Or so contend the publishers of Wired, an arty new high-tech magazine out of San Francisco’s “Multimedia Gulch” (page 42) that hits the stands this week. This is not altogether self-serving rhetoric. Arguing that a computer isn’t an ordinary box any more than rock and roll was a musical form-it’s a lifestyle-Wired copublisher Louis Rossetto has a vision for his magazine: to be a Rolling Stone for the computer generation, announcing its arrival and giving it voice. Unlike traditional computer magazines, Wired is less about product reviews than about the impact of technology on our culture. Using less grand rhetoric, Wired adviser and futurist Paul Saffo has called the new venture “Vanity Fair for propeller heads.”
The first issue, like many debuts, is a mixed bag. It has a trendy look-a lot closer to Interview or Details than PC World-and its stories range from a dense essay on the promise of photonic computing to a rambling talk with intellectual natterer Camille Paglia. The cover boy is Bruce Sterling, the noted cyberpunk science-fiction author. Sterling writes a solid report on the military’s use of “virtual reality” in battle training. Despite claims of being radically different from computer trade mags and the national press (which is “still groping for the snooze button,” the editors sniff in a foreword), Wired stories on such topics as sexual high jinks on-line and computerized libraries have been around for a while-yes, in the national press. Still, Wired has its share of surprises. New York Times reporter John Markoff’s brief piece on hackers’ tricks with cellular phones reveals the chilling fact that the wizards can use the phones’ built-in software to track the location of other individual cellular-phone users.
Some in the publishing industry doubt there’s a market for the Wired blend of technology and artsy interests. Rich Karlgaard, editor of ASAP, a new technology supplement to Forbes, says, “If you get out of Silicon Valley there are not a lot of places where you find that psychographic group.” One industry analyst is put off by the magazine’s self-important attitude: “It’s just hard to continually watch people breathe their own exhaust and not wonder when they’ll asphyxiate.”
And if that technologically savvy, culturally omnivorous audience is out there, why do they want to mess with that outdated medium, paper? Shouldn’t the publication of the future be, well, digital? Take a very different kind of publication that sounds Wired’s themes: Beyond Cyberpunk, a disc-based collection of articles, images and sound, all cross-referenced for on-screen reading pleasure. Gareth Branwyn, one of Beyond Cyberpunk’s creators, says his brainchild is “a huge critical success and has been a moderate commercial success”-with fewer than 1,000 of the $29.95 product sold. Viewing such multimedia wonders can be a hassle. You have to load it into your computer-you can’t just carry it into the bathroom for a quick read. Paper, says Rossetto, remains “the most cost-efficient and viable way of reaching the people we want to reach.” He may have his eyes on the future-but he knows that profit is in the here and now.
