On the Wired renaissance

There’s been some murmuring among the tech barons about buying Wired magazine and turning it back into the magazine they remember from their youth. Anduril co-founder Trae Stephens wrote an X.com diatribe about this a couple weeks ago, where he complained that Wired still has good journalists, but they are focused on the wrong stories. “The building still has good people. The question is who owns the building.” (Anduril, you might recall, is the company building killer AI drones for the military. It’s run by weird creep Palmer Luckey. So I can see why its executives would rather Wired go back to writing VC glow-up profiles.)

YCombinator CEO Garry Tan (who likes to tell local politicians to “die slow”) loves the idea. In a blog post that was probably written by ChatGPT, Tan argues that "great tech journalism (…) doesn’t just cover technology. It creates the intellectual conditions for investment and progress. It puts a story in [an investor’s] head that sits there for nine years and then fires when the moment is right.”

Tan is a clown, but he isn’t wrong that the magazine has decisively moved away from its 90s techno-optimist roots.

Today’s New York Times features a profile of Katie Drummond, the magazine’s Editor in Chief. It’s a very good profile, well worth reading. Wired has been nominated for a National Magazine Award and, if I didn’t hate Polymarket and Kalshi, I would bet they’ll win it. The Katie Drummond era has been Wired at its finest.

And, given my documented history of reading entirely too many Wired magazines, I think that’s a nice excuse to write a bit about how the magazine has changed with the times.

Wired was founded in 1993. It has had seven editors-in-chief, and each has taken the magazine in a different direction. Here’s how I would briefly typify them.

-There are the Rossetto years (1993-1997). I’ve written at length about this before (see “On Wired magazine’s startup phase”). This was the peak of Wired’s cultural influence, the time that many think of as the magazine’s golden era. Wired was the first magazine to make tech culture seem cool. Wired under Rossetto was definitely techno-optimist in its approach. And, make no mistake, techno-optimism is a political ideology. Business moguls and supply-side guru George Gilder were good. Government bureaucrats were bad. Silicon Valley was good. Traditional media was bad. Making money was good. Paying taxes was bad.

Rossetto lost control of the magazine midway through the first dotcom boom. Wired was a cash furnace, and he tried and failed twice to take the company public through an Initial Public Offering. (It takes a… unique kind of person to fail twice at a tech IPO in the middle of the dotcom boom. Rossetto was just that sort of unique.)

-Rossetto was replaced by Katrina Heron (1998-2001), who managed Wired through the glory years of the late dotcom boom. These were the years of overstuffed 300-400 page magazines, half of which were advertisements. They were the years of the Wired index and fawning profiles of some truly insane futuristic ideas (Digiscent!). The tech press in those years, led by Wired, was practically identical to the fawning business press. It was a less openly ideological magazine, but also a magazine swelling with confidence that the new, glorious business-future was being born.

-After the dotcom crash, and just before 9/11, Chris Anderson replaced Heron. Anderson was the longest-tenured Editor in Chief (2001-2012). He steered Wired back to its trademark techno-optimism and wrote many of the defining pieces over the next decade. (The Long Tail, Free, The Web is Dead, The End of Theory) It was a different type of techno-optimism than under Rossetto. There was a lot less George Gilder, fewer fawning profiles of business moguls and no Newt Gingrich. There was also less junk science in there. But there was a whole lot of Silicon Valley boosterism. That’s what WIRED was there to do: make tech culture cool, and cover Silicon Valley like it was the future.

-After Anderson we had a few years of Scott Dadich (2013-2016). This was in the early 2010s, when Big Tech had gotten truly big, Moore’s Law had quietly run out of steam, and/but the techlash hadn’t happened yet. (It was also late Obama. Imagine late-Obama vibes and you’ll have a good sense of the tone of the magazine.) The magazine took some swings at taking politics and social issues seriously, but those swings mostly failed to connect. There are some great articles from those years that I teach in class (Silk Road! No Exit!), but my impression is the magazine struggled with its identity during the Dadich years.

-Nick Thompson’s editorship (2017-2020) overlapped with the techlash. And while I would now rate the Drummond era ahead of the Thompson era, it seems to me there has been a lot of casual forgetting of just how good the magazine was under his leadership. WIRED in 2017-2020 broke a whole lot of news about the tech platforms. It was well-sourced and confrontational. This was around when Wired magazine became an outlet that the tech billionaires low-key despised. They were the years when the magazine stopped treating Silicon Valley as the future (complimentary) and started treating it as the present (derogatory).

-Gideon Lichfield took over after Thompson left for The Atlantic. He ran the magazine from 2021-2023, and his tenure felt very 2021-23 to me. Tech was the biggest bubble on earth. Much of that bubble was clearly insane. the magazine covered the bubble and covered the insanity. It was critical-but-serious coverage. And that, by nature, was a bit of a muddle. Good examples that come to mind are Sandra Upson writing about CryptoPunk NFTs, Steven Levy writing about Clubhouse, and Gilad Edelman writing about Web3. All three are high-quality journalism that read a little funky today, because the correct-with-hindsight reaction to all three is “this is such bullshit and it’s gonna fail,” but all three were instead treating each subject as “this is a big deal and it seems kind of insane what a big deal it is. Let’s think through what it all might mean.” The tech boosterism of the 90s and the 00s was long gone, but much of the writing felt like serious journalism applied to unserious times.

And now we’re in the Katie Drummond era. And the Drummond era is spectacular.

It’s worth noting that the magazine dropped from monthly to six issues a year when she took over. I don’t have any insight into their finances, but that cannot have been a good sign. What Drummond has clearly done is take a storied magazine with a checkered past and absolutely rise to the moment.

WIRED during the second Trump administration has filled the space that the Washington Post occupied during the first Trump administration. It just keeps breaking news and holding power to account. Drummond and her team recognized that the way to build a loyal-and-growing subscriber base is by reporting the goddamn news.

Rossetto would hate it, I’m sure. Chris Anderson sure seems to hate it. The VCs despise it. They think Silicon Valley is the future and the tech press is supposed to be the future’s optimistic advance team.

But y’know what? Rossetto was embarrassing. The VCs are embarrassing. Techno-optimism has aged like raw milk.

…Y’all see that Marc Andreessen interview where he brags about having zero introspection, and claims introspection didn’t exist 400 years ago? Embarrassing. Of course his crowd can’t deal with critical journalism. They can’t deal with anything!

Y’all notice that Garry Tan’s sole solution to every criticism is “maybe one of my friends should just buy it.” Tan actually thinks that Bezos's ownership of the Washington Post and Patrick Soon-Shiong’s ownership of the LA Times has gone well. This is not a guy who is capable of learning new things.

I read old Wired magazines to learn about the mistakes that led us to the present. I have learned a lot from the magazine’s archives, but it is often a frustrating experience. The old Wired ideology paved the way to the present.

I read current Wired magazines because they break news and hold power to account. I can see why the tech barons hate it. But that’s exactly why we should all be subscribers.