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Unplugged: The End Of Wiredness
It was over a year ago that Wired Magazine was sold to the Conde Nast publishing empire. Last week, Lycos completed its $83 million acquisition of Wired Digital, publisher of Wired News and its once- groundbreaking website Hotwired.
With the Lycos deal done, the Wired era is officially over -- welcome news to some, a loss to others. Wired and Hotwired helped define the Net and the Web in their early explosive years.
Both the magazine and its website specialized in experiment with the then-explosive media idea that technology, politics and culture are all related to one another, something few new or old media entities grasp. This was vastly more interesting than anybody on the East Coast was doing, then or now. Smart people came running from all over the country to work for the magazine and its experimental online offshoot.
Now, you rarely hear either mentioned, especially by the geeks and nerds who used to devour both. The formal dissolution of the controversial, influential media empire generated little notice or commentary even on the Internet.
The end of that era bears marking, if not necessarily mourning. Nostalgia is the cheapest kind of introspection. On the Net of all places, change is the only permanence. Net time seems to move much faster than the ordinary kind, and Wired already feels as if it were published an another era. I guess it was.
I wrote for Wired and Hotwired for several years until the sale of the magazine and then the website. No longer welcome at either, I left both soon after the ownership changed.
In both cases, I had as much fun as I've ever had in my writing life, at least until I wandered onto Slashdot last year. Hotwired was a raucous place in its early and very few glory years, a gathering spot for hackers, pundits, cyber-theorists, cypherpunks, new and old media practioners, political writers, and Web designers and programmers.
Though I didn't quite realize it when I first arrived here, the people gathered around Linux, and open source and free software - grumpy, brainy, idiosyncratic - had that same sense of revolutionary fervor, the kind of fizz that comes with building something new and great.
Good and bad, there had never been a national magazine like Wired. The magazine mixed butt-ugly, luminous graphics with Utopian rhetoric and startlingly visionary essays, ideas and features. Wired stunned and embarrassed the slick marketers and elitists who ran - and still run -- much of the country's media out of New York and Washington.
And boy, they hated it. Wired-bashing was for years staple chatter at New York media parties. The magazine violated every conventional wisdom about marketing and magazines. Yet some sensed what it signified: a diverse, interactive, from-the-bottom-up media environment which would inevitably displace and diminish traditional publications. And it has, especially among the geek young.
Wired ignored celebrities. It was addicted to squabbles and arguments. Its cover looked like somebody had thrown up on it. It bristled with ideas and theories, many of them loopy and incomprehensible. Wired was the herald and cheerleader for the digital culture at a time when few non-geeks understood a thing about it, or believed it would amount to much.
Geeks read Wired as if it were the Koran. Everybody else read it because they were afraid not to.
It was uniquely loved and read by kids, who had long ago abandoned mainstream media for cable, Nintendo, Quake and the Net. Writing for Wired in the mid-90's, I was shocked at the amount of e-mail I got (and still get) from teenagers and college kids, the very people we were led to believe had given up text in favor of games and graphics.
This response was a stunning contrast to the audience for mainstream media - like newspapers, whose readers are mostly in late middle-age.
The difference between Wired and almost all other slick magazines was that the people running Wired believed, rightly or not, that they were part of a social revolution that was altering the world - its politics, culture and economics.
Sometimes they believed it too devotedly. Wired often filled up with nearly fanatic screeds, clunky rants about the demise of existing institutions. One column even predicted the end of illiteracy among children. Why? Because getting online was so supremely cool that even the most impoverished kids would be driven to somehow learn to read. In a cynical world this notion of technology as irresistibly cool (Bill Gates says "neat") seems enthusiastically naïve.
The number of techno-toys popping up in ads and features sometimes became unbearable.
Wired was often arrogant, in-your-face and hard to take. But in retrospect, the information about software, hardware and networked computing was essential. Much of the prophesizing didn't turn out too far off the mark, either. It's almost eerie how prescient the magazine sometimes was. In different ways, Wired predicted the rise of digital technology as an engine of social change.
The magazine carped all the time about how digital technology would empower individuals, and it has.
Wired readers need not have been surprised by Mp3's, eBay, weblogs, electric communities, e-trading and ICQ and Hotline messaging systems. Readers of the The Washington Post and The New York Times, on the other hand, are still reeling.
Hotwired, too, became a magnet for geeks from all over the country, who flocked to San Francisco to build and experiment with Web design, graphics and architecture.
In the early and mid 90's, the prevailing notion was that websites which took on the look and function of conventional newspapers and magazines - think Hotwired, Slate, Salon, Suck, Feed -would become the new mass media, replacing the old. Hotwired was meant to launch Wired's political revolution. They didn't come close, and neither has anybody else; almost all these sites have struggled, increasingly turning towards ad-generated revenue models rather than the paid subscriptions most hoped would roll in.
While they are are successful and/or interesting to varying degrees, none has grown remotely in proportion to the explosion of users on the Net.
For all its faults, the demise of the early Wired left a enormous hole that hasn't been filled. Many geeks still have old copies of the magazine tucked away and can cite chapter and verse of early stories on bots, memes, bandwidth and the early development of the World Wide Web.
But Wired overreached. Its owners expanded into Europe, started a book-publishing company, launched a TV show, hired platoons of staffers to build up its Web operations. When the company offered an IPO to raise funds for the global revolution, those eastern institutions - the media, Wall Street - that Wired had denounced for years as outdated and antedeluvian, pounced.
In almost Biblical irony, the company that had defined the digital revolution became one of the few new media companies unable to cash in on it, at least not by current standards.
The contemporary version of Wired is very much in keeping with the company that owns it - smart, slick, striving above all things for style and hipness. Wired is editorially focused on the mostly Northern California-based digerati, the West Coast's answer to the New York media elite.
It's pages smell good. It's professional and sober, lacking arguments or ideas, focusing on the business of computing rather than the culture and politics of the Net and the Web. Wired is a good magazine, but no longer a magazine that wants to get out front too far. You can almost hear the sighs of relief among conventional journalists and editors. It is a magazine any eastern journalist or magazine editor could love.
This may prove to be a smart marketing direction, but doesn't generate much fizz. Hotwired is now about Web tools, animation and graphics, not politics, culture or geek life.
There's no reason why Wired shouldn't have changed, of course. Modern media, especially digital media, evolve all the time. The heady sense of revolution that marked the 80's and early 90's on the Net has already faded, apart from pockets of social and political change like Mp3, free software and open source, and the still-vibrant hacker spirit that dwells in pockets of resistance all over the Internet.
The big news on the Web these days is business. Will AOL take on Disney, or buy CBS? Will the music industry regain control? Will Amazon ever make money? Who will win the Microsoft antitrust trial? The Telcomm Wars?
For evident reasons, revolutions don't last long. They're too intense and disruptive, and whatever their intentions, they often wind up paving the way for people seeking money and power.
It's also fitting that eras end, since that means new ones begin. People who love change look ahead. Wired announced the beginning of something, but there is less need to ballyhoo what's become so pervasive and visible. The Net doesn't need to be explained so much, now that so many people are simply experiencing it, a lesson that has yet to quite reach mainstream journalism. Grandma has been e-trading for over a year now, and Harry and Martha from Des Moines regularly e-mail their grandkids and plan their winter trek to Florida with Yahoo.
The new media of the Net and the Web will need to be more useful than ideological, more cognizant of technology and techniques than revolution. And probably delivered in digital form. Still, there's a need for a successor to help explain the next great wave of technological digital evolution.
In an odd way, it's just as well Wired was taken over. Otherwise, it might have been bypassed by the scope and pace of the change it was predicting. Give the people who created it some credit, though. They saw what was coming and banged the drums.
"A design is perfect not when you have nothing more
to add but when you have nothing more to remove"
Wired will live on at least in terms of wired news, which is actually a good site.
Lots of pioneers have faded.
Only Yahoo stands alone from the original pack of portals and search sites...Netscape has been swallowed, Alta Vista has now been acquired (again)....its the way of things.
geesh i though it was only read by teenagers and wannabes. it was the rolling stone version of the internet and high tech chic. all i ever saw it being about was image and style, who really needs that crap, but i suppose thats why it sold in the first place. nobody wants quality these days they just want to see and be seen looking cool and i suppose wired did that for them.
lets remember people substance should come before style.
Yup, I concur. The best issue was the one with the Silver cover, soon after it was gone.
I feel it's important to note that Wired UK was a different beast, only 1/3 - 1/2 came from the American version, and it had considerably less adverts before the contents page. I also agree with the notes about Byte, it's sadly missed, and always helped me beat someone about the head with useful technical information.
You might have Slashdot, but you also need Haddock, The Register & NTK.
Nowadays, it seems so archaic waiting a month for the previous month's news.
The very first issue of Wired, if memory serves, had Will Gibson on the cover. The first issue I ever bought had Laurie Andersen.
If these strike you as less "celebrity-like" celebrities than, say, Spin or Vanity Fair, it is only because they couldn't afford or solicit more famous ones until later in the magazine's history.
Of course, even celebrities were not as "cool" in the Wired view of things as the CEOs of major media corporations; witness their fawning issue about Viacom. Wired has been consistently kissing up to The Man since the second or third year. For a much more sober perspective on what Wired meant to the world, go read Wired Magazine, Voice of the Corporate Revolution by Keith White (of the Baffler). It's a good slap in the face after the dewy-eyed blatherings of Katz.
~k.lee
Oh, puhleese. 2600 magazine is a digest of adolescence. It's the 'Free Willie' (oops, I meant Mitnick) magazine. Consistently inaccurate, technically subliterate. It should be sold at Radio Shack, except it's too offbeat.
Tell me you're hoarding that stack of "Wired" back issues solely because there's too much slick ink on the pages and the recyclers refused them.
Any other excuse boggles the mind. Sheesh, a fetishistic hoard of stuff that fetishizes brightly colored crap.
No more glorification of the pseudo-hip?' re-a-loser consumerism?
No more techno-cool cheesiness?
No more interviews with pasty-faced egomaniacs who want to share their "vision" of the technology future?
No more obnoxious this-is-the-latest-thing-if-you-don't-have-it-you
No more calling yourself "alternative" and "revolutionary"?
Well Tito, get me a tissue.
He recompiled the kernel, but then had to shoot it with a revolver when it booted up the next time with a Fischer-Price splash screen.
Indeed. Wired Magazine's perpetual bashing of all things East Coast (especially Manhattan) was arrogant, irritating, and stupid, particularly in a magazine that claimed to be the voice of a global revolution. Hackers are not rappers. East Coast hackers do not feel the need to go around bashing on West Coast hackers, and vice versa.
Wired's vision of coastal animosity probably sprung from the owners' personal resentment towards the so-called "media elite" that refused to accept them at first. Of course, their own personal lust was merely to replace that very media elite with their own elite based upon the hipness and "Third Wave"-ness of one's money-grabbing posture, a lust barely concealed by their false "power to the people" rhetoric.
Oh, and while I'm at it, I might as well note that the appearance of non-white-males on Wired's cover was vanishingly rare, even in proportion to the number of non-white-male "digerati".
~k.lee
For me, Wired was a must-read because it was irreverant, funny, and occasionally contained superb writing about issues and concepts that the mainstream media simply didn't know was important. But it was also arrogant and self-satisfied and eventually became a business concerned with profits and -- the real killer -- concerned with what people thought of it. The world needs seedy nerds laughing and pointing at the naked king in his imaginary finery; that attitude dies the instant you begin to care what the king and his advisors think of you. Like any venture a magazine has to pay for itself but that first heady year or two, while everyone thinks they are invincible (or doomed -- it's really the same thing ) can be magic. RIP Wired; whatever you are now.
:)
Now that that's over, let's go have some fun!
My fave Wired ever was the Brian Eno issue. Not only did it have my friend Ricko's sig as teh random ascii art of the month, it has a little blurb about a Mosaic beta. Something like "you can 'surf' the web looking at pictured and reading text... kind of like gopher with graphics" (loose paraphrase)
I remember, distinctly remember, thinking that that sounded pretty dumb. (heh.)
But my point is that Wired was good then, really good, imho. But then again I think that the net was cooler on a command line, so what do I know? Does anyone else get teary-eyed thinking of everyone ntalk-ing each other and using pine and elm? I'd have to say that _that_ was the golden age of Wired. Then everything got fancy.
I Miss Mondo2000 now, though -- the only glossy magazine that ever interviewed Manuel Delanda, Terrence McKenna and My Bloody Valentine.
anyway.
Why not a hardcopy of /. Rag on a month basics?
Come on Rob, use the force
i remember when they put lucas and others on the cover which wasn't the case for the first couple of years. you put celebs on the cover to increase sales.
there's a big difference. 2600 has a narrow niche to fill, but Wired was trying to cover a revolution. You're fooling yourself.
I remember buying the first issue, just as I was about to graduate from college, and being very excited about the future that the magazine espoused (and advocated). The MacLuhan references and "video" pages all were just neat and different than anything I'd seen before (even as a reader of other alternative magazines).
By issue three, I realized that the magazine was ALL style, and no substance. Occasionally there was a decent interview, but everyone talked about a vague "gee-whiz" future, not the actual tomorrow, day-after-tommorow future. Brian Eno's interview was great, but who the hell wants to pay for reading about nostalgia that hasn't even happened yet?
Haven't looked at it in years...
Hotwired is now about Web tools, animation and graphics, not politics, culture or geek life.
Wired magazine itself, though, is not quite a morass. The issue that hit my kitchen table yesterday has a story about "Hyperfliers", people who log 100,000+ air miles a year (now that's a
geek life if ever there were one). The gem of the issue, though, is Bruce Sterling's article predicting the future of Kosovo based on the experiences of The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. A brilliant article, and they don't get much more political.
Of course, I have been trying to figure out just what it has to do with the Net.
I noticed this link a couple years and its moved around a bit but I found it again. The Rise and Fall of Wired chronicles every issue of wired and how it basically lost its way. It links to each article -- some of the links are broken, but if you've got a big collection of issues (like me), its an interesting read.
I remember picking up my first issue of Wired (1.2) when I was in JR HS, and devouring the entire issue over the course of a weekend. I really got into the article about muds and I joined MicroMUSE and spent most of the summer on that damn MUSE, programming new objects and stuff. Anyhow, like someone earlier said, Wired was more of a starting point, especially for me -- it let me see that there were other people like me, interested in the same topics. You also have to remember that yes, the Internet was around before Wired was, but it was typically the domain of college students and newer telco types, unlike today, where ads with cowspots and toy robot/toasters pollute the airwaves. Slashdot mostly fills Wired's niche now, but sometimes its nice to have something physical, something you can grab hold of. Wired was that mag. No longer.
I lump myself in the generation that lived through the computer revolution, and I almost never read Wired magazine.
1) Nothing in print could ever keep up with a properly run e-zine.
2) I distrust almost anything technical in newsprint, unless its a scientific journal, or Sci Am, etc. Journalists write to make a buck, and if editors can't find eminently qualified people to submit articles, they hire the hacks to fill the blank pages. And nowadays, they don't even have the integrity to issue corrections in a misreported article, unless its highly publicized screwup.
3) Don't give a damn about a pontificating pundit's opinion, just the data. Websites like Slashdot always meant more to me than magazines like Wired.
Slashdot and its ilk seem to be filling the niche though. Giving the somewhat clueful and interested somewhere to hang out
they are here on slashdot? where? i havent seen any around in quite along time.
If the content is crap and nobody wants to buy the rag, advertising isn't all that important.
Same thing happened to radio.
Wired has always just been a cheap commercial imitation of Mondo 2000.
I subscribed for a few years, starting, I believe, with issue 3 or 4. A few years ago I threw all the issues into a grocery sack and gave 'em to a friend of mine who is unemployed. What a cruel trick, giving a sack of fetishistic materialist hype magazines to somebody with no money. She liked 'em, though. I think.
Try penthouse.
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Your honor is perfectly understandishable.
Yeah- that was it. ;) ) :)
I have issues from the one with Preppie pink and green colors and Viacom as Beavis and Butthead, to 6.01 ('Change Is Good').
Wired was colorful and had surprisingly little to say. One of the reasons I liked it was that it never really surprised me- it would showcase things I already knew, or work itself into fits of slathering ecstacy over people who were kind of like me, and it all seemed attainable. I seemed to be, not the Wired Professional, but one of the weirdo geek people that they worshipped. (was kinda cool
The single issue that clobbered Wired for me was that asinine Well issue- it really revealed who was running the show, and I was disgusted. How could anyone be so self-absorbed as to specify a Bethlehem BBS from which all sprang? The very concept was absurd and inappropriate.
The 'Apple- Pray' issue also annoyed me in different ways- I've been using Macs for years, but that is _not_ the way to treat Apple. They were _not_ some spiritual homeland for obscure willowy people who can't handle technology- they are just a computer manufacturer who do some things differently, some things well, some things not so well. Using their wares IS NOT a religious issue, it's a CHOICE that people are more or less free to make, barring 'trust' actions to freeze out real choice in the industry. The tradeoffs and gains and losses are quite real and it's perfectly plausible for someone to choose Mac stuff just because they feel like it- worship just don't enter into it! So this issue, too, bugged me.
In the end I just stopped getting it. Slashdot is what Wired thought it was trying to be. My Wired magazines are bits of history on the shelf. One day they will have the same cachet as my tattered Creative Computings
Negroponte was/is cool. Negroponte is a _huckster_ and makes little pretense to be anything else. He lives to sell ya wild ideas, and he's good at coming up with perspectives which are far out- and he's one of the first people to flip out at the shoddiness of proprietary software, at a time when it was mostly still a lovefest! 5.07, July 97, 'Digital Obesity'- one of the few bright spots in the notoriously pathetic 'The Long Boom' issue, notable for its crazed Tinkerbell ethic in which all we had to do was wish REALLY REALLY hard that the world will be lovely, and Tinkerbell will make it so. (Another bright spot was 'Where Computers Go To Die'- another guy _doing_ something positive)
Two years later exactly, an antitrust case is holding the industry hostage one way or another, hardware manufacturers are hemorrhaging money, and we have Linux: in other words, the only people doing okay are those who DID SOMETHING, and Wired, who advocated the Tinkerbell ethic, is dead. I daresay Negroponte is still doing his thing, though- more power to him. Rob, ever thought of giving Negroponte article posting privs?
Wired was a _blend_ of visionaries, hucksters and total fools. Quittner was a pretty cool journalist. Negroponte is a lovely huckster. And in the end, Wired was never as hip as it thought it was. It was much like Usenet- a crapshoot, unjudgeable as a whole, hopelessly inconsistent.
--
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=8^
Other than that, you're right on though. The passing of Wired's online stuff DOES deserve mention. As long as they keep Suck online, I'll be happy. (don't flame...i know, Suck hasn't been owned by Wired for some time now).
Werd.
politics and culture are all related to one another, something few new or old media entities grasp. This was vastly more interesting than anybody on the East Coast was doing, then or now.
Well, I beg to differ. 2600 Magazine is an east coast publication, and is, was, and always will be superior to Wired in those terms. Of course, the 2600 vision of the future isn't as utopian...
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
Geeks read Wired as if it were the Koran. Everybody else read it because they were afraid not to.
ROTFL. Wannabe geeks read it. IT managers who wanted to act cool, hip, and aware read it. Wired wasn't in any way visionary; nearly everything ever published in Wired was years out of date. It was probably cool for people who had never heard of William Gibson or Tim Berners-Lee until they leafed through its glossy pages, but for true geeks it was mostly a sad commentary on the way pop media misinterprets technological and cultural phenomena.
Granted, as far as mainstream media goes it wasn't that bad (one only has to look for the old Time magazine article on "cyberpunk" for evidence) but to say it was ever cutting edge is laughable.
We're simular, but a little different.. Definatly the feeling is the same, if the content iteself isn't a bit different..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
I agree in part, but now it has SOME good articles, instead of Many good Articles, as before.. I still read it, but it's just not the same.. Kinda like Instant Coffee vs good old fresh ground..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
I guess it all depends on who you ask. I always found that Wired was honest with it's adds.. In your face, and flaming bright. But I never found the articles to contain the sales pitch that the ads did.. I found the content GREAT, with interviews with alot of people more 'off the cuff' then well rehersed..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
One thing that John Katz didn't mention in his article was Threads, a discussion board inside HotWired. A whole subculture grew there, making comments about what was discussed on the site, and much more. That was the first message board that caught my eye (before Slashdot), and both the topics and the board itself were before its time.
That didn't survive, either, but they have a site at www.newstrolls.com. John even used to write articles for them sometimes.
I'm just wondering why there was no posting of the sale of Slashdot.
There was, June 29, here.
I have grown rather disenchanted with WiReD since the Conde' Naste buy-out.. if it's all about content, then why do I have to struggle through 8 pages of ads to get to the first table of contents page, then another 2-page ad spread, then the second?
It is now the rare exception to find a pair of WiReD pages facing each other in which neither is an ad. How very tiresome. They may still have some vague remembrance of interesting people like Bruce Sterling, but it's hard to tell or, in fact, to care much anymore.
I'm just glad we get to see those jamming cigarette ads, myself.. what says idealistic revolution like a hyper-garish ad for Camels? Mighty Tasty!
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
Yes, I know that they are collecting information, but I can only read some selected pages..
Is there a website where I can get 'historic' web sites? For example, I would like to see the old HotWired-Website, or the Silicon Graphic's SiliconSurf pages, the good old GNN and stuff like that. That's the problem with electronic information, unlike paper you cannot really collect it. And if you would and make your archive public, you would violate the publisher's copyright...
Like you, I subscribed early on and then let my suscription lapse. Now I buy about one out of three issues when I see an article I like. At $12, I may as well save money and subscribe.
Not so much a sig as a lack of one.
Good summary, Jon.
I, too, remember Wired, but from a different perspective: I can turn around from this chair and view my stack of every issue, neatly arranged by date. And the Re>Wired Parody, too - almost superfluous, really. Wired was everything Mondo 2000 tried to be and then some; it could be serious when it wanted to be and often comical when it didn't want to be, but usually every issue contained some kernel of truth, even if it was only a picture of the latest tech toys.
The best Wired issues were the ones in which riders such as Neal Stephenson (remember issue 4.12 - The Hacker Tourist?) were given what seemed to be free reign.
If Wired seemed to bent to some on projecting the "New Economy" and their place in it, I say they made up for it with their re-telling of facets of Net history in stories such as "The Epic Saga of The WELL". Yes, they were biased, but they tended to get most of the story right and they certainly prompted discussion.
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 4th Ed., Vol 2
I enjoy the magazine, but what vision of the future is 2600 peddling? One in which all people have equal access to the inbound numbers of pay telephones and C source code to viruses?
Rogers Cadenhead (Web: http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench)
Geeks read Wired as if it were the Koran. Everybody else read it because they were afraid not to.
It's fitting that in writing a eulogy for the "Wired era," one of its writers continues the magazine's longest-running trend -- masturbatory love.
Amid all the hype for new media and the emerging digital culture, you could always count on Wired to be more excited about itself than any of the subjects it was slavishly heaping praise on. Wired continues the trend this month by placing on its cover one of its contributors, Po Bronson, at the center and in front of four people he's writing about.
No one is more prominent in the photograph than Bronson, who coincidentally has penned a wonderful article in the issue about those other four shlumps -- people who came to Silicon Valley to make it rich in this IPO-mad climate and failed more often than not.
Wired strongly believed how important it all was because that made the magazine and its writers important, too. Never mind the fact that many of the things it hyped most were least deserving of it -- remember videogame-design-supergroup Rocket Science and zippies? I don't either.
When Conde Nast finally succeeds in removing anything that was ever good about Wired magazine, it will be best remembered more for what its refugees did afterward, such as Suck, The Fray and ClearStation.
(Some refugees, at least.)
As for the "Era" it supposedly ushered in, file that along with push, Netizen, the failed HotWired IPO and other as-if speedbumps on the road from gopherspace to here.
Wired published some nice articles -- and a good news site -- about a parade it more often followed than led. It paid some great writers and Web designers and hawked 1,000 technologically wonderful but completely unnecessary gadgets like the digitally enhanced notepad. (I'm still waiting for teledildonics.)
Let's not get carried away, though. I refuse to get excited about any digital revolution that wasn't fought at the command line.
Rogers Cadenhead (Web: http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench)
How many people here recall a little book called _Hardwired_, by walter jon williams? How many people know that now only did the _Wired_ editors and owners not get permission to use the word, they sued Mr. Williams for using it years before they went online! They harrassed him for years before Ownership changes resulted in saner management.
You can keep this mindless worship of being on the reckless cutting edge of a new frontier. All instutions have a dark side, and this one was no exception.
See also Danny O'Brien's take on this at http://www.spesh.com/danny/wireduk/index.html .
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
...but you're also anonymous, so the only person you could possible impress, is yourself.
Wired News is less than a shadow. I still scan the headlines every day, but there is rarely an article worth reading. Wired News used to publish (gasp!) editorial commentary by Katz (Media Rant) and others. But we no longer get anything but news reports and very poor attempts at humor in the stock market wrap-ups.
-jwb
The first time I read Wired, it blew me away. The graphics, the ideas, and most of all the references to things online. I would take it home and dial up using my 2400 modem, and explore the internet. Not the web ; the internet. I learned about Veronica, and Archie. I learned about MUDS. I learned that I could go online with my crappy 286 and have access to computers all over the world.
As the internet exxpanded and changeed so did Wired. many of the people who only remembered the late 90's Wired, will not mourn it's passing, but I think that many people will/have mourned for the passing of the Wired that they remember. My Wired died the first issue that Nicholas Negroponte failed to have the back page. I almost never agreed with him, but I always had to figure out why. I liked that.
I never really enjoyed HotWired though. It never gave me a community to join, even by proxy. This seemed to be the real problem with Wired. They never in their heart of hearts appreciated the bi-directionality of the internet. They always thought of it as a many to many broadcast medium. The truly succesful sites have been many with many projects....
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
Contrary to popular opinion, libertarians of any sophistication acknowledge the need for cooperation and community. Many, including the original founders and operators of Wired, have no great passion for big-business nor the desire to read or write about the doings of successful businessmen that the modern Wired exhibits. Its only those who've been infected with some kind of Ubermensch superiority syndrome who feel libertine politics is a way to isolate themselves from society. Many of the leader of the free/open software movement are libertarians. How do you explain that ?
I used to read Hotwired, and to a lesser extent wired, quite religiously, but both of them have sucked quite badly for some time now. Wired is exclusively for clueless junior businesssmen who want to be cool, and HotWired has gone from interesting and sometimes controversial to be a low quality 'web design for dummies'. A shame.
Slashdot and its ilk seem to be filling the niche though. Giving the somewhat clueful and interested somewhere to hang out.
I think you're thinking of USA Networks buying Lycos. But I believe that buyout failed. But no, Microsoft does not own Lycos.
*rolls eyes* *rolls eyes*
Hello Mr. Katz! This is not the first time Wired Digital has changed ownership.
A subscriber to Wired (dead-wood-edition) since `93, I felt screwed when the first Calvin Klien and Guess Jeans ads began gracing the inside covers. Sheesh.
Well, I'm going to put my collection of Wired in storage and then sell them for a fortune on eBay 30 years from now.
L@@K! Rare! Wow! Ancient Internet Mag
Chuck
Your mission, Jim, should you choose to accept it: log onto slashdot and post some wise ass remarks.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Tired: Wired.
Wired: Slashdot.
Finding God in a Dog
Well it was years ago I read the last Wired article. It was some sort of idea. Somehow a good one. For some monthes I would make an obligatory stop on wired. But unfortunately it didn't last long.
/. everyday day (sometimes every hour). Now sometimes it takes two or three days to get a look at it. There is something wrong going on /. and it looks a bit like Wired story.
Wired died quite quickly. One the edge of its popularity its creators made the worst error they could make for such an "original" idea. They stereotyped the "uncommon" and hyperinflated it.
In fact it was a year or two that wired lived its golden moments. People everywhere talked about it, even in Russia. But here there was something that killed it kickly. Its themes became "alien" to us. We know its pretty cool to be "underground". Unfortunately by time this underground seemed to run over Apple or somewhere else. I even couldn't guess where. Besides the stuff became more and more "tabloid". The last times I saw it I wondered if guy from Brittish newspaper Sun have taken charge of it.
The final blow was graphics and html design. When all those cute draws, animations became mastodons. When everything turned Java, ActiveX and CGI it was bye-bye Wired. Since then I have looked two or three times over it.
There is one lesson to take from Wired. If you turn "underground" around two or three bright ideas for too long then you become "establishment". And after that if you keep this stereotype unchangeable, if you even hyperinflate it, then you surely die.
That's a lesson that one of my most respected sites has to learn and quite soon: Slashdot. Damn a year ago I was reading
Have any of you other fellow subscribers noticed that Wired has (subtly/not so subtly) changed their focus? They seem to turning into a Forbes magazine, with their main focus on people who've gotten rich and powerful in the digital world, like Silicon Valley. It is really dull compared to what it used to be.
It's easy to wax lyrical about the "good old days." However, change will always happen, especially on a medium as volatile as the Internet.
Let's see what happens with Wired mk III.
--
"May I have ten thousand marbles, please?"
I remember the original Silicon Surf as being a major influence in my personal love affair with SGI machines.
That was one heartbreaking page, since it seems to presage the beginning of the end, the recasting of SGI as just another box manufacturer.
I remember when they changed to a white background a few years back (which I assume this is referring to), I wondered what the heck was going on - it was just boring.
D
(Proud owner of a used Indigo2).
----
I first used it because web servers were free, while the Gopher folks wanted to charge $ 500 for "commercial use".
I thought about this and realized I was more or less a commercial entity. So I got a web server instead.
I started to quickly enjoy the idea of hypertext. But it took me a long time to see the value of images. I always browsed with Lynx and hated the slowness of images. Now, of course, a page without images is thought of as pretty quaint.
D
----
So, with all the money poured into it and all the throngs of advertisers eager to support it, why wasn't Wired more of a financial success?
D
----
It still has extremely high-quality articles you can't find anywhere else, so I wouldn't put it down too heavily.
:-(
I remember when it was stunning - printed on gorgeous thick paper, with a graphic design adventure on every page. The only problem is that many of those beautiful pages were virtually impossible to read. I emailed Andrew Anker of the magazine to ask "I think there are some great articles in Wired, but I can't read them. Could you tone down the design a bit?"
I still remember his reply. "Read the online version, then".
That kind of arrogance was what killed Wired (or LR's control of it, anyway), but in an odd sense it was also what made it so appealing.
I never took to HotWired, probably because I found the site hard to read and confusing to navigate. Oh, and I was always forgetting my password.
I don't think the magazine has changed as much as Jon does, but that's probably because I haven't seen it from the inside. I'm relieved that I can finally read the articles, but I will admit that with readable articles some of the creative spirit of the magazine died. Odd, that.
But Wired News is still one of the best news sources on the web, even though the lower number of articles makes it a shadow of its former glory.
So what happened to Louis Rissoto (or however you spell his last name)? Did he make a nice pile by selling out to Lycos? If he does, I have a feeling we'll see some bizarre new venture coming up the pike, but I wouldn't be surprised if he overspends and goes broke again. Pity.
D
----
May Wired rest in peace. I'll keep my bookmark to Wired News. But its definitely time to bury my HotWired link. It was fun while it lasted, but now we'll have to find others map for other frontiers.
Mondo 2000 was about smart drugs, ass piercings, and hooking up sex toys to serial ports. Not exactly mind blowing stuff. Now Boing-Boing, that was where it was at.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
I would beg to disagree.
I found early Wired to tie the world together in an amazingly insightful way. They took the cultural, economic, and technological forces that shape our lives and showed how they wove together in an intricate tapestry of interaction.
That phrase reminds of of John Conway's game of life. A simple cellular automata showing a complex mosaic of interaction with every tick of the clock. While this is an idea that may not have graced the pages of Wired, this sort of wild connection between mathematics and sociology is just the sort of thing you'd expect from them.
I grew disgusted when the vaunted idea that the 'net' would be some kind of political force in the 1992 election was proven false by the outcome. In my mind, Wired had become populated with starry eyed idealists with a tenuous grasp on reality. I dropped my subscription.
Most of the people I know who disliked Wired during the time I liked it were the kind of people who didn't have the imagination to see beyond the edges of their CRT. Most of the technical people I know who had the wit to understand that what they did had cultural significance thought the magazine was pretty interesting.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
I used to read Wired religiously. Once it started being published in the UK, I found it much easier to track down, and it was a monthly must have. I didn't always agree with it, but I found it fascinating for it's fervour and attitude.
Then the UK arm collapsed and I didn't see it for months. When I finally tracked a copy down, nearly every article was about business - who was merging, who was buying, who was selling.
I don't care about that. I wasn't to know who's designing, who's making, who's _thinking_. Wired stopped being the magazine that Internet Doers wanted to read and started being the magazine Internet Buyers wanted to read.
I'll miss it (and Byte another magazine with an enthusiasm for all things new).
But then, I have Slashdot now.
My Journal
A few years ago, Douglas Rushkoff wrote this essay on the demise of Wired UK.
Funny how some people seem to have more insight than others [check the flames at the door].
it's about time to retire wired.
:)
the magazine certainly was read and enjoyed by techies. the technolust section was the bomb, featuring every gadget one could possibly imagine. the political articles, while heavier on cyberhappy rhetoric than actual content, provided a great introduction to the complex interactions between the dreams of cyberspace and the laws of politics. and they were always eager to talk of the new cool thing at the media lab.
but it wasn't the visionary magazine some think it was. the articles, while skillfully written and even more wonderfully illustrated, with funky, fluorescent lettering on high-quality paper, were still written by journalists who wrote of things they knew little of. and it showed. it showed through detailed speculations of possible future impacts of technologies that contained no interesting details of how they work in the present. it showed in clueless articles on science and pseudoscience (the article about supposed discovery of antigravity especially stuck in my throat). but more importantly, it showed in the cult of celebrity (or "cyber-celebrity", later replaced by "making-money-on-the-'net-celebrity") that filled the magazine. it's easier to write about a person than about the work they do, the latter would require grokking the technical.
wired had always been enjoyable. but not enjoyable in a "wow, this is just what i needed, i think i'm gonna start working on this" sort of a way. there was never enough detail for that. it was rather inspiring in a "wow, this is a neat toy, if i ever get rich i'm gonna get me one of these" way, or even in a "this story isn't quite right, but it's good that someone's telling these stories to the masses" way. or at least they did for a while, until they got replaced a year ago with the stories of the internet as el dorado.
wired, you served your role. you've been an interesting read. you've been a people magazine that aspired to be the economist. but my subscription ends in december, and i'm not going to renew.
My other car is a cons.
I may be wrong in this, but doesn't Microsoft now own Lycos?
SO that now means that Microsoft now owns Wired by way of Lycos, correct?
Hmm, back in the heyday of Wired, the nerds I knew only read it to make fun of the self-styled "digerati" who thought they were cool and hip because they fanboyed about technology, even though they didn't really understand it. The sort of people who didn't grasp that the Internet was more than just port 80. The sort of people who thought things like intelligent toilets or cuff-links with built-in cell-phones were the most exciting implications of our ongoing technological revolution.
Wired was certainly interesting to look at while tripping for the entertainment value of the layout alone, but please, let's not assume their blandly yuppietopian vision of the future has any real relevance to net culture.
I think maybe Jon is over dramatizing the effect and impact of Wired because he was there and it felt like (or they liked to believe it was) the center of the web-savvy world. In reality, however, most techno geeks I knew couldn't stand to try to read it.
Wired always had a low signal-to-noise ratio. It was and is hard to tell where the advertising starts and the content begins. I figured it was a good outlet for some acid-popping graphic designers (nothing wrong with that) and a few hackers, but not much more. It looked good sitting on the table in the waiting room of the internet start-ups saying "look how cool we are! We're different from the rest of the world!", but really, who really looked to Wired for info on current technology or culture? There were and are better outlets, more focused and readable, for all of the things Wired wanted to do.
It was great for it's pictures of the new techie toys and freakily manipulated pictures of the founders of the web and the companies that made it great, but is that really a reason to wax poetic? I think not...
Usually I just ignore these posts. You know, obvious troll, just trying to get a rise out of someone. They kind of annoy me. I don't have anything against JonKatz even tho he's kinda cheesy sometimes. Some of his articles are pretty good, and this one at least isn't too bad.
:^] ...)
Nonetheless, this post just made me laugh and laugh. (I think I'd better get back on the medication
oh well. no one can deny what they once were.
Joseph?
Think about it. You want cutting-edge, this is pretty much the place. We get quoted more and more as an authoritative source, if not THE authoritative Geekworld source.
If we aren't, I'd still be willing to argue it over a beer or three. . . .
I read MONDO 2000, which was about expanding your world and experiences in every way, and really using the web as a tool to connect and have fun and play with the boundaries of culture and your mind.
My friend's middle-aged Mormon marketroid dad read Wired, or rather, used the ads in Wired as a hipper-than-the-guy-in-the-next-cube sharper image catalogue of new toys to buy and forget in a week. As "revolutionary" as they claimed to be, Wired was always about moneymoneymoney, and was kept on a tight editorial leash by their advertisers.
The true herald of the Web should be the herald of free thought and new ideas. The idea of exploiting a fad to make piles of money is nothing new.
As I understand it, though, it looked a lot like Shift does now. Shift has all of the examinations of pop-tech culture and edgy stuff that people are lamenting not finding in Wired.
Just my two cents, but I wait with baited breath for the new Shift to appear in my mailbox.
Greg
And what is up with having to choose between either a fair trial, or a speedy one?? Do you also have to choose whether your punishment is either cruel or unusual?
Do not even make jokes about our constitutional, political, civil and human rights, because it ain't funny.
Here's two cents, go buy a clue.
--
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Then they were acquired.
Or, as Wired might have put it:
As I browse through the comments here I'm struck by the number of people who would argue that Wired transformed itself from a vibrant magazine to one pre-occupied with business and corporate interests. As Katz puts it, "It's professional and sober, lacking arguments or ideas, focusing on the business of computing rather than the culture and politics of the Net and the Web."
Wired was, from the very beginning, obsessively and misguidedly attached to extreme libertarianism, and the boring, offensive and oppressive stances it began to take were inevitable. If you didn't see it from the first edition it's because you were blinded by the excitement of something 'new' which I suppose, to some extent, and to some people, it was.
The problem is that the magazine held two incompatible premises: that the importance of the web was that it provided the space for a new kind of community, and as such it was an outgrowth of, and response to, existing social structures; and, that in this new space we could finally shed out communal responsability and revel in the opportunities for purely personal gain, stock-options in start-ups and toilets that would automatically clean our asses while planning our itineraries.
The Web is not, cannot be, and should not be thought of, as a place to escape community, communal responsibility, and inter-relatedness. It is a place to rethink our relationships in the real world, and to transform them.
The real revolution, the one that Wired missed, is the very opportunity provided by projects like Linux, Gnome, and copy-left licences. We are transforming the nature of community and work right here, and it's a new way of approaching old problems precisely because it avoids the old traps of selfish, accumulative (property-centered) individualism.
As for Wired, Good Ridance!
uh, well if you read the whole post you'd see that he agrees with you
_
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
uh, well if you read the whole post you'd see that he agrees with you, He's saying that wired *was* cool, and now its not.
:(
I currently have a subscription, but it just isn't the same as it used to be. I remember reading every single thing in the mag, and now I don't even read half the stuff, it sucks.
I remember reading an artical in a recent wired that spent several pages talking about the stuff you could do with your millions of dolars, and its like WTF?? I don't have millions of dolars... I keep hoping that at some point, there will be some articals that harken back to the old days... but I never see them
slashdot is great, but where are the psychodelic colors??
_
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
For every one who's 'inside' or hip or cool... there is someone else who's 'hipper' and 'cooler' and deeper inside. Or at lest thinks they are...
these people are always condescending toward the 'wannabies' when in fact most of the people they belittle want to be nothing like them.
here's a simple litmus test: if you think your hip, your not.
_
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Wired *was* cool, but it wasn't writen from a purely technical stand point. The people who wrote it *did* "get it." I just hope that maybe someone over there will read this thread, and relize there mistake.
wired just sucks now...
_
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
.that's so cool :)
_
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Try Maxim or FHM :) High quality .. umm .. writing :) I'm just reading the articles, really!
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us. - Douglas Coupland
/. is becoming what WiReD was ... but it lacks some of the hard journalism that a "professional" (making money doing it) magazine can pull off ...
/.'s style of story collection, it's pin point niche targeting, and TONS of free content (from the readers no less) is the future of media (remember we're all geeks, computers don't scare us and they won't scare anybody else in 20 years) Rob, if you guys sold out for less than a cool mil, you were robbed ;).
I'd take the moderated ravings of 100,000 geeks over those of 20 reporters any day. You get a lot more first hand, arguable, backed-by-proof opinions here.
I didn't read WiReD, now I never will.
(I think this is off-topic for the original post, doh!)
+&x
I think, in some way (and yes I know this has been mentioned before) that /. is doing much of the same thing that Wired/Hotwired did. In a different format, yeah, but different is sometimes good.
/., but after about 7 or 8 months felt it was starting to change. Maybe it was a change in the features, or maybe not. I really don't remember why I stopped.
/. in a copy of Wired, and took interest.
Why else would I be here? : )
One of the first websites I ever found (and the first one I actually became a member of) was Hotwired, and this announcement strikes me cold. I read Hotwired as religiously as I do
Every once in a while, when I have nothing to do, I'll visit Hotwired, or I'll go down to Barnes & Noble and pick up Wired, and afterwards suffer from eyestrain or call someone up and debate business matters (kidding).
Oddly, I first found out about
But on another note, why are search engines these days getting so...comercial? They're just frickin search engines!! I've been using Lycos and Yahoo since the begining, and now I can't stand either of them. I don't want a free home page and free e-mail, and I don't want a personalized news page, and I don't want to bid online for Pokemon cards, I just want to find what I need!
Anyone agree?
miyax
_________________________________________________
"I want an Internet. Can I have one of these?" - Mel B. (Scary Spice)
Oh, so being held without bond or a trial for over 4 years doesn't constitute an abuse? I guess I was dreaming when I read something about a right to "a fair and speedy trial"...thanks for alerting me to my misconception!
James
For me, Wired died a long time ago. I remember seeing my first issue alongside Mondo2000 at an underground bookstore 6 or 7 years ago. Both magazines blew me away and I would wait anxiously for the next issue. There was just so much weird stuff in both of them, and yet somehow it all seemed to relate.
Lately, whenever I see a Wired for sale somewhere I can't help but vomit. Just look at the latest issue "Generation Equity: Kids who have stock options and too much $$$". When did everything become about money? I want to see an article on purple toast eating moon men who surf the web while sitting in an orgasmatron. That's the kind of stuff that used to be in W1red.
I once had a client who wanted to learn more about technical issues so he could talk to us techies building his E-Store. He went out and bought a copy of every computer mag at Walden books. He musta spent $300.
The next day I saw him reading Wired and I asked him what he thought of it.
"I don't know man, these guys do LSD and stuff, they're weird?" he said.
Hell yes they do LSD, or at least they used to.
The Information Revolution will be fought on the command line.
The description above is the best description I've ever seen for Wired, it's from a book Generation Ecchh, which was a very funny parody of a lot of pop culture.
At any rate, has Wired really changed, it's always been fun trash and still is !
Finally, the one thing that has always bugged me about Wired ( and American magazines in general ) is that the articles are always way too long, they say what they have to say and then go on for 20 pages. So I guess it's fitting that Jon Katz's article is too long. Compare
this to the Economist !
I don't know what's it's availability is in the States right now (it's Canadian), but I find that Shift is now what Wired used to be. There are no articles about the "mergers and acquisitions", only great stuff about technologies role in society.
I think it's a great magazine (and I don't even work for them!).
About a year ago (shortly after the sale which I was oblivious to, not being a regular reader any more) I bought a copy of Wired and was annoyed to find 3 articles about mobile phones and nothing substancial anywhere. So I asked the first geek friend I ran into "Is it just me or is Wired now crap?" and he said, "Wired is now crap. Read Slashdot instead." Been here ever since.
Cheers.
"I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent"
> Insert standard Anti-Katz Rant here
Hey, what's up? Nobody is flaming Katz. Could it be *GASP*, he is becomming acceptable?
He IS getting more readable. Shorter articles, he gets to the point and every other word isn't "Geek".
Anyway, Wired was always entertaining, and that is why you read it, right?
What happened to that Linux box you were trying to build?
Talisman
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
I was hacking since 1983, and I could almost never agree with anything Wired said. It all was either underresearched, or plain utopian, or just regurgitating ideas which were forgotten for good some 20 years ago. Not mentioning that most of the stuff was plain unreadabe due to awful typography.
/. in not focusing exclusively on computers and trying to present a wider picture. I will miss it.
Still, I believe that among our fundamental rights there should be a right to be obviously wrong somewhere. Wired didn't prove anything, but most of the articles in their lame wrongness provoked a lot of people to come forward and set the record straight. Wrong stuff can lead to a lot of positive development too.
Above notwithstanding, there were some articles that ruled, interview with Freeman Dyson for one. It was a bit like
I was rather confused by this myself. JonKatz doesn't usually seem like the 'hip' geek who is 'with it'. I'm not so sure I really understand which issues of Wired he's been reading, but I must imagine it must've been from the first handful of ground breaking years and not the last disgusting blatant advertisement years.
Keep up the good work Rob!!
This space for sale
Wired was really a tamer version of Mondo 2000, and it in turn has become a slightly modified version of Forbes ASAP, i.e. a boring little business magazine. Sadly, it's still better than most and a source of ideas despite its encroaching lameness.
I remember seeing the first issue on the newstand and reading about hacking cellphones and an article by Bruce Sterling. Now all we get are buttkissing megalomaniac capitalists.
Wired, I hardly knew ye.
p.s. any other possible replacement zines for wired out there?
In part of his article, he mentions that Wired has gone from covering the culture and politics of the net to covering the business aspects of it. This is so sadly true.
Most new issues of Wired that I buy are filled with stories about business: interviews with people who made it big; features on companies that made it big; stories about companies that might make it big.
I started reading Wired mainly for the cultural aspect of it, not business. I personally dislike the whole business world, it bores me beyond comparison.
There used to be a time when I wouldn't miss a single issue of Wired, but nowadays I have to try to convince myself to buy it at the newsstand because nothing inside really grabs at my attention and catches it.
I can make a personal recommendation for those who have been driven away: a little magazine based out of Toronto called Shift. It's been around for 7 years, mainly underground, but it's received a bit of a push this year. It's difficult to find outside of Canada, but look at the website anyway. It's become my new "must read" magazine.
- Jacob Rens
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
As someone who read the first couple of years, I quit when the style got to overwhelming the substance. The issue that did it for me had purple page numbers on often bright pink/orange pages. Since I (and a measurable percent of the rest of you) am significantly color blind red/green it made the index & 'see page nnn' totally useless. Enough was enough. Reading crack pot ideas now and then was one thing, having to search under hi-intensity light for the damn page numbers was genuinely over-the-top.
Then, later, suckered into the perfect cover of the HAL 9000, that article was a new and very deficient low water mark that finished it's fate.
I subscribed to Wired when it first came out. The first year read a lot like Slashdot in print. Then it became mainstream and boring. The point being, Slashdot is as good (if not better) then Wired ever was and I don't have to pay for it. The original subscription for 1 year was US$40. I just got an offer to get it for US$16. Downhill....
Try google.com, you'll like it.
1000 SlashDot sigs
Finally subscibed to Wired a little less that a year ago after buying it for years at the newsstand. Took me a while to notice that I wasn't as interested in it as I used to be. Finally it dawned on me with last months issue that Wired has become nothing more than another business promotion rag. I received this months issue about a week ago and it is still in it's plastic wrapper on my pile of freebie industry mags that I will get to reading someday. But then again I stuck with Byte magazine from the Wayne Green days to the bitter end.
i love that magazine SO much!!!! i will truely miss not reading it every month. getting wired in the mail always made my day, and i would read that magazine till another one came the next month... those were the good ol days....i wish that they would still produce the magazine as it esists now, but i know that isnt going to happen. i will miss u wired =)
For a long time, wired was the magazine that didn't suck. Nowadays, I'm reduced to reading wallpaper and black book. Anyone have any pointers to decent mags?
Johan
... Good summation (obituary?) for Wired.
/. is what wired once was....
I'm wondering if
-=Knowledge of software commands does not mean mastery of concepts=-
Why did this story not generate much buzz? Because as the author implied, Wired was allready dead. The only thing that sets it apart from other magazines now is annoying unreadable page layouts.
As for reporting all news remotely attached to the computer industry in depth and encouraging discussion. Slashdot does a better job (and it's owned by externals too you know.)
Goodbye Wired, but I feel like I'm saying not saying that the first time.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
There are some things missing from /. & co. that I think that Wired did a good job in covering. Civil & Net Liberties (and how they're being taken away from us every day). The Netizen section of Wired was one of the only places you could find out about net-law and how it affects you. While /. does have news about net law, it rarely has articles that look at the overall picture. Thats what I miss about the old Wired.
--Remove chicken to e-mail
After reading several dozen posts about this reminiscing of Wired, I find it highly amusing that a good portion of you people suggest that Wired was beneath you. This post-cool attitude that many of you geeks cling to makes me laugh my ass off. This constant desire to be one step ahead of the masses when in reality, 99% of us comprise the masses is sheer lunacy. I don't understand the need to knock everything that came before you. My comments are not specific to Wired. I have seen this attitude directed towards numerous entities, persons, etc.
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
Even though I still bristle to think of the psychedelic rat puke that was Wired's outrageous, color-blind design scheme, and while plenty of their articles were silly, simple-minded, or just plain wrong (see: [Apple logo] Pray.), there was enough in the pulpware version of Wired for a whole lot of people to look around and think, hey, maybe I can do this stuff. Right now, vivid and Organic are probably Indian leg-wrestling for Wired's office space, which sits between them. Without a voice like Wired, odds are they wouldn't have been able to survive with stupid script tricks and graphical magic.
I have to respect their bleeding-edge online design, as well, despite my firm grounding in usability. It's still important to have some of us doing cool for cool's sake.
Look what Wired spawned. Technolust. The meme. neo-cyber-nano-*. Street cred. TWIT$. Hell, I first heard about Edward Tufte in one of those rare black-on-white pages. Wired is to be credited (or blamed, as may be your taste) for the very commoditization of cool we see on the web and off -- for better or worse.
Anyway, I buried Wired at 5.01, when they tried to make the fonts more accessible and the editor-in-chief talked about growing up. The Wired we wanted was Peter Pan. We never asked it to put on a suit.
All I could think of while reading this article was all the times I've heard people say that wired was for people who wanted to be 'hackers' but were too afraid of technology and the real 'scene' (I hate that word) to get in there themselves. One could read wired and still feel 'in' and 'hip', even if such was not the case.
One can see this in the books that wired writers go out and write. It's all net.history glossed over and condensed in an easily digestible lump so those who were not there can still feel like they're with it. I admit, I checked out "Bots: The origin of a new species" and "net.wars" and many of those books from the library, because in most cases I was not there.
Maybe it was just because I missed the whole beginnings of wired (hey, I thought BBSes were the place to be!) that it seems this way, and it doesn't seem like a 'passing of an era' or anything worth noting.
On another tangent, the funniest thing I read was 'hot wired style' a book on webdesign..from the people who made those 'butt ugly graphics' as jon said. I ask, do we *really want* our websites to look like that?
The lack of positive response was disappointing. Maybe the pioneer spirit of the internet is disappearing?
.net and in particular, the WWW, as popular as it now is. Maybe people like me are relics of a bygone era...
...Student, Artist, Techie - Geek *
I certainly didn't expect the personal, nasty emails I received.
Are we all growing comfortable with the commericalisation of our "toy"? After all, many of us helped make the
I'm not screaming for any kind of "reclaim the net" campaign, I suppose as long as we have places like Slashdot, and our favourite BBS's ( FIX - shameless advertising!) then we'll always have our little corner. But why not try and make our corner a little bigger?
Mong.
* Paul Madley
*...Slacker, Artist, Techie - Geek *
Remember: Nothing is Cool.
A great loss - a little before my nettime, but I was fortunate to come across it towards the end of it's heyday.
...Student, Artist, Techie - Geek *
Maybe we should do it ourselves? There's enough writers, researchers, designers et al here to do just that. There's definately enough people to physically host it and run it. Is there enough enthusiasm? Is there enough intrest?
There should be.
Unfortunately (as is often the case), I don't have enough time to organise something on this scale - that said, I've no experience of anything this big. But if like me, you can help in even a small way... Some crazy Norwegian friends of mine started a project like this a while back - but they simply couldn't commit enough time and resources. But in these, we already have a starting point (any FIXers reading this?).
So, who wants to get this show off the road?
Am I just being reactionary and unrealisitic? Or do people out there still care?
Mong.
* Paul Madley
*...Slacker, Artist, Techie - Geek *
Remember: Nothing is Cool.
Interestingly enough, when I read your post it made me think of all the E-Zines I read when I started reading Wired. I was subscribing to 2600 by mail, CDC by E-mail, and several other 'hacker' zines that were available at the time. I ran a BBS and hubbed 4 networks with political and technical discussions on them. One day it happened -- everyone was talking about the first month's issue of Wired magazine. Everyone was talking about the second, then the third. It wasn't a replacement of the others, it was the interest in having a 'real' magazine to go out and buy and bring to school or work that really represented the "us" that read it.
... I still read CDC and the like ... and don't read Wired anymore. Like another reader mentionned, I have the best issues on my shelf in order, right back to the first few.
... but it lacks some of the hard journalism that a "professional" (making money doing it) magazine can pull off ...
Ah well
/. is becoming what WiReD was
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Yeah, I only received it for like 6 issues, but that first one was their 5th anniversary. There were some GREAT articles -- one each focusing on the 1st world (Silly Valley), 2nd World (cyberart in St. Petersburg), 3rd World (wiring Africa). Articles that got to run over 1000 words! Wow! As a writer for several publications, I've hated that steel wall that inherently reduces your meaning. These pieces and others -- the one on Danny Hillis -- the one on headhunting in the Valley -- actually got to convey some atmosphere. Great writing. And some eye candy.
Sure, the mag got Forbes-y later, but it was invaluable, to me, a budding geekgirl, to introduce me to some of the hghly fragmented, exciting subcultures within geekdom.
Ceterum censeo Microsoftam esse delendam.
I can't wait for the Lycos/Wired commericial. MAybe they will have the Robo Dog (feature in a past Fetish) to 'Go Get It'! "Wired RoboDog, go get it!" (hmmmm maybe mp3.lycos.com will get better after the last issue of wired (who's cover story was 'I want my mp3s) didn't even mention lycos in it's list of mp3 searches.)
Your mammas flamebait.
Even with the degradation of editorial leadership, I think that WIRED will be remembered as a great magazine. Growth happens, WIRED went bankrupt being a leader, it has quelled down to make a living. I will have fond memories of reading WIRED and being provocked to think about technology in my life.
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I never consulted it for technical details on programming or engineering leadership. They did try to cover almost all technologies and their impact on our lifes, a huge task.
I enjoyed WIRED's recent excerpts from the upcoming book on silicon valley's draw on young dreamers. The article was titled "Generation Equity". I live in MA and appreciate WIRED exposing these wrinkles of SV life to me.
As an aside, I thoroughly enjoyed the article in the rag THE STANDARD regarding the arbitrarily anointed "boy CEO"s who are farcically running the web "community" GLOBE.COM. (see http://www.thestandard.com/articles/display/0,144
That article exposes the strategy of highlighting the "boy wonders" to make GLOBE.COM seem like a cool investment. I want to see more of these hype-busting articles in any magazine, even WIRED.