The Digerati!
By Paul Keegan
Paul Keegan has written for Esquire,
GQ, New England Monthly and
Philadelphia magazines.
WE HAVE TO WRAP OUR brains around
3.05 for a second." John Battelle, the
managing editor of Wired, is using
softwarespeak to start a meeting about
the fifth
issue of the magazine's third year.
But Louis Rossetto seems to be
somewhere else. Wearing sneakers
and jeans, his wavy gray hair yanked back
into a ponytail, curly
wisps escaping around the sides,
he stares blankly into space, like some
cocky kid on an internship. Actually,
he's Wired's 45-year-old editor and
publisher, looking
lost in a daydream . . . about
how he trounced the mass media, maybe, those
Second Wave dinosaurs who wouldn't
know an Ethernet if somebody hacked one
directly into their brainstem.
. . .
Rossetto props himself up on a bony
elbow. The daydream would go like this:
He lopes through the streets of
Manhattan -- a tall, skinny figure -- with
his partner in
romance and business, Jane Metcalfe.
It's 1991 and they have no jobs.
They're looking for money to start
a new magazine about the Digital
Generation, whom they
call "the most powerful people
on the planet today."
Eventually, they get one bite --
from Nicholas Negroponte, director of the
Media Lab at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, who introduces them
to certain
people who might be forgiven for
thinking they are among the most powerful
people on the planet. But each
one -- Rupert Murdoch, S. I. Newhouse,
Christy Hefner,
Henry Kravitz and on and on --
politely tell Rossetto and Metcalfe to get
lost. A cute couple, but what the
hell are they talking about?
It's not a good time to be asking
for money. The country is in recession,
the gulf war has exploded and the
term "information superhighway" doesn't
even exist. As
magazines fold and advertising
budgets are slashed, those lucky editors, TV
producers and ad execs who still
have jobs are clutching ever more madly
for a trend that
will define the 90's, any plausible
new market for companies to hawk their
products to -- Generation X! No,
the End of Greed! Wait, Grunge!
O.K., maybe Rossetto's record of
reading entrails was spotty. After getting
his M.B.A. from Columbia in 1973,
he lay on the beach and smoked dope until
the
inspiration struck to write a novel
about a President named Richard Nixon
who avoids impeachment by fabricating
a national security crisis -- but
"Takeover" was
published just a week before Nixon
resigned. Bummer. A few years later, he
was hanging out in Rome working
on the set of the raunchy sex flick
"Caligula" when he
realized that those real, 200-person
orgies would make a perfect metaphor
for the sexual revolution -- which
was history by 1981, when the book he
ghostwrote,
"Ultimate Porno," finally came
out.
But by 1991 Rossetto just knows
what the Next Big Thing will be. He and
Metcalfe tell everybody in New
York who will listen, practically climbing
the Empire State
Building and blasting it through
a bullhorn: DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY IS NOT A
TREND. IT'S NOT EVEN A ZEITGEIST.
THIS IS . . . A . . . PHREAKING . . .
REVOLUTION!
The Digital Revolution is happening
now, on the cusp of the millenium. Why
can't they see? Why can't they
wrap their puny minds around the fact that
for a lousy
$350,000 they can have control
of not only two unemployed dreamers and
their new magazine but the key
to the new American soul, the whole damn
future of media,
a worldwide. . . .
"This really doesn't work -- it's
creepy." Rossetto has snapped out of his
trance. He's talking about a story
on techno-pagans.
"I'm not persuaded it's a trend
at all," agrees Kevin Kelly, the executive
editor. The manuscript is sent
flying across the table. Tired, not Wired.
LOCATED IN A FOURTH-FLOOR LOFT IN
AN old factory building in San Francisco,
Wired's office is almost too techno-chic
to be true. Most of the 77
employees are in their 20's. An
African gray parrot squawks in the lobby.
Healthy meals are prepared daily
in the kitchen by the staff chef and on
Thursdays you can
pay a masseuse named Ratka $10
to knead out the kinks in a private room.
And everywhere are blue-gray wires,
bunches of them, crawling across
ceilings, snaking
and twisting down walls and columns,
across desks and tables, eventually
plugging into four Ethernets and
150 computers -- a self-conscious display
of the new
American status symbol of hipness
and emerging power.
Today, Rossetto's daydream is real:
Wired has become one of the hottest
magazines in America. It went from
an object of derision to a moneymaker
just three issues
after hitting newstands in January
1993 (five years is considered
miraculous for most new magazines).
It has won more than a dozen honors,
including a National
Magazine Award, reached 228,000
monthly circulation, started new editions
in Japan and Britain and spawned
Hotwired, an already lucrative, if
esoteric, new form of
journalism delivered on the Internet's
World Wide Web.
But Wired is more than a successful
magazine. Like Rolling Stone in the
60's, it has become the totem of
a major cultural movement. Its leaders --
those "most
powerful people on the planet today"
-- are mostly affluent white guys in
their 30's and 40's. They speak
their own language -- of hypertext, data
compression, bit
strings and bandwidth. They wrap
their minds around ideas, jack into
computer networks, interface with
virtual worlds and grok (meaning, they
dig) hacking. They
have their own style of dress (sneakers,
no ties) and artist icons (Laurie
Anderson, Brian Eno). In their
universe, science, entrepreneurship and free
markets are cool;
the mass media, old literary establishments
and government meddling are
not. They can be arrogant and self-involved,
but many are also intelligent,
creative and fun --
like big kids, some of them!
"This is the mainstream culture
of the 21st century," Rossetto says. "It's
a new economy, a new counterculture,
and beyond politics. In 10 or 20
years, the world will
be completely transformed. Everything
we know will be different. Not just a
change from L.B.J. to Nixon, but
whether there will be a President at all.
I think Alvin
Toffler's basically right: we're
in a phase change of civilizations here."
Those comments come during one of
many excitable interviews. Back at the
editorial meeting, Rossetto zones
in and out, cupping his angular face in
one hand, eyes
roaming to a corner of the ceiling,
skin so pale that just where his long
fingers end, you can see blue veins
around his eyes.
Behind him, curling on the walls,
are pages from the latest issue, splashed
with the ground-breaking design
that has become the magazine's trademark.
Since Wired
was conceived as a report from
the future, its creative director, John
Plunkett, liberally sprinkles the
pages with psychedelic Day-Glo colors and
places text over
spooky images of brains, circuits,
globes and TV screens. Some stories are
impossible to read -- even laid
out sideways. Marshall McLuhan is listed on
the masthead
as "Patron Saint." In the very
first issue, Rossetto warned that "the
Digital Revolution is whipping
through our lives like a Bengali typhoon. .
. ."
The message is clear: Without Wired,
you'll drown. The magazine makes the
future look like a terrifying,
disorienting place. This is no accident.
Wired is a magazine
for and about the Digital Vanguard
-- and anybody else who thinks they are
smart and cool enough to join the
club.
How they discovered this new digital
subculture is explained by Jane
Metcalfe, whose office is at the
opposite end of Wired's loft space. The
33-year-old company
president moves her thin frame
around with great bursts of energy and
charm, talking rapidly about how
she and Rossetto met in Paris and worked
together in
Amsterdam for Electric Word, a
technology trade journal. When the journal
folded in 1990, Rossetto made the
rounds at industry shows and conferences,
trying to
figure out what to do next. That
was their moment of epiphany.
"We saw this whole new community
of people," she says. "There was this
gathering political agenda, a perspective
on the world, a sense of the
future."
At first, the community seemed quite
diverse -- architects, film makers,
engineers, designers, writers,
computer scientists, artists, musicians.
Then came the insight:
They were all becoming increasingly
wealthy and powerful through their
pioneering use of digital technology.
Rossetto and Metcalfe popularized a
nickname for these
people that dramatically reflected
the tremendous shift in power underway
-- the one McLuhan predicted way
back in 1964 when he announced the demise
of the
500-year-old literary order spawned
by Gutenberg's press -- The Digerati!
"The amount of video compression
they did," John Battelle is saying at the
Wired meeting -- Rosssetto has
perked up again -- "it's like 134 gigabytes
of video
compressed down to two CD's, and
that's 650 times 2 megabytes, so that's
incredible compression, and he
was the guy who wrote the algorithms to make
this
possible. . . ."
Everybody in the room knows what he's talking about.
Today, the concept of an emerging
digital elite seems perfectly obvious.
But a truism of American culture
is that a trend doesn't exist -- never
mind a full-blown
Zeitgeist or a once-every-500-years
revolution -- until somebody finds a
market for it. That's why the whole
concept of Wired magazine didn't really
click until
somebody (nobody remembers who)
exclaimed: "It's a consumer magazine!"
The industry experts said to forget
about it: nerds simply don't buy
Absolut and Volvos. So Rossetto
and Metcalfe did what Americans with a
dream have been doing
for 150 years: They went to California.
By the fall of 1992, they scraped
together $75,000 from Negroponte
and $150,000 from a Silicon Valley
entrepreneur named
Charlie Jackson and hired a staff
to produce the first issue.
At any previous moment in history,
a magazine so inscrutable and nearly
hostile to its readers certainly
would have flopped. But finally, with a
Digital Something
dawning, Rossetto's timing was
flawless. The ensuing deluge of press
coverage was mostly fawning, and
big-ticket advertisers like Volkswagen and
Dewar's bought
space to reach this lucrative new
consumer niche. The digerati Wired reader
is a demographic dream: a 34-year-old
man in upper management with a
household income
of more than $80,000 and a job
that includes recommending or actually
buying expensive digital equipment.
The genius of Wired is that it makes
the Digital Revolution a
self-fulfilling prophecy, both
illuminating this new subculture and
promoting it -- thus creating new
demand for digital tools, digital
toys, digital attitudes. Now you need to
read the "Fetish" and "Street Cred"
sections (to know what to buy), "Jargon
Watch" (what to
say), "Net Surf" (where to go in
cyberspace) and "Idees Fortes" (what to
think about).
Rossetto upped the ante in October
by going on line with Hotwired, a new
medium featuring hyperlinked text,
sound, photos, video and discussion
areas that he
claims will revolutionize journalism
in the 21st century. So many
advertisers signed up for Hotwired
that some had to be turned away.
Subscriptions, free to anyone
using the Internet's World Wide
Web, have soared to 180,000 and could reach
the millions.
Now the big media moguls get it.
By late 1994, Disney, Ted Turner and Cox
Communications all wanted a piece
of the action. Conde Nast trumped
everybody at the
last moment by offering $3.5 million
for a minority interest in Wired -- no
strings attached.
These media tycoons desperately
want access to this burgeoning market --
which is visible now, through a
window, from inside Wired's conference
room. Those
bright young staffers do look cool:
ripped jeans, black spandex pants,
backward baseball caps. Some have
body piercings; others slap the gray
carpets with bare feet,
grooving to thumping techno-pop
music. They don't make enough money yet to
be considered true digerati. But
they give the movement crucial hip cachet,
while the
older Wired readers provide the
dough.
This next generation marks the cutting
edge of an enormous cultural gap
Wired has exposed -- between the
on line and off line, young and old, rich
and poor, digerati
and literati. Wired's shake-up
of the media establishment is a metaphor for
the tremendous wealth and power
that will be gained or lost -- in business,
the arts,
education, politics -- according
to who most shrewdly associates themselves
with the latest technological advances.
Which has triggered a small but
fierce backlash: Are Wired's digerati
cynical manipulators of techno-babble,
hyping a utopian "revolution" that
conveniently allows
them to cash in before retirement?
Or are they truly visionaries, the only
ones with enough technological
sophistication to lead us into a complex and
more egalitarian
world?
". . . it would be one of those
things that, you know, our core audience
would really grok," Battelle is
saying.
The editorial meeting ends. Rossetto
heads for the door, ponytail bounding.
This afternoon, he'll hop into
his black Saab and drive to Monterey, where
digerati from
around the country are meeting
at TED6 -- the sixth Technology,
Entertainment and Design conference
-- to plan the next stage of the
revolution and enjoy what
Rossetto reverently calls "a celebration
of ourselves."
"HAVE COMPUTERS CHANGED YOUR NOTION of God?"
Stewart Brand reads the typed question
through half-glasses perched on the
end of his nose, his long body
cramped into the passenger seat of Kevin
Kelly's dusty
four-door Mazda.
Kelly is driving them to Monterey.
Considered the West Coast center of the
Digital Vanguard -- the M.I.T.
Media Lab is the East Coast axis -- the TED
conferences
have been held intermittently since
1984. They are organized by a
gregarious writer-architect-corporate
consultant named Richard Saul Wurman,
who looks like a short
Hemingway and says cryptic things
like "I sell my ignorance."
Brand is one of Wired's contributing
writers. He's reviewing questions for
his interview this afternoon with
Nathan Myhrvold, a TED6 speaker and the
boy-wonder
physicist who heads Microsoft's
advanced technology team.
"Will we see artificial intelligence in our lifetime?
"Will your children use paper at work?"
These are the kind of questions
the digerati love to think about. They've
been pondering them since the 60's,
where the roots of their movement are
firmly planted.
Brand remembers when he saw his
first computer, in 1962. He'd just gotten
out of the Army and was hanging
out with the Beats in San Francisco when he
happened
into a laboratory at Stanford University,
where he saw "wild-eyed,
long-haired radical people" playing
Spacewar, the first computer game.
"Spacewar was pretty
psychedelic," Brand says. "But
the computer people, the hackers, were not
taking drugs. They were stoned
on a much more lively drug than LSD. See,
LSD never got
better. That was the problem. But
computers just kept getting better and
better."
Brand knows something about hippies,
drugs and computers. He was one of Ken
Kesey's Merry Pranksters and could
be found in "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid
Test"
wearing an Indian-beaded tie and
driving Tom Wolfe around in a pickup
truck; Brand launched the now-famous
symbol of the environmental movement
-- a
photograph of the planet earth
-- and started the Whole Earth Catalogue in
1968. There, he says, he was the
first to coin the term "personal
computer."
"These hills, I've walked stoned
many a time!" he laughs, gazing out the
window at the meadows made lush
by the winter rain.
Brand is 56, white hair circling
his nearly bald head. He doesn't do drugs
anymore. Lanky, with a boyish face,
he's dressed in jeans, black felt hat,
brown leather
jacket and carries a white-handled
knife on his belt. Now he works as a
futurist business consultant for
major corporations and tosses off such
famous aphorisms as
"If we're going to be gods, we
might as well get good at it."
Kelly and Brand share a joke about
the earnestness of the Whole Earth
Catalogue's back-to-the-earth days.
"Hand flour mills!" Kelly says.
"Oh, yeah, and jug and bottle cutters,"
Brand says. "Cut the top off
bottles, make them into glasses
and save the world!"
They roar with laughter.
Kelly, who is sometimes referred
to as Brand's protege, took over for Brand
in the mid-80's as editor of Brand's
magazine, Coevolution Quarterly, which
later
became the Whole Earth Review.
At 42, with a hound-dog face, Kelly wears a
button-down shirt and smudged black
pants and carries the distracted air of
a professor.
He's Wired's Big Think guy, "the
balloon we follow around," as one staffer
calls him. Kelly's latest idea
is to not read or write for several months
to see how well a
person would function in a post-literate,
electronic society (the result,
of course, might be a book).
Kelly champions the magazine's best
stories, like the one about the
Internal Revenue Service's sinister
plot to electronically suck taxes
directly from bank accounts.
But Kelly also defends stories
about bizarre utopian fantasists that Wired
regularly embraces -- like the
Extropians, who believe we can achieve
immortality by
downloading the contents of our
brains onto a hard disk.
Kelly's conversion to digital technology
came in the early 80's, when he
was running a mail-order company
and began using the Internet to send his
catalogue to the
typesetter. "I plugged in and had
a religious experience," Kelly had said
in his soft mumble back at the
Wired office. "I discovered that there was
this thing out there."
It's one of many conversations
about computers that turns mystical,
drifting from scientific fact to
unproven belief. "Technology is not
neutral," Kelly said.
"Technology is absolutely, 100
percent, positive."
>From that widely shared faith,
the theology of the digerati flows. "You
know, I don't like computers,"
Kelly said. "But I use them because they're
very handy tools.
The reason why the hippies and
people like myself got interested in them,
is that they are model worlds,
small universes. They are ways to recreate
civilization.
"The first things discovered by
people like Jaron Lanier," he said,
referring to the pioneer of virtual
reality, "is you start to say, 'What is
reality?' We get to ask the
great questions of all time: 'What
is life? What is human? What is
civilization?' And you ask it not
in the way the old philosophers asked it,
sitting in armchairs, but by
actually trying it. Let's try and
make life. Let's try and make community."
Riding to the TED6 conference, Brand
elaborates on Kelly's point, recalling
the conflicts that arose in the
60's counterculture. There was the
do-your-own-thing
crowd versus those into "consensus."
The psychedelic trippers in opposition
to conventional-reality types.
Rebels who disdained politics versus
marchers on
Washington. People who believed
in technology (usually acolytes of McLuhan
and Buckminster Fuller) and those
who feared computers as evil instruments
of the
military industrial complex.
Clearly, today's digerati emerged
from a convergence of the
do-your-own-thing, psychedelic,
apolitical technophiles. "Since we started
dropping out of college,"
Brand says, "one of the things
we missed was academia's disdain for
business and money: 'do your own
thing' translated into 'start your own
business.' " He
mentions some of the most famous
hippie entrepreneurs, like Steve Jobs and
Steve Wozniak, the founders of
Apple Computer. "A lot of these people were
tremendously rewarded," Brand says.
"They didn't change their views. They
just became rich and powerful."
What Brand doesn't say is that many
of the do-your-own-thing, psychedelic,
apolitical technophiles have also
become wealthy and powerful by viewing
civilization in
startlingly Darwinistic terms that
are rather, well, unhippie-ish. Kelly's
recent book, "Out of Control,"
for example, argues that our increasingly
technological society
has begun to resemble a biological
system, with computers simply part of a
natural evolutionary process that's
far too complex for mere humans to
control. "And it's
better that way," exclaims the
book jacket.
Being "out of control," in fact,
is central to the idea of the Digital
Revolution. And nothing embodies
the chaotic, boundless ecosystem of the
future more than today's
hottest digital craze, summed up
by a sign Kelly and Brand notice as they
pull into downtown Monterey: "Introduction
to the Internet: $149.99 for
three two-hour
courses." "All the fishermen are
getting on line," Brand says, laughing.
The transformation of the Internet
has been a techno-hippie's dream:
originally designed by the Pentagon
as a communications system so
decentralized that it could
survive a nuclear Armageddon, the
Net has since mutated into "the largest
working anarchy in the world,"
as Kelly calls it. Censorship is nearly
impossible. Left
unfettered, in Wired's view, the
Internet will eventually place so much
power in the hands of the citizenry
that oppressive 20th-century
institutions -- government,
public schools, the mass media
-- will crumble.
The Digital Revolution will reach
fruition, Rossetto argues at particularly
rapturous moments, when society
is organized by a "hive-mind consensus"
that allows
humanity to evolve into ever higher
forms, perhaps even fulfilling
McLuhan's prophecy to "make of
the entire globe, and of the human family, a
single conciousness."
Of course, the gnarled fishermen
aren't on line yet. But until then, not to
worry: the digerati are hard at
work getting cyberspace ready for them. As
Brand told The Los
Angeles Times not long ago, expressing
an idea Wired roundly endorses: "I
think elites basically drive civilization."
GREAT SWARMS OF DIGERATI (AND FAUX
DIGERati) are buzzing -- swarming and
buzzing like the Great Hive Mind
of the Future -- as they gossip and
mingle. Trumpets blare a dramatic
fanfare, drums pound the earth and a
choir of angels sings. It's the
theme music for TED6, which means that
everyone should get
back into their seats.
Rossetto and Metcalfe have strolled
into the Monterey Conference Center and
now float up to the lobby on the
escalator. They laugh and hug old friends.
Metcalfe is
beaming; Rossetto looks rested
and refreshed, having chopped off his
ponytail. He's also lost that spaced-out
look from the previous day's
editorial meeting.
"We came in as adventurers . . .
," Rossetto shouts over the hive. He's
talking about his first TED experience
in 1990. ". . . and we came out with
a cause." He
thrusts a white fist into the air
and cries, "The revolution has begun!"
It's easy to see why he's excited.
Rossetto was a nobody back in 1990. Now
he and Metcalfe are the king and
queen of the new digital media. They have
been given
one of the highest honors at TED6:
a prime-time slot on Saturday night --
just before the emotional farewell
dinner -- for a live demonstration of
Hotwired.
He surveys the throng: they're crowding
the table selling New Age books and
tapes with titles like "Healing
Yourself With Your Own Voice," clustering
around giant
color computer screens to group
Net surf, walking around with cell phones
stuck to their ears. Plastic-tube
necklaces mark the 650 people who paid
$2,000 to watch
high-tech demonstrations and hear
speeches by people like the architect
Frank Gehry, the biologist Stephen
Jay Gould and the polio curer Jonas
Salk.
It's like a Digital Parallel Universe
stretching out before him. Digital
Queers (an activist group led by
Tom Reilly) talk to Digital Journalists
(Kevin Kelly and Stewart
Brand), who are represented by
Digital Agents (John Brockman), who listen
to Digital Musicians (the jazz
vibist Gary Burton) and sometimes hang out
with Digital
Comedians (Penn and Teller), who
talk about Digital Films (Jurrasic Park)
with Digital Scientists (Marvin
Minsky).
"The things that we've dreamed about
are becoming real," Rossetto says,
gazing around the lobby. "The fire
has been sparked and it's spreading."
TED is where Rossetto first noticed
the digital wave expanding from the
nerdy pioneers to the next stage.
These "early adopters" pushed the
revolution forward by
spending money on primitive equipment
-- like that first Macintosh with no
hard drive -- and dreaming up new
uses for it, demanding that it be better,
faster, cheaper.
When Rossetto started Wired, some
outsiders had trouble imagining who these
"most powerful people on the planet"
were. Stories about sci-fi cartoons
and Donkey
Kong video games ran alongside
ads asking the reader to match characters
from a Comedy Central sitcom with
color photographs of their vomit. (A
bunch of
12-year-old boys are taking over
the world?) The very same issue also
explains how to get stock quotes
over the Internet and a list of
"deductible junkets," like a
three-day conference about the
World Wide Web, for $995. (So now it's a
business magazine?)
But Rossetto had gleaned a deep
truth: his readers were juveniles trapped
in the bodies of successful businessmen.
The cover of the April issue
perfectly sums up this
strange phenomenon: the heads of
Sumner Redstone and Frank Biondi are stuck
onto cartoon bodies of Beavis and
Butt-Head, the headline blaring, "Viacom
Doesn't
Suck!" Somehow, the chairman and
C.E.O. of a $30 billion media conglomerate
have become way cool.
WELLING TOO MUCH ON MARKETING strategy,
however, would ruin the post-hippie
sensibility so crucial to these
gatherings. We're talking about a
revolution!
So Rossetto stands amid the buzzing
swarms waving his hands, unleashing
long volleys of outlandish rhetoric,
like this one about the "huge forces
in our society
starting to surface. And now they're
starting to walk on land. And when
they do, they're going to change
the way the landscape looks in mammoth
ways!"
Not bad. A kind of evolutionary, "Creature From the Black Lagoon" thing.
He'll be a bit more modest during
his Hotwired presentation Saturday night,
reaching back only to 1948, when
television was about to radically alter
American life.
Other times he invokes the Industrial
Revolution, Toffler's Second Wave.
But he really outdid himself in
his first editor's note in Wired: today's
social changes are so
profound, he wrote, that "their
only parallel is probably the discovery of
fire."
The TED conference is brimming with
evangelism and boundless optimism --
like some rally for Amway or Nu
Skin. Empowerment is on everyone's lips,
the faster
tongues psyching up the others
with wild claims, saying outsiders will
laugh at you when you compare this
movement to the biggest forces in
history, which hardly
seems far-fetched when a new market
starts growing crazily, exponentially,
like a force of nature, out of
control, with an evolutionary mind of its
own!
"When I said there would be one
billion people on the Internet by the year
2000, they laughed!" Negroponte
tells the TED6 crowd later. "That was eight
months ago.
People aren't laughing today. Gutenberg's
press was a drop in the bucket
compared to what's happening now!"
Few speak this hyperbolic language
as fluently as Negroponte, who's had 10
years of experience asking Fortune
500 executives for money to help the
Media Lab
"invent the future." In his best-selling
book, "Being Digital," Negroponte
even uses the pyramid logic of
multilevel marketers, comparing today's
technological
advances to a child's fantasy in
which one penny doubles in value each day
for a month, skyrocketing from
$2.6 million to $21 million in the last
three days. "We are
approaching those last three days
in the spread of computing and digital
telecommunications," he wrote.
American business has done the same
math. Just look around: it's a feeding
frenzy! Some people on the TED6
guest list are probably authentic members
of the
digerati, but which ones? Quincy
Jones? U2's Edge? William Randolph Hearst
III? Jay Chiat of Chiat/Day? Michael
Lynton, president of Disney's Hollywood
Pictures? And which of the lesser-known
but powerful executives from every
company and institution you can
think of: the Museum of Modern Art,
Metropolitan
Life, The New York Times, Random
House, Polygram, Nike, Viacom, Hoffman
LaRoche, Mattel, Levi Strauss,
Coca-Cola, AT&T, Encyclopedia Britannica,
MGM,
General Motors?
That's exactly why this might be
the last TED. The conference has no
invitations, news releases or advertisments.
Notice travels only by word of
mouth -- which kept
the gathering pure, for a while.
But now any digerati manque with a lousy
$2,000 check is just buying his
way in and the TED conferences don't seem
to have that
exclusive quality anymore.
During the morning session, for
instance, some lady from a major New York
publishing company had the nerve
to raise a hand and ask: "But how do we
make money
if we just put everything up on
the Net?"
Rossetto, in the lobby, repeats
the question with mocking tones. No
reference to huge forces crawling
out of the sea? No Tofflerian Second
Wave? No discovery of
fire?
"It's like these people haven't
spent half a millisecond to consider the
issues," he says, disgusted.
Look, lady, nobody here is against
making money. But for God's sake, don't
say it.
Actually, Rossetto has already figured
out how to make money on the Net.
That's the next phase of the revolution.
It began in October when he
started Hotwired,
widely regarded as the most ambitious
commercial media service ever
attempted in cyberspace.
"Wired covers the Digital Revolution,"
Rossetto likes to say, "but Hotwired
is the Digital Revolution."
Hotwired, located in a loft adajacent
to Wired, is filled with more young
people staring at computer screens.
The publisher, Andrew Anker, a stocky
29-year-old, sits
calmly as his staff rushes to get
the latest offerings on line. Hotwired is
growing so fast he's about to knock
out a wall to double the office space.
They are adding
more editorial content and the
number of advertisers has jumped to 16 --
including Zima, AT&T and I.B.M.
-- who buy discrete billboards that provide
a wealth of
information if subscribers are
interested enough to click.
At least for now, that's how Hotwired
makes money. Without the enormous
costs of printing and distribution,
this service has been profitable since
day one, and
today at least $200,000 per month
in ad revenue comes through the door.
Sitting next to Anker is Hotwired's
managing editor, Chip Bayers, 30. He
admits they struggled at first
to describe what exactly Hotwired is.
Finally, they settled on
calling it a "cyberstation" containing
"a suite of vertical content streams
with an integrated community space."
In plain English, that means a broad
smorgasbord of magazine-style text,
digital photographs, sound clips
and short and somewhat jerky video
segments, plus room
for subscribers to discuss the
material and add their own multimedia
contributions. Hotwired takes full
advantage of hypertext, perhaps the most
revolutionary feature
of the World Wide Web, which allows
users to click to supporting documents
or related material located anywhere
in the world.
Rather than simply dump printed
material on line, Hotwired is cooking up
original offerings to take full
advantage of the new medium. It's "Way New
Journalism,"
says Joshua Quittner, a Hotwired
writer, featuring not only the best
devices of the novel but also movies,
radio, CD-ROM and networked
communication. Bayer
describes an example of this revolutionary
journalism: a series about a
reporter named Robert Levine following
the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile across
the Rockies. A
subscriber could aim a camcorder
at Levine as he whizzes by in the
Wienermobile, Bayer says, and post
a video bite on line as part of the
story!
Subscription, which is free, has
skyrocketed to 180,000, and Anker says
it's growing at the astronomical
rate of 1,000 per day. Hotwired is aimed
at "digital savvies,"
who make up an even more exclusive
group than Wired readers because they
must have both the computer equipment
and know-how to navigate the World
Wide
Web.
With Hotwired, Rossetto is venturing
into sensitive territory. The wider
digital culture is one thing, but
the Net community is distinct. Based on
the free sharing of
information, the Internet for years
has been used by academics, scientists
and public-policy makers around
the world to exchange ideas, opinions and
research. Now
the commercialization of the Net
has begun and Rossetto -- one of the first
to profit in cyberspace -- knows
he must tread softly. And speak
profoundly.
This "connection of human minds,"
he says, represents the best hope for
regaining that old-fashioned American
sense of community that the mass
media has stolen
from America.
"With Hotwired, people can talk
back to us," he says. "And they can talk to
each other. People don't just passively
consume one too many episodes of
'The
Simpsons.' They connect to us to
connect to their friends, to connect to a
community, to be part of a mind-set
and a consciousness that transcends the
limits of the old
media. And in the process, they
start to begin to build a new society, a
new culture, a new way of thinking
about community."
One trick you aren't likely to perform
on Hotwired is to hypertext yourself
into a conversation with Jonathan
Steuer. A 29-year old Ph.D. from Stanford
in interface
design, Steuer was instrumental
in getting Hotwired off the ground but
clashed repeatedly with Rossetto
over what "virtual community" means. He
quit in January.
"I think Louis's claim that he has
any commitment to the idea of community
is a lie," he says.
On this particular day, Steuer is
wearing purple pants and socks and bright
blue shoes. His curly black hair
reaches his shoulders and long silver
earrings, with stars
on the end, dangle from his lobes.
He sits in a restaurant near his house
in the Mission District, where
he works on Cyborganic, a World Wide Web
site that he hopes
eventually will spawn real coffeehouses
where people can meet.
Steuer dismisses Rossetto as a Net
latecomer. The first issue of Wired
mentioned the Internet only once
-- and in a manner that drew some
snickering, even from
Rossetto's friends. Above Negroponte's
column, his E-mail address was
printed as "nicholas@internet,"
which would be like addressing a postcard
c/o Planet Earth.
Perhaps realizing his limitations,
Rossetto chose as Hotwired's executive
editor Howard Rheingold, author
of the best-selling book, "Virtual
Community." But like
Steuer, Rheingold wanted Hotwired
to be more about bringing people together
and less about selling Volvos.
"Hotwired is a business with a payroll,"
says Rheingold, who also quit.
"There's nothing wrong with that,
but don't pass it off as cultural
revolution."
Call Rossetto a Net outsider and
he gets agitated. "Hotwired is
acknowledged to be the best thing
out there," he fumes. As for Rheingold
and Steuer, Rossetto says
that last fall, 11 days before
going on line, they had burned through
$200,000 to $300,000 without setting
any firm deadlines or producing a
prototype. Rossetto
moved into the Hotwired office,
froze out the touchy-feely crowd and
elevated Anker, a hard-nosed investment
banker.
"To me, it's like the fascination
with CB radio," Rossetto says about
Steuer's and Rheingold's idea of
virtual community. "It is amazing, when
you first get into it, to
be able to just talk to whomever
you want to whenever you want to. But in
the long run, people actually want
something else out of media. The major
thing that's
going to be necessary in the future
is the ability to take the raw material
of the world and make sense of
it. Because you as a writer or me as an
editor can do a better job
of interpreting reality than they
could."
Um . . . doesn't that make this
supposedly empowering, many-to-many medium
an awful lot like the old, one-to-many
mass media?
"No," Rossetto insists, "the mass
media talks to everybody. It tries to be
abstract and discover a voice and
attitude that everybody can connect to. I
think Hotwired
focuses on a voice and attitude
that certain people will connect to. We
don't need to have an audience
of 100 million people. We're happy with an
audience of maybe a
million. But a million is a lot
different than 100 million."
How big Rossetto's audience will
ultimately get is anybody's guess. But
clearly he has ambitions to be
a major media player in the 21st century.
And no, he says, the
Digital Revolution doesn't mean
the end of paper: the printed page is still
the best medium for the sensuous
graphic art and the "highly intellectual
discussions" found
in Wired. In fact, Rossetto projects
that Wired will eventually reach
450,000 circulation, perhaps spawn
an entire series of books about the
Digital Revolution, new
magazines that might cover every
subject -- sports, business, arts -- that
will be radically transformed in
the new world.
But paper simply can't offer the
kind of exponential growth that the
Internet does. Hotwired is currently
free to subscribers, but Rossetto
acknowledges that could
change. As Quittner might say,
there's some "Way New Economics" at work. If
100 million people are on the Net
by the year 2000, the writer points out,
and just 1
percent are willing to pay three
cents each to read a story about O. J.
Simpson, that's $30,000 per story.
Think about it: Ten such stories
per day. Twenty! A hundred! Suddenly, the
temptations of the mass media are
creeping into this empowering new medium.
Everybody knows you can sell more
stories about O. J. than about a quest
for the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile.
"Pretty soon," Quittner says, "you're
talking about real
money."
"IT'S MY PLEASURE TO present to
you a man who is a visionary in many
regards . . . Louis Rossetto."
Wearing green-striped Adidases and
black jeans, Rossetto takes the podium,
having taken a one-day break from
TED6 to fly to San Diego and speak to a
national
association of college newspaper
editors. He gazes at the audience of
several dozen students, then pauses.
"I don't know how to respond to that
introduction."
Rossetto rarely accepts speaking
engagements and doesn't often stray
outside the digital world. This
"visionary" business makes him nervous,
too. He frequently
disavows any claim to being a leader
of the Digital Revolution -- which, by
its definition, is not supposed
to have one.
"Don't follow leaders, watch your
parking meters," he'd said on the flight
from San Jose, quoting Bob Dylan.
Rossetto also cringes at being portrayed
as a Hot Young Anything. He and
Metcalf are walking Gap ads, but
they turned down the chance to pose for
the company's
campaign.
"It's not why we started this thing,"
he explains. He wants Wired to be
taken seriously as an intellectual
publication -- not merely about life
style but about "mind
style." No doubt they're also worried
about wading too far into the
mainstream and having their faces
plastered all over the world by the
soon-to-be-extinct mass
media.
"The mass media look at this phenomenon
as a threat," Rossetto tells the
college students. "If you read
the front page of The New York Times, they
don't talk about
the emerging new economy; they
talk about some idiot hacker who has just
been caught."
Rossetto's thin body sways as he
sculptures ideas in the air with his
hands. He describes a utopian future
in which encryption tools make all our
financial transactions
private, thus ending the Government's
ability to collect taxes -- ending
the nation-state itself! Home will
become the locus of our lives. Families
and neighborhoods
will thrive again. As for poor
people -- the Information Have-Nots -- he
tells the college students not
to fret: anyone can buy a computer today for
$700 and connect to
a network for just $10 a month.
He quotes a Wired slogan: "To be
information rich today, you don't
need to be rich."
After the speech, a woman in a red
plaid skirt and green jacket, blond hair
pinned up with barrettes, nervously
hovers around Rossetto, who is
surrounded by three or
four students. As he finishes and
heads for the door, she approaches him.
"I listened to what you said,"
she says, "and I just had to say something."
She tells him she teaches at a community
college in Arizona and takes
exception to certain of his comments,
especially the part about the
American educational system
being "as backwards as it was a
hundred years ago."
Her face reddens. "I'm out there
trying real hard, trying to fight the good
fight," she says. "You can't just
say that nobody's doing anything."
After the woman leaves, a kid in
white shorts says to Rossetto: "You got
flamed."
It's a good thing she hadn't read
the piece in the first issue of Wired,
called "School's Out." Adapted
from a book of the same name by Lewis
Perelman, the article
calls education "the last great
bastion of socialist economics" and argues
that eliminating all American schools
would free up $450 billion, fueling
"a high-tech
commercial industry" that would
do a much better job teaching children
skills they'll need to be "knowledge
workers" in the new information
economy.
"She just took it personally," Rossetto
sighs, sitting in the lobby
afterward. He's waiting for the
limousine to pick him up. Demographic
tests, he says, show that the
person least likely to buy Wired
magazine is an American schoolteacher.
That's hardly surprising, he's told,
given that the magazine considers them
obsolete.
"I'm sure it's totally scary," he agrees, nodding.
Scary even for some people within
the digital elite. It seems the
intramural battle of the 60's counterculture
-- "do your own thing" versus
"get involved" -- are
happening all over again, except
the combatants are now graying at the
temples.
David Bunnell, a computer magazine
entrepreneur, knows the technology as
well as anyone but has a different
idea about what to do with its power.
Five years ago,
he put up $100,000 of his own money
to start "Computers and You," a
computer job-skills program in
the sleazy Tenderloin district of San
Francisco. It's a ragtag
collection of drug addicts, ex-convicts,
homeless people, midgets,
transvestites, blacks, Asians,
whites, Hispanics and others who live in
poverty. Until they can
locate the "enter" button on a
keyboard, they're no closer to the TED
conference than the young black
nanny who could be seen throughout the
weekend chasing a
white baby around the lobby.
"It's only white people," Bunnell
complains of the Wired world, "it's only
males and it's survival of the
fittest."
Come to think of it, certain comments
you hear while hanging around the
digerati do make them sound almost
like an entirely new race. "The people
reading Wired are
. . . an entirely new civilization
that is still in its infancy," Alvin
Toffler told Wired.
It's almost like an invasion from
another planet. "It is an invasion from
another planet," Kevin Kelly says.
"Just like the hippies were an invasion
from another planet.
I mean, where did they come from?"
The point is driven home by Rossetto
as he eagerly fast-forwards to the
future. "My sense about this is
that we're talking the beginnings of
exo-brains," he confides at
one point. "Brain appliances. And
exo-nervous systems, things that connect
us up beyond -- literally, physically
-- beyond our bodies, and we will
discover that when
enough of us get together this
way, we will have created a new life form.
It's evolutionary; it's what the
human mind was destined to do."
One nice aspect of an evolutionary
view of technology, of course, is that
it provides a biological explanation
for why some people -- like Bunnell's
motley crew of key
punchers -- might not join what
the digerati like to call their
"self-selecting elite." But there's
also a market imperative at work: these
people have no money. They can't
drive the Digital Revolution ahead.
So why should the digerati log off long
enough to truly empower them?
Back in the lobby, waiting for his
car, Rossetto says he gets three
speaking invitations a day. He
used to take them all, but now he almost
always says no.
Maybe he should get out more?
"What's my job?" he snaps. "I don't
know, I. . . . " His voice trails off.
He watches bellboys wrestle bags
across the hotel lobby. The spaced-out
look he'd worn
during the Wired editorial meeting
returns. The encounter with the teacher
seems to have unnerved him.
"I get a certain satisfaction out
of this kind of contact," he says, his
voice nearly inaudible. "But, in
the end, what I have the most leverage
doing is just what I do,
putting out a magazine."
Rossetto gets up, looks around.
Where's his driver? The present is such a
dreary place. He's anxious to get
back to Monterey in time for the show
tonight by Penn and
Teller -- back to the glorious
future, where the digerati live.
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Reserved.