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In the Internet, moreover, I had been handed a set of tools that allowed sensations to be created by anyone for almost no cost. Some of the successes had been epic, as in the case of The Blair Witch Project, which cost roughly $22,000 to make but earned, after a brilliant and dirt-cheap Internet marketing campaign, more than $248 million in gross—an anecdote that launched a thousand business books. (The sequel cost $15 million and flopped.) Scores of other viral victories had been considerably more modest financially but eye-opening nonetheless. A gregarious Turk named Mahir Çagri lured literally millions of visitors to his slapdash personal home page, which professed his love for beautiful women and popularized, for most of a year, the greeting “I kiss you!” A twentysomething New Yorker named Jonah Peretti (who figures in chapter 3 of this book) sent to his friends an e-mail exchange he had had with Nike, and weeks later found that it had been disseminated to literally millions of people; he later went on to create more such “contagious media” projects and even taught a class on the subject at NYU. These sorts of links passed from person to person, from in-box to in-box, arriving once a week or even daily. Sometimes they were essentially found objects (like Mahir’s home page), culled from the dark corners of the web in the service of semi-ironic hipster sport; but as the years went on, increasingly the forwarded e-mails linked to content that was consciously made to spread. The “viral,” whether e-mail or website or song or video, was gradually emerging as a new genre of communication, even of art.

A marginal genre only a few years ago, the intentional viral has become central as this decade malingers on. Each day, hundreds of millions of videos are viewed on YouTube, and hundreds of thousands are uploaded. The viral currents charging through MySpace, with its millions of members and tens of thousands of bands, can literally create a number-one band—cf. the Arctic Monkeys—while the network of indie-rock music blogs, chief among them Pitchfork Media, is arguably the most important influence on which smaller bands prosper and which languish. Corporations are funneling million-dollar budgets into “word-of-mouth” marketing, with its emphasis on quick-hit pass-along ads, short-lived web “experiences,” promotional blogs, and endless Internet tie-ins to the companies’ more traditional campaigns. In national politics, the Internet has emerged as the crucial location for volunteer recruitment, fund-raising, and, above all, “conversation”—if one can accept that as a euphemism for the churning mess of interconnected blogs, most of them partisan, that every day and night are looking for opportunities to score political points against their enemies. The traditional media, unsure of their own business models, have moved to adapt, scrutinizing their most e-mailed lists for clues to the zeitgeist and then sending their reporters to chase the sorts of contagious stories that the Internet audience craves. All of this money and energy is aimed at creating hyperquick blowups, the kind of miniature crazes whose success is measured in hits and whose life span is measured in months if not weeks or days.

Sudden success has ever been the truest American dream, in 1800 and in 2000 and, God willing, in 2200, among those who survive the terror attacks and sea swells and oil wars. But what this particular decade, the first of the twenty-first century, has built, I would argue, is a new viral culture based on a new type of sudden success—a success with four key attributes. The first is outright speed: viral culture confers success with incredible rapidity, in a few weeks at the outside. The second is shamelessness: it is a success defined entirely by attention, and whether that attention is positive or negative matters hardly one bit. The third is duration: it is a success generally assumed to be ephemeral even by those caught up in it. These first three attributes, it should be