Like many great things, this all begins with a bet. It was 2001, and Jonah Peretti, a graduate student at MIT at the time, was procrastinating. Instead of writing his thesis, he had decided to take up Nike on their offer to personalize a pair of sneakers. Under a recently launched program, anyone could do so from their website, NIKEiD. The only problem, at least from Nike's point of view, was that emblazoning them with the word sweatshop, as Peretti had requested, was a non-starter. Peretti, in a series of emails, demurred pointing out that in no way did the word fall into any of the categories of objectionable terms that would result in his personalization request being rejected.
Peretti, believing others might find the back-and-forth with Nike's customer service representatives amusing as well, forwarded them to a number of...
