WIRED: A Romance, by Gary Wolf (Random, $59.95).
Subtitling a work of non-fiction about the magazine publishing industry “a romance”, as Gary Wolf has, might ordinarily be considered a bit pretentious. But it’s perfectly appropriate here.
Magazines are romantic anyway – otherwise sensible businessmen will pour money into them purely for the thrill of being there. They can emerge as announcements of new subcultures, and stick around as cultural symbols. They lend themselves to independent publishing ventures, where newspapers are too monolithic and TV and radio too expensive and too regulated. Their publishers can dream of starting the revolution and be out of business two years later.
All of the above apply to Wired, the magazine Wolf’s book is about. When Wired launched from San Francisco in 1993, it wasn’t just shedding light, it was announcing the revolution. Most new magazines will kick off with a friendly word from the editor; the first pages of Wired announced, through the words of its “patron saint”, Marshall McLuhan, that “everything is changing: your education, your family, your neighbourhood, your job, your relation to ‘the others’. And they’re changing dramatically.”
Wired gave the ordinary reader the impression that a vanguard of intellectual horsemen was already galloping forth into the electronic future to clear the way for us all. Magazines that are About Something aren’t uncommon, of course, but they don’t usually get as big and as influential as Wired, and certainly not as quickly.
Yet – and this was a time when market research was a particular tyranny – nothing in the tea leaves of the focus groups said Wired was essential, or even viable. Its founding couple, Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe, were laughed out of offices when they went to pitch for funding for their new, important magazine about how computers were changing everything. Computer magazines were brochures and technical tracts, nothing else.
An unlikely but instructive comparison is due here with the original “lad mag”, loaded, whose debut in 1994 was, along with Wired’s one of the three key magazine launches of the 90s (the other was Entertainment Weekly in 1990). Like Wired, loaded got men reading magazines again. While the industry was doggedly trying to profile male magazine readers, loaded’s fanzine-trained editor, James Brown, had the simple intuition to give them hooters, football and lashings of irony.
Rossetto, too, knew his audience in a way the researchers could not. His readers were, as Wolf puts it “autodidacts and know-it-alls. If something was a little beyond them, they were all the more eager to catch up.” They were also a large and lucrative niche that didn’t seem to have shown up on anyone else’s radar.
There were other disruptions to the prevailing order. McLuhan’s words were not contained in a column, but laid in flouro inks over the six-page “visual manifesto” that began the first issue. Wired’s unruly art direction was both a reaction against the order imposed by computer typesetting and an exploration of what computers, and the new presses and inks becoming available, made possible.
As Wolf points out, the electric word was effectively in Rossetto’s DNA: his father had helped develop the first electronic typesetting machines in the 1950s. And, presumably, so was the unruliness. He spent the late 60s as a young Republican, an anarchist and, eventually, a libertarian.
He appeared on the cover of the New York Times Magazine as an example of this new kind of radical, then disappeared into a rootless existence: leaving Columbia business school sure he did not want to work for a corporation; doing odd jobs; appearing, Zelig-like, in the world’s major conflict zones; even ghost-writing Ultimate Porno, a book about the making of the movie Caligula. By his forties he was living in Amsterdam, still smoking pot and in danger of living a life without any real landmarks.
But then he and Metcalfe, another drifter in Europe, returned to the US to launch the magazine of their dreams. When I interviewed Rossetto in 1997, he was strikingly romantic about that journey. He and Metcalfe had been, he said, “almost as immigrants like my [Italian] grandparents were … the leap of faith they had to have made, to leave behind everything that they had built, every association that they had, and go to this place that was just this vague possibility. And in the end all they had was their own beliefs and their own obsessions – and probably their own dogged determination not to have to turn tail and return empty-handed.”
It still reads well – Rossetto was a great interview. But when I went back to it for this review, I realised I had in some respects imagined the person I was writing about. I had a decent mental image of the other Wired founders I’d met; original investor Nicholas Negroponte and executive editor Kevin Kelly; and certainly of Metcalfe (who is described as “handsome” on her entry to the book on page 10 – compellingly so, I might add). But Rossetto? I had somehow remembered a much younger man than the one in the photos.
That rather illuminated Wolf’s description of Rossetto as being “like a magnet whose grip increased dramatically at close range”. He compares this quality to Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs’s famous “reality distortion field”. Elsewhere in the book, Rossetto’s “natural immunity to social pressure and insinuation” reads as a light shade of autism, something not uncommon in fervent libertarians.
At the helm of the magazine, Rossetto displayed two traits that are closely linked on the libertarian gene: a delight in robust debate, and the capacity for blind denial when the argument didn’t go his way.
It was most ironic that, even as his magazine hailed the Internet revolution, Rossetto simply could not grasp what it was all about the way that his oddball young employees did. He fumed about the “public service Internet” and couldn’t accept that the really revolutionary thing about the Net was that everyone could do it. Meanwhile, after hours, the staff were running some of the first really popular websites – for free – while Wired tried to charge for entry and lost a lot of money.
The Internet complicated Wired’s story in another important way. By the bizarre economics of the 90s tech boom, the loss-making online version, HotWired, was valued far more highly than the profitable print magazine, purely because it was on the Internet, and therefore enjoyed boundless possibilities. Expectations were raised beyond all reason, money spent that wasn’t to be recouped.
The consequent shambles of poor timing, a failed public offering and the jitters of the crowd of stakeholders the project had picked up along the way – most of whom wanted to cash up before the bubble burst – are the elements of a classic tech-wreck story. Most examples of that genre – such as Boo Hoo, Ernst Malmsten’s autobiographical tale of the Boo.com debacle – are appallingly self-serving and make you want to slap the author. Wolf, who remains a contributing editor at Wired, is content to cast himself as a supporting actor, “happy to take a small paycheque and root for chaos”.
Rossetto ends the book as a man with no idea when – or how – to quit and move on. He almost had to have a gun held to his head to approve an offer from Condé Nast for the magazine, even though it left him and Metcalfe with $US30 million in cash – enough money with which to finally be free.
So now Wired is a Condé Nast title, neither as exciting or as daft as the magazine that its founder created. Some of its excitable preaching looks silly now: Michael Crichton predicting in the March 1994 issue that “what we now understand as the mass media will be gone in 10 years. Vanished without a trace.” The notorious “Long Boom” cover story of July 1997 (which presented a global scenario of “25 years of prosperity, freedom and a better environment for the whole world” as a sure thing) is frequently cited by Wired’s critics as the peak of its panglossian foolishness.
Yet, there were also predictions that seem less crazy now than they did then: a young Marc Andreessen, working on Mozilla, the web browser later released as Netscape, declaring that “One way or another, Mozilla is going to be on every computer in the world.” One way or another, that actually came true.
There were many stories – from electronic privacy to media gigantism – that found their way from Wired to the rest of the popular press. It helped, for better or worse, to introduce an array of new business buzzwords (can you say “disintermediation”?) that had previously been uttered far on the fringes, in the hippie capitalist pages of The Whole Earth Review.
Although its narrative falls apart a bit over the last quarter, Wired: A Romance is a sensitive, frank and intelligent effort to gather the threads of a phenomenon. It will please anyone who read those early issues, or got online, or joined the boom. And it will remind everyone of the hazards and rewards of working with an obstinate libertarian.