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Ars's Skeptical Take on Wired's NextFest
jamestech writes "Over the weekend, Wired magazine held its 'NextFest' in Chicago, a demonstration of what the future supposedly holds. Arstechnica's Hannibal visited NextFest, and was not impressed. Regarding a dolphin-shaped water vehicle and exoskeletons for the old, he notes, 'if you're being pursued by a senior citizen then you can use the dolphin to escape.' Wired's been more about style rather than tech since the late 90s, but have they finally dropped science in favor of science fiction?"
Wired has gone the way of Red Herring. They just don't know it yet. Perhaps they are going to try to reincarnate as Asmov's Science Fiction.
It seems to me that innovation has been lacking lately... there is not a lot to report for 'NextFest' as it were.... at least nothing commercially exciting .... not like black boxes in automobiles, or search engines that really do know what sites you want to see, or maybe RSS in Longhorn...
Geeez, with the amount of innovation being reported in the daily news on almost every major information provider's site, what was the point of NextFest? Its not like you can't turn on the television and find out about the latest in technology...
As I write, there is some story on television about the lineman who now has bionic arms... what were the NextFest promoters thinking?
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It's not about what's practical, what's available today, what's cool (how many MP3 player stories do you want to read?), it's about the FUTURE and unfortunately it's not going to be rocket backpacks, cities under the sea and moonbases.
It's going to be about taxes, regulatory regimes, investment timetables and all the other boring crap we put up with today...
I'm happy to see someone like Wired still trying to convince us that the future is bright (the dolphin is seriously cool, by the way) but I for one am giving up hope of believing it.
I am a leaf on the wind
It's hard to say Wired is lacking anything when it never actually promised something in the first place. The magazine has no mission statement. It accepts contributions from anyone, anywhere. By that fact, Wired could be considered a reflection of our digital lifestyle, and if we don't particularly care for what we see...
I suspect "Wired bashing" is a pretty easy piss for this crowd as it might likely be for the Ars crowd.
That said, I do get pretty tired of the "won't the future be greeeeaaaat!" boosterism in Wired (and elsewhere). But I've got V.1 #6 (or something like that, I'm too lazy to dig it out and look) and I'm still a sucker for their style and, before some wise guy pipes up, yeah, I keep reading it more often than not.
Ciao, dcobbler
The naysayers are wrong. NextFest was a lot of fun. It was like a science museum on steroids--with real live engineers and scientists there to answer your questions. The Nasa exhibit rocked--especially since the mars-rover programmers were there. Yes, it was subsidized by and represented the military-industrial complex, but that subsidy allowed the art-and-design institutes, the grad students, and even high schoolers to participate.
Here's a copy of my original post from last weekend. I don't think people fully appreciated the wealth of talent that was present:
I spent yesterday at NextFest and had really interesting conversations with the scientists and engineers behind the technologies. Whereas most trade shows have marketing-folk, NextFest had the "real deal" folks there. Conversing with them about their projects was quite easy:
Example interesting conversations:
* Electrical Engineers from Sweden working on innovative devices for monitoring power use
* Doctoral CS candidates preseting their thesis projects.
* Art/Design professors from Tokyo and Vienna working on interactive media projects.
* Undergrads from Dublin working on a video game (controlled by breath) which they found equally popular with boys and girls.
* The Mars Rover programmers were there. (I didn't get a chance to talk w/ them, however, but could have).
* The La Vida Robot guys and their teacher (who bested MIT in the underwater bot contest).
Pictures from the 2005 event.
Information and pictures from the 2004 event.
Went to a small round table once ~2002 with a newly appointed senior editor at wired who had been brought in from New York Magazine to overhaul the magazine's image and style content strategy. This was just when the mag went to the new format with lots of short, punchy briefs, product matrices and gizmo reviews (and right after they dropped the 3-4 page graphic intro that was ad-dead). He explained that this format tested better with a wider audience than the more geeky tech format (my memory, not his words). This was in no small part precipated by Conde Nast's purchase of the mag.
it's ok though with mags like MAKE taking their place and publishers like O'Reilly staying true to their tech demographic. Hopefully their success will inspire investments in more daring technology coverage.
Sure, Wired is full of ads. And some articles weigh heavy on the entertainment industry. But it also provides some of the *best* writing on technology that any magazine has to offer.
m l
Case in point, this article from the April 2005 issue:
La Vida Robot
How four underdogs from the mean streets of Phoenix took on the best from M.I.T. in the national underwater bot championship.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.04/robot.ht
Take 15 minutes and read this. It is an amazing story, and extremely well written.
I think the oddest idea was the treadmill cum mouse. There was a girl exerting not a little effort while turning what appeared to be bike handles and running around quake 2. The saleslady said that you could even use it to browse the web. I guess the treadmill would also act as the mouse wheel.
But what was baffling was that they weren't promoting it as any kind of exercise equipment; the fellow I talked to even discouraged it, saying that it wasn't built the same way as one in the gym.
The *real* kicker, though, was when I asked how you would move side to side. I figured the handlebars would move on a rail, but the guy insisted, with a certain amount of misplaced pride, that it would be a button on the handlebars, and then using the treadmill to do the actual movement.
I'm a very meek, little person, so it has to be a dumb enough idea for me to tell someone, to their face, that is the most stupid idea I'd ever heard of. Good to know the future is filled with as many useless gadgets as the present.
I think that was the (perhaps unintentional) point of the article. I went to NextFest myself, and there was no actual information there. Next to each item on display, there was a piece of paper taped up with a one paragraph description of what the thing is and why it and the company that made it are great. Next to each paragraph was a salesperson who, when you ask a question about the product, would kindly read the paragraph to you.
Don't criticize Hannibal for not pumping a lot of information into this article. There wasn't any to begin with. It would have been pretty unfair of him to have created it, or made it up, or done the research on each of these items and posted about that. There just wasn't anything good to write about. NextFext seemed to be designed as an ad. You can't write about ads. The only thing you can do is decide whether or not you want to buy the product. And clearly, he doesn't want to.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
My wife and I have a subscription to Wired. Every month when an issue arrives (just got the remix issue yesterday!) we spend a few days discussing all the cool articles. Inevitably we always remark on how consistently good the magazine is.
Let's look at some cool bits in the past months:
November 2004: Wired came with a cd containing songs all distributed with the creative commons share and share alike license! Want to remix some Beastie Boys and Danger Mouse?
December 2004: Awesome issue on the present state and future of exploration.
April 2005: Hybrid cars, a good article on China, an awesome article on Robert Rodriguez.
I could go on, but suffice to say that the magazine consistently puts out well researched and quality articles.
* Wired reader since 1994
What exactly is wrong with the magazine?
I'm a current (and longtime) subscriber, and what I find wrong with Wired is more akin to the unnerving foibles of a loved one that make you grind your teeth but grin and bear it. Two things come to mind.
First, their attempts to hip up their prose can wear pretty thin. If you have to mention the same object again and again in an article, it's good to introduce some variety by using synonyms. But at Wired, they go right for the hip slang: If they need to mention shoes, they'll have to say "togs" (and, for a year or so, almost every issue had to mention "Prada" specifically.) I wish I had a copy with me now, I'm sure I could easily find ten instances of cool, slangy substitutes for day-to-day words that would have sounded fine. It's just a bit much.
My second complaint is about their coverage of weapons and war and how they paint these topics with the same glib strokes as VoIP, robotics or ecommerce. I remember a letter they (admirably) printed once in which the writer mock-praised them, "Way to jump on the death-dealing bandwagon!" Yeah, murdering people is great, and the tools that let you do it more efficiently are totally wired. I've duly informed the editor of my views, as a subscriber, for what they're worth (which is to say, I don't just bitch about them on Slashdot.)
Still, I mostly love the magazine. The "Infoporn" layouts can be amazing. However, for a good review of technology, I prefer The Economist's "Technology Quarterly" issue. You get a good survey of recent trends and research with a thoughtful analysis of what impact these might have. Plus, The Economist covers weapons and war with all the sobriety they deserve.