Feature

Unemployment Online

Just as Fast Company sang the praises of the Internet economy in its ascendance, a Website called FuckedCompany.com is dutifully recording its decline. A mock memorial to dead dot-coms, it's run out of the garment-district loft of Philip Kaplan, a 25-year-old programmer with his own Web services firm. "But PK Interactive is a real company," says Kaplan, a tall, self-assured 1997 Syracuse grad, as he shuffles around his home office in cargo pants and black Nike sandals. "We've been profitable since day one, not like an annoying Internet business."

Kaplan has been the pessimists' oracle since Memorial Day weekend, when he started FuckedCompany.com on a lark. He sent the site's URL out to a half-dozen friends and left for a trip to Brazil; by the time he got back a week later, 20,000 people had logged on. Most wanted to play the site's "Dot-Com Dead Pool," an e-company riff on the "Celebrity Dead Pool," a Howard Stern diversion in which the regulars bet on which famous people will die first.

Now FuckedCompany.com gets more than 400,000 page views per day, both from people who play the game and from those who just want to read updates on the Internet apocalypse, posted on the site whenever it strikes Kaplan's fancy: "BabyGear.com is out of business and left with almost $10 million in debt. Woohoo that's some good spending, cowboy!" FuckedCompany.com is now the 2,250th-most-popular site on the Web and ranked No. 9 in traffic among all high-tech-news sites on the Internet, according to PC Data. "That's fucking crazy," Kaplan wrote when informing his public of the accolades on the site. "You all should be ashamed of yourselves."

By chronicling the failure of other companies, Kaplan may have, oddly enough, found a way to cash in himself. When he put the site up for auction on eBay in September -- as a lark, of course -- the bidding reached $10 million. "Press started calling," he says. "Then my buddies called up, and they were like, 'Dude! We just bid $10 million for your site!' " Real bids, he claims, also came in -- at around $3 million -- and Kaplan says he's now negotiating a sale.

In his spare time, Kaplan also writes a newsletter for his FuckedCompany.com subscribers with a more personal point of view. "This year I wasn't invited to anything cool, and I still haven't finished my custom light-up Tron suit," he wrote on Halloween. "So I wore my proud to be a policeman T-shirt and went to some NYC loft party that pretty much sucked. I want to be like those elite people who hobnob with Leo and Lenny Kravitz. Which brings me to my next point: Anyone who does anything halfway cool in this town -- Internet or otherwise -- invite me to your parties, dammit."

As a punk version of Warrant's "Heaven" blasts out of the loft's hanging speakers, Kaplan, who goes by the onscreen handle Pud, scrolls through the 400 e-mails he gets each day from the bitter, the frantic, and the just plain nervous. "All these people are my compadres," he says in a deep baritone, thrumming his fingers on his brushed-steel desk. "They're all just people like me, you know -- dudes who work in Silicon Alley."

Kaplan swipes at his mouse and today's layoffs flicker onscreen. Employees have been shown the door at iChoose.com, UrbanDesign.com, SportsHuddle.com, Buy.com, WeMedia.com, iVendor.com, ArtistsDirect.com, Sandbox.com. It's still only noon. For his item on Sandbox.com, Kaplan writes: "A Website where one can play games for free, Sandbox.com, laid off about 30 employees. Umm, what's the business model again? (Question marks in tribute to my Latino brothers and sisters. One love)."

He opens a new e-mail: Another company has supposedly laid off all its employees. Another: Love your site -- you should do stand-up comedy. "I archive the ones that are real ego boosts," he admits, clicking his mouse to save the message. "And the ones from girls."

Some of those who have been laid off will never again have a job where transgender issues are discussed over lunch in the office. Sudeshna Nayar is now at Dow Jones, but she misses "the excitement of Urbanfetch." After leaving UBO.net, Charles is now at Simon & Schuster producing video games, but he doesn't plan to stay. "I'm not going to be some guy with a corporate job," he says. "That's for later in life."

For her part, De Sanctis has taken a "BizDev" position with LockStream, an Alley company that claims to have the only secure solution for digital distribution of music on the Net. "Look, content may be king," she says. "But it's also a bitch. I worked my ass off in that job chasing it." At her new job, she's working with a boss from years past, "rocking it out with him on a whole other level."

Of course, there are those who have no trouble at all deciding what to do after their dot-com dies: Shortly after Pseudo.com went bankrupt, founder Josh Harris wired his entire house with 32 Webcams for an art project, and threw a party featuring a full-size boxing ring and sushi served on top of a naked woman. Around the same time, Jess Zaino, a petite, curly-headed 24-year-old former Pseudo employee from Ronkonkoma, Long Island, was stuck at her apartment in Fort Greene, collecting unemployment and listening to Aretha Franklin. A lot of Aretha Franklin.

A couple weeks after the company went under, Zaino was chilling out at home reading Joe Eszterhas's American Rhapsody when she started to freak out. "It was like, 'Wow!' " says Zaino. "Pseudo goes bankrupt and I get no severance, no nothing, just a 'Sorry, guys, and here is security to escort you out of the building so we're sure you're not stealing the MP3 players.' " Then her life started to "suck" -- her grandmother died, she got pneumonia, and she broke up with her live-in boyfriend of two years. "I did a lot of self-reflection and soul-searching at that time," she says. "Learned a lot about patience and discipline." She read the Dalai Lama's The Art of Happiness, and that helped her deal with her anger.

"Because," yells Zaino, "I'm supposed to be a millionaire now, dude!"

And why not? In the small, weird world of Silicon Alley, she was a star. At 21, Zaino dropped out of college in California; in New York, she crashed one of Harris's parties and told him she'd "lick the floors to work at Pseudo." The next day, she got a job as receptionist. Eight months later, she had her own Web-TV show, StarFreaky, which featured her as a George Whipple-esque personality interviewing celebrities at guest-list-only events. "I loved that job," she says. "I had my own show, I had pictures taken of me all the time, I had an assistant." She was a cover girl -- even if she was only on the front of Video Systems Online Magazine. Earlier this year, when I was reporting a story about the players of Silicon Alley, Zaino called, unsolicited, and offered herself up as the leading member of the "Internet Brat Pack."

On a cold night in November, however, Zaino found herself working as an MTV production assistant, logging tape for a proposed MTV special, Revenge of the Rejects, an America's Funniest Home Videos-type show that features discarded submissions from other programs. "Four-hundred-pound girls singing Backstreet Boys with their little brothers," she says, walking the carpeted halls of the MTV offices on the thirty-second floor of the Paramount building. "Scary, right?"

Though she left MTV two weeks later, Zaino remembers her time at Pseudo as more than just a job. While we talk, she shows off a tattoo on the back of her calf that she had done the week after Pseudo closed. It's the company's logo, a circle about the size of a Snapple cap, half red and half black. "It's flaking a little because it's new," she explains. "But I wanted to get it to represent my schooling and all that shit. 'Cause I'm proud of what I did there.

"Way down the line, the Internet in the last few years is going to be remembered as an Andy Warhol, Max's Kansas City thing. I can see the books that are going to be written." She smiles. "And I'm going to be in them."