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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.
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...
... 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.