If attention is the new oil, Ben Smith's Traffic is the story of the time between the first gusher and the perceptible impact of climate change.

The curtain opens in Soho in the early 2000s, after the first dot-com crash but before Google, Apple, and Facebook exploded, when it seemed that New York City, rather than Silicon Valley, might become tech's center of gravity. There, within a few square blocks, Nick Denton's merry band of nihilists at his growing Gawker empire and Jonah Peretti's sunnier team at HuffPost and BuzzFeed were building the foundations of viral internet media. It was tech's age of innocence: The old establishment might have been discredited by the Iraq War, but digital news would empower the spread of truth. After all, didn't the progressive internet get Barack Obama elected?

Ben Smith, who would go on to earn a controversial reputation as BuzzFeed's editor in chief, was there to see it, and he chronicles it all with marvelous lucidity underscored by dark wit, spar