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The privatization led by Clinton and Gore enabled the dot-com boom of the 1990s as well as the bust that followed. Once more, the best-connected insiders emerged from the chaos in an even stronger position. Ghazi was working as an investment analyst during the boom, but his former company promoted …

In Ghazi’s telling, each tech boom began with a constant and a variable. The constant was easy financing, whether from government-subsidized borrowing or unsophisticated investors. The variable was whatever Silicon Valley was trying to sell at the time. In the early nineties, the boom was about har…

“It’s all about getting the chart that goes up,” a disaffected social media marketing expert told me over drinks. “There’s a whole industry devoted to making charts that go up.” To illustrate his point, he pointed me to the Guardian newspaper’s now-defunct “partner zones” program, which afforded la…

Fraud was the hot topic that year, because digital ad buyers were starting to wise up. More than two decades after the arrival of the commercialized Web, a trade group finally funded a proper scientific study on the problem of online ad fraud. The study found, among other things, that marketers wer…

When a tech company captures an audience, it gets more than the opportunity to sell products and ideas. It also harvests the discretely quantified and collated bits of individual user data that people hand over, wittingly and unwittingly, as they stare at their computer and smartphone screens. As v…