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When Internet stocks began their freefall in February 2000, public opinion quickly dismissed the Internet as merely a fast delivery service for information. Journalist Michael Lewis argues that this reaction conflated the overrated profit-making potential of the Internet with its far more significant social effects. The Internet had enabled people to thwart established rules and conventions, threatening not just commercial order but many forms of authority. Lewis frames these disruptions through the sociological concept of "role theory," which holds that people have no fixed self but wear masks suited to their social situations; the Internet offered new situations, prompting people to seize new masks. To investigate, Lewis partnered with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), which funded a television series on these changes.

Lewis's investigation repeatedly leads him to children. He cites the Finnish company Nokia, which dominated the mobile phone business partly by studying how children used new technology. Finnish schoolboys invented instant text messaging out of nervousness about asking girls on dates, and the technique spread upward to adults. Lewis argues that rapid capitalism rewards those willing to discard old identities, and children, who have not yet committed to a fixed self, hold an inherent advantage.

Lewis roots his interest in these disruptions in his upbringing in New Orleans, where his father's law firm of "gentlemen lawyers" collapsed as commercialization overtook the profession. Lewis left home and invented a new self, a child's response to being on the wrong end of a trend.

The book's central case study concerns Jonathan Lebed, a 15-year-old from Cedar Grove, New Jersey, who became the first minor charged with stock market fraud by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In September 2000, the SEC announced that Jonathan had promoted stocks from his bedroom, buying shares and posting hundreds of bullish messages on Yahoo Finance message boards before selling at a profit. His total earnings approached $800,000; after negotiations he retained over $500,000. Lewis visits the Lebed family and finds Jonathan's father, Greg, a volatile Amtrak middle manager, and his mother, Connie, an office temp who absorbed her husband's eruptions with practiced indifference.

Jonathan's path began at 11, when he opened an America Online (AOL) account and started watching CNBC, a financial news channel. On his 12th birthday he invested an $8,000 savings bond in AOL stock against his father's advice and sold at a quick profit. By 13, his mother had opened a brokerage account for him, and he turned $8,000 into $28,000 within a year while creating Stock-Dogs.com, a web site devoted to small-cap stocks, or shares of relatively small companies. Teachers pulled him out of class for investment advice.

The SEC first contacted Jonathan at 14, suspecting an adult was directing the trades. Five lawyers interrogated him for eight hours, focusing on his ties to Ira Monas, a now-jailed investor-relations man who had fed him information about small companies. Jonathan revealed he had deliberately concealed his age online. Connie closed his brokerage account, but Greg opened a new one in his own name so Jonathan could continue trading.

Lewis sets Jonathan's story against Wall Street's eroding credibility. Amateur web sites gave away what Wall Street sold, and a Bloomberg study showed amateur earnings forecasts were wrong by 21 percent on average versus 44 percent for professionals. The professionals' inaccuracy stemmed from a structural conflict of interest: The companies they analyzed were also their firms' biggest clients. In a four-page email to his lawyer, Jonathan wrote: "Nobody makes investment decisions based on reading financial filings. Whether a company is making millions or losing millions, it has no impact on the price of the stock. . . . everybody is manipulating the market."

Lewis visits SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt in Washington and finds a wide gap between the agency's public narrative and reality. Levitt called Jonathan's case "more serious than the guy who holds up the candy store" but admitted he did not know what Jonathan actually did online. Richard Walker, the SEC's director of enforcement, could not define "artificial" price inflation without circularity. Lewis concludes the SEC let Jonathan keep $500,000 because it feared losing in court, which would have formally declared his actions legal.

The book's second case study concerns Marcus Arnold, a 15-year-old in Perris, California, who became a top-ranked legal expert on AskMe.com, a knowledge-exchange web site. Marcus, whose family had immigrated from Belize via South-Central Los Angeles, registered under a pseudonym, claimed to be 25, and began answering legal questions based entirely on watching Court TV. By late July 2000 he ranked third in AskMe.com's criminal law division, which included 125 licensed attorneys as well as former police officers and former inmates. When Marcus disclosed his real age, competing lawyers attacked his rankings, but his clients rallied to his defense, and within two weeks he climbed to number one. Lewis connects Marcus's success to a broader erosion of professional mystique.

Lewis then turns to Justin Frankel, a 20-year-old AOL employee who posted software called Gnutella on the Internet in March 2000. Gnutella enabled peer-to-peer file sharing: Users could exchange files directly between computers without a central server. This eliminated the vulnerability that had allowed the recording industry to sue Napster, an earlier file-sharing service. AOL, then merging with Time Warner, forced Frankel to retract the software, but 10,000 people had already downloaded it, and the source code was quickly reverse-engineered. Lewis travels to Oldham, England, to meet Daniel Sheldon, a 14-year-old who had built the Gnutella community's most articulate web presence. Daniel envisioned a network free from corporate control. Lewis predicts Daniel will be absorbed by the system he opposes, because capitalism co-opts its most threatening outsiders.

Lewis profiles the rock band Marillion, which after being dropped by the record label EMI in 1995 turned to its fan base. When a fan organized an Internet fundraiser that raised $60,000 for a U.S. tour, the band began soliciting advance payment for new albums, raising over £200,000 and inverting the traditional power dynamic between artist and record company. Lewis frames these stories through venture capitalist Andy Kessler's repeating cycle: Cheaper technology enables outsiders to bypass established rules, chaos ensues, and the fringe becomes the new establishment.

Lewis examines TiVo and ReplayTV, two companies whose personal video recorders threatened the television industry by enabling viewers to skip commercials and create personalized channels. He argues the devices' true significance lay in replacing crude demographic targeting with precise behavioral data, unraveling a system of invisible subsidies paid with human attention. He extends this logic to politics through Knowledge Networks, a company that installed free WebTV sets, or television-based Internet terminals, in randomly selected homes for weekly surveys, producing detailed portraits of public opinion.

In the final chapter, Lewis examines two prominent technologists confronting the possibility that the system they helped build may render them obsolete. Computer scientist Danny Hillis proposed building a clock designed to last 10,000 years. Bill Joy, chief scientist at Sun Microsystems, warned that nanotechnology could produce self-replicating robots and called for restrictions on certain research. Lewis argues both men behaved like establishment figures appealing to authority because they had grown up and knew what that meant in a system rewarding perpetual youth.

The book ends with the Lebed family. Greg told Lewis that the moment the computer entered his house, his son's childhood ended. Jonathan replied that people spend most of their time as adults and it is important to focus on the future. The exchange captures the book's central tension: A system that rewards childlike flexibility simultaneously demands that children abandon childhood to seize the advantages the system offers.