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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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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)
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
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.
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
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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
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...
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 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!
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)
... Good summation (obituary?) for Wired.
/. is what wired once was....
I'm wondering if
-=Knowledge of software commands does not mean mastery of concepts=-
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.