"Founded in 1993 by Jane Metcalfe, Louis Rossetto, and Kevin Kelly, Wired emerged when San Francisco’s tech scene was still shadowy and creative, populated by phreakers and neo-hippies, artists and anarchists, ravers and cypherpunks. The founders were hugely influenced by Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth network, a group of technologists, entrepreneurs, and writers. Unlike today’s tech workers and entrepreneurs, the readers of early Wired were direct heirs of the sixties’ countercultural ethos (not coincidentally, the same spirit that informed the rise of personal computing in the seventies). On the Venn diagram between monied techno-utopianism and hippie idealism, Wired’starget reader sat squarely in the center.
As people were beginning to figure out how to integrate technology into their lives, Wired raised new possibilities for the cybernetic future. In early Wired, technology wasn’t just entertaining; it was a tool, meant to liberate and enlighten. Products were positioned as socially transformative (“We’re Teen, We’re Queer, and We’ve Got Email”). I was strangely moved by an article about Santa Monica’s Public Electronic Network, an online town hall used by the city’s homeless and wealthy alike. And then there were the regular contributions by members of the Electronic Frontier Foundation—a civil-rights nonprofit that is effectively cyberculture’s answer to the A.C.L.U.—advocating for digital freedoms including online privacy, encryption, and free speech...
In early Wired, a piece about a five-hundred-thousand-dollar luxury “Superboat” would be followed by a full-page editorial urging readers to contact their legislators to condemn wiretapping (in this case, 1994’s Digital Telephony Bill). Stories of tech-enabled social change and New Economy capitalism weren’t in competition; they coexisted and played off one another. In 2016, some of my colleagues and I have E.F.F. stickers on our company-supplied MacBooks—“I do not consent to the search of this device,” we broadcast to our co-workers—but dissent is no longer an integral part of the industry’s ethos.
Today’s future-booster events, like the annual Consumer Electronics Show, tend to prize stories of novelty and innovation—and yet, reading early Wired, it becomes clear that many of the inventions that claim to be new today are simply extensions of what came before."
This all sounds like the optimism of my silicon valley childhood, the future that we were raised to inherit.
I sort of forgot about this, but there was a definite part of "cyber" that was also about questioning the current world order, being very cynic-savvy about the political structures that technology fit into.
I think the difference was the idea of the tech company, before the scene was dominated by massive work-play complexes that have kinda commodified the rebellious youthyness.
And a transition from physical engineering with specialized software (remember how often people said "widgets"?) to software engineering of the same specific set of physical devices. Tech companies and startups are a lot less independent of each other.
#RealTimeBrainDrips
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