Since no one will actually read the enormous Vanity Fair oral history of the Internet, because everyone's attention span has been destroyed by the Internet, perhaps no one has noticed that it is the most hilarious thing ever published—sometimes intentionally. Is the whole piece a prank? Well, it certainly lets Julie Wainwright, the CEO of pets.com, rewrite history. "People think we spent tons of money in advertising. And we didn't, because I only ran ads in key markets," she says. Really? Like that $1.2 million Super Bowl ad? "I shut it down in November 2000 and actually returned money to shareholders," she says. Yes—and took a quarter-million in severance.

In varying degrees of intentionally and accidentally hilarious, one will find:

Barry Diller: I started using a P.C. earlier than most, and it led to me discovering something that I referred to as interactivity, a word that I obviously made up.

And:

Jann Wenner: Jim [Clark] and Marc [Andreessen] set up a demonstration. I'd never seen a hyperlink before. I don't think anybody had. And it was kind of drop-dead amazing. That you could click on this blue, highlighted, underlined word and then, bam, go to a whole new level of information was dazzling.

Dazzling!

Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos: When we launched, we launched with over a million titles. There were countless snags. One of my friends figured out that you could order a negative quantity of books. And we would credit your credit card and then, I guess, wait for you to deliver the books to us. We fixed that one very quickly.

And:

Bill Bastone [The Smoking Gun]: We launched the site on April 17, 1997. I didn't have an e-mail address. I remember actually faxing out like 40 press releases on paper. Boy, what a retard: I'm sending you a fax to let you know about this Web site that we just started.

And maybe the weirdest moment:

[EarthLink founder] Sky Dayton: I owned a couple of coffeehouses in L.A., and I had a computer-graphics company that I co-owned. And I heard about this thing called the Internet. I thought, That sounds kind of interesting. The first thing I did is I actually picked up the phone and dialed 411, and I said, I'd like the number for the Internet, please. And the operator is like, What? I said, Just search any company with the word Internet in the name. Blank. Nothing. I thought, Wow, this is interesting. What is this thing anyway?

Years later, many of us are still asking that question.