Wired is a Mighty Morphin PowerBook. Despite the magazine's
insistence that it is still reassuringly Gutenbergian, printed on "non-
glossy, recycled papers" (Wired 1.5), the reader can't escape the
nagging suspicion that Wired is actually the shape-shifting android
from Terminator 2, disguised as a magazine. Like the liquid metal T-
1000, whose "mimetic polyalloy" enables it to morph into "anything
it samples by physical contact," Wired uses digital technology to
"vacuum up all references within the known history of mankind,"
according to creative director John Plunkett, who in collaboration
with his partner Barbara Kuhr designed the magazine.
Equal parts corporate annual report and cyberdelic migraine, Sharper
Image catalogue and The Medium is the Massage, Wired is the limit
case for postmodern technodazzle in graphic design, pushing the
eyestrain envelope to just this side of unreadability. (It falls to the
Gen X music magazine Ray Gun to shatter the legibility barrier into
postliterate fragments.) Plunkett and Kuhr's design is meant to
communicate the cowabunga fun of surfing the Third Wave, the
sped-up, off-center whirl of late 20th century culture.
Wired's logo and coverlines are printed in hot pink, orange, and
yellow fluorescent inks that simultaneously evoke neon nightlife and
the high-resolution color monitor. The four-page introductory spread
invites comparison to movie titles and cinematic montage: a quote
from one of the issue's contributors unfurls across Op Art
checkerboards, supersaturated color fields, and resonant images from
our collective memory (Walter Cronkite, happy shoppers, mushroom
clouds). Immediately after the contents pages comes "Electric Word,"
an eight-page barrage of news briefs and product reports whose
layout crosses the hard-edged geometry of Bauhaus design with the
stroboscopic editing and in-your-face camerawork of MTV: images
inset in colored squares and rectangles float over blocks of prose,
headlines chop articles in half, and a gossip column set in type so
small and light it can only be read with a jeweler's eyepiece slices
horizontally across the entire section. "Electric Word," says Plunkett,
is "where we've deliberately pushed as hard as we could against the
conventional linear presentation of information."
Most of the feature articles that follow are presented in a (relatively)
straightforward manner, with about one notable exception per issue:
Wired 1.1's notorious feature on the Otaku, which ran sideways,
with a sidebar running down the middle in a purple stripe; William
Gibson's cover story in 1.4, faintly visible through hazy swaths of
color and blown-up buzzwords; and, in the same issue, my interview
with Manuel De Landa and Mark Pauline, drastically abridged to
accommodate an eye-crossing spread laid out like a checkerboard,
with squares of prose hopscotching over photos.
(Conflict-of-interest disclaimer: the media bias police will see score-
settling in this last example; most will take it for what it is--a
subjective view of deconstruction in magazine design, seen from the
writer's perspective.)
Because Wired is an unabashed commodity fetish that delights in
the play of images across its glossy surface, it invites the throwaway
critique that it is nothing but surface. This mistake has been made
before, in the denunciation of cyberpunk SF as "literary MTV"
(George Slusser), the dead end of postmodernism's obsession with
texture and quotation. In Wired's case as in cyberpunk's, this
reductionist write-off is too easy. Langdon Winner, a penetrating
critic of technoculture, revealed an uncharacteristic blind spot when
he dismissed Wired as vapid technophilia, wrapped in seductive
packaging. "For those in the middle of a cyborgasm," he wrote, "there
is evidently little need to think."
Reading Winner, one senses an implied causality between Wired's
supposed vacuity and its "surrealistic images in Day-Glo colors" and
"jumbled mix of typefaces." There is a hint of puritan censoriousness
here, a deep-rooted distrust of flamboyant display and Dionysian
abandon that makes strange bedfellows of moralists on the left and
the right. (Winner's charge that cyberzines such as Wired are
"cyberpornography," "bombarding their readers with pure sensation
for sensation's sake," resonates sympathetically with conservative
calls for the exorcism of '60s libertinism and a return to family
values.)
On the contrary, I would argue that Wired, far from being depthless,
is dense with ideas. Indeed, it has become a bully pulpit for
corporate futurists, laissez-faire evangelists, and prophets of
privatization. In 1.5, the futurist Alvin Toffler bemoans the fact that
the shortsighted U.S. is air-dropping food rather than fax machines
and camcorders in the former Yugoslavia, and that Washington is
concerned with ho-hum Second Wave issues such as the decaying
urban infrastructure when it should be paving the Information
Superhighway. In. 1.4, George Gilder, an apostle of info-capitalism,
reweaves the threadbare myth that in the near future, when each of
us commands the googlebytes of a supercomputer, economic and
political power will be magically redistributed. (This cherished article
of cybercratic faith underwrites Newt Gingrich's so-called "Let Them
Eat Laptops" speculation that perhaps the government should
provide "the poorest Americans" with laptops--after it has
unburdened them of frivolous entitlements such as Aid to Families
with Dependent Children, presumably.) And in issue 1.3, Peter
Drucker, the Moses of management theory, reprises the corporate-
friendly refrain that since our post-industrial culture runs on
information, the blue-collar worker is obsolete--a joyful noise to
managerial ears in an age of outsourcing and downsizing, but bitter
music to former laborers, now consigned to the subsistence wage
purgatory of the service industry. No matter, though; Druckerian
history teaches us that "massive unemployment . . . became the
fertile ground in which Silicon Valley bloomed."
In the silicon social Darwinism ostensibly popular with the 33-year-
old, $81K-earning male who is Wired's typical reader, the
evolutionary race goes to the wunderkind "small player" enshrined
in computer industry myth (Bill Gates, the two Steves who founded
Apple); unskilled and de-skilled, the masses are stampeded in the
mad rush to the millennium. "Tofflerism-Gingrichism," asserts
Hendrik Herzberg in a recent New Yorker essay, is not unlike
Marxism-Leninism in its "worship of technology," its "know-it-all
certainty," its "scientism," its 'revolutionary' rapture." There is, he
notes, a "similar exhilaration that comes from being among the select
few to whom the mysteries and the meaning of history are
vouchsafed . . . a similar patronizing contempt for those who don't
'get it' and are therefore fated to be swept into the dustbin of
history."
It does not follow, however, that the party organ of Tofflerism-
Gingrichism recognizes a family resemblance on the Left. Wired
makes no pretense of ideological balance--Winner and other
left/liberal critics of smiley face free-market futurism get no airtime
in its pages--and its heady vision of a high-resolution, broad-
bandwidth future is dangerously myopic, blind to environmental
concerns, race relations, gender politics, and labor issues. But,
misbegotten though many of them may be, there's no dearth of ideas
in Wired.
Moreover, though it often drowns out textual meaning, Wired's visual
cacophony reverberates with meanings of its own. Not for nothing is
Marshall McLuhan listed as "Patron Saint" on the magazine's
masthead: referencing Hypertext, computer games, MTV, and virtual
reality, Wired's hyperactive design constantly reminds us that the
medium is the message. At the same time, it inverts McLuhan's
theory of "rear-view mirrorism," which states that the content of
each new medium is the medium it superseded (early movies
emulated stage plays, for example). By contrast, Wired's
"cyborgasmic" graphics are a computer simulation of things to come;
Plunkett and Kuhr wanted the magazine to look "as though it had
literally landed at your feet as a messenger from the future." But
there are ironic quotes within quotes, here. Wired is also always
telegraphing its own putative obsolescence by harking back to the
Gutenberg Galaxy; its square spine, coated cover, matte paper stock,
book size, and Waldbaum serif typeface--evocative, says Plunkett, of
"the Renaissance, the first full flowering of what printing presses
could do,"--all say Òbook." Through sleight of mind, the "messenger
from the future" wraps itself in the legitimating mantle of
Gutenbergian authority. Wired is a magazine simulating a book
simulating a computer screen.
But larger issues are reflected in the mirror finish of Wired's design.
Its aesthetic of overt manipulation--of "overdesign"--is the graphic
equivalent of the opening sentence in Gibson's Neuromancer, "The
sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead
channel." Abandon nature, all ye who enter here: both Gibson's world
and Wired's remind us that technology is transforming our
environment into a profoundly denatured, digitized--and,
increasingly, corporate--place. "Electric Word's" incredible shrinking
articles and ever-expanding images enact the much-talked-about
televisualization of print media--an especially alarming trend in the
U.S., where literacy rates are declining, growing numbers of cities are
one-newspaper towns, and two-thirds of the citizenry claim to get
"most of their information" from television. Simultaneously, the
deluge of information that overwhelms the Wired reader springs
from the received truth, in cyberculture, that we are the "Third
Wave people" imagined by Alvin Toffler, "at ease in the midst of [a]
bombardment of blips," accustomed to gulping "huge amounts of
information in short takes."
Ironically, Wired dramatizes the extent to which our notions of
rationality and critical thinking are still configured by the written
word. Metaphorically speaking, reading Wired causes "simulator
sickness"--the nausea experienced by cybernauts when perceived
movement, in a virtual reality, is not matched by a corresponding
disturbance in the vestibular system. Its articles require readers
even as its design yearns for inhabitants: Wired's a magazine that
went to sleep and dreamed it was SimWorld. In the terminal culture
modeled in its pages, the written word is vestigial--an evolutionary
remnant of print culture. As a millennial artifact, Wired impels us,
unavoidably, toward two questions of critical significance: Can
literary content be disembodied and reincarnated in a post-literary
form? More profoundly, will the centered, bounded self, which
McLuhan argues was a product of the book, liquefy into a
polymorphous perversity, like the T-1000? Reading Wired, we feel
our edges beginning to blur.
Mark Dery is a cultural critic, editor of Flame Wars: The Discourse of
Cyberculture, and author of the forthcoming Escape Velocity:
Cyberculture at the End of the Century. markdery@well.sf.ca.us.
© 1995 Educom.