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Back to Nearly Deep Thoughts
Weird? Why hard? Why R&D? Whirred?
Take me back to The Web of Deceit so I can sort this thing out!
Someone in the Wired magazine conference on America OnLine commented on the distinction between America's cyberzines, Wired (circ. 250,000), Mondo 2000 (circ. 100,000) and bOING bOING (circ. 15,000): "Wired is the asshole yuppie boomer dad who thinks he's hip, driving the car. Mondo is the bratty alienated adolescent son in the front seat, ripped on DMT, who wants to kill his dad. Boing Boing is the 10 year old kid in the back seat with a beanie hat, playing with his game boy and giggling at both of them." Chronologically, of course, Mondo 2000 precedes Wired (so does Boing Boing). But aside from that, the portrayal works.
SUBjectives: The View from Inside the Mondo
I was Editor-in-chief and a co-owner of Mondo 2000 when Wired first appeared in 1993. At that time, Mondo was arguably at its peak. We were producing our quarterly on a regular basis, the circulation had reached 100,000 (where it has stayed since), we had a new book out (Mondo 2000: A User's Guide to the New Edge) that had gone to #1 in the Village Voice bestseller list (based on sales in independent, non-mainstream bookstores but still...), and we were about to be at the center of a Time magazine cover article on "Cyberpunk." Perhaps more importantly, we were the only place to go for writers who wanted to cover the burgeoning hip computer culture in reasonably sophisticated terms and have their work reach a substantial audience. You will then understand why when issue #1 of Wired appeared, our editorial staff collectively smirked and immediately hit the boardz deriding Wired magazine as "The Monkees." (The Monkees--of course--were an unoriginal, corporate, put-together version of the Beatles).
We were surprised by the positive response to the early issues of Wired. While their design veered even further than Mondo's toward the RayGun slice-and-splatter aesthetic, the editorial voice was staid and serious, their intentions overtly journalistic. We imagined that we were appreciated for being quite the opposite. Operating without competition, Mondo 2000 had been able to define a style for the emerging "cyber"culture that was quirky, irreverent, intentionally ridiculous, surreal, anarchic, ironic, arch but not minimalist, generous, goofy and science factional rather than traditionally journalistic (operating somewhere at the interstices of information and invention). We viewed our publication as an art form, in an almost classical sense of auteurship.
In other words, we were self-indulgent. People perceived Wired as being more informative, accessible, comprehensible, and better-written even. Wired, corporate hip incarnate, captured the populist flag. This is the way mainstreaming works, of course. It was ever thus. A dulling of the hard or weird edges pleases the masses, the corporate advertisers, *and* the politician, as one. Total win.
Conspiracy-oriented Mondoids saw a conscious plot by the New World order, in its various manifestations, to capture the New Edge. Timothy Leary told stunned Wired staffers that Wired was a CIA plot to derail Mondo 2000. There was, in fact, a soft conspiracy. Initial funding for Wired came from the cyber-hipeouise, people who had been given the opportunity to invest in Mondo 2000 but couldn't relate to its sense of the ludicrous. Electronic Frontier Foundation cofounder Mitch Kapor, after his interview appeared in M2k, shook his confused head and told me, "All my friends *love* Mondo 2000. I don't understand why."
Aside from initial online flamefests (that I participated in as a Mondo partisan) limited primarily to the WELL (the hip California bbs), the two magazines have never spoken of each other directly, never offered a critique or a full-body-assault expose, or mentioned eacn other when covered by the media.
The Wired strategy was to marginalize Mondo. On its launch, Wired advertised on all the public buses in San Francisco: "At last. A Magazine for the Digital Age." In a gossipy section of Wired's premier issue, Mondo is backhandedly "complimented" as "fave cult rag." By late 1994, I frequently came across articles about Wired saying almost exactly the same things, and in the same sort of language, as had been said about Mondo in 1989. "There's a whole new world out there. Technology is hip. And you'd better learn the language because now there's a popular new magazine..."
Meanwile, in the all-important subterranean level of advertising sales, Mondo salespeople would hear about the Wired pitch. When asked about how their compared to M2k, Wired reps would say how they loved Mondo, but Mondo was a *drug culture magazine.* Ouch. Direct hit. Score ten points Wired.
Mondo, on the other hand, didn't so much have a strategy as a reaction. On the internal level, the response was paranoia among the dominant conspiracy freak faction. On the level of editorial content, Mondo 2000 shifted left. This too, was more reaction than intention, and as such was primarily implicit. And nobody noticed. (By the most recent issue, #13, M2k has almost become politically correct, adopting the voice of the cybercrit academic left. For example, an introduction to an article about body transformation performance artist Orlan, speaks of "the phallic gaze" and "endocolonialism.")
REjectives: Nobody Loves You When You've Been Around Too Long
Wired came along as something new at the very moment that Mondo 2000 was starting to experience a backlash. Previously praised explicitly and frequently for its writing style, the meme went out that M2k was "poorly written" and going downhill. This started around issue #8. In point of fact, any reasonable person coming upon the magazine now, without the context of context, would note that each issue gets progressively more finely written, more sophisticated and--yes--even more poignant--up through and including issue #11 (with Arthur Kroker, Hans Moravek, Pirate Media, Roseanne Stone, Einsturzende Neubauten, Cintra Wilson etc.).
The Backlash. In an attention-competitive, fast-forward, nihilistic, media-driven culture, mere presence for any length of time initiates a backlash. Descriptives like cyberpunk or riot grrrl surface representing relatively new cultural gestalts and hang out for fifteen minutes (almost literally) before someone declares themselves "sick of hearing that word." Since the views and aesthetic gestalts that these terms describe hang on for a longer period of time, because they're an authentic response to real social factors that don't change that quickly, we wind up either: not having the descriptors that allow us to connect, being forced to be very inventive with our soundbyte explications, or using the deflated terms embarrassedly and advisedly... in quotes.
Nearly a year ago, I ran into Jane Metcalfe, the feminine half of Wired's first couple, at a party. We were chatting about something else altogether when she suddenly started wondering aloud when Wired would start to experience "the backlash."
The backlash has started. But this time, it's actually *about*
something. At the end of 1994, the Progress and Freedom Foundation (PFF), a Newt Gingrich political front group, released its Magna Carta for the Digital Age. Co-authored by cyber-luminaries and Wired-fodder like Alvin and Heide Toffler, George Gilder, and Esther Dyson, this piece of self-serving quasi-libertarian (free market) cyberbabble dropped a small surprise on that substantial sector of Wired readership that identifies with countercultural attitudes: Wired was listed as a sponsor.
Wired spokespersons claimed that they had simply sent some free magazines to a PFF-sponsored conference on request, and I certainly have no reason to doubt their word. Still, the damage was done, with Wired and Gingrich linked up in articles in the American left publication of record, The Nation, and the American liberal-centerist publication of record, The New Republic. It didn't help when the Electronic Frontier Foundation held meetings with the PFF, emerging with a public statement that the groups found a lot of common ground between them. Jane Metcalf is on the Board of Directors of the EFF.
OBjections: It's A Small Rightwing World After All
The impact of the technological/digital juggernaut that Wired, Mondo 2000, and indeed this author, have attached ourselves to is manifold, but two particular results seem to outweigh the others in importance. Digital technology trends towards democratizing communications. Ever-increasing numbers of human beings can send information and content directly to each other without the intervention of capital, a publisher, or an editor--presuming access to a modem and a computer. (Desktop media technology are just icing on this cake.) From a historical perspective, while acknowledging vast numbers of information have-nots, we are still rushing headlong towards a new sort of human being--a creature with a "voice" in the world.
AND digital technology, in tandem with robotics and other factors, are creating a post-industrial economy. This post-industrial economy does NOT requre the participation of very many people. In plain country english, there's no reason whatsoever to pay most people money for anything. The republican/libertarian solution? Let 'em eat modems. Let 'em rot.
I have ranted and raved at many hackers and people who are part of the "A" list of cyberculture. I have asked for their help. They are passionate about liberty. They are passionate about privacy. But try to talk to them about hacking the economic marginalization of the majority that leads to intolerably Third World living conditions and they'll only look at you quizzically as if you just dipped your beef jerky into the wine. This shouldn't surprise me. The techno-elite are perhaps the only group advantaged by the new economy. They will be the new lords of the terrain in a Dickensian world of beggars and servants. Just because they think of themselves as hipsters doesn't mean we should expect them to share the wealth.
Let a Million Technozines Bloom. The megacorps-- now having fully absorbed the fact that technology is a culture--see Wired and only Wired (a recent, cute, TV ad for IBM has a group of isolated Nuns talking computerese. "I read about it in Wired," says one.). They are even willing to pay an obscene $60,000 to sponsor a page of the Wired WWWebzine, Hotwired, for a month. But this groovy love affair between Wired and the new boomer captains of the post-industrial world, wherein Megacorp big time players like Viacom's Frank Biondi and Bell Atlantic's CEO Ray Smith are puffed as philosopher king's of the late 20th Century, may not be providing the same sort of voyeuristic frisson for Wired readers that it does for the wanna-be players who publish the magazine. Meanwhile, a plethora of smart, independent, technoculture magazine (like the one you hold in your hands) are appearing from all over the world. Assuredly, diversity will reign. A million technozines will bloom. The new world may not be Mondo, but at least the revolution will not be Wired.
Back to Nearly Deep Thoughts
Weird? Why hard? Why R&D? Whirred?
Take me back to The Web of Deceit so I can sort this thing out!