I apologize if somebody thinks that this is off topic.  As soon as Wired
Magazine had a web presence I started to read it.

          Bud Kennedy

          [log in to unmask]

'Wired': The Coolest Magazine on the Planet

The New York Times

July 27, 2003

'Wired': The Coolest Magazine on the Planet
By DAVID CARR

WIRED
A Romance.
By Gary Wolf.
282 pp. New York: Random House. $25.95.

Wired magazine, that storied artifact of a digital age, was conceived by
its editors as a ''a reverse time capsule. It would sail back through
time and
land at people's feet.''

And so it has, most recently in the form of ''Wired: A Romance,'' a book
by one of the magazine's contributing editors, Gary Wolf. Our notions of
the future
have a tendency to age quickly, and Wired, a magazine that served as
both Boswell and bomb thrower for the geekerati in the 1990's, seems to
have aged
more quickly than most. The seminal publication, Wolf writes, was
created in the midst of a digital revolution that its high priest, Louis
Rossetto, liked
to refer to as a ''Bengali typhoon.'' By the time Rossetto and Wired's
co-founder, Jane Metcalfe, were thrown clear, everything had changed,
but not in
the ways that they once thought it would.

Wired was important not just because it was the first magazine to make
the computer world seem hip; it also trained its eye on the implications
of the onrushing
new technology, not merely on appraising the newest machines and
trendiest gadgets. (Though Wired featured plenty of articles about those
things, too.)
The magazine, Rossetto promised somewhat grandiosely early on, would
foment ''a revolution without violence that embraces a new, nonpolitical
way to improve
the future based on economics beyond macro control, consensus beyond the
ballot box, civics beyond government and communities beyond the confines
of time
and geography.'' Rossetto's manifesto seems quaint just 10 years later,
but it found many disciples. Gary Wolf, an early Wired employee, was
among them,
and he has written a deceptively deadpan recollection that reads more
like a libretto than a straightforward work of journalism.

Wolf expertly traces the magazine's heavily hyped ascendancy, though,
sadly, most readers will know all along that the magazine Rossetto saw
as a Trojan
horse for revolution was eventually sold in 1998 to a corporation (Conde
Nast) like any common asset. (The magazine still exists, though it
doesn't carry
the swagger and prestige it once did.) Wolf writes with a former true
believer's skepticism, a wan idealism rubbed out by subsequent events.
As his book's
title suggests, Wolf is still a bit wistful about Wired's careering
journey through the 90's.

It's hard to blame him. The corporate-dominated magazine industry tends
to stay safely behind significant issues, while Wired was that odd indie
publication
that actually enabled a movement by appealing to its nobler instincts.
But as Wolf demonstrates, Wired's purity of purpose -- Rossetto seemed
to care about
money only as oxygen for his dream -- did not inoculate the magazine
from the ambient greed that reduced a hoped-for paradigm shift to a pile
of failed
I.P.O.'s.

''Wired: A Romance'' is less a love story than a theological autopsy of
a religion that flourished and went away in less than a decade. Things
happened
quickly for Wired -- remember ''Internet time''? At its height in the
mid-90's, Wired could be found in the lobbies of venture capitalists, on
the light
tables of designers, underneath the coffee cups of computer geeks and in
the middle of the only conversation that seemed to matter. It was,
briefly, the
coolest magazine on the planet.

This book is fundamentally a biography of Rossetto, a larger-than-life
personality whom Wolf compares to ''a magnet whose grip increased
dramatically at
close range.'' In retrospect, it would be easy to mistake Rossetto for
another would-be Internet guru and Wired as a curio of a bygone time,
but as Wolf
makes clear, the revolution that Rossetto championed was not about the
Web. Rossetto saw desktop publishing as a profound reinvention of the
printing press.
''He thought computer publishing would change the world,'' Wolf writes.

And Rossetto knew a thing or two about revolution. As Wolf points out,
Rossetto, a former anarchist who obtained a master's degree in business
administration
from Columbia, was a global itinerant, a gaunt, hippie-ish Zelig who
just happened to be in the neighborhood when the Shining Path emerged in
Peru, when
the Tamil rebellion began in Sri Lanka, when the Red Brigades sowed
chaos in Italy.

Small wonder Rossetto ended up in San Francisco in the early 90's with
Jane Metcalfe, then his girlfriend, on the cusp of another kind of
insurgency, both
of them working to finance a new kind of magazine. Rossetto wanted to
call their journal DigIt -- as in either ''digit'' or ''dig it'' -- a
bad idea that
Metcalfe mercifully talked him out of. The new magazine would be named
Wired.

With the help of $20,000 from a sympathetic Dutch entrepreneur, the pair
managed to get inexpensive access to a Canon color copier -- an exotic
technology
at the time -- to produce a prototype. Several of Wired's more durable
angels, investors with real money who bought Rossetto's conceits, signed
on later.
And John Plunkett, the man responsible for Wired's neon-suffused,
anarchic design, committed to joining the magazine in spite of himself.
This glossy fever
dream of a magazine made its debut at the Macworld conference on Jan. 2,
1993. The early adopters snatched it up and Wired was on its way.

But Wolf demonstrates that Rossetto always seemed to keep his ambitions
just ahead of his funding. Chunks of the enterprise were handed out to
investors
so that Wired could expand to the Web, to television, to Europe and
beyond. The magazine's Web site, HotWired, turned out to be a
particularly effective
way of making money disappear.

Wolf, who became HotWired's executive editor in 1995, appears in the
narrative at this point, saying that after meetings with Rossetto he
left his boss's
office with ''the light step of a person who has been given permission
to be bad.'' But Wolf's efforts to enrich his writer friends with
lucrative freelance
assignment for the Web site comes off as a misdemeanor in felonious
times. The pressure to move Wired toward an initial public offering
drove an ill-advised
effort for bigness at all costs. No one cared about profits, and deals
were made willy-nilly to build the hypothetical value of the company,
including
adding a search engine, the gewgaw of the moment.

The pranksters at Suck, a sardonic (and now defunct) site built by Wired
employees on the sly, captured the era's ethos with carnal clarity. In
an essay
written at the very beginning of the Web boom, Wolf writes, ''The
Sucksters' advice was to fluff up a site, locate a rich, stupid buyer
and then run away
fast before the concoction deflated.''

To his credit, Rossetto never saw how giving away content free on the
Web could make anyone rich. Wolf describes -- in too much detail,
because he happened
to be in the middle of it -- how Rossetto fought to make visitors to
HotWired register, which some believed violated the Web's ethos. By this
time, bankers
and shareholders were looking over his shoulder, accusing him of being a
profligate Luddite at a revolution he once led.

While charting the Nasdaq's rise and eventual fall, Wolf shows Rossetto
and Metcalfe readying Wired for a ''liquidity event,'' that supremely
validating
90's moment. But when they hit the road in October 1996 to pitch
investors, Rossetto's overweening ambitions and the market's gyrations
left Wired's public
offering dead on arrival. Rossetto become so preoccupied with saving the
business that he eventually handed leadership of the magazine over to
Katrina
Heron, a former editor at Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. Heron, who is
now a consultant for The New York Times, proved to be an able and
popular steward
of the magazine, but in stepping aside Rossetto had built his own
gallows.

The money men who had attached themselves to Wired set up a series of
impossible financial targets for Rossetto, and in March 1998 he and
Metcalfe were
cast out of the future they had built. The magazine was eventually sold
to Conde Nast, and its two founders ended up with $30 million and a
profoundly
bad taste in their mouths. Wolf allows Andrew Anker, the ferociously
ambitious C.E.O. of the company, to serve up an epitaph for the ideals
that once drove
Wired. With the sale of the magazine on the table, Wolf recounts how
Anker and other senior Wired employees went to a bar in San Francisco
for an impromtu
wake. Anker gleefully tallies up his substantial gains to the outrage of
his less fortunate colleagues.

''What is this, 'Sesame Street'?'' Anker said. ''Every man for himself
means every man for himself!'' The future, it turned out, would still be
written
by Charles Darwin in spite of Wired's best efforts.

David Carr is a media reporter for The Times.

Copyright 2003
The New York Times Company