Farewell
by Jon Katz
27 August 1998
In the brave new world of Web media, three years is a very long run.
Mine is over with this column, at least on HotWired.
When I first began writing in this space, it was as part of Netizen, meant to be the political arm of the digital revolution, a free-wheeling, high-spirited encounter with the 1996 presidential campaign. Since then, HotWired has been reborn more times than a circuit-riding preacher in the Bible Belt.
It was inevitable that sooner or later its executives would come up with a redesign that didn't fit comfortably with an oddball like me. The surprising thing is that it didn't happen sooner.
But you can't spin geeks, so there's no point in trying: The site is reinventing itself once again, focusing sharply and perhaps wisely on the news, art, and technologies of the Web, and a wide-ranging media/culture/geek column doesn't belong here anymore.
I have no complaints. This is an amicable parting, and I'm, more than anything else, grateful for the time I had here, the support I always felt. I've worked with one of the best editors I've ever had, and my fondest wish is to find another as honest, smart, and tough. "Let's leave on a high note," my boss Cate Corcoran told me, "while things still work. Before you get tired or ticked off, and the column suffers."
This is brilliant advice.
Besides, I have a couple of books to write and need to pay some attention to writing them.
I'm very conscious of my good fortune at having loved what I've done for three years; I move on loving it even more than when I started. To my demoralized friends and ex-colleagues from my pre-Web jobs, battered by takeovers, working for smarmy media moguls, drowning in bureaucracies, and creatively boxed-in by marketing campaigns, timid bosses, and the suffocating confines of probity, this is an amazing thing.
I really don't know anyone in media who has been given the freedom that I've had to spout off on a wide range of subjects. I profusely thank everyone responsible for giving it to me.
Writing on the Web has made me better every day I've done it. Turning on my computer is still a miracle to me, each morning's email yielding ever-richer daily gabfests with hackers in New Zealand, Oxford dons, a Missouri State Police detective, Argentinean geeks, not to mention gurus, pundits, professors, programmers and college kids from everywhere. Watching the evolution of my emailers in just a few years has been stunning. I hear regularly from people I rarely encountered when I started: blacks, young women, Europeans, grandmas. And the spectacular assortment of geeks, hackers, cypherpunks, flamers, and cybergurus has only proliferated.
They alternately praise, scold, challenge, provoke and befriend me. They have made me immeasurably smarter, humbler, and wiser. I can't overstate how grateful I am for their educational efforts, generosity, and friendship. I've also come to terms with my own geek heritage and made contact with fellow geeks all over the planet. I've come home.
I expect to find a new home on another Web site. I'm talking with a couple. Meanwhile, you can find my rants at Rolling Stone, where I'm a contributing editor. And a book called Running To The Mountain, partly inspired by a column I wrote here, perhaps of interest to some of you, will be published by Villard Books in March.
But HotWired will be tough to duplicate. I suspect I couldn't survive a large corporation, and many contemporary media editors prefer to dictate opinion rather than publish other people's. In three years, I've never been censored or even pressured. Nobody directed me to write anything or not to. I had the great joy of jeering at media moguls, poking the intense smarty-pants at Slate, and shooting BBs at Chairman Gates. "You have no idea how lucky you are," a friend once emailed me from one of the country's leading newspapers. "Nobody at any newspaper is that free." But I did know how lucky I was and knew it from the first.
The sad part for me is that leaving HotWired severs my last connection with anything that has "Wired" in the title. I loved being part of this weird revolution and can't help feeling sharp pangs at seeing the magazine I wrote for gobbled up by Condé Nast slickies, while HotWired sets off in hot pursuit of The Ultimate Marketing Plan for the Web. One of the fundamental laws is being played out all around me: Media are truly creative only when being born or dying.
But I'm not much interested in looking back. Everything has its time, and in modern media, that time tends to be short.
Here on HotWired, I started out writing about politics and media, and then turned increasingly to the burgeoning anthropology of the Web, to the many issues swirling around, influencing, and being influenced by technology.
If the quality of my work was sometimes uneven, my determination to rant was unwavering. I ranted from the hospital where my daughter was undergoing spinal surgery, from an art gallery in Provincetown, a Starbucks in Los Angeles. I ranted from the woods in upstate New York - where I bought a decaying cabin - while well diggers pounded the ground outside my window, from an airplane over Nevada, from Tommorrowland in Orlando.
And of course, I ranted from my still-famous basement in New Jersey - reviled by Slate, where an essay branded me the bunkered spiritual leader of digital porn-degenerates and violent-film buffs and likened me to the Unabomber. I've never been so proud.
Emailers still solicitously ask me how my basement is doing, as if it were a member of my family.
I acknowledge plenty of dumb columns, missteps, and mistakes. We never became a political voice of a new culture. The old one still reigns, as Monica Lewinsky makes clear. We never figured out how to have civil, coherent discussions in open forums like Threads. There were plenty of memorable brawls - over whether or not to boycott Wal-Mart, for example, whether Tupac Shakur was really a good writer, whether the issue was really sex or obstruction of justice.
Often strident and defensive, I learned - painfully and gradually - how to listen. And lots of people took the trouble to listen to me. That's the true journalistic revolution and promise of the Web.
My proudest achievement: I've answered every piece of personal email I've received. I believe interactivity works. I believe it's the potential moral salvation of media.
So, thanks for reading, emailing, squabbling, correcting, suggesting, and discussing all these ideas with me over the past three years. I've had innumerable incarnations in my media life - reporter, editor, producer, author. You haven't heard the last of me, and I hope I haven't heard the last from you.
I will still be jonkatz@bellatlantic.net.
Say your own farewell to Katz.
