Picking Up the Cyber Slack

Jaime Levy’s real name is not Jaime. She won’t tell me what her real name is, only that her parents named her after a Beatles song, and that she hates the Beatles—wishes they’d never existed—and so she’s Jaime, a nod to Van Halen, of all things, and the bionic woman, Jaime Sommers, her “idol” when she was just a punk kid growing up in the haze of Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley. Jaime Levy is, in all things, self-made. And when what she wants doesn’t exist, she makes that, too.

As a graduate student at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program in the early years of New York’s new media renaissance, she figured magazines would go electronic soon enough; in 1990, she started publishing her own interactive floppy disks, pointand-click magazines full of sound collages, rants, gig reviews, and games. The zines Cyber Rag and Electronic Hollywood made her famous in the emerging cyberculture, and when the web finally caught up, she adapted her DIY interaction design to online publishing, becoming creative director of Word.com, one of the first magazines to properly make use of the new medium’s affordances. Word was scene-altering: The first time the New York Times ran a feature on web browsers, it used Word as its example site, and even the Netscape browser had a button pointing straight to it (the button was labeled “What’s Cool?”). The site’s icon-rich design, heavy with streaming audio, experimental layouts, and interactive experiences, was so ahead of its time that it had a tendency to crash browsers.

In those days, unmistakable with bleached-blond hair and a mouth as unfiltered as her hand-rolled cigarettes, Levy called herself the “biggest bitch in Silicon Alley,” a grunge prophetess of new media who wasn’t afraid to make waves, or make money. Her clients were rock stars—a floppy disk she created for Billy Idol’s 1993 Cyberpunk album was the first interactive press kit—and corporate giants alike. Samsung once hired her to create the “Malice Palice,” a dystopian chat room modeled after a post-Fall San Francisco, full of drug-pushing zombie bots and radioactive burritos. Silicon Alley, New York’s media-centric analogue to the Bay Area’s entrepreneurial internet boom, was her playground; Many East Village artists saw the web for the first time in Levy’s Avenue A loft, on a Mac II a hacker friend connected to a 28 k internet connection.

At the tail end of the dot-com bubble, she was the CEO of a “production studio for the internet” called Electronic Hollywood, where she created interactive toys for major clients and authored a 16-episode...