On the cover of WIRED's eighth issue, the Pillsbury Doughboy stands against a wall, flanked by two men wearing neckties. All are blindfolded, stricken with terror. Together they face a firing squad of mismatched TV remotes. The cover line reads: “Is Advertising Finally Dead?”
By all appearances, the cover promised yet another gleeful epitaph for the declining institutions of the analog age. In just over a year, WIRED had already predicted the imminent demise of public education and The New York Times. Michael Crichton proclaimed in the fourth issue that “it is likely that what we now understand as the mass media will be gone within 10 years. Vanished, without a trace.” Advertising, it seemed, was the next industry marked for obsolescence.
But the cover story itself—an essay by MIT Media Lab fellow Michael Schrage—was not, in fact, an epitaph at all. Instead, the article imagines how advertisers will adapt to, and eventually come to dominate, digital media. Read with the benefit of hindsight today, the piece has an almost Cassandra-like quality, foretelling a future both unpleasant and unavoidable—a future that feels a bit too much like now. It may be the most eerily prescient story that WIRED published in its early years.
How do I know? This past summer, I pulled up a chair—for a time at the Library of Congress—and read every issue of the magazine’s print edition, chronologically and cover to cover. My aim was to engage in a particular kind of time travel. Back when founding editor Louis Rossetto was recruiting the first members of the WIRED team in the early 1990s, he said he was “trying to make a magazine that feels as if it has been mailed back from the future.” I was looking to use WIRED’s back catalog to construct a history of the future—as it was foretold, month after month, in the magazine’s pages.
In part, the fun was in recognizing what WIRED saw coming—the flashes of uncanny foresight buried in old print. Back in the mid-’90s, a time when most Americans hadn’t even sent an email, the magazine was already deep into speculation about a world where everyone had a networked computer in their pocket. In 2003, when phones with cameras were just a novelty in the US (but popular in Asia), Xeni Jardin was predicting a “phonecam revolution” that would one day capture images of police brutality on the fly. Just as interesting were the things WIRED saw coming that never did. The November 1999 cover story held up a company called DigiScent, which hoped to launch the next web revolution by sending smells through the internet. (“Reekers, instead of speakers.”)
But more than just scoring hits and misses, I was interested in identifying those visions of the future that remained always on the horizon, the things that WIRED—and, by extension, the broader culture—kept predicting but which remained always just out of reach. Again and again, the magazine held that the digital revolution would sweep away a host of old social institutions, draining them of their power as it rendered them obsolete. In their place, WIRED repeatedly proclaimed, the revolution would bring an era of transformative abundance and prosperity, its foothold in the future secured by the irresistible dynamics of bandwidth, processing power, and the free market.
At the same time, an animating tension has always run through the magazine, one that stretches all the way back to Schrage’s 1994 essay. The cover loudly suggests the death of the analog order; the text anticipates how the old order will adapt, graft itself onto the digital revolution, and alter its trajectory. Cutting against the magazine’s exuberance—but also propelled along by it—is a heretical strain of gimlet-eyed, anxious ambivalence about who will pay for the future. It’s this tension that has produced some of WIRED’s moments of greatest foresight.
WIRED's first issue appeared four years after the Berlin Wall fell and two years after the Soviet Union dissolved. The Cold War was over, but WIRED insisted that this would be anything but a period of calm. Networked computers would forge a new world culture and ensure mass prosperity—in a series of dramatic overthrows. The inaugural issue opened with a manifesto: “The Digital Revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon—while the mainstream media is still groping for the snooze button.” Technology promised to unleash “social changes so profound their only parallel is probably the discovery of fire.” That WIRED was rooting for these changes was never in doubt. The magazine’s trademark move throughout the ’90s was to shout, “Brace yourself!” while also promising, with a wild grin, that beyond this patch of turbulence is a better world.
Everything was up for transformation. A 1994 profile of the Electronic Frontier Foundation asked, “How hard could it be to hack government?” In 1997, Jon Katz argued that we were witnessing the “primordial stirrings of a new kind of nation—the Digital Nation—and the formation of a new postpolitical philosophy.” The old left-right politics of American democracy were sure to subside in the face of this new digital polity. “The Digital Nation points the way toward a more rational, less dogmatic approach to politics. The world’s information is being liberated, and so, as a consequence, are we.”
The notion that the future of politics might, with the internet, become less rational and more dogmatic was scarcely explored. Yet somehow, WIRED’s optimism didn’t come across as saccharine, but as swaggering. For the June 1995 issue, then-executive editor Kevin Kelly sat down with Kirkpatrick Sale, a self-described “neo-Luddite,” for a tart, extended ideological showdown on the subject of the technological future. Near the end of the Q&A, Sale predicted that industrial civilization would, in the next couple of decades, suffer economic collapse, class warfare, and widespread environmental disaster. In response, Kelly pulled out his checkbook. “I bet you US$1,000 that in the year 2020, we’re not even close to the kind of disaster you describe,” Kelly said. “I’ll bet on my optimism.”
The magazine’s July 1997 cover story announced “The Long Boom: A History of the Future 1980–2020.” On the cover, a smiling globe holds a flower in its mouth, next to the words: “We’re facing 25 years of prosperity, freedom, and a better environment for the whole world. You got a problem with that?”
By the following year, WIRED wasn’t just betting on technological optimism—it was giving readers tips on how to bet on it themselves, with their own money. The magazine launched the “WIRED Index,” a portfolio of companies at the heart of the so-called New Economy, “a broad range of enterprises that are using technology, networks, and information to reshape the world.” It would increase by 81 percent over the course of the next 12 months, outpacing every other broad-based financial index.
And yet, beneath the boisterous optimism that marked WIRED’s covers and its biggest proclamations, the magazine also trafficked occasionally in dark, deadpan warnings. Back in February 1994, the writer R.U. Sirius mused about the coarse dynamics that had already begun to present themselves in an online world where anyone can be a publisher. “As more and more people get a voice, a voice needs a special stridency to be heard above the din,” he wrote. “On the street, people tolerate diversity because they have to—you’ll get from here to there if you don’t get in anybody’s face. But the new media environment is always urging you to mock up an instant opinion about The Other … You can be part of the biggest mob in history. Atavistic fun, guys. Pile on!” In January 1997, Tom Dowe wrote an essay warning about, well, fake news: “The Net is opening up new terrain in our collective consciousness, between old-fashioned ‘news’ and what used to be called the grapevine—rumor, gossip, word of mouth. Call it paranews—information that looks and sounds like news, that might even be news. Or a carelessly crafted half-truth.”
Schrage’s 1994 essay on advertising was less dystopian, but it certainly wasn’t boisterous. “To appreciate tomorrow’s multimedia networks, don’t look to the Bob Metcalfes, Ted Nelsons, and Vint Cerfs for ideas and inspiration. Those techno-wonks won’t set the agenda,” he wrote. “The economics of advertising, promotion, and sponsorship—more than the technologies of teraflops, bandwidth, and GUI—will shape the virtual realities we may soon inhabit.” The article imagined a world where smartphones (well, PDAs) were ubiquitous and pulsing with ad-driven content. “No doubt, many PDA digimercials will prove to be the annoying equivalent of junk mail and those idiotic automated telemarketing calls. But so what … there’ll be a nice market in software that screens out the junk and highlights what PDA owners want.” Between those lines, you can catch an early, primordial glimmer of the basic idea behind AdSense and Facebook—a future that is at least more complicated than it is obviously liberating.
But in WIRED, exuberance was almost always given the final word. In September 1999, the magazine published an essay by Kevin Kelly that squarely acknowledged widespread public fears of an impending stock market crash—and smiled in the face of incipient panic. The tech boom, he insisted, would not end. “Picture 20 more years of full employment, continued stock-market highs, and improving living standards. Two more decades of inventions as disruptive as cell phones, mammal cloning, and the Web. Twenty more years of Quake, index funds, and help-wanted signs. Prosperity not just for CEOs, but for ex-pipe-fitters, nursing students, and social workers as well.”
Six months later, the dotcom bubble began to burst.
For a while, even WIRED sobered up. The April 2000 cover story was a brooding essay by Sun Microsystems cofounder Bill Joy, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.” It envisioned a world where artificial intelligence and automation might mark humanity itself for obsolescence.
The June 2001 update to the WIRED Index opened, “OUCH.” Not long thereafter, Kevin Kelleher wrote an essay titled “Death of the New Economy, RIP.” “In the end,” he wrote, “what really bruised the notion of a new economy is the figment that, by definition, it was going to make the world better. The real new economy is merely agnostic: If business cycles are shorter, they are also sharper and more painful on the way down.” When the September 11 attacks happened, it shook the magazine’s punchy faith in a networked world even further.
But by 2003, the digital revolution had turned exciting again. The spread of Wi-Fi and the growth of the open source movement kindled a thousand speculative business ideas. “Software is just the beginning,” WIRED declared in November 2003. “Open source is doing for mass innovation what the assembly line did for mass production. Get ready for the era when collaboration replaces the corporation.”
Chris Anderson, who had become WIRED’s editor in chief in 2001, articulated the new optimism of the Web 2.0 era in a series of iconic articles. In “The Long Tail” (October 2004) and “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business” (March 2008), he argued that the new reality of infinite, too-cheap-to-meter digital storage would fundamentally change the entire economy. The internet would radically increase the scope and reach of niche entertainment markets, he wrote in “The Long Tail.” Books, music, movies, and television would transcend the limited selection space imposed by the physical inventory of bookstores and record stores. “Free” offered the more radical argument that the new digital economy was fundamentally organized around the economics of abundance rather than scarcity. In this era, the dominant business models would revolve around services that were, in one way or another, free.
At the peak of the Web 2.0 era, in June 2008, WIRED celebrated its 15th anniversary. Founding editor Louis Rossetto returned with a reflection on what early WIRED had gotten right and wrong. He admitted that predictions of media’s demise had been premature. “Governments,” he added, “are still here, presumptuous and bossy as ever.” But the Long Boom was a big call that he confidently declared they had gotten right. “The boom began with the introduction of the personal computer, and it will continue until at least 2020,” he wrote. “There’s a lot of noise in the media about how the world is going to hell. Remember, the truth is out there, and it’s not necessarily what the politicians, priests, or pundits are telling you.”
The Wall Street collapse began three months later. It would seem that invoking the Long Boom in WIRED is a bit like saying “Macbeth” in a theater. It is best not to tempt the fates.
William Gibson is said to have remarked that “the future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.” Paging through the first 25 years of WIRED, what’s most striking is that the future never becomes evenly distributed. Sure, everyone gets on Facebook and uses Google, but the dinosaurs never die outright, and the new age of abundance never quite gains its inviolable foothold. The future just keeps arriving, mutating, bowing to the fickle pressures of advertising markets and quarterly earnings reports.
In 2009, Demand Media was the future of news. This future seemed inevitable, if not particularly desirable. Demand Media was one of the largest content farms on the web, publishing 4,000 videos and articles per day through sites like eHow and Cracked.com. What content did it farm? Whatever its algorithm told it to. As Daniel Roth reported in November 2009 for WIRED, Demand Media tracked what people were searching for on the internet, what search terms advertisers were paying for, and which subjects competing online outlets were publishing about. Once the algorithm selected a topic, articles and video were assigned to an army of freelancers, who were paid rock-bottom rates ($15 for an article, $1 for fact-checking, 25 to 50 cents for video quality control). As The New York Times seemed to teeter on the brink, Demand was reaping huge profits from digital ads. The future of media, WIRED said, was “fast, disposable, and profitable as hell.”
The videos and how-tos that Demand Media’s freelancer network put together were predictably shoddy. But that didn’t matter. The company didn’t need to provide good answers to your Google search; it just had to provide relevant answers that placed well in search rankings. When the company went public in January 2011, it was valued at $1.5 billion—reportedly worth more than The New York Times! But its status as the future of media would be short-lived. Soon after the initial public offering, Google announced a change to its search algorithm specifically meant to downgrade content farms. Demand Media’s business model would never recover. Within a few years, the original executive team quietly left. The company sold some of its big domains and rebranded as Leaf Group in 2016. Demand’s brief moment in the zeitgeist proves Schrage’s point—that “the future of media is the future of advertising.” But in Demand Media’s case, the future of advertising was subject to the whims of Google’s engineering team.
In retrospect, the larger lesson from Demand Media’s brief reign concerns fragility. In the rush to identify the next industry that will be disrupted by the digital revolution, we underrate how fragile the business models of the disruptors themselves tend to be. They usually have as much to fear as their old and lumbering counterparts.
Consider: Napster didn’t kill the music business; the courts killed Napster. Then a dozen Napster-like flowers bloomed in its place. But they were a mess, and they had little money to invest in improvements. Then iTunes, Rhapsody, and (later) Spotify built business models that included a (reduced, different) role for record labels. Nothing ever quite seems to fulfill its imagined revolutionary potential, and nothing ever quite seems to die. The New York Times is still alive (and—contra Anderson—doesn’t cost $0.00 online anymore either, having instituted a paywall along with numerous other publications, including WIRED). Webzines, the blogosphere, and Demand Media were all supposed to kill the news business. Each proved at least as fragile as the industry it was disrupting, a leaf on the changing winds of digital advertising markets. Yesterday’s imagined futures just keep accruing, providing sedimentary layers that today’s future can be built atop.
Looking back at WIRED’s early visions of the digital future, the mistake that seems most glaring is the magazine’s confidence that technology and the economics of abundance would erase social and economic inequality. Both Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 imagined a future that upended traditional economics. We were all going to be millionaires, all going to be creators, all going to be collaborators. But the bright future of abundance has, time and again, been waylaid by the present realities of earnings reports, venture investments, and shareholder capitalism. On its way to the many, the new wealth has consistently been diverted up to the few.
In 2010, Clive Thompson wrote about the potential of “peer-to-peer renting.” A French company called Zilok was allowing people to “post possessions they’re willing to rent out, along with a price,” he wrote. “Want to use someone’s car for the day? That’s $60, cheaper than most auto-rental agencies.” These were the innocent, early days of the sharing economy. “We’re seeing a new relationship to property where access trumps ownership,” Thompson wrote. “We’re using bits to help us share atoms.”
When Uber and Airbnb first arrived, they wore the halo of this broad sharing phenomenon. In July 2012, Alexia Tsotsis penned a glowing early profile of Uber in WIRED. “If this new model of resource maximization succeeds, it won’t just put extra money in the pockets of everyday people,” she wrote. “It will also change the way we think about work and consumption, with every purchase becoming a potential investment, every idle hour a potential paycheck.”
These early views of the sharing economy were accurate depictions of the moment, but poor visions of the future. Within a few short years, many of those Uber drivers would be stuck paying off their cars in sub-minimum-wage jobs with no benefits. What began as an earnest insight about bits and atoms quickly turned into an arbitrage opportunity for venture capitalists eager to undercut large, lucrative markets by skirting regulations. To meet the growth and monetization demands of investors, yesterday’s sharing economy became today’s gig economy.
By now, the digital revolution isn’t just the future; it has a history. Digital technology runs our economy. It organizes our daily lives. It mediates how we learn information, tell each other stories, and connect with our neighbors. It’s how we control and harass and encourage one another. It’s a tool of both surveillance and resistance. You can almost never be entirely offline anymore. The internet is setting the agenda for the world around us.
The digital revolution’s track record suggests that its arc doesn’t always bend toward abundance—or in a straight line at all. It flits about, responding to the gravitational forces of hype bubbles and monopoly power, warped by the resilience of old institutions and the fragility of new ones. Today’s WIRED seems to have learned these lessons.
Perhaps because of all that accrued history, the digital present affords less room for open-ended, boisterous optimism. Back in 1995, when Kevin Kelly made his $1,000 bet with Kirkpatrick Sale that in 2020 we wouldn’t even be close to economic collapse, class warfare, or widespread environmental disaster, the pages of WIRED told a story that supported his confidence. Judging from WIRED’s recent reporting—about the climate, discourse on social media, and international relations—the bet has, at the very least, gotten a lot more interesting. (“He is obviously losing,” Kelly says of Sale. “We should find him to make sure his check is still good.”)
Old WIRED said the swaggering, optimistic stuff out loud and muttered its critical, dystopian remarks in wry stage whispers. New WIRED has almost reversed that formula. The first issue began by describing a typhoon no one else could see. Today, everyone sees it, and the magazine reports on the effects and movements of the storm. It still voices plenty of enthusiasm around the edges. But WIRED is no longer simply cheering the imminent arrival of the future. It seems to recognize that behind this patch of turbulence is probably another one.
Enjoy the ride.
David Karpf (@davekarpf) is an associate professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at the George Washington University.
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