Message
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
'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