NetSlaves

» see netslaves.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

NetSlaves ran from October 1998 to June 2003, which is almost exactly the window I came online, and I could not have been further from what it was about. Its subject was what it felt like to hold a job in the New York internet industry. I was fourteen when it started, on a 33.6k modem in Turkey, and the closest thing to a dot-com labor market anywhere near me was an internet cafe charging by the hour and a man behind the counter resetting the machines.

Steve Baldwin and Bill Lessard had a book first. They took the idea to New York agents, who told them it was a magazine article rather than a book, and more than one of them said so. Instead of shrinking it they put it on the web in October 1998 and let readers supply the material. The book existed inside a year anyway: NetSlaves: True Tales of Working the Web, McGraw-Hill, 1999.

Forbes covered it in April 1999 and put the traffic at roughly twenty-five thousand visitors a week. Wired described it as the only site where the web working poor could air their feelings. That phrase is doing more work than it looks like. In 1999, describing anyone in the internet business as poor cut directly against the entire mood of the coverage, which ran on stock options and on how early it supposedly still was.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the caste system ~

The argument underneath the site was that new media had a hidden caste system, invisible from outside, that decided how far any given worker could actually move. The book turned that into a taxonomy: internet jobs sorted into named castes, each with its own chapter, an org chart written from the bottom of the building rather than the top. The names were funny. The point being made with them was not.

The site itself was a magazine that grew a bulletin board. Baldwin and Lessard wrote everything at the start, then opened it to anyone with a story, and the stories were about hours and about the specific paranoia of working somewhere with eighteen months of runway. Steve Gilliard wrote daily through 2000 and 2001 and produced the most contentious material the site ever ran, which pulled traffic and made enemies across Silicon Alley in roughly equal measure.

~ the day the forum emptied ~

In June 2002 Gilliard, by then holding moderator powers, permanently banned a user posting as Cheopys. Users left in sympathy and kept leaving. Baldwin, writing about it years later on his own site, said NetSlaves soon found itself empty of anything resembling real discussion, which is a mild way of describing a community that walks out over a ban.

It limped for another twelve months and closed in June 2003. By then FuckedCompany had taken the anger anyway, because a dead-pool with a scoreboard is a better container for rage than an essay is. The second book, Net Slaves 2.0: Tales of Surviving the Great Tech Gold Rush, came out that same year from Allworth Press, published into the wreckage it was describing.

~ the inheritance ~

The forum is gone in the literal sense. It ran on ASP bulletin-board software that Archive.org never crawled properly, so the discussion that was the entire point of the later site did not survive. What is left in the archive is front pages and article text, which is the half that mattered least.

The domain went through more afterlives than the site had years. By December 2008 netslaves.com was serving a this-website-is-for-sale page. Around 2011 a reconstruction of the mission statement showed up at the address running on a German-language WordPress theme. By 2013 it was a Parallels Plesk default page. By 2015 it had been reduced to a bare placeholder reading HTTP HERE, and in 2026 it is a HugeDomains listing. Steve Baldwin, meanwhile, had been running Ghost Sites of the Web since 1996, an e-zine devoted entirely to dead and abandoned websites. In June 2005 he used it to write the obituary for his own.

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