A very late-90s artefact in the best possible way, this sits somewhere between cultural reportage, memoir, and field notes from the early commercial internet.

McGrath writes at the moment when digital life still felt like a frontier rather than infrastructure: chat rooms, online identities, virtual intimacy, techno-utopian fantasy, and the queasy sense that bodies, desire, and selfhood were being reformatted in public.

What makes it interesting now is precisely its date. Books like this catch the internet while it still had the aura of elsewhere: sleazy, emancipatory, ridiculous, ecstatic. A period piece of digital culture, media archaeology, or strange pre-millennium social theory.

Flamingo paperback, 1998 edition. Great condition.