The Players Ball: A Genius, a Con Man, and the Secret History of the Internet’s Rise - David Kushner

Written by David Kushner
Read by George Newbern
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
Release date: April 9, 2019
Duration: 07:09:11

An engrossing microcosm of the internet’s Wild West years, based on an ugly conflict between two eccentric innovators of online dating and pornography.

In The Players Ball, award-winning journalist David Kushner draws from years of research and interviews to vividly recreate the Wild West years online, when innovators and outlaws battled for power and money. He explores the risks, rewards, challenges, and back alleys of how the world online came to be and provides essential insights about where it’s heading. The Players Ball is the rollicking true story of a decade-long cat-and-mouse game between a genius and a con man that changed the way people connect, and defined the digital age.

In 1994, visionary entrepreneur Gary Kremen used a $2,500 loan to create the first online dating service, Match.com. Only 5 percent of Americans were using the internet at the time, and even fewer were looking online for love. He quickly bought the Sex.com domain too, betting the combination of love and sex would help propel the internet into the mainstream.

Gary Kremen was an unkempt computer innovator whose keen sense of what was next was embodied by his founding of the dating site Match.com, and Stephen Michael Cohen was a con artist, libertine, and tech enthusiast who developed the first sex-oriented bulletin board system in the early 1980s. Cohen was in prison in 1994, as Kremen was developing Match.com and, presciently, registering domain names based on perceiving their future profitability: “His plan was simple, to register each and every category of classified ads online.”

Later, Cohen also took the Sex.com address, via forged paperwork, seeing its lucrative potential. The mercurial Kremen was astonished to discover the theft in the wake of his emotionally devastating ouster by the Match.com board. “Kremen didn’t know why or how Cohen had obtained what was rightfully his,” writes the author. This led to a complex, increasingly bitter legal battle.

Kushner constructs this labyrinthine tale clearly, focusing on the experiences and outlooks of both Kremen and Cohen and chronicling his discussions with associates and early industry observers. He keeps it compelling by emphasizing the high stakes of their struggle for what the internet has since become, though the narrative sometimes meanders and finally seems anticlimactic.An easily consumed, worthwhile addition to the literature reconstructing how the online world has become both profitable and pervasive.

“Kushner delivers a fast-paced, raunchy tale of sex, drugs, and dial-up.”