Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Gary:  a dangerously ambitious question.

Let's say, for the sake of rhetoric, that Wired is broken.
(I don't think it is.  In fact, I think it's doing very well.  But.)

So fix it.

How?
  

    
OK, refine that hypothetical. How are we imagining it to be broken?
  

    
That was up to you.  :)

You can just skip over that question if you like (or if you're sane.)
I was just inviting you to retool Wired at will.
  

    
I just found Gary's own explanation of the Romance subtitle, leading
chapter 14 - The End

"In tragedy everything is lost, in comedy everything is gained, but
romance is a mixed genre, whose happy outcome is never free of
shadows."

Very nicely put. 
  

    
Yes Gary we have moved you from author about Wired to consultant to
Wired. Now that you have a clear historical trajectory, where and how
do you aim Wired?
  

    
but, does he also get moved from writer money to consultant money?
  

    
Making a magazine is hard, and though I understand pretty well how
Wired worked from 1993 to 1997, when the main part of my story comes to
an end, I'm not certain that qualifies me to tell today's publisher
and editor what to do. I've noticed, in watching reaction to the book,
how much strong opinion about Wired remains - both positive and
negative, as always. Just the other day, in an interview with KRON
television here in the San Francisco, the host of the show, at the end
of the interview, held the book up to the camera and said a few nice
things about it before pointing at the title and remarking:

"It's called Wired - A Romance. It could also be called Wired - A
Scam!"

I hadn't said anything of the sort, of course. This was an expression
of the always exciting hostility that remains, especially in media
circles, when the topic of Wired comes up. With this, and with a
revisionist history of the Internet bubble now ascendant (let's see, it
all started with Enron and pets.com, right?), Wired has a difficult
job, and I think it's succeeding rather well. As a reader I miss the
visual inventiveness and the off-the-wall narratives, as a writer I
miss the chance to do fictional interviews. These were very fun. In
exchange, the magazine has become more reliable, more consistent, more
journalistic.
  

    
Why is "scam" off the mark?  Not for readers but for investors and
vendors.  You certainly described a certain amount of scrounging for
funds to keep this startup business alive, and there were promises made
that were not yet true and might have ever been true if the stars
didn't line up right.  I don't know if it crosses the line to a
full-fledged scam, but it's not exactly honest work either.
  

    
Who would you say thought of Wired as "our" or "my" magazine in its
heyday?  Who thinks of it that way now?

(For an example of what I'm wondering, compare the attitude toward,
say the Whole Earth Catalog and Coevolution Quarterly in their heyday
vs. Whole Earth Magazine now.  Or Deadheads circa 1969 vs 1978 vs 1985
vs 2003.)
  

    
Brian, that's why I encourage folks to read Gary's book. As he makes
clear, quoting Louis: "Every person who ever touched Wired made money."
In that way, Wired was unlike most of the rest of the dot.com wave. 
  

    
Yup, I think I made about $400. A veritable cash cow, that magazine.
  

    
Hey, Boswell! I feel an urge to step aside and let one of the more
interesting people who plays a small role in the book speak for
himself.

As for the question of a scam - okay - Brian's point is well taken. If
by scam you mean that in Wired's scrappy start-up phase there were
numerous incidents of advantage-taking (things consumed that would be
actually be paid for only in the case of success, etc) then you are
right. These are the ugly truths of many thinly funded start ups, which
does not make them right. Still, in the whole world of scams, these
are very minor ones. But the scam accusation usually refers to the idea
that Wired cooked up a whole stock market bubble on a theory that the
editors knew to be false, in the service of a scheme to get away with
their own IPO before the concoction deflated. That's one way to tell
the story, but it's not the one I chose. I think it is a crude
caricature, and essentially false.
  

    
Who thought of Wired as "their" magazine? The core fans were men
between the ages of 25 and 45, often with technical backgrounds, for
whom Wired gave a larger, exciting cultural context for work they knew
to be important.
  

    
That's certainly correct. When that changed, and the "management"
changed, Wired became what it is today. Sad, really, but all magazines
follow the arc of life in general. Wired's was just a bit accelerated.
But then again, all things were in those days.

Now, like a lot of other magazines, it is just running on fumes.

Do I have a small role in the book? If so, I'll have to order it up
from Amazon.
  

    
I came to think of Wired as a glossy 'zine. In fact, one of our local 
newsstands here in Austin grouped Wired with the rest of the zines, right 
by Iron Feather, as I recall. (And not far from our own Fringe Ware 
Review, an image of which our operatives within the Wired establishment 
dropped, prominently, onto the inside cover of an early issue.)

Wired had EFF connections; EFF members got a free copy of Wired #1, and 
some members complained because they assumed that EFF had given its member 
list to Wired (the actual case, I seem to recall, was that Wired gave EFF 
the magazines and EFF added the address labels). When the various hopeful 
protochapters of EFF were meeting in Atlanta, only to be told that EFF had 
decided not to do chapters, that first issue had just appeared on the 
stands featuring on its cover EFF-Austin's most vocal member, Bruce 
Sterling. While Howard Dean was still taking throat cultures, we were 
seeing the political potential of the Internet, and Wired was focusing 
that kind of energy ... from libertarians, mostly - the technoliterate 
cyberselfish crowd. Okay, so it was one-dimensional politics - the vision 
was still there.
  

    
Slipped by Boswell, a former EFF employee... ;-)
  

    
...who wrote for Wired #1 -- but never again.
  

    
>Now, like a lot of other magazines, it is just running on fumes.

If you mean ad-wise, I think you are wrong. Things have been steadily
improving from what I can tell. And circulation remains high -- it's
even grown some.

If you mean editorially, I know for sure you are wrong, though of
course this is more subjective.
  

    
Yes, Boswell is mentioned in the book in connection with the famous
"leaked" memo. He is described as a member of the Well and as a
prankster of sorts - prankster is proceeded by an adjective:
inveterate, or infamous, or perhaps merely the more mild "well-known."
I don't want to ruin a sale... After all, in the high reaches of Amazon
where this book dwells, each copy matters.
  

    
The boswell bent over his keyboard,
A prankster of sorts. Wired's money was green.

They said, "You have a blue keyboard,
You do not play things as they are scored."

The boswell replied, "Things as they are scored
Are changed upon the blue keyboard."

And they said to him, "But email, you must,
A memo that will screw us, yet ourselves,

An email typed upon the blue keyboard,
Of things exactly as they are scored."
  

    
> fumes

Wow, what a surprise, that blackout!
Not if you read the cover story I wrote for Wired about the sad state of 
the national grid in 2001 and possible solutions:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.07/juice_pr.html

May, 2002.  Time magazine publishes a cover story about rising rates of 
autism, with a sidebar called "The Geek Syndrome" about autism increasing 
even more rapidly in Silicon Valley.  What a surprise.
Not if you read my story "The Geek Syndrome," published six months 
earlier:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aspergers_pr.html

March, 2002.  John Ashcroft announces that the FBI has smashed the
"largest ring of child pornographers in history."  Operation Candyman is
hailed as a major FBI success amidst the 9/11 mess. One year later, two
federal judges throw out Candyman cases, citing the FBI's "reckless
disregard for the truth" and massive invasions of privacy. The only
national news story that dared question the bureau's actions was mine,
published five months before the judges threw out the cases:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.10/kidporn_pr.html

Pure reckless self-promotion here, but I'm sure every Wired writer could
post their own list of stories that proved equally prophetic. Those
"fumes" that Wired is running on still seem to be potent enough to allow
us to kick the asses of most mainstream media on a regular enough basis to
make the magazine worth reading.  Unless you're more concerned with
whether or not Wired is as bleeding edge hip as it used to be.

Rant over.
  

    
By the way, hi Gerard!  I love you and miss you.  The stinging rebuke in 
my post was not for you personally, but reflects the exasperation of 
someone who works to keep Wired relevant and solid amid a chorus of yawns 
about how Wired isn't as k00l as it used to be.
  

    
Gary, we are all bit players in this tale. Have you heard from any
reader who had never read Wired -- only heard about it -- and then read
your book? Did it work for the unitiated?
  

    
Does it count if you haven't read it in three years.

And diga, you are always first in my heart.
  

    
Note to diga: Yeah, but have you had any *scoops*?! <grin>

I recall a fellow zine publisher writing for Wired and mentioning 'kool
points' as part of the allure (decent rates being the other). How could
you go there, I asked him... you'll be EDITED! A whole crew of zinesters
who'd opted out of professional journalism so that they could publish
their prose as written eventually wrote pieces for Wired... I wonder if
that was a pain, dealing with those independent voices? I recall at least
one writer (actually a pro) who was irked by editorial changes to a piece
he'd written and became, for that and other reasons, one of Wired's most 
vocal critics.