When did you stop reading WIRED?

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I know, I know, you saw through the "cyber-geek, forward-looking, freethinking" pretense right from the start and saw it as the house journal of the "dress down Friday, global capitalism can be fun, continuation of business by any means" brigade. But humour me. Were you taken in by the early version of the Wired vision? When did you stop believing and what was it that changed your mind?

(For the record, it wasn't until Keith White's essay, "The Killer App: Wired Magazine, Voice of the Corporate "Revolution" in the Baffler collection, Commodify your Dissent that I opened my eyes. And I felt like a sucker for having being taken in so easily. That's my confession....)



-- Nicholas E. Grinder (eda@impolex.demon.co.uk), June 25, 2000

Answers

No, I was too naive to see through it right away. I was just getting into the digital workplace at the time and was frantic to understand the environment. I don't think Wired was complete crap to begin with; I think it got worse as they tried to be more corporate. I'm seeing the same slide with Fast Company now.

Just for fun, here's a link to a Wired Random Sentence Generator: http://reality.sgi.com/dawson_engr/phrases/wiredPhraser.cgi

Eden www.i-mite.com

-- Eden Sommerville (eden.sommerville@eva-tone.com), June 26, 2000.


When I first discovered it, I bought into the Wired 'feel' hook, line and sinker. I even subscribed to it for a year. Having just discovered the wonders of the internet and contemplating a computer science major, I thought it was just dandy.

After almost a year of Wired bliss, I took a class called "Images in Consumer Society." Our final project was to write a paper deconstructing a image or set of images used for commercial purposes... I chose to do Wired. Poring over every issue made me realize how fundamentally pro-business, materialist, anti-feminist, utopian, classist and deceptive the entire enterprise was (and still is). Besides that more serious stuff, it strikes me as pathetically humorous just how hard the magazine tries to peddle their glossy Wired-brand world. These days, I browse through a copy every now and again more for humor value than anything else.

-- kristin (kristin@unspoken.org), July 03, 2000.


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