Belief of Aliens Derailed This Internet Pioneer's Career. Now He's Facing Prison

wow this reminds me a lot of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sekret_Machines:_Book_1_%E2%80... The Blink182 guy tom delonge made with a fiction author. The book is fiction but the preface seems to say "hint hint nothing here is fiction."

These stories used to be so cool to read because they were so different from reality. But now reality is stranger than fiction.

> Firmage rose to fame after founding a software company from his bedroom in Salt Lake City when he was a teenager, later selling it for $24 million to Novell and founding the digital design company USWeb in 1995.

https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2024/02/29/joe-fi...

> USWeb's business model focused on acquisitions of small, independent web design firms and their client bases, with the company's public stock as payment; in all, it bought more than three dozen other companies

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USWeb

The article is paywalled, but the "pioneer" moniker seems to stem from this business model?

WoW! this is a realy realy valuable information. there are people who have money and lawyers who will invest in anti gravity and THEN sue you.....righty then it seems reasonable to try to monitize absolutely anything that fits within the known laws of the universe, as long as you get your lawyers, and accountant/astrophysisist/banker* to sign off on it. and blithering on about aliens and antigravity isn't a liability good to know, good to know!

*same persons seem to work in those collected fields

"Joseph Firmage helped create today’s digital economy. These days, he’s being sued by antigravity-machine investors and claiming to be hounded by a Jamaican wire-fraud gang, with a guy pretending to be Steven Mnuchin along for the ride."

Free to view: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-02-05/aliens-de...

Mental health is a real killer. It’s so sad when people who clearly have passion and (initially) wealth and apparently a stomach for risk and hard work just can’t bring themselves to be honest.

The market wants triviality from us. It wants web design companies and domain name squatters (his ventures that apparently made returns). The brilliant art or game changing technology is what our souls desire but man, don’t chase the ideal and abandon the pragmatic. And certainly don’t lie to yourself to get there. A joke: the market wants Loom, not Boom.

This is a good article to read if you have a good life but only did moderately well in tech. I beat myself up daily for not having made more money doing simple obvious stuff, but at least I’m not a delusional liar.

I wouldn't put this guy in the context of true genius, but he was clearly a visionary thinker and producer in tech, and also had a serious break with reality.

The break is even more common in the rare cases of great genius.

John Nash is a famous example, mabe the most famous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash_Jr.

People can be clearly crazy, and still make significant contributions. The fine line between genius and insanity is well noted:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-hidden-habits-of...

The only reason its an issue, is because of trying to apply a hero designation to people who make great contributions. Human's just aren't that simple.

Every person has good and bad points, expecting someone to fulfill broader social criteria of benevolence because they've made contributions in some field is just unrealilstic and unjustified.

This is why "cancel culture" is inappropriate, as practiced by both wing-nuts and woke-nuts. It's an unrealistic expectation being projected onto another person.