*Well, the calendar isn't in a hurry, but it doesn't stop, either.
"Why WIRED? Because the Digital Revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon—while the mainstream media is still groping for the snooze button.”
So began the founding manifesto of this magazine. It’s an awesome document: 216 words of vim, bold font, and attitude.
As the years passed, WIRED has done its best to live up to the ideals of the founding manifesto, particularly its timeless invocation to “tell us something we’ve never heard before, in a way we’ve never seen before. If it challenges our assumptions, so much the better.” The magazine has covered the story of tech as its heroes have climbed the status hierarchy from court jesters and outcasts to kings and queens. And it has dealt with the complexity of being a media organization optimistically covering the forces destroying media. Those fat magazines have become thinner, but WIRED’s words and images now spread in a million ways, from phones and tablets to voice assistants, social platforms, and whatever-the-hell-else comes next.
And so, for our 25th, we’ve decided to create a birthday issue. We picked 25 icons we think are most responsible for the changes of the past quarter-century. And we’ve asked each to nominate someone or something they think will change the next 25. With each pairing, we’ve tried to create some kind of conversation between the two, or between one of them and you, the reader. We’ve also revived some long-lost story formats from the magazine’s past (Tired/Wired, is that you?) and commissioned five essays to evoke the big themes that defined each half-decade along the way. Our hope is that in 2043, you’ll go back through the choices we made in this issue and see some that make sense and some that, in retrospect, seem insane. That’s the way it’s always been with WIRED.
“So why now? Why WIRED? Because in the age of information overload, the ultimate luxury is meaning and context. Or put another way, if you’re looking for the soul of our new society in wild metamorphosis, our advice is simple. Get WIRED.”
(((We like a manifesto on the old blog here.)))
In 1993, WIRED cofounder Louis Rossetto wrote an impassioned manifesto in the first issue of the magazine. Twenty-five years on, his vision looks amazingly prescient. But the letter, which includes the infamous and slightly inaccurate phrase "Bengali typhoon" (Bengali storms are actually called cyclones), has never been posted online—till now. Here, then, are the words we still live by.
Why WIRED?
Because the Digital Revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon—while the mainstream media is still groping for the snooze button.
And because the computer "press" is too busy churning out the latest PCInfoComputingCorporateWorld iteration of its ad sales formula cum parts catalog to discuss the meaning or context of social changes so profound their only parallel is probably the discovery of fire.
There are a lot of magazines about technology. WIRED is not one of them. WIRED is about the most powerful people on the planet today—the Digital Generation. These are the people who not only foresaw how the merger of computers, telecommunications, and the media is transforming life at the cusp of the new millennium, they are making it happen.
Our first instruction to our writers: Amaze us.
Our second: We know a lot about digital technology, and we are bored with it. Tell us something we've never heard before, in a way we've never seen before. If it challenges our assumptions, so much the better.
So why now, why WIRED? Because in the age of information overload, the ultimate luxury is meaning and context.
Or put another way, if you're looking for the soul of our new society in wild metamorphosis, our advice is simple. Get WIRED.
