The Lizard of Ozzzz.com... A Silicon Valley Tale by Mary Lauren Karlton

About the book

Caitlin Leary, a twenty-two-year-old Ph.D., is recruited from a small town in New England to a prestigious position with a hot new dot.com company founded by one of Silicon Valley's business leaders, Sam Thorne, who has a reputation for lechery. The company, Ozzzz.com, on the surface, is an Internet community for children, offering educational games and other resources. The truth, which Caitlin does not know, is that Ozzzz.com is a front for a mind-control experiment executed through subliminal messaging propagated through animations over high speed Internet Connections.

The raison d'être for the company is to see if gains in e-commerce activity can be achieved by utilizing this secret technology to direct the behavior of the children using the site. If the Ozzzz.com experiment is successful, Sam's ultimate goal is to use the tool to create a population of malleable automatons who will do the bidding of the global corporate oligarchy. Sam also has a personal agenda with Caitlin -- to use the mind-control technology to seduce her in order to prove the technology's effectiveness.

Ozzzz.com becomes wildly successful. Children all over the world become addicted to Ozzzz.com, and a public outcry against Ozzzz.com erupts. Concerned parents and teachers set out to crash Ozzzz.com. Caitlin finds herself caught in the middle of the backlash and begins to do some serious soul searching. She shares her disillusionment with Trini, a young Hispanic artist who has a romantic interest in Caitlin and with Mo, a sincere black man who cleans the Ozzzz.com offices after hours. Mo overhears conversations between Sam and his cohorts that reveal the true intent behind Ozzzz.com and informs Caitlin of his discovery.

Caitlin sets out to unearth the mind-control programs underlying the Ozzzz.com Website. Determined to get at the truth, she enlists the assistance of a brilliant Internet hacker who cracks the code. After completing her investigations, Caitlin sends anonymous letters detailing her finds to major business publications. Caitlin then quietly slips away from Silicon Valley back to her home in Maine with Trini, and they make plans to re-open her grandfather's chowder house. The truth behind Ozzzz.com becomes headline news, and Sam Thorne is called before the Department of Justice for criminal charges.

About the author

Mary Lauren Karlton has been a marketing and media consultant in Silicon Valley for eighteen years, working with some of the industry's most recognized companies as well as a host of startups. She has been in the fortunate position to have personally observed the behavior of all levels of the Silicon Valley culture from the inside. Being under non-disclosure and spending time socially with people who work in the industry has allowed her to be privy to many insights, motivations, and frustrations of a large cross-section of Silicon Valley culture. Ms. Karlton is currently Director of Marketing for the BiosGroup, a Santa Fe company that creates predictive modeling tools and e-commerce solutions based on complexity science.

Prior to her years in the computer industry, she was a journalist for various weekly newspapers in the Chicago area and a book editor for McGraw-Hill in New York. Ms. Karlton holds a Master's Degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto (studying with Marshall McLuhan, Northrup Frye, and Robertson Davies) and BA in Journalism from Northwestern University. She has published poetry in the Antigonish Review and the University of Toronto Quarterly.