and the campaign was picked up by just about every major newspaper, local radio station and even made it on to the BBC. The campaign went global when Newsweek published a feature about the site in its international edition, revealing that the petition had received more than 56, 000 signatures in the first week.

Once people had signed the petition, which was to be sent to Tony Blair when it reached 100, 000 signatures, they were taken to a second page which told them that – as luck would have it – we were about to launch a hilarious email magazine that would help fill their soon-to-be-free Friday afternoons. With just one extra click they could sign up to the newsletter, completely free of charge. By the time the petition reached its 100, 000 signature target in less than a month, more than forty thousand people had subscribed to The Friday Thing – all before we’d even published a single issue.

The debut issue of The Friday Thing was published in the summer of 2001 and the ezine ran into controversy almost immediately when, a couple of months later, four hijacked planes flew into various American landmarks and fields, sparking what we have come to know as the War on Terror. In the days and weeks after September 11th, it seemed to the three of us at The Friday Thing that something was very wrong with the media. George Bush’s administration was openly gearing up for war against Afghanistan – a war that, wherever you stood on the issue, would doubtless lead to thousands of innocent lives being lost. And yet huge sections of the press seemed to be too afraid to question any of this, lest they be labelled terrorist sympathisers. And worse than that, no one was making jokes about it all.

Originally, we had intended The Friday Thing to be a light-hearted jokey read for bored office workers but, by the end of September 2001, we had dropped any pretence of apolitical niceness and the email had become fiercely satirical and hugely political. Through September and October we lost about 40 per cent of our readers and our mail servers almost crashed with the weight of hate mail. In the end, we created a special email account to filter it all out: terroristsympathisers@thefridaything.co.uk.

Those readers who did stay, though, told their friends about us and The Friday Thing ’s profile, particularly among journalists and so-called ‘opinion formers’, grew and grew. At the start of 2002, we decided that our audience was big enough and loyal enough to switch to a paid subscription model – £10 a year for fifty-two issues – to help pay our bills without resorting to advertising. The Guardian published a double-page feature on the switch and a huge 20 per cent of our subscribers converted, enough for us to invest in a proper subscription system and actually to think about hiring some new writers. With a proper writing team and money in the bank, The Friday Thing continued to grow steadily, thanks in large part to our habit of publishing horrendously inappropriate ’special issues’ to mark news events. Our ‘The Queen Mother Is Dead’ tribute issue hit subscribers’ inboxes less than two hours after her death had been announced¹² and contents included a list, compiled by Charlie, of ten things you didn’t know about her late majesty (‘No. 8: She once called C. S. Lewis a cunt’). One of my favourite issues, published several years after the Queen Mother one, was also the one that most divided the readers: ‘The Seven/Seven Issue’¹³, published less than three hours after suicide bombers attacked London ’s underground system in 2005. The attacks had come the day after London had been awarded the 2012 Olympic Games and the issue included such features as alternative London Olympic Slogans:

LONDON: Get it while it ’s hot.

LONDON: You can run, but you can’t park and ride. LONDON: Light the fire within, flee the fire without. LONDON: Chariots of bombs.

LONDON: Where no matter what happens, and how many people are dead, there’ll always be some twat with a camera phone taking pictures.

…and a list of possible suspects for the bombing including, at the top of the list, the French. I even penned a haiku for a feature we called ‘Haiknews: today’s news in just seventeen syllables’:

London Olympics

Transport regeneration

Off to rocky start

The Londoners who subscribed to The Friday Thing loved it and emailed in their hundreds to thank us for showing that the capital wouldn’t be stopped by terrorists and would laugh in the face of danger. This was more true than they knew – I was staying at my girlfriend’s flat at the end of one of the affected lines and had to walk eight miles back to my computer, through police cordons and pubs full of jubilant office workers, to edit and send out the issue.

Back in 2002, and with The Friday Thing starting to take off, I realised that writing jokes about the big news stories of the day was much more effective than a sarcastic web directory in making people laugh and, more importantly, getting myself noticed. Unfortunately it also turned out to be a much better way of getting pilloried in the press and almost thrown in jail…

1.3

If you turned on the TV towards the end of 2002 you could have been forgiven for thinking that Britain had gone absolutely horseshit mental. Every week, it seemed, another pretty young girl from a nice family, who was happy and popular and always did well at school, was being kidnapped or murdered by what the Sun newspaper cheerfully termed ‘evil paedo scum’. Naming and shaming was as popular a feature in the Murdoch press as Page Three girls and discounted holidays to Butlin’s.

Of course you can ‘t blame parents for wanting to keep their children safe; that’s pretty much the job description of a parent. And, on the face of it, the tabloids were doing a public service in warning us about the paedophile menace lurking in our midst. The problem came when it turned out that a huge number of these concerned tabloid-reading parents were also absolute fucking morons. For every story of an actual sex offender being driven from their house by a baying mob there was one like that of Dr Yvette Cloete, a doctor at the Royal Gwent Hospital in Newport, South Wales, who returned home from work to find that a group of ‘concerned parents’ had daubed the word ‘paedo’ on her front door in bright red paint.

Dr Cloete was a consultant paed… iatrician . Easy mistake. If you’re an absolute fucking moron.

And so it was that one hung-over morning, after reading yet another story about vigilantes who had threatened to stone Maxine Carr, the girlfriend of Soham killer Ian Huntley, to death during her high-profile trial for perverting the course of justice, I decided to set up a website parodying this collective national madness.

The result of two or three hours of hung-over labour was thinkofthechildren.co.uk, a spoof campaign site which claimed to offer a handy online guide for crazy vigilantes of all stripes to co-ordinate their crazy vigilante efforts. Although there are a few parts of the site I’m still a bit proud of, the majority of it was, I freely admit, satire of the lowest order. The frequently asked questions on the front page of the site read as follows:

Who are we?

We are concerned parents, many of whom have children of our own and who want the law changed to protect them. Every day in Britain happy, popular children who do well at school are being murdered by evil paedophile scum. Well enough’s enough! It’s time the law got tough on child murderers.

What do we want?

We want the law changed to make it illegal to murder children and bury them in woodland. We want it to be made illegal for adults to work with children. We want an end to the ridiculous process of ‘criminal trials’ for suspected child killers.

When do we want it?

Now.

…

There then followed some essential advice on starting your own mob:

Placards

Once you’ve gathered a sizeable mob, you’ll need to equip them with placards or banners. Placards – which are easily fashioned by fixing a large piece of card to a stick – should contain snappy slogans which are easy to chant. Good slogans include: ‘die scum!’, ‘peedos out!’, ‘hang child killers!’ and ‘kiddie fiddler shitbag!’. Bad slogans include: ‘You’re the product of a complex series of social and psychological factors!’ and ‘I haven’t really thought this through!’ and a list of upcoming mobs:

Event: The Soham Mob (Maxine Carr Trial)

Date: TBC

Type: Taunting

Details: Please do come along to what promises to be an enjoyable afternoon’s taunting. Children welcome. Our thanks to the Daily Express and Manchester United Plc for supporting this event.

Event: The ‘Not From The Home Counties’ Protest

Date: 26 November 2002

Type: Protest

Details: Protest march to demand justice for murdered children from troubled backgrounds who weren’t ‘happy’ or ‘popular’ and didn’t do particularly well at school. (Cancelled due to lack of support.)
Jonathan Swift it most certainly wasn’t – but only a moron would look at it and not realise immediately that it was a spoof.

Things started slowly – the first hour or so after I sent the link to some of my friends the site got about a hundred visits, mainly from those friends or from people they’d sent the link on to. By dinner time, it had had a thousand visits. By the next day, ten thousand. Pretty impressive, but still chickenfeed compared to Jennicam and the Coffee Pot.

But then things started to get interesting. Several high-pro file comedy and news sites linked to thinkofthechildren.co.uk, as did a couple of major sites specialising in finding new and interesting links – including the very influential B3ta.com.

Suddenly I had 100, 000 visitors.

Gosh.

200, 000.

Holy mackerel.

Half a million.

Holy shit.

Half a million people reading my stupid jokes!

It even got linked on to the Daily Mail discussion forums, where readers responded with a mixture of outrage and disapproval. One poster, in a bizarre twist of logic, even accused me of siding with child killers. The Daily Mail ! My parents would be so proud.

And then…

Nothing.

All of a sudden, thinkofthechildren.co.uk dropped off the Internet. It just vanished. One minute it was there. Next minute I clicked refresh and it was gone, in its place an error message: ‘page not found’.

Irritated, I dialled the number of my web-hosting company, Host Europe. I assumed that the explosion of visitors in such a short space of time had exceeded the amount of traffic I was allowed on my basic cheapo hosting package, or that there had been some other kind of technical error.

I tried to be friendly with the person who answered the phone. It doesn’t do to get upset about these things.

‘Hello there, I hope you can help me. My site seems to have gone down.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry, sir, can I take the address?’

‘Yep, it’s thinkofthechildren.co.uk. That’s T-H-I-N…’

But before I could finish-’Can you hold, please? I need to put you through to my manager.’

This didn’t sound good. This didn’t sound good at all.

Suddenly another voice – a man with the same tone of voice as those little Nazis in ludicrous hats and luminous jackets who stand at railway ticket barriers waiting to fine you £20 because you’ve gone one station too far with your ticket.

‘Hello, Mr Carr?’ said the little Nazi, ‘I’m afraid there’s a serious problem with your hosting. At ten o’clock this morning we received a call from the Metropolitan Police’s Obscene Publications and Computer Crime Unit asking us to shut down your web server. Apparently one of your sites was offering advice on setting up a vigilante mob…¹⁴

He said the words ’setting up a vigilante mob’ in the same way as an arresting officer might say, ‘yes, Sarge, apparently he was just “cuddling” the sheep’. In exactly the same tone.

The Obscene Publications and Computer Crime Unit, he explained, had phoned Host Europe and asked for my site – my spoof site – to be shut down, without any kind of warrant, and Host Europe had complied without even bothering to tell me. This was bizarre. And I wasn’t going to stand for it. I knew my rights!¹⁵

Unfortunately, the only response I could muster to communicate how little I was going to stand for it was a sort of gaspy yelping noise.

‘M-m-uuuuhh-eeee?’

I took a deep breath and tried again. ‘But this is ridiculous. It’s a joke-’

‘It may be a joke to you, sir,’ said the Nazi, ‘but I assure you that we and the police take these complaints very seriously. There’s nothing we can do; you’ll need to speak to the officer in charge at the Met. His number is 020…’

My next call, to the Obscene Publications Unit, confirmed my lack of faith in humanity.

‘Yes, Mr Carr, we did ask Host Europe to shut down your site… No, sir, we didn’t have to get a court order. We received a complaint about the site and, after investigating, I telephoned Host Europe and recommended that they take down the site.’

At this point I lost my temper.

‘You recommended it? That’s all it takes to censor something? A recommendation? Jesus, Fahrenheit 451 would have been a much shorter book if the firemen just issued a bloody recommendation that books be burnt.’

For a moment I had forgotten that I was shouting at someone who probably had the power to send me to jail if I got a bit too lippy. He also didn’t get the reference. But my point stood: ‘On exactly what basis did you “recommend” deleting it?’

‘I decided that it could be interpreted as inciting violence.’

Yes, officer, I wanted to say, you’re absolutely right, it could be interpreted that way. If the interpreter was the type of baying, inbred, placard-waving, tabloid-reading fucking moron that the site was parodying in the first place.

‘Did you even look at the site or did you just take the word of someone who saw the link on the Daily Mail forum and decided that Something Must Be Done?’

‘Yes, sir, I did look at the site.’

‘And you realised it’s a parody?’

‘In my view it wasn’t clear. And the complainant believed it to be genuine.’

I was too angry to think straight. I couldn’t believe how easily it had been for the police to get the site taken down, just because some idiot Daily Mail reader couldn’t recognise a joke, compared to how difficult it would be to get a book pulped or a film banned in similar circumstances. I didn’t care how unfunny thinkofthechildren was any more – I just wanted it put back up. Right. This. Minute.

‘I’m sorry, sir, I can’t actually make that decision. Host Europe were the ones who decided to take down the site. You’ll have to ask them if they’re prepared to reactivate it.’

In other words, in the absence of a court order Host Europe could have told the Met to sod off. But it chose not to. Instead, my friendly web host, to whom I’d paid hundreds of pounds to host my site, had complied with an informal request from the police – much like a puppy might comply with an informal request to ‘roll over’.

Well, fuck that, I thought. I called my Nazi friend at Host Europe again, ready for a fight. Not only had they taken thinkofthechildren down, but they’d disconnected my entire server, including The Friday Thing and my own personal email account.

‘So what do I have to do to get my server back up and running?’ I asked Martin Bormann.

‘You’ll have to take down the thinkofthechildren site and give us an assurance that you won’t put it back up.’

‘And if I agree to that, you’ll reconnect me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Okay, I agree – but you’ll need to reconnect it first so I can delete the mob stuff.’

‘Er… All right then. But you’re agreeing to take the mob stuff down?’

‘Of course.’

Like hell I was.

‘Thank you.’

‘No, thank you .’

*Click*

Prick.

Now, I should say at this point that I was honestly, honestly, going to take down the part of the site that gave advice on setting up mobs. After all, it wasn’t that funny. And the idea of being carted off to court for inciting violence when every chav in the country was standing outside the courts baying for blood didn’t hugely appeal.

But the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to tell them where to shove it. Why the hell should the Internet be at the mercy of a humourless policeman and a dickhead hosting company having an informal chat?

Of course, what I also realised was that something being banned – whether it be a film, an album or a book – gave an absolutely guaranteed fast track to popularity. Surely by the same logic, defying a ban would be my passport to the satire hall of fame. This was going to be great!

The moment the server was reconnected, I put the site back online exactly as it was. Well, except for a small link at the bottom entitled ‘An Open Letter to Host Europe and the Obscene Publications Unit‘. Clicking on it took the visitor to a (slightly snotty) letter explaining that I had absolutely no intention of editing the site and outlining the various bits of the law that required them to get a court order for websites to be closed down. For good measure I put a note at the top of the page for anyone else who visited the site, inviting them to email the CEO of Host Europe, Jonathan Brealey, to tell him what they thought about Internet censorship. And then I sat back and waited for the shit storm.

I didn’t have to wait long.

The first call came from technology news site The Register. Apparently some of the journalists were fans of thinkofthechildren and they wanted to write a piece about my ‘fuck you’ to the police. Then the Guardian called, and someone from the Observer . Then Spiked Online (formerly Living Marxism) asked me if I’d like to write something about my brave stand for freedom of speech. Even the Christian Science Monitor wrote a piece about me and my brave stand. If you’ve got the Christian Scientists on your side, you know you’re doing something right.¹⁶

This word ‘brave’ that journalists kept using was starting to scare the hell out of me, though. I wasn’t going for brave, I was going for cheeky. Cheeky people get judges wagging their fingers at them and are then sent on their way with a clip round the ear. Brave people go to jail and spend the rest of their days breaking rocks with sledgehammers. I wasn ‘t brave. I was an attention-seeker in a strop. But it was too late to back down now – bloggers were saying I had ‘balls of steel’ (oh God), and the Christian Scientists had described me as a ‘latter-day Jonathan Swift’ (ridiculous, obviously, but of course I’ve dined out on the quote ever since).¹⁷

I put the worries to the back of my mind. I’d done my research and the law was pretty clear – the police could only shut down websites with a proper warrant, and with the press watching it would be a huge PR mistake for Host Europe to close me down again. I was sitting pretty.

And then my friend Sam Lewis rang, bubbling with excitement. Sam is a former journalist who had made a small killing not long before when he’d sold a magazine he’d started to a major publishing house. I’d met him when he was covering an Internet conference for an industry magazine and we’d since become good friends. He was almost ten years older than me, but we shared a similar sick sense of humour and I envied his ability to juggle being a good writer with actually understanding business. Whatever was going on in the industry – or in the media generally – he seemed to know about it first. Including this.

‘Ha, mate! The Evening Standard! What a bunch of wankers, eh?’

I had no idea what he was talking about.

‘Er… mate… I’m in Nottingham. I’m pretty sure they don’t sell the London Evening Standard here. Why – what’s going on?’

‘Shit, you haven’t seen it? You’re on page seven of the paper and on the front page of the online version. You need to go online RIGHT NOW.’

‘I am? For thinkofthechildren?’

‘In a manner of speaking. Look, just go online NOW. I can’t believe I’m the first person to phone you about it. Has no one else emailed?’

I hadn’t checked my mail all day – I had been too busy sifting through the backlog of messages from when the server had been taken down. I scrolled up the list of messages in my inbox and, sure enough, there were half a dozen mails from friends with subjects like ‘Evening Standards?’ and ‘Standard!’ and ‘Holy Shit!’. The Standard website finished loading and I scanned down the front page for a mention of thinkofthechildren. ‘I can’t see anything… there’s just this big thing about Maxine Ca-

…oh…

…my…

…God…

…you have got to be fucking kidding me…’

But he wasn’t. There, plain as day on the front page of the Evening

Standard site (and apparently on page seven of hundreds of thousands of newspapers flooding the capital) was a four-column news story under the headline ‘ “Soham Mob” security fears as website urges violence at murder case court.’
The story, by Standard reporter Danielle Gusmaroli, began:

Police today threw a security cordon around Peterborough Crown Court amid fears that an angry mob might try to attack Soham murder suspect Ian Huntley. The discovery of an inflammatory website encouraging protesters to use ‘bricks, rocks and bottles’¹⁸ prompted police to draft in 120 officers to protect the trial of the caretaker accused of the murders of Soham schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.

And it went on:

The site lists the ‘Soham Mob’ among its supporters. They are thought to have been among the 500-strong mob that pelted Huntley’s van with eggs and tomatoes as it left Peterborough Magistrates’ Court last month after his first court appearance.

I think I can categorically state that the Soham Mob were not among the five-hundred-strong mob who pelted Huntley’s van, given that the Soham Mob were entirely fictional. In fact, they had a cast-iron alibi: they were inside my head the whole time.
And finally:

Attempts have been made to close down the website site [sic] , but its operators claimed that under the European Human Rights Act they have the right to freedom of speech .

That last bit actually made me gasp. This woman – this hack – Gusmaroli had actually read my open letter about the fact that it was a spoof, and was covered by European freedom of expression rights, before she made up her story. And yet she’d still written a story as if the site was on the level. This was journalism, Jim, but not as we know it.

‘ M-m-uuuuhh-eeee!’

‘Congratulations, mate. You’re finally famous.’

‘Yeah, as a vigilante, Sam. I’m famous as a fictional vigilante. I’m like the Lone Ranger for idiot chavs. ‘

‘The Unsecured Loan Ranger.’

‘You’re not helping.’

‘The Purple Loans Ranger.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘Oh come on, you know what Oscar Wilde said about being talked about. ‘

‘Why am I spending two years in Reading jail when I’ve done nothing wrong?’

‘That’s fucking showbiz, man! No business like it. Good luck!’

1.4

Sam was right. After the brouhaha died down, thinkofthechildren turned out to have been a rather excellent piece of personal publicity. Thanks to all the press coverage – including a nice piece in the Guardian media section taking the piss out of the Evening Standard – lots of journalists and commissioning editors knew who I was.

By the start of the following year I had left Nottingham (clutching my 2:2 in Law – a miracle of cramming) and moved to London where I was writing regularly for an eclectic mix of publications including the Daily Star and a sex magazine for women called Scarlet (where I reviewed adult DVDs on the basis of plot alone, making me the first person in the history of the universe to fast-forward through the sex scenes in porn films to get to the dialogue).

My biggest coup, though – and the one I was most proud of – was when I landed a regular freelance gig with the Guardian writing a regular new media column in my ‘trademark satirical style’.¹⁹

If I ‘d learned anything from the thinkofthechildren incident – and I hadn’t – it’s that one man’s ‘trademark satirical style’ is another man’s first-class ticket to the dock, something I proved again and again at the Guardian, to the growing despair of my editor, Janine Gibson. Having narrowly dodged a complaint to the Press Complaints Commission for my first column in which I claimed that Madonna was pregnant again,²⁰ for my second column I’d hit upon the brilliant idea of taking on the ridiculousness of the English libel laws. How stupid and arrogant of lawyers and their overpaid clients – I wrote – to think that they could possibly keep anything secret in the era of the Internet. After all, what was the point of using court injunctions to cover their client’s indiscretions when there was nothing to stop a foreign website publishing all the sordid details outside the UK court’s jurisdiction? To prove my point, I decided to refer to a particularly juicy story that hadn’t appeared in the UK press because of an injunction but had been widely reported overseas: that a particular clean-cut British celebrity was having an affair.

To prove my point, I first wrote a feature for The Friday Thing which didn’t mention the name of the celebrity explicitly but did link to various foreign sites where it was revealed. I then boasted in the Guardian about how I’d done it, thus making a mockery of the injunction.

What I ‘d overlooked is that, in the English legal system, making a mockery of High Court injunctions has another name. Contempt of court.

The next day, as I was shopping in Budgens, my phone range. It was Janine and she didn’t sound very happy.

‘Where are you?’

‘I’m in Budgens buying a sandwich.’

‘Well, you should probably get back in front of a computer. We have a bit of a problem.’

‘Shit. We do?’

‘Well, technically I don’t. But you do, and the paper does, which means I do. Do you have a lawyer?’

Um… no…’

‘That’s not good. You need to get one. We’ve just had a letter from — —’s lawyers. They’re threatening to sue both you and the paper for libel, and they’re going to complain to the High Court that you are in contempt.’

‘That doesn’t sound good. Could I be fined a lot for that?’

‘You could go to jail for that.’

‘I should get a lawyer.’

‘You should get a lawyer.’

In an astonishing stroke of bad luck, it turned out that the Guardian had decided to print my column right alongside an article about libel law written by none other than — —’s lawyer! I can only imagine the lawyer sitting at his breakfast table, admiring his work only to scan across the page and see… me… underneath my gooning byline picture, sticking two fingers up at him and his stupid injunction. An injunction that the Guardian ’s in-house lawyer later told me was ‘one of the most restrictive and far-reaching’ injunctions she’d ever seen. Brilliant.

I did the mature thing, of course, spending the next two days hiding in my girlfriend Claire’s flat, avoiding phone calls from any number I didn’t recognise and Googling for advice on how not to get raped in the prison showers. It wasn’t until almost a month later – after spending the best part of £2, 000 that I couldn’t afford hiring a topflight lawyer – that I heard the best news of my life: the other side had dropped the case.

Apparently they’d realised that they didn’t have a case against the Guardian – just against me personally, and The Friday Thing . And as I didn’t have any money, I wasn’t worth the time or money to go after – despite all the ‘irreparable harm’ they claimed I had done to their client’s reputation. I agreed to remove the article from The Friday Thing archives and the Guardian took the column down from their website. The matter was closed, but I was still £2, 000 poorer and my future at the Guardian was hanging by a thread. To this day I can’t see — — without wanting to punch the litigious little cunt in the face. Whoever he is.

After such a promising start, it’s a miracle that I managed to hold on to my job for the next two years. Especially when every few weeks I’d manage to piss off someone important by attacking them through the column. Another enemy I made was Ian Hislop, the editor of Private Eye, who I decided to take the mickey out of mercilessly after he published a scathing article about a Labour MP named Tom Watson. Watson’s crime had been to use his website to publish a hilariously ill-judged message to the ‘youth’ of his constituency. It began:

‘ Teens! We know that you’re too busy fighting off your biological urges and being l33t hax0rs to Get Involved, but politics is cool, m’kay?’

Yikes! Hislop was right: it was pretty horrendous, and Private Eye republished it in full as an example of how massively out of touch today’s MPs were with ‘da yoot’. Unfortunately for Hislop, though, the message was a spoof, designed to prove exactly that point. It had been written by none other than Tom Watson’s web adviser and my old friend, Tim Ireland.

Sensing comedy gold, I penned eight hundred words of open advice to Hislop about how Google was a great way to check out the origins of websites so as not to end up looking like a complete tit. The Eye was good at giving it out, but they very rarely found themselves on the receiving end of piss-taking so I felt very pleased with myself when I saw my column in print.

And then, a couple of weeks later, my phone rang. It was Sam Lewis again.

‘Ha, mate! Private Eye, eh!’

‘Oh, God. What now?’

‘Honestly – do I have to do this for you every time? You’re the star of this issue’s “Ad Nauseum” column. They’re pointing out that your piece suggesting that Hislop should use Google appeared on the Guardian website next to an ad for Google. They’re saying it was deliberate product placement and calling you the “Google adman’s stooge”.’

‘You’re shitting me.’

‘Ha hahaha. I swear to God.’

To be fair to Hislop, it was a beautiful piece of revenge and one that would have left the majority of Private Eye ’s Luddite readership chuckling about how the Guardian had been caught out sucking up to an advertiser. The lesson couldn’t be clearer: if you’re going to attack another journalist, don’t pick on one with a vast circulation and the ability to make you look like a complete twat in a magazine that all your mates read. I’d taken on the master, and lost. Game over.

I sent Hislop a letter congratulating him on his win, but explaining that for future reference accusing a new media hack of being in the pay of Google is like saying a motoring journalist is in bed with the internal combustion engine. He sent me a lovely handwritten postcard featuring a picture of Margaret Thatcher in return, thanking me for my advice and wishing me luck. The man is old school.

1.5

With regular money now coming in from the Guardian column, my regular contributions to other publications and the modest subscription revenue from The Friday Thing, I had been living something of the high life since arriving in London.

I had started hanging out with the great and the good of the dot com world: attending launch parties for new sites, going to parties to celebrate them staying in business for a whole year, eating their lunches, drinking their booze and learning their secrets while they tried to convince me to write about them in my column. Many of these online entrepreneurs had become my friends and I’d managed to find myself a new girlfriend – Maggie, a Welsh journalist who was a restaurant reviewer for a food and drink website. This was a brilliant blag: it meant we could eat at some of London’s best restaurants and never pay a penny. Life was wonderful: The Friday Thing and the Guardian column meant that my plan to use the Internet to become hugely famous and successful was firmly on track, I’d made lots of new friends, and, on top of all that, I was getting laid and eating gourmet food for free. Even Sam Lewis was jealous, and he was rich.

Meanwhile, the people I was writing about were not having such an easy time of it. 2003 was a really strange time to be covering the ‘new media’ industry – mainly because no one was really sure for how long there would be an industry left to cover.

The dot com boom of 1999 seemed like a millennium ago: a period in history as crazy as the tulip craze or the South Sea Bubble look to us now.

The first signs of trouble for the industry had come in 2000. As the century turned, so had the market and – to use the parlance of analysts – the boom had turned out to be a bubble. And then the bubble had burst. The problem was that for years investors and the stock market had allowed the value of Internet companies to rise and rise, despite the fact that none of them was actually making any money. But then one day they decided enough was enough and with that: Pop! One company after another closed their doors, laying off hundreds of staff and causing the value of technology stocks to go through the floor.

During those post-bubble years, between 2000 and 2004, the entire industry was in turmoil. No one could agree whether we were seeing an industry in its death throes or whether the downturn was just (as many optimists claimed) ‘a correction’, a natural response by the market to weed out sky-high valuations and bad businesses. Generally, those who survived the crash remained firmly in the ‘correction’ camp, while those who had lost everything loudly declared that they were simply the innocent victims of an over-hyped industry, fuelled by the high expectations of the press and the ridiculous overconfidence of investors. No one, they protested, could possibly succeed under those conditions.

It was that latter camp that most riled me, but also most appealed to my sense of Schadenfreude. These smug wankers who had grinned out from the front of business magazines and newspapers across the world, these young entrepreneurs, some not even out of school, who claimed fortunes (on paper at least) in the tens of millions.

God, I hated them.

God, I envied them.

But now they’d lost everything and instead of shrugging and saying ‘ah well, it was good while it lasted, and fuck it, I’m still only twenty-two’, they blamed the market, the press, the fact that they were ahead of their time. Anything to avoid admitting their complicity in the bullshit instant-fame machine that they thought would make them rich.
My favourite example of this phenomenon was Benjamin Cohen.

1.6

Benjamin – Ben – Cohen is one of that rare breed of people: someone I took a passionate dislike to from the very first time I heard his name, without even having met him.

Actually, I should clarify that – it wasn’t his name that made me dislike him; that would make me sound like an enormous anti-Semite²¹ . No, the reason I took an instant dislike to Ben Cohen is that he was everything I wanted to be: someone who during the dot com bubble had created a virtual media empire out of nothing and in doing so had managed to convince the press that he was not just a genius, but a rich genius. And all before he was twenty.

The story goes a little like this.

Once upon a time (1998) there was a sixteen-year-old boy called Ben. Ben decided that there was a gap in the market for a site offering everything the modern Jew-about-town could need: Jewish news, Jewish advice, a calendar of Jewish holiday dates, Jewish discussion rooms and so on. He called it soJewish, because that’s the sort of name someone with no imagination whatsoever would call such a site.²² Before long the site had become reasonably popular, with thousands of people visiting every week. SoFar, SoGood. But Cohen didn’t just want to be an entrepreneur – he wanted to be a celebrity; and what better way for a slightly dorky kid to become a celebrity on the eve of the dot com boom than by becoming a teenage millionaire?

So that’s exactly what he became.

And here’s how he did it. He simply phoned up, wrote to and otherwise button-holed as many journalists as he could find and told them ‘my company has been valued at millions of pounds’. Now of course, Fleet Street’s finest are no mere hacks – so they went away and fact-checked Ben’s claims, demanding proof of his self-confirmed valuation.

Just kidding. They are hacks.

‘His company is worth millions!’ they repeated. ‘And if his company is worth that, and he owns the company, then that means he is worth millions as well! He’s a millionaire! A teenage millionaire! Hold the front page!’

Even proper journalists normally known for their investigative work – journalists like Jon Ronson, whose work I love – were sucked into the hype. As he wrote in the Evening Standard at the time: ‘For Britain’s business journalists, Benjamin has come to represent the Internet world in all its wonder and bizarreness.’

Thanks, Jon. And to think they used to say ‘if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is’.

But Cohen didn’t stop there. After soJewish, he decided to expand his empire, creating a whole network of sites under the brand ‘Cyberbritain.com’. And appropriately enough for a network with such a porny sounding name, the first two Cyberbritain sites were porn sites – Hunt4Porn.com and dotadults.com – both naked (sorry) attempts to attract the sticky white pound. The pitch? That the sites would provide the best way for one-handed surfers to find adult websites.²³ The reality? The site was just some tacky window dressing that Cohen had bolted on to an existing public-domain listing of hard- and soft-core smut.

But there was still a boom on and, again, the press lapped it up. Everyone knew that sex sells, and lazy journalists could only speculate what adding an ‘adult’ arm to a company already ‘worth’ ‘five’ ‘million’ ‘pounds’ would do to its valuation. But fortunately, they didn’t have to – Ben was quite happy to tell them exactly what it did to his company’s valuation. It increased it immeasurably, he explained. There was no doubt about it: he was now Britain’s richest teenage dot com entrepreneur.

Even if he did say so himself.

Of course, all of this smacks of jealousy on my part. If I could have achieved even half of his success while still producing almost no original content or having any original ideas, I’d have done it in a heartbeat. Well, of course I would. Even if it meant having to use porn to do it, like Ben did. There is nothing inherently bad about online pornographers – as I’ve said before, they’re basically responsible for inventing ecommerce and online video – and there is something only a little inherently bad about passing off other people’s porn directory as your own. I had to admit it was pretty enterprising.

But… and here comes the but… BUT there is something very wrong about peddling other people’s porn, creating tons of artificial wealth on the back of it, and then pretending you hated doing it.

Which is what Cohen did the moment the market crashed and the hype dried up.

Four years after creating soJewish, Hunt4Porn and the rest, Cohen sent out a press release to journalists, marking the occasion of his twentieth birthday.

Reading through it, I was absolutely stunned. This was, after all, the guy who had spent the last half-decade or so relentlessly promoting himself and his media empire. The man who had gladly given journalists quotes about his wealth and how he was changing the world. A man who was quoted in a TV interview saying ‘money has no morality’. And now, after the dot com industry collapses, he sends out this. A press release to mark his birthday.

And what a press release…

Once I’d finished reading the emailed press release, I immediately hit the forward button and sent it to Sam Lewis, annotated with my own comments. Here’s exactly what I sent (the text in bold is from the press release; the italics are my comments)…

To: Sam Lewis

From: Paul Carr

Subject: Total genius or unbelievable dick – you decide…
The Last of the Teenage Dot.Com Millionaires is to Disappear… He’s turning twenty

A strong start. If the secret of a good press release is to grab journalists’ attention with a strong title then he’s played a blinder. When I read that itle, my attention was immediately grabbed by the fact that I was suddenly vomiting involuntarily on my own shoes.

Benjamin Cohen has been at the forefront of one of the most innovative industries that the UK has ever seen, the dot com industry. Founder of soJewish.com, the community portal, he was thrust into the limelight at the tender age of 16.

Yeah, thrust into the limelight like Michael Douglas was thrust into Catherine Zeta-Jones. Or Harold Shipman was thrust into murdering old people.

Figures of £5m were quoted for his personal stake in the business. As it goes…

as it goes? As it goes?! – another useful tip, Ben, don’t get your press release drafted by a chirpy Essex builder.

…the company merged with the London Jewish News… and then reversed into Totally plc on the AIM market. For a day Cohen was the youngest director of a publicly quoted company ever. His share in Totally was not worth anything like the £5m that was quoted two years earlier, it was valued at £310, 000…

Hang on. Let me read that again. Is he saying he wasn’t a millionaire at all? He’s admitting it was never true? He lied in the title of his press release and then admitted it three paragraphs later? That’s pretty ballsy.

…but had reduced to £40, 000 when he came to sell his stake.

So in pounds sterling, he was actually a forty thousandaire. In what currency was he a millionaire? Yen?

Cohen was hyped from day one of his media debut. However, this was not by PR people – he had none – but by the press. Speculating at his stake in the business, Ben was made into a millionaire.

…and now the Oscar for most disingenuous paragraph in a bullshit press release. The envelope, please.

Cohen for his part never truly believed what was said about him and his bank balance and realised that at the end of the day he’d be very lucky to walk away from SoJewish.com with a few hundred thousand pounds.

Unlucky.

…

[Said Cohen] ‘When I look back at the way that I was… I cringe. I was at the top of an industry that was built on sand. I was carried away with the fact that I, a mere 17 year old had as much experience as anyone else at building an Internet company.’

‘I can remember how rude I could be at times to journalists and people phoning up for advice. Back then, I could be as obnoxious as I liked and people would still come back for more, they had to, I was Benjamin Cohen, the Dot Com sensation.’

Also, Benjamin Cohen, the cock.

…Shortly after the [BBC2 Trouble at the Top documentary that followed Cohen and his 'businesses' as they struggled to make money] was screened Benjamin says he grew up.

‘I realised the stupidity of what was going on, there was no concentration on key revenue streams, it was all about land grab and not about money. I decided that the only way there would be a future was to start to cut back.’

…

Benjamin also decided to start a degree at King’s College London in Religion, Philosophy and Ethics. This, he says, has also forced him to grow up.

‘The added work load of a degree has made me focus a lot more when I am in work. I still manage to spend around 40 hours a week at work but it is a lot more focused on what can make money as opposed to what makes me look good in the papers.‘

He added… in a press release… sent to THE PAPERS.

‘I think that really I spent too much time flirting with the media and not enough time working in the early years.’

His three-page PRESS RELEASE continues.

The degree has also made Benjamin rethink his impressions of internet pornography, a subject that he has been criticised for in the past. CyberBritain.com owned Hunt4Porn.com, Europe’s first and largest adult search engine. Destined to cause controversy, Cohen has always displayed mixed views towards this aspect of his empire.

‘In one sense I still stand by the comments that I made last year about freedom of speech and the right of the individual to access pornography. Yet I have come to realise that there is really little money that I can make out of it.’

The above might actually be my favourite paragraph, not just in this press release, but in any press release ever sent. It’s a heart-warming tale of Damascene conversion…

God: ‘You know, Saul, there’s really very little money to be made in persecuting Christians.’

Saul: ‘Good point, God. I think I’ll change my ways. Call me Paul.’

Benjamin has grown up into a sensitive and sensible young man. He has dispensed of his obnoxious, brash manner of the past into quite the perfect gentleman. He has the ability to laugh at himself and realise his faults but most importantly, change them.

Seriously, Sam, I PROMISE I didn’t make this up. ‘Quite the perfect gentleman’!

I prefer the new me a million [*] times more than the old one. I much prefer the calmer, sensitive and perceptive nearly twenty-something than the excitable temperamental teenager.’

*40, 000.

Benjamin Cohen was the first and the last dotcom teenage millionaire…

No, he wasn’t. He’s just admitted that. Do you think he even read this thing as he was writing it?

…sure there were many after he first appeared but they disappeared from the scene long ago. He’s excited that the label will finally be dropped and he can become Benjamin Cohen, the businessman, student, media commentator and human being.’

Well, one out of four ain’t bad. Although, if he’s really off to university I can’t wait for his next press releases…

Benjamin Cohen: ‘The media claimed I’d got off with my housemate while I was drunk, but that was just hype…’

Benjamin Cohen: ‘Why reports of my £4.5m student loan were greatly exaggerated.’

Benjamin Cohen: ‘My mixed views on downloading tons of porn while I should be revising.’

Amazing.

P

1.7

It wasn’t just Sam and I who were having fun at Ben Cohen’s expense. The release was not exactly well received by the new media press, with many – including iconic geek news site The Register – simply printing the release verbatim and inviting readers to make their own comments.

You see, journalists will tolerate falling victim to hype; they ‘ll tolerate overblown valuations and they’ll even embrace precocious sixteen-year-old kids who claim to be worth millions of pounds, while the journalists themselves struggle to pay their rent. Yes, we’re jealous and we’re bitter, but we have a job to do and, in a boom, we’re your bitches.

But when the market crashes and the same precocious kid sends a press release admitting that it was all bullshit: hoo boy, then your ass is ours.

As 2003 turned into 2004, more and more entrepreneurs who a couple of years earlier had treated the press like their own personal PR machines, found themselves calling up journalists and begging to take us for lunch. I knew that I was in exactly the place you should be during a flood. On the high ground.

It didn ‘t matter how much money these people were losing; there were still plenty of stories to tell, and I was still going to be paid to write them, whatever happened. There was nothing that would make me envy the entrepreneurs I was writing about – nothing on earth that would make me want to trade places with them.

Nothing.

No way.

Not a chance.

And then I got the call.

Did I fancy a trip to Clapham?

Chapter Two: “The interactive hit of the summer”…

1. Today you would need 210, 000 ZX Spectrums to equal the internal memory of a reasonably decent camera phone. [↩]
2. 10 PRINT ’shit!’ 20 GOTO 10. [↩]
3. In 1424, Cambridge University library owned just over 120 books. So rare and valuable were they that for the cost of a single book you could buy an entire farm. Thanks to mad cow, foot and mouth, blue tongue and bird flu, the same is true today. [↩]
4. Even the Daily Express got there in the end, and they’ve still barely worked out how to be a newspaper. [↩]
5. Admittedly, earlier revolutions had had snappier mantras. ‘The future will be televised!’ – except for viewers in Scotland. [↩]
6. There’s an old joke about a kid typing into a search engine ‘women sucking off three-legged goats that are on fire’ and the search engine asking ‘what colour goats are you looking for?’ Also it’s widely accepted that VCRs became popular so quickly because they allowed horny men to watch pornography in their own homes rather than in grubby adult cinemas. Similarly, it’s staggering the number of Internet technologies we now take for granted that were invented by online pornographers to make money: secure credit card payments, streaming video, pop-up adverts, members’ only content… the list goes on. [↩]
7. The episode was entitled ‘Rear Windows ‘98′, which is actually brilliant. Rejected choices – presumably – include: ‘Gone With The Windows’, ‘Dial M For Microsoft’, ‘The Internet Connection Wizard of Oz’ and ‘Photoshop Your Wagon’. [↩]
8. The word ‘experiment’ is used on the web in the same way as it is on TV: as a euphemism for ‘excuse to show tits in the name of science’. [↩]
9. Which actually suits Jennifer just fine. Today, she doesn’t have so much as a MySpace page. [↩]
10. Part of the Pearson Group which also owns Penguin and the Financial Times. [↩]
11. Idiot. [↩]
12. The issue was published so quickly that subscribers assumed we’d written it in advance and put it in a drawer for later. In fact, Charlie and I wrote the whole thing over the phone while watching the coverage of her death. [↩]
13. The title was supposed to be ironic. The fact that the British press actually adopted the phrase ‘7/7′ to describe the attacks as if they were in some way part of a global ‘9/11′ franchise is, frankly, bizarre. [↩]
14. Presumably as opposed to an officially sanctioned mob. [↩]
15. I had no idea what my rights were. [↩]
16. Unless you’re a surgeon, obviously. [↩]
17. Including mentioning it in this book. [↩]
18. That’s true, it did. In fact, what it said was ‘ During a mob gathering, anything which can be thrown should be thrown. Eggs, bricks, rocks and bottles make excellent missiles but use your imagination – it’s your mob!’ It also covered fire-starting in some detail: ‘ Studies have shown that a paedophile is 90% less likely to return to his home if it has been razed to the ground so don’t forget that paraffin! However, if you are planning to include an element of arson in your mob event, be sure to keep matches away from children. ‘ [↩]
19. Tough on facts, tough on the causes of facts. [↩]
20. ibid [↩]
21. In fact, some of my best friends control the media and killed Jesus. [↩]
22. I would have called it ‘Look! Jews talking’. [↩]
23. Other ways include: close eyes, throw rock, hit porn site. [↩]