And if there's one thing you can say with certainty about archaeologists, it is that they enjoy the benefits of hindsight. If "Leaving Reality Behind: Etoy vs. eToys.com and Other Battles to Control Cyberspace" is any indication, the farther we get from the dot-com bust, the better the books about it will be. "Leaving Reality Behind" is probably the best one yet -- capturing in full detail both the idiocy of the Net's early rush to commercialize itself, and cyberspace's potential as a new medium for art, politics and communication.

Most books so far have focused on one or the other, tending to be either too insular, too gung-ho (or too sneeringly dismissive), or so focused on their immediate topic as to be immediately out of date. But "Leaving Reality Behind" avoids its predecessors' mistakes by simultaneously focusing on two engrossing stories -- the rise and fall of eToys.com, which encapsulated dot-com start-up excess as well as any company this side of Webvan or Excite@Home, and the high jinks of etoy, a group of European artist/pranksters.

The entrepreneurs behind eToys and the dada-esque delinquents of etoy could not have been more different, but when eToys sued etoy for trademark infringement, the company's lawyers ensured that the two would be forever linked.

	"Leaving Reality Behind: Etoy vs. eToys.com and Other Battles to Control Cyberspace" By Adam Wishart and Regula Bochsler Ecco 320 pages Nonfiction Buy this book

To anyone who had been paying attention, the eToys trademark action seemed like one of the most egregious examples of greedy venture capital-backed Net newbies stamping on the little guy ever witnessed online. Etoy had been around much longer than eToys -- it was in fact one of the first groups of cultural malcontents to fully recognize the Internet's potential. It had won prestigious artistic prizes and been written about in a host of media publications. It had registered etoy.com Internet millennia before eToys.com was a gleam in a rapacious venture capitalist's eye.

Trademark suits, no matter how wrongheaded or stupid, are a thin thread to spin a whole book upon. What makes etoy vs. eToys delightfully compelling is that etoy predicated its artistic vision on poking subversive fun at capitalism, and in particular, that essentially American brand of capitalism that is fixated on brand and marketing image. While Wall Street and the business press and daytraders were waxing euphoric about the likes of eToys.com, the etoy boys were acting out a living, breathing satire of capitalist absurdities that, in hindsight, was amazingly prescient. Etoy really was a competitive threat to eToys -- not because it threatened the company's profits but because it pulled eToys' nonexistent pants down, revealing a derrière of emperor-like girth. It announced to anyone who cared to listen that the dot-com heyday of the late '90s was a multibillion-dollar farce.

And this is said in full knowledge that the etoy boys were often sophomoric, just as fixated on fame and fortune as your average Silicon Valley start-up founder, and doomed, likely, to obscurity themselves once the Internet moved on to whatever is Part 2 of its unlikely evolution. There's a certain brand of European artist/intellectual moralizing about American corporate culture crimes that is all too easy to dismiss as sour-grapes sniping from loudmouths who've read too much Derrida, Debord and Baudrillard. A small serving of etoy's grandiloquent posturing went a long, long way.

But after reading Adam Wishart and Regula Bochsler's "Leaving Reality Behind," it's hard to deny that, long after the posturing has subsided, there is one thing that will forever remain a central part of etoy's legacy. It was right. One of etoy's biggest scams, in which it pretended to be a corporation itself, with "stock" and "shareholders" and worldwide marketing campaigns, was no more fake than any number of actual companies that were traded on NASDAQ. In fact, its very fakeness was its truth!

Meanwhile, what is eToys.com's legacy? Little more than another tired tale of greed, hype and hubris and a gigantic waste of money. The company that was going to save us all from the hell that is shopping at Toys "R" Us ended up leaving almost no visible mark whatsoever on the real world. For the archaeologist sifting through the dust of ages past, the traces that remain are a puzzle -- but not a very difficult one. At first you might wonder: How could people have been so dumb? But then you remember: Mind-numbing stupidity is an eternal part of the human condition.

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