Popular email chains have been around nearly as long as email itself, but back in 2001 words like “viral,” “Internet meme,” and “clickbait” were as yet unknown. What Peretti naively experienced was an early version of what would become a pervasive means of harvesting attention in the early twenty-first century. Peretti, who has a curious, scientific mind, started to consider the phenomenon carefully and systematically. “I looked at stories like the Nike shoe story, and there were actually plenty of other ones. Someone did something, it went big for a while, but then that’s where the story ends.” Having done it once, by accident, he wanted to see if he could make it happen at will. He wanted to see if he could understand what it took to make something “go viral.” For he realized that his weird experience had a deeper significance; it marked a change, made possible by the Internet, in how attention might be captured, and from whom.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 943