Wired: A Romance by Gary Wolf

From the Publisher

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test for our own age, the story of a dreamer who turned American media upside down—and suffered the consequences

Louis Rossetto had no money, no home, no job. Five years later he owned the hottest magazine in America and was poised to become an international tycoon, with America’s most powerful financiers by his side.

Rossetto was the founder and editor of Wired, whose hyperactive Day-Glo pages proclaimed that every American institution was obsolete. Instantly, Wired, was everywhere—on television, passed around the halls of Congress, displayed in the office of the president of the United States. Wired,’s headquarters in San Francisco became a pilgrimage site for everybody who wanted to be at the white-hot center of the digital revolution. Not since the early days of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone had anybody so brilliantly channeled the enthusiasms of his era.

But this was only the beginning. Wired cast an uncanny spell, creating a feedback loop that grew stunningly out of control. Wired,’s online site, HotWired, designed and sold the first banner advertisements for the World Wide Web, unleashing a commercial frenzy. Wired, reached for empire, with a book-publishing company, a broadcast division, and foreign editions all over the globe. But as the market’s enthusiasm outstripped the limits of reason, Rossetto faced a battle over the fate of Wired that would prove the ultimate test of his radical ideas.

Gary Wolf, one of Wired,’s most popular writers, takes no prisoners in this insider’s account, telling a story that is alternately thrilling,hilarious, heartbreaking, and absurd. Now that bumper stickers read-ing please god–just one more bubble have been sighted on the highways of California, Wired—A Romance goes beyond the dot.com clichés and paints a deeply affecting portrait of the boom.

The New York Times

Wired: A Romance is less a love story than a theological autopsy of a religion that flourished and went away in less than a decade. Things happened quickly for Wired -- remember ''Internet time''? At its height in the mid-90's, Wired could be found in the lobbies of venture capitalists, on the light tables of designers, underneath the coffee cups of computer geeks and in the middle of the only conversation that seemed to matter. It was, briefly, the coolest magazine on the planet. — David Carr

The Los Angeles Times

If your memory of the last decade is a pixelated blur of dot-com schemes spawning countless millionaires, then revisiting the rise of the digital era through its most celebrated publication should bring events sharply back into perspective. In Wired: A Romance, Gary Wolf offers a studied rather than sensational journey through the detritus of the '90s techno explosion, the magazine's pivotal role in it and its maverick cast of characters. — Jackie Bennion

The Washington Post

Wolf writes about Wired with such grace and high spirits that I find it hard to imagine any fair-minded reader coming away unpersuaded that in its heyday the magazine -- a visionary monthly that promoted digital technology not merely as a technical marvel but as a genuine social, political and even spiritual revolution -- was a vastly important publishing phenomenon. — Tim Cavanaugh

Publishers Weekly

As a staffer at Wired, the magazine that started and fueled Internet economy hype, Wolf watched the rise and fall of an era from his desk. And he took notes. His story, however, doesn't rise above the slew of boom-and-bust books; despite a few colorful details, much of it involves dull talk of stock options, money and control. Wolf follows Wired's founders, Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalf, from their beginnings publishing European trade magazines to launching a wildly successful, influential magazine. The pair left Europe for San Francisco in the early 1990s to create "the mouthpiece of the digital revolution." Like most new businesses, Wired was launched with its founders' (here, especially Rossetto's) force-of-will, financial bootstrapping and an overwhelming sense of mission. In the early days, employees had to buy their own pens. "[Rossetto] was not just being frugal," Wolf writes. "The pens-or rather the absence of pens-had a meaning: hold on to your independence; do not get lazy; do not lose your identity; do not merge with the group." Indeed, Wired created a unique corporate culture, in which management brought employees to the hills north of San Francisco for a bit of media strategizing and pot smoking, and IPOs were printed in neon colors instead of the standard b&w format. Although not a tell-all, Wolf's story provides some gossipy tales of backstabbing, bruised egos, multimillion-dollar deals and steamy affairs. But as a romance, the story is bittersweet. Overspending and personality conflicts eventually forced the sale of Wired, albeit for a tidy profit. Like so many similar tales, what started as an attempt to change the world became an unseemly struggle for money and control. (On sale July 8) Forecast: Wolf's book, which would have made a great piece in San Francisco magazine but drags at book length, will be of interest only to those with ties to Wired. For general readers, the dot-com story may be over. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Wolf, coauthor of Dumb Money and a contributor to Wired and other magazines, here chronicles the life of Wired founder Louis Rossetto, as well as his times, which happened to be the stock market "bubble years" of the 1990s. According to the author, "The story had, if no sole author, at least a preeminent champion. His name was Louis Rossetto and his platform was Wired." Wolf introduces us to the intriguing Rossetto and his partner (in business and personal life), Jane Metcalfe, who met in Europe in the 1980s and eventually returned to the United States to start Wired. The magazine's story is told against the backdrop of the Nineties bubble and its collapse in 2000. The market's rises, corrections, and fall directly affected operations at Wired, and readers are given an inside look at the magazine's headquarters. This is a readable and fascinating account of Rossetto and Metcalfe, their influential magazine, and the volatile times to which they belonged. Highly recommended for both public and academic libraries.-Lucy Heckman, St. John's Univ. Lib., Jamaica, NY Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Unconventional business saga about the founding of Wired magazine and its related online empire. Journalist Wolf, himself a Wired contributor, opens the story in 1985 with its dominant character, 35-year-old Louis Rossetto, living in Amsterdam and dreaming about starting a magazine that would capture not only the promise of online technology, but also the accompanying lifestyle. In Paris, Rossetto met Jane Metcalfe, another youngish American expatriate, who became part of his personal life and eventually his business partner. By the end of the ’80s, Rossetto and Metcalfe had worn out their welcome in Europe with both employers and social acquaintances; they decided to return to the US, hoping to raise money for a new magazine. The author devotes the first five chapters to the rootless wanderings of the oddly magnetic, ethereal Rossetto and the somewhat more realistic Metcalfe, chronicling every kick in the teeth they suffered before launching the first issue of Wired from a San Francisco workspace in 1993. The failures, told in excruciating detail and with oddly flat affect, pile on top of one another until the journey becomes extremely depressing. The Wired launch provides brief uplift, but Rossetto was so contrary with anybody who preached the conventional wisdom of the magazine business that soon the narrative is filled again with relentless contentiousness. Wolf knows his use of the word "romance" is unorthodox; he insists it’s appropriate because it hints at the supernatural, tracing "the effect of a fantastic idea—the idea that computers will make every existing authority obsolete—as it worked through and upon the man who conjured it up." Uneven, but the quirky charactersand the magazine’s skyrocket trajectory keep it compelling through the final page.

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INTRODUCTION

A proper romance ought to pit youth against age, innocence against worldliness, and show the triumph of love over all temptation. We begin, then, with some disadvantages. Our hero is in his forties. He scorns idealism as naivete. And his domestic life has a distinctly argumentative cast. Nonetheless, this book is called a romance, and I think it is accurately named.

A romance should at least have a hint of the supernatural. Here we are more lucky. Fauns and angels are not permissible in journalism, but there are other forces in the world that hauntingly express themselves through individuals. Original ideas often appear unexpectedly in several places at once; like ghosts, they are in the air. Once such ideas begin to spread, they can have an uncanny, almost demonic effect, causing otherwise rational people to act strangely. The story that follows is a romance in exactly this sense: it traces the effect of a fantastic idea–the idea that computers will make every existing authority obsolete–as it worked through and upon the man who conjured it up.

Thirty years ago a young man was featured on the cover of The New York Times Magazine. He was a pioneer of a new political movement called libertarianism. The goal of the libertarians was to abolish the government, but they did not succeed, and the young man left the United States and resettled in Europe for two decades. When he returned he upended the media business, captured the attention of millions, and seduced some of the country's most powerful financiers. He even spoke, again, of the end of government.
He was no longer a libertarian, because libertarianism was a political label,and he had become an enemy of politics. The transformation he advocated was more profound than that. He spoke of a new social life unimpeded by national borders; of communities transcending time and geography. His message was, in part, about technology, and the financial mania it precipitated resembled other incidents of hysteria that came in the wake of important inventions–railroads, automobiles, electricity, radio. But he was not an inventor, nor even a very great businessman. He was simply a talented storyteller who offered a glimpse of a future in which all outmoded constraints would be swept aside.
His success coincided with a great stock-market bubble. How much was he to blame for it? When economic historians sort out the confusion of the last ten years, they will doubtless give some of the responsibility to administrators of the central bank who lowered interest rates at a key moment, flooding the market with cheap money that quickly found its way into stocks. But the supply of money is only one side of the story. The other side is demand. In the optimism of the bubble years, enthusiasm for the story of the digital revolution made huge speculative investments seem reasonable; this in itself caused credit to loosen.

An interesting illustration of the duel engines that fuel financial bubbles–loose credit and enthusiasm for a good story–can be found in the temporary success of John Law, an economist and gambler who launched the first modern bubble in the early
eighteenth century. Under sponsorship of the French court, Law formed a bank that issued paper money backed by significant specie reserves. He increased confidence and credit began to flow. But that was not all he did. Law also took control of a company with monopoly rights to settlement and trade in the Louisiana territories, and sold several waves of shares to the public. After some manipulation of currency supplies by the court and Law's bank, shares in the Mississippi Company took off. With an initial value of five hundred, Mississippi shares eventually doubled, and then ran up to ten thousand in a frenzy of speculation. In the dŽnouement, all were ruined.

Why did investors clamor to buy shares in the Mississippi Company at so many times their offering price? The wealth of the Americas was the perfect speculator's tale. It was rumored to be infinite, and it was impossible to investigate firsthand. Before the fever broke, every segment of society was infected, and after it broke, every participant suffered.

At the end it no longer mattered that America contained every natural advantage for farmers, traders, and well-capitalized chartered monopolies. A bubble, while dependent upon its story, renders the story's truth irrelevant. This is because, paradoxically, a bubble feeds upon skepticism. Today's skeptics are tomorrow's buyers. People who decline to purchase shares at five hundred, who laugh at them at a thousand, and revile them at fifteen hundred eagerly snatch them up at two thousand when the spectacle of friends and neighbors celebrating their profits becomes too much to bear. As the bubble grows, the story becomes more and more popular, for it is the buyer's indispensable justification and excuse. Only when the story's truth is more or less universally acknowledged do prices plateau and then plummet. Skepticism, a key ingredient, has run out.

The romance that follows is not a full account of the mania that enlivened the late nineties and brought so many unlikely characters to the fore. It is merely the story of its story. Instant communication and ubiquitous computers were on the verge of creating unprecedented wealth and freedom; humanity was at the dawn of a new era. This story had, if no sole author, at least a preeminent champion. His name was Louis Rossetto, and his platform was Wired.

CHAPTER 1: FROM NOWHERE

Louis Rossetto had a strange effect on people. He was like a magnet whose grip increased dramatically at close range. Listeners might be dismissive at a distance, and dubious as he opened his mouth, but then he pulled them in and held them close. He always seemed to be better informed than anybody else in the room. He had sources from Afghanistan and contacts in Sri Lanka. He knew Dutch, Italian, and Portuguese. Because he was so coherent, and because when he had made his point he fell silent and waited calmly for a response, Louis had a peculiar way of compelling his acquaintances to express agreement with things that they were not really sure of. This could be embarrassing later and sometimes even made people swing the other way and say they hated him.

John Plunkett was unnerved the first time he got a glimpse of Louis through the window of an elegant office building on the Quai d'Anjou, in Paris. John was a big man with a deceptively placid expression. Normally he worked as a graphic designer in New York City making annual reports for big corporations. ÒSelling shit on a stick,Ó he called it. But at the moment John was short on money and looking for a job. He had seen an ad for a designer in the International Herald Tribune, and after scheduling an interview he decided to walk by the office and have a look. Truck traffic paused in front of the building, obscuring his view, so he crossed the street and peered between the drapes. He saw a tiny computer sitting on a desk, with an orange screen and black letters too small for him to make out. In front of the screen a tall man sat completely still, his face expressionless. He looked like some kind of hippie or derelict, out of place behind these old stone walls and six-paned windows. The man suddenly turned toward the street and stared. Something about his unblinking expression, its lack of acknowledgment or human recognition, startled the designer, and he fled. Later John would interpret this encounter as a premonition, but light fades early in Paris in the fall and perhaps Louis Rossetto's gaze registered nothing because he only saw his own face in the window, reflecting back.

Designers are never implicated, John told himself, after he took the job with Real Invest. Real Invest was a discreet financial operation that offered individual banking services and untraceable European investments for Americans who preferred to keep their capital gains out of the hands of the Internal Revenue Service. Bill Sigal, the owner, would eventually flee Paris one step ahead of the police. John found Sigal to be a slightly threatening person, self-assured and ruthless in his extraction of cash investments from midwestern rubes (whom he called, as a sort of shorthand, ÒdentistsÓ), but Plunkett's job was only to redesign the company's newsletter, called Globescan, and he took no more responsibility for the malodorous quality of the Sigal enterprise than he did for the assertions made to stockholders of his corporate clients.

Later John would describe Real Invest as a lure for expatriate bums looking for an angle.On the other hand, were they really bums? The man who had startled him at the window may have been a drifter and an odd duck, a character from another time and a kind of political exile, but he was only a bum if the word conjured meanings beyond mere vagrancy: boisterous anarchism, say, and hatred of authority, and a love of mayhem as a source of both entertainment and sustenance. Add these antiquated associations into the mix, and you still wouldn't have it right, because the old type of bum–the Wobbly, the hobo, the one-big-union man–was an enemy of capitalism, while Louis Rossetto had a master's degree in business administration from Columbia University, where he specialized in marketing and finance. He was an amateur scholar of the Haymarket riots and a deep reader of libertarian economics. Many years after their first meeting, when their partnership had brought John both international acclaim and a deep sense of personal grievance, he would remember his conversations with Louis as the most interesting he had ever had in his life.