The Leap: A Memoir of Love and Madness in the Internet Goldrush
By Tom Ashbrook
Houghton Mifflin
295 pages, $25

Pushing 40, passed over for a promotion and tired of the rat race, Boston Globe journalist Tom Ashbrook was at a crossroads. News had become decadent. "It got ugly. Petty. Tawdry. Marginal. Vaudeville. ... O.J. Whitewater. Paula Jones."

His seemingly glamorous career as a foreign correspondent had begun to pall. "Walking through the gutted streets of Mogadishu and Vukovar," he suddenly noticed how passˇ it all seemed. "It looked older than news should be," he recalls of the war-torn vistas of Africa and the Balkans, "too old for me ... a creaking pointless trick of history too bloody, too endless."

But the problem wasn't media distortions of the world, the problem was the world itself--specifically, all that tangible substance that is, economically speaking, pure dead weight. "Brick-and-mortar was a burden, a ball and chain," he writes of the "heavy, solid, depreciating" physical world. "It was the old economy. It was history. And its past performance was no guarantee of future returns."

From now on returns would only come from a "world that was electronic, light, untouchable," far removed from the "factories and warehouses and stores" he wished would just melt into air. Surely, he thought, as he pondered a tired world of massacres and blow jobs and rusting infrastructure, "there had to be a way to keep life fresh and free," a way to "go forward, to find the world's new energy." Fortunately, there was a way: "They called it the Internet. ... It was young and fresh and knew nothing of genocide and war."

So, Ashbrook cofounded a dotcom--HomePortfolio, an online home furnishings catalogue. The Leap is his account of HomePortfolio's beginnings, from starry-eyed inception to triumphant first-round financing, with investors lining up for a piece of the action. Part advertorial and part manifesto, The Leap is a fascinating window into the mythology of the New Economy. Its most potent metaphor is the Web site itself, a haven of "unique home design products" that helps consumers "express their personal tastes and aspiration" and conjures up "the home of people's dreams." HomePortfolio both expresses the cyber-critique of reality--that it's a squalid, enervating mess we'd be well advised to bypass via the Internet--and transcends it by promising to replace the "dark, cloistered and usually modest home of reality" with an "open, gracious, sun-filled version of that traditional home."

Through its user-friendly interface, bricks and mortar, once the constituent materials of factories, are stripped of their association with assembly-line toil and become the stuff of "dream homes," fantasy settings for upscale domesticity and leisure. The pointless, bloody past is harmlessly resurrected as pretty Victorianish décor, and identity is disentangled from collective experience and becomes a unique expression of personal tastes, imagineered out of the cornucopia of options thrown up by the market.

Then there's Ashbrook himself, the proverbial content-provider, who trades in his depreciating intellectual capital for skyrocketing equity capital. Neither an autistic tech-head nor an MBA'd player, he is a typical bourgeois bohemian, complete with liberal politics, a Woodward-and-Bernstein anti-establishment streak and an ostentatious diffidence toward wealth. For him, entrepreneurship is a voyage of self-discovery: "I didn't think it was about money at all," he writes of his blossoming get-rich-quick scheme, but about "risk-taking" and "passion" and "feeling really, really alive."

Ashbrook's story is a reassuring one, in which the bohemian ideals of emotion, spontaneity and direct experience are assimilated to the dominant ethos of capitalist acquisitiveness. Nonetheless, his glib assertion that profitability equals authenticity papers over more troubling questions that are raised but not confronted in The Leap. Can dream homes exist without industrial drudgery? Will all the social ills of capitalism evaporate along with the physical plant? Does the Internet promote a deeper engagement with the world, or a more hermetic form of escapism? Is investor confidence the ultimate measure of one's humanity?

And is it really not about the money at all? Ashbrook hymns HomePortfolio as a liberation movement that will usher in the democratization of art and design and "change the way people lived, the way they slept and cooked and saw the sun and loved and breathed and the rooms they danced in." But it becomes clear early on that Ashbrook has no particular interest in houses, per se. "Great homes are inspiring," Ashbrook allows half-heartedly, "but the main thing is ... to move information in a way that makes a difference." Why is he so inspired by information flow, that insipid managerial abstraction? Because information flows triggers cash flow, to the tune of "$80 million--by year three." Projections like that make him giddy: "I hopped up on a big rock, pissing a long arc into the woods, laughing and crowing like a goofy rooster."

What really seems to motivate Ashbrook is the status anxiety of professionals who find themselves near--but not at--the top of the heap. Pre-leap, Ashbrook, his wife and their three kids are one of those destitute upper-middle-class families you read about, unable to make ends meet on $150,000 a year. Trapped in the limbo between affluence and wealth, he starts to question the hamster wheel of salaried employment. He muses on the fact that, while the top 5 percent of the population earns just 18 percent of the nation's income, the top 2 percent owns 80 percent of the wealth. His own labor had gotten him into the top 5 percent, but only equity would get him into the top 2 percent. He recalls the words of an old gold prospector he used to know: "You'll never be free working for a wage."

As The Leap progresses, this theme evolves into an elaborate counterpoint between debased labor and exalted capital. Labor is stultifying and moribund. Capital is creative and life-affirming. Labor is embodied in the "lifeless eyes" of the "zombies" Ashbrook used to work with at the Globe. Capital is embodied in the "glittering eyes" of the "young firebrands" in the entrepreneurial management class he sits in on at Harvard Business School. The key element distinguishing labor from capital is risk.

The point is hammered into Ashbrook at Harvard, where academic celebrities regale him with pop-nihilist clichˇs about the death of the middle class and the need to "put all concrete elements of the past at risk" and "eviscerate traditional customs." Under their influence he begins to rail against his fellow risk-averse Boomers, still absorbed with "their angst and their aging parents and puking kids and their complicated emotional lives," still dependent on their "automatic deposits, pension plans and 401K statements" and all the other "vanishing 9-to-5 certainties" he had learned to do without. "Can they ever be free enough," he wonders, "to give a startup the push it's going to need to make it?"

What a contrast to the superwealthy venture capitalists who staked HomePortfolio, all of them titans who gobble life by the fistful. If one is "electric," then the next is "smart and intuitive, irreverent and funny," while a third is "an empath, with huge sparkling green eyes" that see "right to the souls" of the supplicants pitching him for financing. One Wall Street honcho is nothing less than a human hurricane as he rains a "shower of instructions, ideas, simultaneous interlocking phone conversations" that keep "a whole platoon of lieutenants racing in his wake to wrap up the deals he spun off in waves."

Ironically, given Ashbrook's oft-expressed view of entrepreneurship as a deliverance from the curse of labor, his own life as an entrepreneur is governed by the most degrading of all capitalist work processes: the cold call. He phones friends, relatives, venture capitalists, next-door neighbors, total strangers, even NBC anchorman Stone Phillips, trying to drum up funds to keep HomePortfolio afloat. Capitalism is about capital, nowhere more so than at an online startup. Ashbrook had imagined the Internet to be "a realm where value created in the mind could be turned directly, digitally, into real economic value." But he discovers that grassroots e-commerce requires a huge overhead of computers, programmers, graphic designers and photographers; soon HomePortfolio's "burn rate" hits $75,000 a month, with no sales and no product to sell. Desperate for cash, Ashbrook and his partner shoulder hundreds of thousands of dollars in credit card debt as their wives protest at the ruin of their family finances.

Ashbrook's book is worth reading for its harrowing depiction of the insatiable hunger for capital, the endless credit crises and the humiliating necessity to sell oneself and one's carefully nurtured equity stake to any and every moneyman. But while others might view this saga as a dehumanizing tragedy, Ashbrook turns it into a swelling Nietzschean rhapsody. The cold call is the furnace in which his soul is forged anew: "My palms were sweating. I felt flushed. ... If I couldn't dial that number, then I wasn't cut out for this entrepreneurial thing. ... I was just another good schmo on the assembly line, waiting for his plant to close."

Finally, he dials. He meets rejection after rejection, but he finds that it only makes him stronger. "Only my flesh is vulnerable, and I am not flesh. I am one with the vision. I will walk on water, I will pull the sun up with my bare hands. I will make new worlds."

As he reassesses every human tie in terms of its cold cash value to his business, Ashbrook learns that entrepreneurship is the bedrock of human solidarity. The insecurity and atomization bred by the marketplace turn out to be the wellspring of deeper, stronger communities based on risk. He feels a mystic connection with his distant forebears who braved the leap across the Atlantic, and with the little band of risk-takers in the HomePortfolio office. "What a time we lived in," Ashbrook exults, "when talented people like this were free agents."

Like other New Economy propagandists, Ashbrook uses the rhetoric of self-actualization to disparage older conceptions of human fulfillment--that labor should be dignified and remunerative, that security is the essence of freedom, not its antithesis. It's not an entirely successful strategy. Much as he touts an economy based on authenticity, deep down Ashbrook thinks the world has too much authenticity--too much history, too much corporeality, too many social encumbrances that inhibit the exercise of free agency.

The contradictions become glaring when we think about where the money that financed his business came from in the first place. Did venture capitalists pull it out of the sun with their bare hands? No, it came from automatic deposits, pension plans, 401Ks and all those other bourgeois crutches Ashbrook imagines he can do without. It came from the college savings Boomers are stashing away for their puking kids. It came from profits off the labor of all those good schmos on the assembly line, waiting for their plants to close down. Ashbrook would like to wish away these inconvenient realities.

To get a look at Ashbrook's preferred form of authenticity, I logged on to The Ultimate Purpose of Creation--I mean, HomePortfolio. It may not change the way you love and breathe, but it's not a bad site if you're looking for stuff to put in your house. You can click through to a manufacturer's page, place online impulse orders, or find out where the nearest showroom carrying an item is located (1,001 miles away in the case of a door that caught my eye). You also get rank upon rank of thumbnail photos, sorted by product type, style and price, including 294 chests of drawers, 160 shades of green paint, 1,138 varieties of doorknob, and 123 different toilets (at a median price of $700). And if browsing HomePortfolio is a little like trying to take a sip of water from a fire hydrant, that's an unavoidable part of the consumerism of self-expression that HomePortfolio upholds. You need a virtual infinity of options to ensure that you'll find the one unique object that embodies your personal tastes and aspirations.

But the basic premise behind this idea--that the consumer has a unique vision, a pre-existing configuration of desire that HomePortfolio simply renders palpable and purchasable--seems deeply flawed. "People are getting better and better at deciding what they like," according to HomePortfolio's credo of populist connoisseurship, but the Web site itself suggests they have no idea what they like. One sees this in the site's Q&A section, where HomePortfolio editors deal with the inchoate pleas of homeowners trying to fill up the echoing interiors of their McMansions. "I'm having a hard time knowing what colors and styles go together," frets one woman grappling, visionless, with a kitchen renovation. "Help!"

To stimulate and shape consumer desires, the Web site offers a "getting inspired" section with lush photo spreads of designer homes. When I logged on, they were showcasing a renovated 19th-century Texas farmhouse. The owners had decided to "visually link" their new addition with their house's imagined past using "rugged touches" like rough-hewn beams, poured concrete countertops and a chicken-feed trough placed insultingly on the dining room table as a centerpiece. That no actual Victorian would have decorated her house with barnyard motifs seemed beside the point.

HomePortfolio isn't really about fulfilling desires, it's about manufacturing fantasies. "Dreaming about homes is the true American pastime," says HomePortfolio's business plan. But it also notes that most of us can't afford luxury houses and must "pursue our dreams vicariously." While HomePortfolio can enhance "the process of dreaming effectively about a new home or renovation," it acknowledges that, for most of us, the dreams can never actually come true.

Still, it's a lucrative business--so lucrative that Ashbrook can only compare it to that other dynamo of e-commerce: "Dreaming about beautiful homes equals safe sex on the Internet." The Internet may know nothing of genocide and war, but it knows a lot about pornography, which is all that HomePortfolio adds up to in the end--just another solipsistic, masturbatory reverie to console us for our cubicled lives.