Unplugged: The End Of Wiredness 143
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 slick commercial imitation (Score:1)
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.
Yup (Score:1)
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
Perspective (Score:1)
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.
Re:wired was actually respected? (Score:1)
For other really bad pseudo-technical magazines, check out New Media, which might or might not still be in publication. The layout was atrocious, and every other page had a bright watermark that read "Amendment 1" what made the text even harder to read. It reminded me of some running gag that noone outside the publisher got.
Re:Why Wired UK failed (Score:1)
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hmmm... (Score:2)
Other than that, you're right on though. The passing of Wired's online stuff DOES deserve mention. As long as they keep Suck [suck.com] online, I'll be happy. (don't flame...i know, Suck hasn't been owned by Wired for some time now).
East Coast: 2600 Magazine (Score:1)
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...
won't be missed (Score:2)
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.
Re:I guess that's why you're a writer.... (Score:1)
Re:I still like Wired (Score:1)
Re:Misplaced Nostalgia (Score:1)
Alternatives (Score:1)
That didn't survive, either, but they have a site at www.newstrolls.com [newstrolls.com]. John even used to write articles for them sometimes.
Re:Speaking of being sold Slashdot.org was sold (Score:1)
There was, June 29, here [slashdot.org].
Ads on every page is not the Hax0r way (Score:1)
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!
Re:Old web snapshots, anywhere? (Score:1)
Old web snapshots, anywhere? (Score:2)
Re:hmmm... (Score:2)
Another favorite Wired memory in retrospect: in one very early issue, one item on the overhyped list was Mosaic. The commentary was something like "With Mosaic you can see people's home pages, except now with pictures. Who cares?" and predicted the Mosaic hype would die off soon. Very funny, when viewed with the benefit of hindsight.
Re:deWired (Score:1)
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.
Wired (Score:2)
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.
2600 Magazine has a vision for the future? (Score:1)
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?
You Say It Was a Revolution? (Score: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 [suck.com], The Fray [fray.com] and ClearStation [clearstation.com].
(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.
*Barf* Give me a break. (Score:1)
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.
Re:Why Wired UK failed (Score:1)
Re:Wired (Score:1)
Re:I still like Wired (Score:2)
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
Re:Old web snapshots, anywhere? (Score:2)
-jwb
Things Change. (Score:1)
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....
Re:Wired became what it was destined to become (Score:1)
A shame, but we have /. now (Score:2)
Slashdot and its ilk seem to be filling the niche though. Giving the somewhat clueful and interested somewhere to hang out.
I was a wiredling (Score:1)
Re:Microsoft Owns Lycos (Score:1)
It's not the first time (Score:1)
*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.
Collection of mags (Score:1)
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.
A final tribute to Wired... (Score:1)
Wired: Slashdot.
Wired died. When Slashdot will?.. (Score:1)
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
Wired has turned into Forbes? (Score:1)
The changing face of news... (Score:2)
Change happens (Score:1)
Let's see what happens with Wired mk III.
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Silicon Surf (Score:1)
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).
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I discovered the web by accident. (Score:1)
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
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Wired success (Score:1)
D
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I still like Wired (Score:2)
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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Nostalgia++ (Score:1)
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.
Re:Ding-dong the witch is dead. (Score:1)
Re:Misplaced Nostalgia (Score:1)
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.
Re:East Coast: 2600 Magazine (Score:1)
An Ex-Wired reader speaks (Score:2)
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.
Why Wired UK failed (Score:1)
Funny how some people seem to have more insight than others [check the flames at the door].
wired - rest in peace, and good riddance (Score:1)
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.
Microsoft Owns Lycos (Score:1)
SO that now means that Microsoft now owns Wired by way of Lycos, correct?
Nerds reading wired? (Score:2)
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.
Misplaced Nostalgia (Score:3)
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...
Re:hmmm... (Score:1)
Well, I was an early Wired reader. My first issue I bought was 1.5, a friend had 1.2, which was the first one I read. Those were the good days. Back when the 'net was new to most people, the Web was in it's infancy, and technology was just for "geeks". Over the years, Wired stayed current with the trends, and manged to let us know what was happening before it happened. Those are the times that Jon was referring to. Back when Wired was the source of information for the information industry underground. Before Slashdot, before the web, even.
The writing was excellent, if idealistic. The content was varied and informative, always letting you know little snippits of things to be. Those were the good times.
In recent years, however, Wired has succumbed to the death-spiral of commercialism. The last good issue that I bought was the one with HAL on the cover. While it had been declining for a few issues, that one was, to me, the crowning moment. Soon after that, Wired fell off my radar.
I have every issue before the HAL issue.
I only have four from after it.
Re:won't be missed (Score:1)
One note: the Time cyberpunk article came out about when the first issue of Wired did. I found that infamous issue of Time in my house and just dropped to the floor and read it. Devoured it. I knew just by the fact that it was in Time the story wasn't totally 100% fact, that didn't ever bother me (besides everyone knows the cyberpunks were a front to get all the yippies spending $$ on net/vr tech, just trying to make it sexy (like Bruce Sterling's Viviran's (sp?) are to the greens). Picked up the 2nd issue of Wired a few weeks later just before I moved overseas. I read it so many times my dad got me a subscription. I learned so much from it.
I have a recent issue of Wired: they may as well have printed "Internet = money" on every page. Sorry wired "Internet = freedom"...
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Re:won't be missed (Score:1)
Here are some links I was looking for when I wrote the above:
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Re:DIE JONKATZ DIE (Score:1)
Nonetheless, this post just made me laugh and laugh. (I think I'd better get back on the medication
Wired News (Score:1)
oh well. no one can deny what they once were.
Speaking of being sold Slashdot.org was sold (Score:1)
/. - Actually, I think it IS the "New Wired". . . (Score:1)
If we aren't, I'd still be willing to argue it over a beer or three. . . .
Ding-dong the witch is dead. (Score:2)
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.
Try Shift (Score:1)
As I understand it, though, it looked a lot like Shift [shift.com] 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
Re:Mitnick (Score:1)
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.
--
Wired == Tired (Score:1)
Then they were acquired.
Or, as Wired might have put it:
Wired became what it was destined to become (Score:2)
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!
Re:Old Wired (Score:1)
_
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
Re:Old Wired (Score:1)
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' ?"
heh (Score:1)
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' ?"
Re:won't be missed (Score:1)
damn,that's perfict! I've noticed there was somthing "wrong" with wired. it was all about "busness" or somthing, but that wasn't exactly right...
that's really a perfict synopsis of the old and new wired...
_
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
wired was around before port 80 was cool (Score:1)
wired just sucks now...
_
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
heh (Score:1)
_
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
Re:Apolitical Hotwired (Score:1)
That was just about the only thing I read.
I remember getting a new issue of wired, and pooring through each page, reading everything... now I'm lucky if I get 10 minutes of enjoyment out of it
_
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
Re:I still like Wired (Score:1)
I still remember his reply. "Read the online version, then".
I would read Wired via gopher in the early days before the web took hold. Having the information presented to you in all text on an amber VT320 felt so good. Did away with the eye candy of the magazine (which, admittedly, was pretty to look at) but kept the information clear. Something about sittin in the University library on the public terminals reading Wired was a bit of a thrill in those days. I dunno; can't really explain.
Wired published one of my songs once; a piece called "The Flamer" to the tune of Simon and Garfunkel's "The Boxer". They published it in their 'Net Surf' column and attributed an outdated email address of mine. There were also inexplicable changes to the lyrics which pissed me off, but I'm not sure if it was the work of Wired or whichever source they got the song from. It sure wasn't me, cause I was never asked.
So that's my story with Wired. It served its purpose for quite some time, and will be missed. But we move on to other things.
Re:The magazine that doesn't suck (Score:1)
/. vs. WiReD (Score:1)
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!)
Re:An Ex-Wired reader speaks (Score:1)
Stopped buying it when the UK arm collapsed, and it turned into a corporate love fest. Very sad.
The wierdest thing was that about WiredUK the British contributors tended to be fairly left wing. Where the American one would cover Yahoo's owner's many millions, the British one seemed more comfortable covering the use of the Internet in fighting the McDonalds libel case.
Re:deWired (Score:2)
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)
Mitnick (Score:1)
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
Re:East Coast: 2600 Magazine (Score:1)
Besides, if I want cheezy BASIC programs to do XOR encryption and obsolete VMS hacks, I can find 'em faster on the internet. Like any magazine, publishing lag is a killer, but they seem to throw in stuff that's been useless for years. Reading articles by 15 year olds who argue about great crackers of the 70s is mildly entertaining, but I certainly wouldn't call most of what the magazine presents a vision of the future.
In a strange way, the 2600 crowd (yes, I'm throwing the magazine readers, alt.2600, and #2600 into the same boat -- damn me to hell) seems to have a lot in common with the SCA [sca.org]. They spend a lot of time and energy romanticizing a version of the past that never really existed. They enjoy it, but the rest of the world looks at them with a mixture of amusement and pity.
Re:Why don a /. Rag? (Score:1)
One important thing: Rob's editorial column in the front of the mag must be called "First Post" :)
--
Re:Wired's transformation... (Score:1)
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.
Vogue for Geeks (Score:1)
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 !
Shift: The new wired? (Score:1)
I think it's a great magazine (and I don't even work for them!).
Re:wired was actually respected? (Score:1)
I think that you might have started reading Wired too late in the game
Early on, Wired was full of essays by visionairies, philosophers, and artists. It had articles that, while somtimes outrageous, made you think. Sometimes you agreed, sometimes you disagreed, but you were always stimulated mentally. It had articles on Extropians, Burning Man, and other fringe-intellegensia elements. No one else did this, especially with the panache and artistry the contributers had.
Wired had the soul of the sixties with the body of the digital era. Laissez faire libertarianism had replaced the hippy socialism of the 60's, but the same spirit of idealism was evident. Negroponte, Katz, and Kelly all contributed to this. Sometimes the feeling of revolution became burdensome, but it was always catching.
I disagree with Jon on one thing: I do not think that the revolution made possible by the Internet has fully completed. At least, I hope not. There is still room to grow beyond grandma emailing her family.
Or maybe there's not.
Rev. Scatological Warfare
/. IS the new Wired (Score:1)
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.
KATZ SUX!!! (Score:1)
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?
The right to be wrong (Score:1)
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
Old Wired (Score:1)
Keep up the good work Rob!!
The Next Wired? The Next Mondo 2000? (Score:1)
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?
Re:Wired loved celebrities from the start (Score:1)
Wired was fun to pick up and look at occasionally in the same way a Kaleidoscope is, and it was just as lacking in content.
Wired's transformation... (Score:1)
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 [shift.com]. 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
Re:Old web snapshots, anywhere? (Score:1)
Ironically enough, it appears to be only searchable in meatspace.
George
Style over Substance (Score:1)
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.
Re:deWired (Score:1)
Re:deWired,search engines (Score:1)
Down Mod Bait (Score:1)
i loved wired magazine (Score:1)
The magazine that doesn't suck (Score:1)
Johan
Re:Nerds reading wired? (Score:1)
I guess that's why you're a writer.... (Score:3)
I'm wondering if
deWired (Score:5)
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