NetSlaves: True Tales of Working the Web, 1st edition
Authors: Bill Lessard, Steve Baldwin
Venue:  (1999)

:This beat was stressful [stressfull] enough before,when the online service kept all the racy,anarchic conversations ghettoized in one chatroom in order to keep the rest "family friendly. " But tonight the owners decided upon a final solution for that ghetto: Deletion. Now the refugees,locked-out and angry,are swarming into other chatrooms like rioters storming into the suburbs to pillage its virgin daughters: Devil-worshippers flood the Spirituality forum; references to masturbation and pedophilia rear up in the Teen Talk chatroom,and it's your job to stamp them out like roaches. How much can you and your fellow overworked,underpaid "cybercops" take? You find the answer when another "cop" starts waving a real gun;he voices started during your second week with no more than an hour of sleep at a stretch. It's 4a. m. and you are permanently tethered by e-mail,phone,and beeper to software users worldwide who demand your instant attention 24 hours a day. This is your reward for saying "No" to a job with the world's largest software company. When you walked away from the worksheet-and-chinos fascism of their Seattle campus,you thought you were saving your soul. Instead you've lost your freedom. As you swill more cold coffee,each e-mail chime,phone ring,and beeper summons jolts you with the force of an electrode. And the voices in your head are getting louder. Scenes from a cyberpunk novel or an updated film noir? No,these are the true stories from the dark corners of the Internet,where platoons of perma-temp workers roam roninlike from job to job,anonymously holding the economy together. NETSLAVES: TRUE TALES OF WORKING THE WEB offers eyewaccounts of gruelinghours,gross mismanagement,and chronic backstabbing in an industry with no real rules. The truth is not only stranger than fiction; it's stranger than "Dilbert" on acid or a Hunter Thompson nightmare. Meet&#58 A"help desk" worker overwhelmed by customer e-mail,who finds himself drawn to the elegant solution of the "delete" key; An engineer at the world's largest chip manufacturer,fired after his health is destroyed by overwork,who decides upon a gloriously futile gesture; A freelancer who is made the fall guy by her bosses after faulty software posts the wrong verdict at the end of the O. J. trial; A mail-order machiavelli who earns millions selling cut-rate PCs that spontaneously combust and interfere with airplane navigation. This is Studs Terkel's WORKING for the web erajolted with caffeine and spiked with sardonic Michael Moore-ish humor. Yes,the Internet is "HOT. " Just ask the workers who've been burned by it. Behind the industry propaganda and media hype are thousands of individuals trying,against the odds,to make a decent living while they keep everything going. In the dark corners of the Web,they labor: a freelancer owed thousands of dollars by a giant corporation; a tech supporter tethered to his tasks by cell phone and beeper 24 hours a day; a "perma-temp" worker,kept by caste from health benefits and a decent wage even after years of full-time work; an "online editor" whose Max Perkins dreams dissolve in mind-numbing chat room censoring or HTML coding; a content provider,pink-slipped as soon as the Web-based start-up she works for starts making a profit. These,then,are the NetSlaves,and their stories are what has been missing from all the gleeful talk of the future of the Web. NetSlaves was written by the founders of the popular Web site. Based on interviews with workers from across the spectrum of Internet-related jobs,the book offers humorous and not-so-humorous eyewitness accounts of the grueling hours,poor management,dehumanizing pressures and paranoia-inducing stresses faced by the women and men on the e-business frontier. To read it is to enter a shadowy world of Fry Cooks,CyberCops,porno spammers,doomsayers,golddiggers,code-packers and moles. This world isn't the creation of some cyberpunk novel: It's real. These "horror stories" are all true. And this is also true: You don't really know the net until you've met the NetSlaves.