The Five-Year Scan

Gary Wolf's "Wired: A Romance"

Two years ago, the youngish go-getters of a fading scene were scrambling through the remnants of the "new economy" in Germany, trying to get their conference up on its feet. They didn't know at the time that the 2001 edition of BerlinBeta would be the last. BerlinBeta was one of those very 90s hybrid events promoting the idea that DJs and video artists and entrepreneurs and computer programmers all shared the same cultural DNA, and one of the organizers, Stephan Balzer, was trying to get an old acquaintance to come and speak.

At the last minute, after what must have been some pretty earnest pleading and negotiating, Balzer's special guest, his coup, agreed. There were conditions: No interviews, for starters, and whatever was said during this closing session of the conference would stay in the room. No quotes.

It was too late to make much of a formal announcement. The programs and flyers had already been printed up and sent out. But there was email, and word-of-mouth spread fast and furious: Louis Rossetto was coming to Berlin. Not only would he be here, he'd speak, and not only would he be speaking, he'd be telling his story, his version of the three-act tragicomedy that had become of Wired, the magazine he'd co-founded, the magazine that had written, illustrated and embodied that very 90s cultural DNA all BerlinBeta attendees could feel unraveling by 2001.

And yet the force of nostalgia must have been potent. Myself, I'd planned to skip BerlinBeta that year. But the moment a friend tipped me off to that little tweak in the schedule, I knew there was no way I wouldn't be there.

When the time came, the auditorium - a movie theater, actually, with a couple of hundred seats - was packed. When Balzer invited Rossetto up on the stage, the applause wasn't exactly boisterous, but the enthusiasm inherent in anticipation was certainly there. Balzer and Rossetto sat in big, comfy, living room-type chairs while a cozy fire flickered on a TV screen behind them. Cute. Story hour. As Rossetto spun his tale, a friend and I - both of us had spent a few years steeped in Wired lore - exchanged knowing glances. Some of Louis's numbers were off; his telling of a few of the plot points seemed a bit twisted in his favor. But it didn't matter. By the end of the session, despite the lack of any major revelations, the crowd had been won over. The ovation was warm and long, and for a moment, it looked as if more than a few might even stand.

"Louis Rossetto had a strange effect on people." That first sentence of Gary Wolf's Wired: A Romance is the only right and proper way to begin the story of the most influential magazine of the 1990s. For all the importance of other key figures in that story - Jane Metcalfe, certainly, Rossetto's partner; John Plunkett, the designer who gave Wired its spectacularly futuristic yet somehow retro-psychedelic look and whom Wolf portrays as perpetually underappreciated and painfully aware of it, too; executive editor Kevin Kelly, born-again Christian, Social Darwinist and crucial idea man - ultimately, it's Rossetto's unique and bizarre take on the world, his reading of a moment in history and his absolute and highly contagious faith in that reading that propels every sentence that follows.

So here, finally, is the book many knew was inevitable long before the deal was sealed. Five years ago. Who knows how many proposals were shelved when it was revealed, back in August 1998, that Gary Wolf was the first to score a contract so lucrative and with a publisher as mighty as Random House that his book, by default, would be the book about Wired. Who would have guessed, though, that it'd take so long to appear? While the magazine's current circulation is probably as healthy as ever, its profile is no longer as distinct. In 2003, most minds are preoccupied with revolutions other than the digital one, and yet, there's an odd minority of us for whom the anticipation has only grown, year after year after year.

The big surprise: It's short. Just over 260 rather sparse-looking pages. Frankly, I was expecting something along the lines of Robert Draper's Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History, around 475 pages of juicy gossip and potent analysis of the magazine's place in media history, its cultural force and impact on a generation. Granted, Draper's book covers about ten years, Wolf's about five, but it could also be argued that Wolf has a far more complex story to tell. His table of contents shows the book divided into two parts, but there are three, really: the conception and launch of the magazine; the company's expansion into other media, primarily its online publishing arm, HotWired; and finally, over-expansion, over-extension and collapse, the financial drama that resulted in the remnants of the would-be media empire being wrested from Rossetto and Metcalfe's hands.

Remarkably, throughout these five years, Wolf has stayed the course he laid out for himself back in 1998 when he told Salon that the book would not be about a

guy who wants to get rich and fucks it up... That's exactly what it isn't... It's the story of an idea - and that idea is called Wired. It's not a story of the search for money, but about how a very small group of people saw something coming, how they invented the name for it and sort of the common understanding of it, how they became hugely successful through their prescience - and then what that success did to them and to the company they started.

And it's all here. But it's not all here. Wolf's book is as packed and compact as an airport thriller, which is why it's both an unexpected delight and a disappointment. But let me immediately add that it may be disappointing only to those for whom Wired had become something of a favorite hobby, as in my case, or a job, as in the case of most of those who have reviewed the book since its publication in July (for example, Tim Cavanaugh in the Washington Post, Andrew Leonard in Salon and Brad Wieners in the New York Observer, all of whom gave the company, in one form or another, a year or two or more of their lives yet don't make a showing in the index).

At the peak of its frenzied growth, Wired employed hundreds and any number of those former employees could probably tick off half a dozen events that seemed very, very major at the time but go unmentioned in Wired: A Romance.

What about that curious subtitle? The laws of the genre had been around, but it was Northrop Frye who, in 1957, chiseled them onto those stone tablets of his, the essential bookshelf ornament for every undergrad English major, Anatomy of Criticism. Here's a bit of what he had to say:

The romance is nearest of all literary forms to the wish fulfillment dream... The essential element of plot in romance is adventure... The complete form of the romance is clearly the successful quest, and such a completed form has three main stages: the stage of the perilous journey and the preliminary minor adventures; the crucial struggle, usually some kind of battle in which either the hero of his foe, or both, must die; and the exaltation of the hero.

Right off, on the first page of his introduction, Gary Wolf admits he won't be sticking strictly to the rules. Nonetheless, he writes, "The story that follows is a romance in exactly this sense: it traces the effect of a fantastic idea - the idea that computers will make every existing authority obsolete - as it worked through and upon the man who conjured it up."

So now we need an antagonist. Wolf introduces one of sorts on page 57: "Andrew Anker was the son of a successful Philadelphia physician, one of four affectionate siblings who grew up cheating each other at cards." That, by the way, is a fine example of the sort of sentence that pops up throughout; not exactly overwritten, but maybe a shade too self-conscious. Don't get me wrong, Gary Wolf is a terrifically good writer, and there's more than enough evidence of his enviable talent in the stories he's written for Wired itself. The slight bone I have to pick with sentences like this one may simply have to do with an awareness that this book has been so long in coming; maybe I just expect the effort put into it to show.

At any rate, Anker the banker turns out to be a nasty, nasty character you wouldn't trust to drop off a letter for you out of fear that he might steam off the stamp - much less oversee your company's finances. But he's not a full-blown antagonist. Nor are all the other suits that swarm in around Louis and Jane in the third act, pecking and nibbling their company away. All of these second-tier and bit players couldn't have brought Wired down during the years in which Netscape and Yahoo! were being so obscenely overvalued. But they were enabled by an air of distrust within the company, a ferocious antagonism outside it, plus a stroke of really bad luck when it came to the timing of the company's two failed runs for an IPO.

Let's back up. As Wolf makes clear, the idea and the man behind Wired were all but inseparable. Stated clearly - "computers will make every existing authority obsolete" - the idea is either absurd or alarming. But packaged right, it could be exhilarating, a vision of that ever-elusive state - Utopia - finally realized. One of the many telling bits of the Wired story I learned for the first time is that the "zero" issue, the prototype Rossetto, Metcalfe and Plunkett cobbled together to show potential investors in a real first issue, consisted of nothing but repurposed articles from existing publications - the Wall Street Journal, MacWEEK, Details, etc. Wolf:

But the borrowed stories seemed bolder here than they had in their original publications. Bound together, they radiated a sense of fanatical self-assurance, as if united in expectation of technological wonders and tremendous social changes. The fact that the stories were taken from mainstream sources strengthened rather than softened the effect, for the credits page offered evidence that the revolution Louis believed he was chronicling had already been widely noted; only the context was new.

Or to put it another way, form is content. Kevin Kelly would be instrumental in shaping the gist of both and early on he found a motto for the magazine in something he'd heard William Gibson say: "The future is already here - it's just unevenly distributed." To an extent, the task Wired set for itself was to gather the pieces and recontextualize them in such a way that the future could be seen plain as day - and as inevitable as the day that followed.

It's here where things get sticky. Before he started work on Wired: A Romance, Gary Wolf was in Berlin researching a story for the magazine and we met a few times. I remember he said something like, "We slowly began to realize that there was some kind of 'anti-Wired' out there," and I don't remember which phase of Wired's history he was referring to, but I do remember thinking: That was awfully late.

As someone who had a small part in that "anti-Wired" (I wrote a book called Rewired in 1996 and lambasted the magazine every few days at a site bearing the same name), I think Gary's made a good choice in representing it with a brief mention of a 1995 piece in The New Republic because it was one that Rossetto took seriously enough to get upset about. Naturally, I wish there were more on that; just as, I'm sure Steve Silberman, who did so much to give a distinctive voice to Wired News, quite an experiment at the time and, really, the only part of HotWired left still regularly read and blogged, wishes there were room in the book for at least a paragraph on Wired News, or that any number of regular contributors to the magazine might wish a nod were given in their direction - but Gary has fashioned a very tight narrative arc, and it's one that successfully balances a few dozen characters without straying from it, either.

The point is that whenever Wired stumbled, the unsightly groundswell of schadenfreude should have been telling. Many were drawn to that "fanatical self-assurance," but many were put off by it as well. You can tell Gary understands what role the media played in giving the company that one extra shove as it teetered on the brink of failing to get its IPOs off the ground, but you can also sense he doesn't think it was really fair. He explains why the markets and mood swings and pundits let Netscape and Yahoo! get away with it but wouldn't in the case of Wired, but you're not quite sure he understands that timing wasn't everything.

As, over time, it became clearer what it was that Louis Rossetto, who was proposing to run a magazine, a cluster of websites, a television show, a publishing house and maybe a few more magazines, too, was so fanatically self-assured about - again, "computers will make every existing authority obsolete" - the financial establishment, the bankers, the press, all of it, had to start wondering about the kookiness factor in the proposed deal. In other words, in grand Arthurian tradition, Louis Rossetto was ultimately his own antagonist. Gary Wolf never comes out and says as much in so many words; but it's there.

A day or two before that BerlinBeta closing session, I spotted Louis Rossetto sitting alone after some other presentation had wrapped and everyone else had wandered outside. Because I'd never met him in person, I wasn't completely sure it was him, though, of course, at the same time, I was.

"Louis Rossetto?"

"Yes?

I held out my hand. "Hi, I'm David Hudson. You probably don't remember, but we exchanged a little email a few years ago."

"Oh, I remember," he said, shaking my hand. I could tell he actually did and I don't mind admitting that I was flattered.

The email we'd exchanged had taken the form of an interview, one that eventually got around, accompanying a cover story in the San Francisco Bay Guardian that spread to other alternative weeklies in the US, running in European magazines from Holland to Italy and, of course, forwarded via mailing lists (here's a version in three parts: 1, 2 and 3). It remains, to my knowledge, the most complete statement of his worldview aimed at anyone outside the circle he used to call the "Wired Ones." He'd blasted a missive off here and there to this or that list or online forum, but never anything so all-encompassing. Why he did there and then, I still don't know. It had nothing to do with me but probably a lot to do with what was going on inside the company at the time.

Louis, via that interview, never fails to rouse a reaction. He's furious, radical, scary at times, often infuriating. You get stuff like that landing in your inbox, you're grateful and rattled at the same time. And it was the last I'd hear from him directly.

Five years later, I sat down next to him in an empty movie theater and we talked about kids and schools and living in Europe and this and that. A little bit of everything and nothing much at all. The main thing I took away from that afternoon was how he'd surprised me all over again. So quiet, so calm.

I thought of that encounter again as I came to the end of Gary's book. Gary reminds us that tragedy in romance is a helluva lot easier to bear than tragedy in myth. When all was said and done, the company chopped up and sold off, "The value of Louis and Jane's portion, together, was more than thirty million dollars."

Camelot may have dissipated for now, but Arthur has been borne off to Avalon. Where the day-to-day wait for the ultimate obsolescence of authority ain't bad. At all.