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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Wired's techno-idealism jolted America before it flamed out. Gary Wolf's new book vividly recalls the magazine's wild and woolly saga, but leaves the big question hanging: Was it right?
Jul 7, 2003 | "We are here to sell the whole culture," Kevin Kelly, Wired magazine's executive editor, told me, as he snatched hurried bites of a sandwich during a typically frenetic workday. The time was January 1994; the place was Wired's first offices, on Second St. in San Francisco, overlooking the entrance to South Park, soon to become ground zero of the Internet economy. And the attitude? The attitude was all Wired: intelligent and arrogant, with a liberal dash of hype.
I was a reporter for a local free weekly assigned to do a feature on the magazine, then barely a year old, but already sending fibrillations through the global media nervous system. Before I made my way to Kelly's office, I had to struggle through camera crews from Germany and CNN, and avoid being swamped by the confidence of the staffers strutting about with all the poise of digitally anointed true believers. The Internet was poised to break mainstream, the Web was just beginning to penetrate public awareness, and Wired was in the right place at the perfect time -- covering, participating, and aiming to profit from, the "revolution."
Reading "Wired: A Romance," Gary Wolf's eloquent and evocative account of the magazine's rise to prominence and subsequent plunge into melodrama, brings back those days with scintillating clarity. Let me get the disclaimers taken care of immediately: In the course of writing a book, an online column, and a handful of magazine features for Wired's various divisions, I came to know, personally and collegially, many of the characters in "Wired: A Romance." And like most reporters who covered the Internet and were based in the Bay Area I followed every DayGlo-highlighted twist in Wired's fortunes with obsessive interest. But I was always on the periphery, and never at the red-hot center.
But from where I sat, Wolf gets it right -- his characterizations are dead on, his history misses no major points, his analysis is appropriate. His portrayal of Louis Rossetto, the libertarian-leaning, autocratic mastermind behind Wired, is unstinting: fully-fleshed, honest and fearless. His account of the financial maneuverings involved in Wired's failed attempt to go public, and the ensuing ouster of Rossetto and his partner Jane Metcalfe from the magazine they created, is illuminating. To read "Wired: A Romance" is to relive a particular moment of history in digitally precise detail. It puts other attempts in the same genre, such as James Ledbetter's "Starving to Death on $200 Million: The Short, Absurd Life of the Industry Standard" and Michael Wolff's "Burn Rate," to shame. More accurate, more empathetic, more true.
Wolf executes so well what he sets out to do, that perhaps the only meaningful criticism one could make is to wish he had aspired to more. Wired strove to cover the essence of what mattered about new technology -- culturally, politically, socially and economically -- better than any other publication, and at the same time it was dead set on capitalizing on its position in the new economy with a hubris and ambition that aimed to shove old media into history's dustbin. Telling Wired's story is thus a perfect opportunity to explore how media, technology and money swirled together in one seething cauldron in the late '90s, and to figure out just where it is exactly that we've ended up.
But Wolf holds back. Which is not to say that he ignores such issues, or treats them trivially. "Wired: A Romance" is a very good book, and there are ample hints and pointers to the larger significances of Wired's story. But in what had to be a conscious decision, Wolf chooses not to attempt to resolve some of the questions he raises -- for example, whether Louis Rossetto's beliefs in the politically and economically transformative powers of new technology have actually been borne out, or contradicted, by events. Instead of trying to knock the ball out of the park and use the story of Wired to grapple fully with the Internet's transformation of culture, media and society, Wolf tells a more constrained tale, one that ends the day Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe were bought out of their stakes in their empire.
