Valley of Genius

by Adam Fisher

  Louis Rossetto: Warmth hit us in the face. He’s the first guy who said, “I think it’s a good idea, and I’m going to help with real support.” It was like, “Finally! Yes!”

  Jane Metcalfe: He was clearly on our side from that moment forward. It was phenomenal. He said, “Let’s go find Bill.” We ended up at some party that night, and Bill Gates was perched on the buffet table with his smeared glasses, swinging his legs back and forth the whole time. He turned through the magazine.

  Louis Rossetto: He looked at me weirdly, like, I don’t think this is going to do it. Sort of shrugged and gave it back to me.

  Coco Jones: I was at Mondo the day the check arrived from Negroponte. It was not an easy conversation when I later quit to go work for Wired. They called me a traitor.

  R. U. Sirius: They had gotten funding from a bunch of seriously well-known people in the tech-cultural world, Nicholas Negroponte being one of them, and I had the distinct sense that these would be the sorts of people who would not like us, and would be happy to see an alternative pop technoculture magazine come up, because it won’t be so anarchic and druggy and somewhat disreputable.

  Coco Jones: Mondo hated Wired. They felt it was completely derivative of what they were doing.

  Gary Wolf: Mondo 2000 was the drug side of this culture. Wired was the other side.

  Jane Metcalfe: The world was changing. And so everybody’s seeing it from their own worldview. Some of them thought it was changing because we were all doing the same drugs. Other people thought it was changing because we were using the same digital tools. And so there were people who could surf in between those worlds and so there were some common threads there in terms of contributors.

  Louis Rossetto: At that point we started to get serious about putting the band together. I was the editor in chief and also the publisher and CEO. So I knew that we needed somebody to keep the trains running on time: a managing editor. So I called Kevin; he came down to our office. He listened to this whole idea.

  Kevin Kelly: I was surprised. I thought I had successfully discouraged them from pursuing this idea. But they weren’t giving up. Louis had a prototype that had been funded by Negroponte, a color-Xerox spiral-bound copy of articles that were taken from other sources and reimagined, re-curated into this prototype. It was a magazine about the culture of technology rather than just technology itself. I had never seen anything like that. I said, “Oh my gosh, this is going to work!”

  Louis Rossetto: I said, “So we need to hire a managing editor. Who would you recommend to do that?” Never thinking that I was offering him a job because I didn’t think he was the guy. He was already editor in chief of his own magazine.

  Kevin Kelly: So the question I had for Louis was “What’s the budget?” We paid almost nothing. Mondo 2000 paid almost nothing. Louis mentioned a very adequate, professional editorial budget. I said, “I think this is so good that I’ll help you launch the first issue.”

  Louis Rossetto: And so we created a position for him, which wasn’t in the business plan, we had no money for it, but he became the executive editor of the magazine. And then we still needed a managing editor.

  John Battelle: I was going to move to New York to be a freelance writer. I wanted to start a magazine about the impact of digital technology on culture. My catchphrase was “the Rolling Stone of the digital age.” I was at a pay phone picking up my voice mail, and there was a message from Louis. I almost deleted it, which would have been the biggest mistake of my career. But I called him back. He explained what the magazine was, and that did it. I was completely hooked.

  Louis Rossetto: John came up on Monday, and we were in the office at Second Street and the place was completely deserted, there’s nobody there because we hadn’t really started yet, and there was one chair and a sofa in this big empty place underneath the casement windows. John and I sat there and talked for a couple hours, and by the end I’d somehow convinced him that this is what he should be doing. So instead of him moving to New York he ended up convincing his fiancée to quit her job, she was a producer at CBS News, and move to San Francisco. So he became the managing editor, just a fucking demon, and she became our PR person. The two of them in lots of ways made the whole thing happen.

  Kevin Kelly: John Battelle was a key hire. He was right out of grad school with a lot of experience, tremendous drive, very organized. The one question I had was whether he was too square. He dressed preppy. This was a renegade outfit. Louis was a born renegade. I was an old hippie. John didn’t look like one, but it turned out he had an inner renegade in him.

  John Battelle: We all brought different networks to bear. I had been a trade reporter covering Apple and technology generally for five years, so I had those writers. Louis knew fabulous freaks from all over the world—crazy artists, hackers from Japan. Kevin had the Whole Earth network, Stewart Brand and those guys.

  Fred Davis: Wired had writers just hovering, the cream of the crop. We were cheering them on, forcing them to produce this magazine because we all wanted to write for it so badly! We were all so frustrated writing reviews of printers.

  Louis Rossetto: We had raised $250,000, but now we were paying salaries, rent, electricity, and all the stuff it takes to make a business. We were going to run out of money in four months. I wanted to make sure that when we ran out, if we weren’t on press, at least we’d have a magazine we could take to a major publisher and say, “Take a flyer on this.”

  Michelle Battelle: There were only ten or twelve people working at Wired at the time: Amy Critchett was there, and Kristin Spence, Eugene Mosier…

  Amy Critchett: I was one of Wired’s first interns.

  Jane Metcalfe: Amy came in and wanted a job, and this was back when we had Kristin working for no money and Eugene tapped to work for no money. And I said, “Sure, you can have a job. You can work eighty hours a week having the time of your life. The only problem is we’re not going to pay you.” She’s like, “Great. That sounds great.”

  Michelle Battelle: I couldn’t believe that they were putting something together that didn’t require a whole bank of desks. They barely had any supplies.

  Amy Critchett: Louis was very clear in his thinking that if you bought people a bunch of pens they would all disappear. So why buy them in the first place?

  Kristin Spence: We put the office together with spit and tape. I was responsible for furniture procurement. South of Market was a wasteland. Louis and Jane were mystified that we didn’t have an IKEA store nearby! We went to salvage yards where we got a bunch of crap-ass hollow-core doors and put them on top of old used filing cabinets or sawhorses for desks. Completely ad hoc.

  Amy Critchett: There was no heat and certainly no air-conditioning. It was a freezing cold winter. So at one point Louis said, “Amy, go rent a heater.” And I rented this industrial heater, it was like a jet engine that literally had flames coming out of it. And we sat it on a mail cart and it had this really loud kind of roar. And that was our heating system. Everyone wore cut-off gloves. It was freezing, it was a freezing winter.

  Jane Metcalfe: We pushed it around to blow heat on people because it was cold and wet. People were getting sick; the water was literally coming through the roof. It’s like, “You can’t get sick! You can’t get sick! The magazine has to be at Macworld.”

  Michelle Battelle: Wired was supposed to launch right around January 15, 1993, because they were aiming for Macworld.

  Kristin Spence: That added to the whole vibe. It was a skunkworks operation in the extreme. We were so committed and passionate about what we were doing. We were living it 24/7. There would be times when we’d be working at one a.m.; there would be a handful of us working, we’d be cranking house music because the rave scene was blowing up and Eugene was deeply involved in it. The rave scene, the revolutionary aspect, we’re guerrilla revolutionary journalists!

  Fred Davis: It was this pre–Burning Man, Anon Salon, Survival Research Labs, Multimedia Gulch group of artsy, nerdy people.

 
Amy Critchett: We were just working so damn hard, and so every night had the potential of turning into a party. Nothing that scandalous. There was definitely drinking. There was definitely… I’m sure there was some coke. I’m sure definitely there was ecstasy around. After work. We were blowing off steam.

  Jane Metcalfe: Everyone was sleeping with everyone at Wired. Louis and I were sleeping together; John and Barbara—the magazine’s graphic designers—were sleeping together; John and Michelle were sleeping together, and that only left a few people who I’m sure had found other people to sleep with because we never left.

  Amy Critchett: There was a couple couches in Jane and Louis’s office. Eugene basically lived there.

  Michelle Battelle: I was from a different world. I was from CBS Network news, where we still had to wear stockings with our skirts. We were much more buttoned up. Seeing Eugene emerge from one of the back offices where he had been sleeping was really interesting to me. It was the first time I’d seen a lip ring in my life.

  Kristen Spence: For those of us who were superyoung, it was just this cool thing happening. But Louis, Kevin, and John Plunkett had the long view. They understood how much things were changing.

  Amy Critchett: Louis was magnificent. His presence, force, and passion—that’s what made Wired happen.

  John Perry Barlow: Jane had the real juice. She got people really excited. There were a lot of people that gave them meetings because of her. She had a lot to do with creating the energy in the magazine and, to a fairly strong extent, its attitude as well.

  Louis Rossetto: Battelle was the most focused, hardest-working manager I’ve ever met. He was intense yet calm, the foundation on which the editorial team was built, the guy who got it done, no matter what. He could sit at his computer for hours on end, his fingers jabbing at his keyboard like it was a karate exercise, just getting it done.

  Kevin Kelly: For the last week Louis came up with these kamikaze headbands. He wanted everybody to wear these headbands in solidarity or something. I never got the allusion. We were going to kill ourselves?

  Louis Rossetto: The payoff was seeing the magazine come off the press: a big six-color Heidelberg roll press, and seeing for the first time what that means. The rolls of paper are up to my shoulders. I can’t put my arms around half of them. And gargantuan big black barrels, fifty-five-gallon drums filled with screaming orange Day-Glo ink. Rolls of paper the size of Volkswagens and ink we’re buying by the barrel-full.

  John Plunkett: It was a built-in contradiction. We were using an old medium to evoke a new medium that didn’t quite exist yet. We knew it would be some sort of electronic networked future, but we didn’t know what that would look like. How could we make it visible?

  Kevin Kelly: Color on the computer was no extra cost. Therefore there should be an extravagant use of color, because it’s free.

  Eugene Mosier: Adding fluorescent colors was a way to evoke the screen, transmissive color rather than reflective color.

  Fred Davis: You could use color on every page if you didn’t have to pay for color separations. It was possible for Wired to have very low start-up costs because they were done with desktop publishing.

  Louis Rossetto: Then we get on press. The first sheets come out; they rip them off the caddy, put it on this big table at the press control panel with the lights that are adjusted to get true color. The guy takes out his loupe, and he makes some adjustments; finally, he says “We’re ready.” John looks at the sheet and says, “I want more ink.” The guy says, “It’s perfect.” This was a press that had never done a job before. Every piece was pristine. We were the first clients to go on this press. There wasn’t anything that was sloppy or worn or out of adjustment. The guy says, “This is the perfect first sheet.”

  John Plunkett: What printers define as “good” is the least amount of ink that they can put down.

  Louis Rossetto: John says, “I want more ink.” The guy looks at him like he’s got two heads. He does the same thing all over again. John says, “More ink.” They do this two or three more times. John says, “All I want you to do is turn the ink up until it starts to smear. Then dial it back until it doesn’t. That’s what I want.” The guy is disgusted. Out comes a sheet and it looks like Wired.

  Eugene Mosier: More! That was the theme of the first issue in terms of getting it physically created.

  John Plunkett: The experience of picking up the magazine and flipping through those first pages was intended to be disorienting and disruptive. To take Marshall McLuhan’s advice and make the medium be the message.

  Kevin Kelly: In the first issue you have Bruce Sterling, you’ve got Stewart Brand, you’ve got Van Der Leun. I was basically taking the same subjects and the same people that I was talking about and working with at Whole Earth and I was doing it in Wired in color. But it was like totally different. Suddenly the entire world was paying attention. Suddenly it was like the most amazing thing in the world. Suddenly it was like, Oh my gosh, this is revolutionary!

  Justin Hall: I remember seeing an advertisement on the side of a bus rolling by with Bruce Sterling’s face cropped and Day-Glo’ed staring out toward me.

  Jane Metcalfe: You can’t believe how little we paid for that.

  Justin Hall: I was so excited to see a computer magazine with a human face on the cover. I thought, Oh my God! Like these people get it. Technology is about this culture that’s happening! And I’m so excited that these people got it.

  Louis Rossetto: We weren’t making a magazine about feeds and speeds. It was about the people, companies, and ideas making the digital revolution.

  Carl Steadman: There it was: this mix of business, technology, and culture, that was right. Wired got it, so I was entranced. I was both entranced and horrified, because it was clear that Wired was horribly awry when it came to its politics. I didn’t know the term libertarianism back then, it hit me as very conservative.

  Louis Rossetto: I was at Columbia in ’67, ’ 68, ’69, and ’71, and of those four years in college, two of them were wiped out by eruptions in the spring. It felt like the world was coming unglued. And if you had eyes you could tell that there were issues in society that weren’t right. But the analysis from the left just seemed wrong. It was like refried Marxism and this colonial grievance bullshit and that was so inauthentic and their prescriptions—what they wanted to have happen—so wrong! So then I started looking for other stuff. And I think I’d read Ayn Rand and then from there you realize there’s more than Objectivism. There’s this libertarian strand and then you realize that libertarianism is really deep. It goes back to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and beyond and has all sorts of other manifestations in American history. And I just got farther and farther into that and realized this is a kind of good way of thinking about things.

  Carl Steadman: Wired had this ideology that had no sense of social justice. Instead, it was Social Darwinism. And I couldn’t abide that because I knew Wired would succeed. It was clear that Wired was it. So that day I had it in my mind that I would have to go to Wired and change it from within.

  Justin Hall: My immediate reaction was I want to join. I want to be a part of this. So I called and I left a voice message on Louis Rossetto’s answering machine and I said, “Hi. I’m in Chicago and I’m connected to the hacker pirate underground of the bulletin board scene out here. I’d really love to write something for you or connect you with those people. Here’s my phone number.” Then the craziest thing happened. He didn’t call me back!

  John Battelle: It was overwhelming. Really overwhelming. All of a sudden we were a hot ticket. The company and the people behind it—the writers, photographers, illustrators—became rock stars.

  Fred Davis: Having Wired on your coffee table, man. That was a status symbol. That said you’re part of that digital visionary crowd. You’re part of that cyberculture.

  Kevin Kelly: And every day there were cameras and TV companies sitting in our offices. And for me it’s like I’m doing exactly the same thing I’ve been do
ing for years at Whole Earth, with very few resources, for a very small audience. Suddenly I was doing it on a big stage with colored lights at the center of the universe. It had been hard to get anyone to pay attention before, and now everyone was saying it was brilliant. It was peculiar but wonderful. And yeah, that was a surprise I was not expecting at all.

  Louis Rossetto: There’s something about investing your humanity, your eccentricity, your exuberance in the things you do. That’s what the first issue of Wired was about. It was about being naked with your craziness, your enthusiasm, your genius. It was pushing to be as great as you can. Be naked. Be human. Let people see who you are.

  Amy Critchett: One thing for me postlaunch that was, just I’ll never forget till the day I die, is all of a sudden I think, Wait, we have to make another magazine? And then again and again and again? Like the idea that it was a monthly occurrence was beyond mind-boggling to me. But we did it.

  Louis Rossetto: Jane and I had been sprinting flat out for three years to get out the first issue, and then the marathon began.

  Jane Metcalfe: We were exhausted. Everyone needed a vacation. Then we looked at each other and said, “Oh, shit! We’re late for the second issue!”

  Toy Stories

  From PARC to Pixar

  Technically speaking, Pixar is not a Silicon Valley company, as its headquarters have never been in the Valley proper—but its roots lead directly back to Xerox PARC. Back in the seventies Alvy Ray Smith was PARC’s unofficial artist in residence. He’d come in at night to play with Dick Shoup’s SuperPaint machine and ponder the potential of computer graphics. Like so many others before him, Smith believed that the computer could be much more than a productivity tool or an entertainment device: It was a new kind of paintbrush in a new kind of art form. Xerox explicitly rejected that idea when they kicked Smith out of PARC in 1975 for being what Stewart Brand called a “computer bum”—a hacker, essentially. Smith turned his fall from grace into the start of a twenty-year vision quest. The dream? To make the world’s first full-length computer-animated film. The journey first took Smith to a research lab in Long Island, where he met his future partner in Pixar, the like-minded Ed Catmull. Then, in 1979, the two boomeranged back to the Bay Area where they found new patrons: The first was George Lucas, who was in the process of finishing The Empire Strikes Back. Smith and Catmull were the core of Lucasfilm’s computer group—the proto-Pixar. Steve Jobs was their next patron. He took over from Lucas in 1986, after leaving Apple, and set it up as a technology company which made little computer-animated shorts on the side. Ostensibly Luxo Jr. and other early Pixar filmlets were created to showcase what could be done with Pixar technology. In reality, the technology was just a means to an end. Pixar limped along for almost a decade while Catmull and Smith waited for the inexorable advance of computer power to catch up with their movie-making ambitions. The evitable result: Toy Story—which, like the prior era’s Pong, marks the emergence of a new American art form.