Wired: Review of the Premier Issue
Collaborative review by Supervert and Swensonia (aka Necro Enema Amalgamated) of the premier issue of Wired magazine. Originally published in Artforum Magazine (Summer 1993).
Is this what cyberpunks would look like if they took off their mirrorshades? Would they have four eyes like Bruce Sterling on the cover of Wired? The polyocular gaze of the cyberpunk author and electronic freedom fighter affixes us with an intensity unmatched except perhaps by the Marquise Casati in Man Ray's famous photograph. However, this is not a surreal image. It is not concerned with dreams, magnetism, or other psychic weirdnesses, but with a vision of consensus reality accelerated by technology. The correct prefix is not "sur" but "hyper" or maybe "cyber." "Bruce Sterling Has Seen the Future of War," a headline proclaims. The premiere issue of Wired promises to tell us whether we're really building a better tomorrow. But does it deliver?
"There are a lot of magazines about technology," declares Louis Rossetto in an opening editorial that reads like a Pepsi commercial on the Discovery channel. "Wired is not one of them. Wired is about the most powerful people on the planet today — the Digital Generation." Apparently, the Digital Generation is a little more grown-up than the readers of Mondo 2000, hitherto the vox cyberpopuli. There are no glossy spreads on rock stars or exhortations to snort vasopressin in the pages of Wired. It comports itself much more seriously — though it has a tendency toward a gushing enthusiasm that sometimes starts to sound silly, as in a sort of "what's hot, what's not" list (e.g. Tired: Cindy Crawford, Chaos Theory, Beaudrillard [sic]; Wired: Jane March, Complexity Theory, McLuhan).
Wired is at its best when the hype clears and good, solid information is left standing in its wake. The various news departments are excellent (did you know that, in Germany, Philip Morris packs buxom babes off to bars with PowerBooks featuring interactive cigarette advertisements? Or that the first Fiber Distributed Data Interface will be installed on commercial airliners in 1995, thus allowing travelers to watch pay-per-view movies, play videogames, or transmit faxes at their seats?). Though there are a few "tired" articles about things even the New York Times has already covered (morphing, the sexual potential of cyberspace, etc.), by and large there is much to admire in Wired. Sterling's superb article on the military uses of virtual reality should help to bring VR's inflated rhetoric down to earth. Richard L. Fricker's investigation of the Inslaw affair (in which the Department of Justice allegedly brought about "the willful destruction of a company, the plundering of its software, the illegal resale of that software to further foreign policy objectives, and the overt obstruction of justice") sets the head spinning. Karl Taro Greenfeld's profile of "The Incredibly Strange Mutant Creatures who Rule the Universe of Alienated Japanese Zombie Computer Nerds" or Otaku, for short, is funny, except that it depicts a bunch of creepily alienated Asian youths who say things like: "I guess I'm frightened of sex... I don't know if it's fear so much as a matter of getting along with objects better than people. If it were possible to have sex with objects, then that would be a different matter."
Marshall McLuhan crops up frequently in Wired and is listed in the masthead as its "Patron Saint." The entire magazine does indeed have a McLuhanesque feel, whether in the typographical design or its intellectual commitment to assessing electronic technology's impact on society. "Intrigued" by her "intellectual resemblance" to McLuhan, Wired even sought out Camille Paglia for an interview, wherein she treats us to a self-analysis of her gray matter: "There's no way my brain is like [Susan Sontag's] brain... I mean, half my brain is the traditional Apollonian logo-centric side which was trained by the rigorous public schools of that period, but the other half is completely an electrified brain." Paglia is far too tiresome to be bothered with, but we are perplexed by a subtle syllogism: If McLuhan is its departed patron saint, and if Paglia is a latter-day McLuhan, then is Paglia the magazine’s living patron saint?
Whether or no, Paglia’s appearance in the premier issue lights up a problem with Wired — the same problem one senses in Clinton/Gore having used "Don't Stop Thinkin' about Tomorrow" as their campaign standard. Though it's full of cheery optimism, this not not just a "tired" song but literally an old one: it promises a future, but you actually turn away from the future in the very act of letting the tune out of your lips. Likewise does Paglia claim to be shockingly progressive while nevertheless spouting those same old tired names from the Sixties: in this interview, she cites McLuhan, Norman O.Brown, Leslie Fiedler, and Allen Ginsberg. McLuhan himself used to say that we march backwards into the future, and our only hope is that Wired understands their patron saint's words as a diagnosis, not a destiny.
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