Inevitably, though, the sidelines remained. Glover, now 40 years old, continued his work as a self-described “tinkerer.” For small cash payments, he did low-level computer maintenance and repair. He installed software on friends’ computers. He set up wireless routers for the elderly, careful always to protect their networks with passwords. He formatted hard drives and reinstalled frozen operating systems. For twenty bucks, he would jailbreak your iPhone.

The sideline extended to optical disc technology. Xboxes, PlayStations, Wiis, Blu-ray—if your device wasn’t working, you took it to Glover, who would fix it for a small cash fee. Most of the time, somebody had inserted a second disc on top of a first, or maybe the laser had burnt out. The fixes were simple and required no more than a screwdriver and a single replacement part. Meaning, if you had a busted CD player, Dell Glover could fix that for you too.

As technology evolved, such physical relics were left behind. I could relate to Glover’s fondness for obsolete tech—looking to hold on to my music collection, I’d saved every hard drive from every computer I’d ever had. There were nine of them, dating back to 1997, each one double the capacity of the last. The earliest, with just two gigabytes of storage, contained the first few songs I’d ever pirated. Now, across all the drives, I had more than 100,000 mp3s.

It had taken me 17 years to amass all these files, but the rise of cloud computing made the whole thing pointless. My hoarding instincts were fading, curating the library was growing more tiresome by the year, and the older drives didn’t even work with modern systems. Finally I caved, bought a Spotify subscription, and accepted the reality: what I’d thought of as my personal archive was just an agglomeration of slowly demagnetizing junk.

How to dispose of it? I googled “data destruction services” and soon found myself in a warehouse in Queens, carrying the drives in a plastic bag. I was prepared to pay for the service, but the technician told me that, for such a small job, he’d be willing to do it for free. He led me around back, through a massive warehouse shared by a variety of industrial firms, to a small chain-link partition that belonged to his company. Once we arrived, I watched as he donned a pair of safety goggles, then picked up a large pneumatic nail gun. He took a drive from the bag, placed it on a workbench, and systematically blasted a half dozen nails through its metal housing. Then he picked it up and shook it next to his ear, to listen for the telltale rattle of its shattered magnetic core. One by one he repeated this process, until the bag was empty. When he had finished, he gathered the ruined drives in his arms, then threw them in a nearby dumpster, on top of thousands of others.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It took me nearly five years to write this book, and the list of people who assisted me is long. Several professors at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism provided invaluable guidance and support, particularly Sam Freedman, Kelly McMasters, Kristen Lombardi, John Bennet, and the trustees of the Lynton Fellowship. I’d especially like to thank Jim Mintz and Sheila Coronel, who taught the best class I have ever taken.

Reporting is an intrusive process, but my sources have been exceptionally cooperative and kind. In Ilmenau, Karlheinz Brandenburg was an almost embarrassingly gracious host. So too was Bernhard Grill in Erlangen. Matthias Rose and Susanne Rottenberger at Fraunhofer arranged a half-dozen interviews for me, and also helped me rescue my rental car after I backed it into a ditch. At Sony, Doug Morris was generous with his insight and time, as were Julie Swidler and Liz Young. In New York, Patrick Saunders and Simon Tai provided invaluable information and context. Above all, though, I have to thank Dell Glover for sharing his incredible story with the world.

I will never forget the day (my birthday, coincidentally) that my agent, Chris Parris-Lamb, pulled my manuscript out of the slush pile and told me I had something worth publishing. As a writer I was unheralded and unknown, attempting to effect a lateral career transition at the age of 34, with no platform, no name recognition, and no published work. But Chris—possibly suffering from some sort of head trauma—decided that I was going to be his next client, and his decision changed my life. Without his business sense and editorial guidance, this project would have foundered. The reader will, I hope, forgive this treacly Rod Tidwell moment, but he really is that good. So are Will Roberts, Andy Kifer, Rebecca Gardner, and the rest of the team at the Gernert Company.

I got lucky with my publisher, too. At Viking Press, Allison Lorentzen took a huge chance on me, and later graciously entertained my desire to read the entire manuscript to her out loud, sacrificing her weekend in service of my neurosis. She’s a great editor. The rest of team at Viking are great, too: Diego Nunez, Min Lee, Jason Ramirez, Nicholas LoVecchio, Lydia Hirt, Sarah Janet, Lindsay Prevette, Whitney Peeling, Andrea Schulz, Brian Tart, Clare Ferraro, and Catherine Boyd. Across the pond at Bodley Head, Stuart Williams, Vanessa Milton, Kirsty Howarth, Joe Pickering, David Bond, and James Paul Jones were all terrific. (I especially enjoyed the UK libel read. Let’s do it again sometime.) And I can’t forget my fact-checkers, Jill Malter and Dacus Thompson, who were forced to wade through thousands of pages of notes and to remind me on repeated occasions that no, Charlotte is not the capital of North Carolina. Additional fact-checking work was done by Lev Mendes at The New Yorker, where editors Willing Davidson and David Remnick were kind enough to publish an excerpt of this book.

It’s not always easy having a writer as a friend. Actually it sucks, so I’d like to publicly acknowledge those people close to me who listened (or at least pretended to listen) to me complain about this project over the years: Robin Respaut, Dustin Kimmel, Josh Morgenstern, David Graffunder, Elliot Ross, Brian and Kimberly Barber, Laura Griffin, Daryl Stein, Dan D’Addario, Pete Beatty, Bryan Joiner, Lisa Kingery, Dan Duray, Brian and Kristy Burlingame, Bernardo de Sousa e Silva, Lauren and Rui Mesquita, Jamie Roberts, Beverly Liang, Atossa Abrahamian, and Jihae Hong. Extra-special thanks go to my spirit brother Daniel Kingery, for nearly two decades of love and friendship. And extra-extra-special thanks go to Amanda Wirth, without whose patience, kindness, and support this book would never have been written.

Lastly, there is my family. Here I am luckiest of all. My father, Leonard Witt, was himself a journalist for many years, and has always encouraged me to write. My mother, Diana Witt, is a librarian by training, and she even compiled the index for this book. But it was my sister, Emily Witt, who really showed me the whole thing was possible. She’s a great reporter, an original thinker, and one of my favorite living writers. She will forever be an inspiration to me.

A NOTE ON SOURCES

A private detective once explained to me the essence of the investigative method: “You start with a document. Then you take that document to a person, and ask them about it. Then that person tells you about another document. You repeat this process until you run out of people, or documents.” Starting with the Affinity e-zine interview quoted in this book, and following this iterative process for the next four years, I ended up with dozens of people and tens of thousands of documents. A comprehensive catalog would take pages—below is a selection.