Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

Joining us today is Gary Wolf. Gary is a contributing editor at Wired 
magazine, where his feature stories have included profiles of Steve 
Wozniak, Rem Koolhaas, Sir John Templeton, Richard Saul Wurman, Ted 
Nelson, and Stanislaw Lem, along with imaginary interviews with John D. 
Rockefeller and Marshall McLuhan. His most recent book, before 
"Wired -- A Romance," was "Dumb Money," a humorous nonfiction journey 
into the dark side of the stock market, written with Joey Anuff and 
published by Random House. Wolf was born in Columbus, Ohio, was raised 
in Salt Lake City, Utah, and now lives in San Francisco. He first 
joined The WELL in 1988. Every time he dropped out and rejoined, his 
member name got longer.

Leading the discussion is Kevin Kelly. Kevin was in the pioneering first 
wave of settlers who founded The WELL, and directed the Point Foudantion 
at the time it launched the WELL in 1985. He was later co-founding editor 
of Wired and -- in full disclosure--  worked with Gary Wolf while he 
wrote for Wired. He wrote a couple of books (see www.kk.org) in between. 
Recently he co-founded the All Species Inventory and Long Bets -- two 
ambitious non-profit enterprises with distant long term payoffs. He is 
currently at work on a book about "what technology wants." Since Kevin 
appears in Gary's book, he relishes the conflict of interest inherent in 
interviewing Gary.

Welcome, Gary and Kevin! 
  

    
Thanks Cynthia for setting this up.

Welcome Gary!

Gary, was there a particular moment while you were working at Wired,
or afterwards, that prompted you to write a history of Wired? I mean
why you and why at all?
  

    
As any journalist will probably admit, a notepad is a great way to
defend yourself against worry. When I worked at Wired, I witnessed many
scenes that baffled me - the company had such an overheated,
melodramatic atmosphere. The company accelerated so quickly through all
the stages of growth (and then collapse), that I needed some tools of
comprehension. When I was totally at a loss, I would pull out my
notebook. Interestingly, very little from these notes actually ended up
in the book. When I left the company, in 1997, I thought I would write
a book that would be based on my experiences, but as I finally got
around to it, I ended up reporting extensively. The interviews and the
documents I gathered gave me the bulk of the material. Still, the
impulse to write the book in the first place, and many of the
characterizations of the people in the book, came from my own confusion
and fascination. 
  

    
That's interesting. I recall many times when I found you chuckling
while you scribbled some notes about something absurd that had just
happened. Why didn't your eye witness reports, which presumably had
great detail, get in?
  

    
You've probably had the experience, if you know any young kids, of
hearing lengthy stories about the kid's friends, whom you don't know.
This is charming - in children. But I found that the things that amused
me greatly in the hothouse atmosphere of a magazine office were less
interesting once I had a little distance, especially since there was a
deeper vein of humor to mine. The humor in the story doesn't come from
"outrageous" scenes of bad behavior in the office, but in the more
complicated irony of a group of people who are successful far beyond
any expectation - who are too right, you might say, and have to deal
with the terrible consequences of being too right. As was writing the
book, a number of magazine memoirs appeared that "dished the dirt" on
famous editors. Sometimes these books were thinly disguised as fiction.
I found them boring - and besides, Louis Rossetto, my hero, is hardly
a celebrity in the common sense of the world. There was simply a more
interesting story to tell - a fact that I wasn't able to realize until
I stepped back from my own experiences. That said, a few of the more
telling scenes I witnessed, including some remarkable dialogue from the
in-house banker and HotWired CEO, Andrew Anker, are preserved for
history.
  

    
Ok, since you were writing this to make sense of the chaos of those
times, now that you have spent several years writing it, has it cured
your confusion? What WAS the meaning and main contribution of Wired in
its first decade?
  

    
Not only have I cured my own confusion, but I've cured everybody's. Or
so I wish. Today, the story of Wired is still tangled up in the story
of the dot.com crash, but as I wrote the book I became convinced that
this is an incomplete context. The timing is wrong. The great rise of
the bubble companies came later - and Wired was not one of them. Wired
was a contributing, even a key factor in the bubble, but it was key
because it gave focus and intensity to ideas that were still very
obscure at the time it launched, in 1993. Louis Rossetto, Wired's
editor, concentrated - in his life and in his magazine - a number
social forces: anarchism that shades into libertarianism, technological
innovation in the printing and publishing industry, an obsession with
revolution, remnants of counterculture. But these forces were still
latent at the time Wired launched. In putting them into a commercial
package, Wired gave direction to a social movement, with shocking,
unforeseen, and sometimes comical consequences.
  

    
You mentioned humor and the comical several times, but one thing most
people agreed on -- even its editors (me included) -- was that Wired
itself did not have a sense of humor. That wasn't true of its staff;
only the persona of the magazine itself. In your book were you trying
to provide Wired with the hilarity it never had?
  

    
Yes.
  

    
Humor is contradiction, and one of Wired's defining qualities was to
boldly proclaim a variety of facts about the present and future, while
maintaining a productive blindness to possible contradictions. Wired
was almost always serious (but... Sonic the Hedgehog as Man of The
Year?)outwardly. The kinetic humor was low, but the potential humor was
high. Wired discovered things and invented things, and I wanted to
capture the humor, which had elements of desperation, without claiming
that they should have known better. Maybe it would help here if I
added: ha ha. Or, as  some critics prefer, har har.
  

    
Or, as the Wired Style Guide would not permit:  :-)  :-)   :-)

Gary, what was the most surprising thing that you discovered in your
research for the book? Something you had no idea of before you started?
  

    
I have a couple of questions, one for Gary and one for Kevin. First
let me say that I am enjoying this book very much. 
Gary - the subtitle is A Romance. Why? I assume it refers to more than
the romances between some of the protagonists. 

And Kevin - what do you think of your own representation in this book?
  

    
This is Gary's 15-minutes of fame, so please direct all questions to
him. I'm just the shill. (Throughout the book I found Gary's depiction
of people to be fair and accurate -- except for me; I come off much
nicer than I am. The Kevin Kelly of his book would have never posted
this note!)

Kurt's question is a good one.  What is so romantic about WiReD?
  

    
I enjoyed the book a lot -- flew through it, in fact, though talks of
boardroom machinations don't exactly excite me. After a while Wired
the magazine appears to be a machine to is running itself.

I was only sorry you left off a great piece of trivia, that in the
first issues (3? 4?) there were no URLs or email addresses at all.
I was also sorry to not find an epilogue. What are Louis, Jane, and
others doing now and did you purposely omit this?
  

    
I found the book very interesting, although it made me sad to have
missed the actual events themselves.  It was clear that Louis in person
was a very charismatic individual, and I suspect he had a great deal
of that just-below-the-surface bubbling energy which makes people like
him difficult to resist.  I was also hankering for more anecdotal
descriptions of the kind of interaction you get when very intelligent
and somewhat geeky folks hang out together for 12+ hours a day, but I
totally agree with your assessment above that it tends to be 'cute' but
pull attention away from the central story line.

When I got to the end of the story, I was actually somewhat relieved
to have finished with Louis - he was a fascinating individual but I
could feel my energy being drained just reading about him.  Did you
feel the same way in the aftermath of your time at Wired?
  

    
Why a romance? I use romance in a novelist's sense, as an indicator of
something uncanny, even supernatural. As I mention in the book, ghosts
and demons are not permissible in journalism, but there are other
forces in the world that weirdly express themselves through
individuals. Such as: a haunting idea. The idea of the digital
revolution rendering all existing authorities obsolete possessed Louis
- and Wired - adding strength, but also causing otherwise rational
people to act strangely.

The "romance" in the title is also an answer to people who have asked:
is it a comedy or a tragedy? There are funny elements, inspiring
elements, farcical elements, and sad elements, but in the end it is
neither pure comedy nor any kind of tragedy. It is like a story that
takes place during Carnival, when the world is turned upside down.
Afterwards, you wake up and ask, "did this really happen?"
  

    
I was glad to see <esau>'s  question about why there were no URLs or
email addresses in the first issue of the magazine. The problem with
including this anecdote, which I found to be very commonly repeated in
critiques of Wired made after the fact, is that in regard to URLs it
isn't fair and in regard to email addresses it isn't true. 

Mosaic, the first widely popular Web browser, was released at the
beginning of 1993, as Wired's first issue was published. If you go back
and review the growing popularity of the Web in 1993-1994, you will
see that Wired's coverage tracked this closely, with more and more URLs
appearing the magazine as the Web replaced gopher, ftp, and other
popular protocols. People who go back and look at the first few issues
and notice a paucity of URLs forget that the Web was just being born.

On the email question: the very first editorial in Wired, following an
"intro quote" from Marshall McLuhan, was Louis Rossetto's manifesto
comparing the digital revolution to a Bengali typhoon. At the end of
this manifesto, he signed his name:

Louis Rossetto - LR@wired.com

There _was_ an embarrassing email snafu in the first issue. In a last
minute panic about whether funder and contributor Nicholas Negroponte
would want his email address published openly, the editors decided to
replace it with a "generic" address: nn@internet. This made them look
idiotic, and in following issues a genuine email address was used. From
the beginning, email addresses were included in the masthead, and the
second issue published a number of letters to the editor that arrived
via email. This was at a time when it was still possible for Josh
Quittner to go out and register macdonalds.com and claim the email
address: ronald@macdonald.com. 
  

    
<esau> asks: Why no epilogue? The Wired story had a mythic structure
-the rise and fall of a hero - albeit on a small scale and with a comic
dimension. I wanted to present this in a straightforward,
self-contained way, almost as an old-fashioned novelist would. That
meant no short, journalistic segments, no stories about how I got the
story, no "where are they now" epilogues. Not that I think these aren't
perfectly serviceable devices. But I enjoyed not using them. 
  

    
Kirsten asked if Louis exhausted me during my time at Wired. The
answer is yes, Wired was exhausting, but it was not all because of
Louis. He was the focus of the drama, but the effects were spread into
every nook and cranny of the company, including the one I occupied.
Writing the book held the additional interest of tracing down the
source of this mania (and exhaustion), which, I think, spread not just
throughout the company but throughout the country.
  

    
Gary is correct about the urls and email. From the second issue onward
we began including the emails of anyone who would let us. In fact I
think Wired was the first publication to regular include the address of
authors and later editors; to my knowledge even the computer magazines
weren't doing it then. People forget the climate at the time. There
were many authors I could not persaude to include their email address.
It was considered very much like publishing your home phone number; at
best it was a private thing you exchanged. Of course companies and
institutions had no addresses themselves, so there were none for us to
print. The absence of emails for authors in issue # 1 (except for
Louis') is primarily an artifact of chaos in trying to get the first
issue out on an impossible deadline; it was yet another innovation that
didn't happen until  #2.

So Gary, if you were a very bad man and were sent to hell, and for
your punishment you had to write "Wired - A Romance" all over again
from scratch, what --if anything --would you do differently?
  

    
I'm sure people are curious about what the reaction of some of the main
characters has been to the book. What, if anything, have Louis and Jane,
Barbara Kuhr and John Plunkett, Beth Vanderslice, Carl, Andrew said that you
can share here?
  

    
Not exactly a question, but a thought which keeps coming to mind as I
go over the book mentally - the book felt a bit strange to read because
it was a pretty clinical narration of some very chaotic individuals
and events.  I don't know how it could have been done any differently
but there was a somewhat jarring disconnect while I was reading calm,
detailed descriptions of some rather bizarre behavior.  This is
especially true because I have had the (mis?)fortune of working with
individuals of this sort and it tends to be very difficult to describe
their actions in an objective way.  
  

    


FWIW, when I wrote a piece for TIME in 1994, I *begged* my editors,
including my former friend Philip Elmer-DeWitt, to include my e-mail address
at the end of the piece. The official response of TIME was "we don't do
that."

As a writer, I knew that enabling reader feedback was going to turn out to
be an invaluable resource.

Needless to say, this was not a problem at WIRED.
  

    
And I remember when Wired used to have a card bound into it you could
pull out with the URLs of the advertisers and the companies mentioned
in the stories, too. 
  

    
Kevin asks what I would do differently were I rewriting the book, and
he stages the site of this rewrite in hell. The most devilish
punishment would be to be forced to confront an issue I was accused by
some reviewers of skirting: the relationship between my personal
experiences at Wired and my role as narrator/historian. I didn't want
the book to disappear into its own navel (or, as I put it on
http://www.aether.com, up its own asshole), so I kept the emphasis away
from myself. This was an obvious choice, since I was a minor
character. But, at the same time, there might have been a way to
incorporate a sexy, modern, narrative trick by which I narrate my own
decision to narrate... my own decision to narrate... my own decision to
narrate... (n, n+1, etc., where n = narrate and n goes to infinity).

You can see why this version of the book is composed in HELL.
  

    
Chip asks what the people written about think of the book: Louis
Rossetto, Jane Metcalfe, Barbara Kuhr and John Plunkett, Beth
Vanderslice, Carl Steadman, Andrew Anker. I don't have a great deal of
detail on this. Andrew Anker, the banker, is as sanguine in life as he
is in the pages of Wired - A Romance. He likes his own character. Carl
Steadman, lord of plastic.com (http://www.plastic.com), has larger
interests and concerns - and besides, he is one of the heroes.

Louis disagrees vehemently with a few things - not with the facts so
much as with my choice of emphasis. He took special exception to my
presentation of the end game.  He believes that Wired was betrayed by
the cynical bankers, and that their sale of the company was an error.
As I tell the story, the bankers were indeed cynical, but their
decisions made perfect sense from the well-defined rules of their own
game. In obedience to the first principle of the book, which gives
priority to each character's self-explanation, I take venture
capitalist Paul Salem's theory of his own behavior at face value. The
reader can thus judge Salem _as a type_, rather than as an aberration. 


Louis had a number of other arguments with how I told the story. BUT -
I was hugely impressed by his fortitude in the face of my demands for
more, more, more information. He knew he did not control the end
result, but he is an editor and publisher himself, and was incredibly
rigorous in his renunciation of any attempt to use his power over
documents, etc., to manipulate the outcome. His attitude has been: "it
is Gary's version of the story, and only Gary's version." He has his
own version. Jane Metcalfe cooperated on the same basis.