There is a game tacked outside the mail room of Wired News that, at first glance, bears a striking resemblance to Gary Wolf's new book on the torrid history of Wired magazine and its founders.
Invented at an indeterminate point in the mid-to-late 1990s, the game, New Media Party Bingo, required attendees of the dot-com soirees that were once ubiquitous in the San Francisco Bay Area to identify certain stereotyped characters. Categories include a wealthy person younger than the player, a person who would post an account of the party online and Nicholas Negroponte, founding chairman of the MIT Media Lab. To win at Bingo, a player had to line up five categories in a row (or four if they use the free space).
Wolf's book, Wired: A Romance, to be released July 8, is in many ways a sort of literary equivalent of New Media Party Bingo, complete with uncomfortably aging visionaries, confused suits (two other bingo categories) and even a cameo by Negroponte himself.
Despite being a rather late entrant to the already overcrowded how-I-survived-the-great-Internet-bubble genre, Wolf's book is a pretty good read. Modeled loosely in the style of a romance tale, it tells the story of Wired founder Louis Rossetto and the seduction of technologies that would ultimately spawn a digital revolution.
While the reader is unlikely to take away any useful insights on how to run a successful media empire, Wolf's wry take on the life and times of Rossetto, the book's central character, has plenty of intriguing insider observations. As a former executive editor of HotWired, the former digital media arm of Wired magazine, Wolf has the advantage of having been close to his sources.
Wolf succeeds in generating a certain interest around Rossetto, who is cast as a libertarian techno-visionary with a stubborn streak that would make a mule envious. In its first chapters, the book tracks the furious efforts by Rossetto and his companion, Jane Metcalfe, to find backers for a publication chronicling the movers and shakers of the digital world.
This is no fluffy profile. Wolf's descriptions of Rossetto's evolving roles, from penniless globetrotter to cash-strapped magazine publisher to media empire overlord, are often downright insulting. They become more so as the book progresses, particularly in an excerpt following Rossetto's delivery of a motivational speech on the global mission of Wired.
"Louis, at first derided among his professional acquaintances as an oddball, then stigmatized by various onetime helpers and hangers-on as ungrateful, was, with his growing celebrity, reviled among a much larger circle as an arrogant extremist whose radical politics and extravagant claims were simply publicity stunts for a growing business," Wolf writes. "Louis was no longer merely resented by ex-friends. He was now hated by complete strangers."
So much for flattery.
Still, the tale starts out innocuously enough in the days before Wired. Rossetto makes his entrance as the ex-editor of a failed magazine on electronic publishing and a global wanderer with a knack for finding himself in the most conflicted and chaotic locales. He meets his mate and Wired co-founder, Jane Metcalfe, through a publishing job in Paris.
The book traces the pair's trajectory from Paris to Amsterdam to New York to San Francisco. It then chronicles their desperate struggle to raise funds (which is where the aforementioned Negroponte steps in with a cameo as an early investor) and the launch of a magazine that became an instant counterculture hit.
Laced into the basic plot line are details that provide a feel for the kind of trendy grunge capitalism that permeated the San Francisco new media scene in the 1990s. There is prodigious pot smoking and copious bar crawling, spliced with investment bankers offering visions of initial stock offerings promising countless riches for a money-losing media startup. Throughout it all, people worked in converted industrial buildings on desks made out of doors.
Among Wolf's fortes as a chronicler are his ties to other ex-employees high and low on the Wired totem pole, who contribute to the narrative development. Among the cast are Carl Steadman, the insomniac programmer and co-creator of the satire column Suck.com; Howard Rheingold, the pot-smoking other former HotWired executive editor who compared the Net to a "global jam session"; and Andrew Anker, the investment banker turned Wired executive who once outlined the process financiers use to determine the distribution of proceeds from a sale:
"The people at the table grab as much as they can." End of lesson.
The book doesn't quite live up to the publisher's promotional blurb, which calls it "the one Internet bubble story that you haven't heard yet – the story of the man who invented it."
Although Rossetto is cast as an unabashed booster for the promise of digital technology, he's no tycoon. Throughout the book, it's other companies, like Yahoo, Amazon and eBay, that generate multibillion-dollar stock valuations. The Wired attempt at a measly half-billion-dollar IPO, meanwhile, was a flop.
That said, the book is true to its promise of a romance-style ending. Rossetto doesn't join the ranks of Internet billionaires, but does walk away with a tidy pile of millions, as Wired magazine and the digital properties spun off from it are sold to wealthy buyers.
Much of what was created during the time span covered in Wolf's novel survives today, albeit under a more Byzantine corporate structure. Wired News, HotBot and other properties spawned by HotWired are owned by the Spanish Internet firm Terra Lycos. Wired magazine, located a block away, is owned by the magazine publisher Conde Nast.
Wired News, true to its roots, still uses desks made from doors and operates out of a converted warehouse loft in San Francisco. No one mentioned in the book, however, actually works here now.
