Leaving Reality Behind

This is a story of the battle for the control of the Internet. In November 1999, at the height of the e-commerce gold rush, an extraordinary hearing took place in a Los Angeles courtroom. On one side, the billion-dollar darling of Wall Street, eToys.com, the brain child of Toby Lenk. On the other side, etoy.com, a group of cutting-edge European artists, hungry for fame, who used the Internet as their canvas. The ensuing battle sharply focused attention on the conflict at the very heart of the Internet: was it for the joy of the many or the exponential profit of the few? Was cyberspace a revolutionary public space or was the new frontier an extension of the shopping mall? Through the story for the Toywar, Adam Wishart and Regula Bochsler weave the history of the seven years that changed the world forever. The main question was this: in 2000, as the on-line world went into melt-down, what would be more valuable and enduring, a ten billion dollar corporation created by the best American entrepreneurs or a chaotic art project by a group of anarchic European rebels?