As the new millennium dawned, a mysterious invention from a charismatic millionaire became a viral sensation—then went down in flames. Ever since, I’ve wondered: Was it all my fault?
By Dan Kois | Slate
In January of 2001, a startup news website broke a huge technology story: A charismatic millionaire was secretly developing an incredible invention, one that would change the world, in his lab in New Hampshire. The news came via a leaked, secret book proposal, which had just sold to the academic publisher Harvard Business School Press for $250,000. Within hours, the story was everywhere.
The proposal quoted Steve Jobs saying the invention would be “as significant as the personal computer.” Jeff Bezos said it was “revolutionary.” But what was surprising about the book deal wasn’t merely the praise the invention and its inventor, Dean Kamen, garnered from tech world luminaries. It wasn’t merely the substantial investment the inventor had received from famed venture capitalist John Doerr, the largest in the firm Kleiner Perkins’ history. What stood out most of all was the detail that Harvard was paying a quarter-million dollars for the book—and it didn’t even know what the invention was. The inventor was paranoid about leaks, and the book’s author withheld that information from the proposal. No one—not even the literary agent who had submitted the proposal to editors, swearing them to secrecy—knew what the invention was. All they knew was the single word of the book’s title: IT.
The tech bubble was bursting, and all across Silicon Valley, paper fortunes were vanishing. Now here was something different, something that felt new because it was old: a real invention, not just lines of HTML. Soon IT was on Lycos, on NPR, in the New York Times, on late-night talk shows. An IT message board thrown onto the internet by two entrepreneurial brothers received 100,000 hits in its first 24 hours. The explosion of the IT story in the winter and spring of 2001 represented an entirely new kind of media frenzy, the birth of virality as we now know it.
