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OMNI Magazine Remembered
An anonymous reader noted that Slate is doing a bit of a retrospective on OMNI. If you're anything like me, reading it was a treat. At home I suffered through Popular Mechanics, but OMNI was what I wished I had. There's many interesting things in the article, like the fact that OMNI is the place where William Gibson first coined the term "Cyberspace."
"Why pizza burns the roof of the mouth" articles that ran on the last page. 2 or 3, IIRC, arguing over whether it was the Melted Mozzarella Layer (MML) or Tomato Sauce Layer (TSL) that caused the burning.
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I noticed this phenomenon about a decade back. Used to be in the 70s and 80s, when you went to Walt Disney World in Florida, it had this solid "golly gee" factor when talking about the future, especially at Epcot or Tomorrowland at the Magic Kingdom. I don't pick up on that so much now; in fact I pick up on a definite retrospective and/or nostalgic feeling when I go there. It's like, now that pretty much any thing is possible technologically, talking about something that's not present but possible is just an exercise in talking about something that will be here when the engineers figure out how to make it profitably.
To paraphrase Yogi, "The future ain't what it used to be."
I probably shouldn't reply to your post but here I go way off topic. I grew up as kid during the Vietnam war. I had friends with older brothers that had been to Vietnam and some that did not come back. When I was in college I was very anti-war and anti-military and never considered it for a split second. As a matter of fact your comment sounds like something I would have said back then if someone mentioned the idea.
After finishing my 3rd year of college I was thousands of dollars in dept from tuition and going nowhere. Friends that had graduated where taking jobs as school teachers and making no money. This was in 1981 and believe me the economy sucked and there were no decent jobs. I had a friend in about my same situation and he talked me into looking into the AF. I ended up going in and it was a great experience. I was in four years and it was total peacetime. No action going on anywhere that I was aware of.
The main reason I got out was that the air force eliminated the flight simulator technician job and it became a civilian contract position. My post is not recruiting anyone for that job because it no longer exists in the air force as far as I know.
No, it died because they replaced Ben Bova (An actual SciFi writer) with Kathy Keeton (Who was some kind of penthouse writer) then it got all about frilly style and such crap.
Later that year, I was at a trade show in Dallas. His other publication, Penthouse was present as well as his competitor - Playboy.
The contrast between the two companies could not have been more different. The Playboy booth was marginally tasteful and people were laughing and enjoying themselves with the pretty 'girls-next-door' - OK, 'fantasy-girls-next-door'.
The Penthouse booth was full of wary, pouting sluts who paced from side-to-side as they were beeing leered at by the mostly male passers-by. It looked more like a zoo enclosure than a booth.
Omni was somewhat similar in that it wrote in a style that was condescending and often trite. Here or there, I enjoyed an article, but most of it was so fanciful as to be disengenuous.
In short, I don't miss it.
*** Don't be dull.***
Browsing Wired's old issues online, I see a number of other hyped stories. No name VCs making "power plays", sexy new markets that don't quite pan out, more no name VCs extolling the virtues of "dumbass" investors. There's the worry about what to do if things get too good in the decade that just passed.
The market will fluctuate daily, but by 2010, the Dow will soar past the 50,000 mark.
There's a lot more pie-in-the-sky predictions which fortunately have been thwarted by circumstance and incompetence.
One sees much the same in the other direction, it's not until more than a year after March, 2000 that one sees a title story that has the dotcom decline as a key part of the story (Andy Grove, then Chairman of the Board for Intel, the story discusses Intel's problems coming from the market and demand declines). There's still plenty of "power plays" and other VC games hyped throughout the issues.
OMNI magazine is alive and well in 2010. What's the matter with you people?
Here's proof. (Ignore the Apple IIgs thingy he hauled to the beach though..)
Clip from 2010: The Year We Make Contact
The short story Johnny Menmonic first appeared in OMNI, and was probably my first exposure to Gibson as a kid. The other OMNI SF story that sticks in my head was Sandkings by George R. R. Martin. OMNI showcased some great SF and art. The art for Johnny Menmonic was a Helnwein self-portrait - some of you might recognize it as the cover of the Scorpions album Blackout, similar to the cover of Rammstein's Sehnsucht. There was even an occasional long poem.
I also recall an issue where there were various political predictions, including that the USSR would become more capitalist while the US would become more socialist by 2020, IIRC. Not bad predictions (although terribly general), even though the USSR dissolved. Russia has become more capitalist and the US has expanded social programs even before the current congress (think SCHIP, etc.).
OMNI introduced me to my favorite limerick:
If binary digits are bits,
Then decimal ones could be dits,
And when things get weary,
Try something less dreary,
Like playing with trinary tits.
And the "Anti-Matter" section was always a fun read. AFAIK, there's nothing like OMNI around anymore. These days, futurism, when one can find it at all, tends toward either the intolerably bleak or some virtual reality mental masturbation. No, Star Trek doesn't count as futurism. With so few of us eagerly anticipating brighter futures, I wonder if enough of us are being inspired to create them.
- T
Has it ever crossed your mind that they might not be conmen, but in fact were as surprised by the bursting of the dot.com bubble as everyone else? Note that, if it was obvious, it would never have occurred to begin with. The fact that the bubble inflated to begin with is incontrovertible proof that it wasn't obviously a bubble. You seem to be promoting them as being either part of a conspiracy or of being both omniscient and dishonest (for not telling us the truth they supposedly knew when millions of other people did not), rather than simply wrong...
Didn't say Wired consisted of conmen (though they might have had more than a few). Just said that they hyped conmen. There's a difference. As for the activities of Worldcom and Enron (as well as a number of dotcoms that engaged in similar fantasy accounting), the magic line between serious business and fantasy might not be well marked, but at point they ended up clearly in scam territory. Incontrovertible proof that bubbles are bubbles? Both the dotcom and the more recent real estate bubbles were obvious to me well before their peak. The signs were there for those who chose to look. Stupid business decisions, exaggerated claims of profitability, complete insensitivity to risk, and of course, ridiculously hyped stories like those in Wired (stock market at 50k, baby!), and of course, the smart money staying away from the final burst (remember when Warren Buffet got out of the dotcoms or Bill Gates started moving his Microsoft stock over to a non-profit?).
As for the accusations of dishonesty? My impression is that there was quite a bit of it going on in Wired, but I can't prove anything. I'd rather just skip them altogether, than read them on the off chance they weren't being deceptive and were merely being wholly gullible. They're a failed, deceptive (whether intentionally or not) news source and nothing I've heard off and on over the years has changed my mind about them.
Back in the early 80s my mother developed angina, and was prescribed nitroglycerine tablets for it - you popped one under your tounge when you felt the onset of chest pains and it helped keep your coronary arteries open. Although they worked, as they were reactive rather than proactive, they weren't so useful if the chest pains and breathlessness were particularly debillitating. Then OMNI had a short piece about a new treatment from the US: a patch that contained the drug and slowly released it through the skin to stop the angina attacks happening in the first place. I showed this to my mum, who showed it her doctors and she became just the second woman in the whole UK to receive the treatment.
Thanks OMNI, I still miss you.