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Few book reviews open with amateur rap, but: ‘back in the day when new media was new,’ goes the first line of a song written and performed by Jaime Levy at famed music venue Webster Hall in New York in a 1998 Silicon Alley Talent Show The performers were web pioneers from the 90s — New York Magazine in 2000, in a stroke of 90s genius, called them Netheads — trying to raise money for a new web development fund Levy was one of the familiar figures on this scene: a punk-rock from California, she came to New York when she was 21 to study at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) and then made a name for herself as a digital publisher, initially distributing electronic magazines on floppy discs She went on to become the creative director of Word magazine, an online magazine launched at a time when there were less than a thousand websites on the internet, most of them of the personal ‘Hey! Welcome to my Web site’ category She also threw the wildest parties; many of her guests saw the web for the first time on Levy’s Macintosh II at drunken evenings in her East Village loft   Back in the day when new media was new, the energy and excitement about the early web was as feverish as the speculation and money it created Newly minted CEOs spent their dollars on parties where a new programme’s source code was projected on the wall and people stood in its shadow, drinking in honour of paper millionaires on both coasts of the United States Back then, there were still many people who saw the internet as a vision of many futures that could be, before Silicon Valley won Looking at how we got where we are now, two recent books, Claire Evans’s Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the