by Adam Fisher
Howard Rheingold: Louis absolutely wanted to be Hugh Hefner, Jann Wenner, Helen Gurley Brown, the dictator of what culture is. Not, as he put it, “the bozo filter for the web.” It came down to lots of everyday decisions: Can you see any of the content before you sign up and give us your e-mail address? Or is there just a banner ad and you don’t see anything more until you sign up?
Louis Rossetto: We invented the banner ad. The stupidest thing that we did was not patent that. We would have been centimillionaires for having done that.
Justin Hall: Anyway, we had some philosophical differences.
Brian Behlendorf: And it became personal for a lot of people.
Gary Wolf: And a kind of war broke out between him and his staff.
Howard Rheingold: So I quit. And Jonathan Steuer quit. And a few other people did as well.
Justin Hall: I said, “Well, I disagree, but whatever. I’m leaving in a month to go back to school.”
Louis Rossetto: One thing about media is that it is software that ships on time, and so at a certain moment I just got completely frustrated with them. We were burning money and no website is happening, and so I ended up replacing them. I just kicked them out.
Gary Wolf: When I first walked in there, I felt this sense of a place where there already was some kind of hysterical traumatic history. All the answers that you got when you asked a question were inflected with this kind of emotional sense of betrayal. And that’s because, I gathered later, that there had already been some kind of vision for what an online voice of Wired should be. And it was related probably somehow to both the utopian language that was accumulating around the early publicly accessible internet and to Louis’s really over-the-top revolutionary proclamations.
Justin Hall: You know—the “Bengali Typhoon”? His ability to spool out hyperbole as a way to describe the oncoming rush of digital technology was historic.
Louis Rossetto: If you read the Bengali Typhoon editorial, it’s completely spot-on. It’s probably not even a big enough metaphor. It’s probably a comet hitting the planet.
Gary Wolf: So you already had kind of an atmosphere of factionalism. And this is where the story starts, really. The story starts with attempting to create and launch the first commercial web publication. How would it support itself? Who would it be for? What would it look like? And that’s really where I came in. Carl came in as a kind of webmaster. Production, I think we called him.
Carl Steadman: I end up getting a job at HotWired. They put me on the mailing list, and here I see this epic battle between employees on one side, and someone called Louis Rossetto, about T-shirts. Like who should get a free T-shirt? If each employee deserves a free T-shirt! I could not believe that there was no sense of organizational structure. I couldn’t believe that there were all these little brats!
Gary Wolf: In this kind of crazy, hysterical microclimate, people who had six weeks of experience on the web comported themselves like captains of industry. You know like, “Okay, I can make a paragraph break on the web, therefore I am king.” And in a way it was true, because if you couldn’t do that you were sitting there saying, like, “Shoot, how do I get the paragraph to break? Can anybody help me?” Keep in mind, you can’t just look it up on Google.
Carl Steadman: There were hordes of young people who had found their first employer, who had no notion of how lucky they were, and were completely undisciplined, and couldn’t get anything done. And I make no friends because things have to change. We have to get things done.
Joey Anuff: The thing about HotWired is, there is the original HotWired and there is late-stage HotWired, and I was late-stage HotWired. Because the original HotWired, as far as I can understand it, were a group of people that sat around, smoked a lot of weed, and never did a damn thing.
Carl Steadman: I think HotWired before I got there took over a year to launch, and it was just ridiculous how nothing happened at that place.
Gary Wolf: In the two years after I got to HotWired it went from about a dozen people to about two hundred people.
Jack Boulware: HotWired was a massive website, it was far larger than anything else that had launched in terms of an online magazine publishing presence. They had so much money and it was online only, and they were just scooping up people from these zines right and left to contribute to it.
Gary Wolf: Louis’s goal in expanding so fast was to do clearly branded media voices across all the major categories that would soon become important on the web. He wanted entertainment and the arts. He wanted tech. He wanted political coverage.
Louis Rossetto: So we set out to basically plant flags in a bunch of different areas, as many different areas as we possibly could. So we did travel sites. We did extreme sports sites. We did political sites. We did how-to sites.
Jane Metcalfe: How to mix cocktails!
Gary Wolf: There was an art section, a music section…
Louis Rossetto: The Beta Lounge was the first streaming music site.
Jack Boulware: They were doing book reviews, which seems sort of ironic. I did a bunch of stories for them. They sent me to the porn Academy Awards in Vegas.
Gary Wolf: You never knew what the new assignment was going to be. Literally any idea that somebody had might catch fire, and the next thing you know we were publishing that stuff. A disciplined organization we were not.
Louis Rossetto: The HotWired site just grew like crabgrass. Every time you turned around and there were another twenty people over there. A large part of the crew that’s being assembled is coders. Literally people writing code for all the things that needed to be done: the editorial systems, the ad management systems, the billing systems. None of them existed, and there was no place to go for them so we had to write them ourselves.
Brian Behlendorf: Before we launched, I had a direct line in with Louis and everyone else building the thing, because I was the one kind of taking their ideas and six hours later having a running prototype. That was a very rapid, highly iterative kind of thing, and that was a key part of why that effort felt creative. After the launch, after there was a lot of attention and a lot of traffic, and suddenly advertisers and such, and understandably it skewed to be more of a business-driven kind of operation. But I think too quickly they moved into a mode that dropped off a lot of the engineers from the decision making and the C suite. I did not stick around and fight for engineering to be better represented at the top.
Carl Steadman: So I’m at HotWired. I ended up running engineering when engineering left. But keep in mind that I don’t just have a technical background, I also have an editorial background, and I’ve got a design background as well. There’s no clear reason why I am locked out of meetings which could determine the direction of editorial. Certainly editorial needed me. Certainly design needed me.
Gary Wolf: Carl had a combination of skills that almost nobody else had. He was very culturally savvy, he was a big reader, and he also knew his way around a web server. So he could do experiments in web publishing that were inaccessible to anybody else in the room.
Carl Steadman: So my frustration with HotWired is building, and my frustration with the magazine as well. Newt Gingrich ends up on the cover. They end up putting Zippies on the cover.
Joey Anuff: Burning Man was sort of the respectable face of what at one point was called the Zippies.
Carl Steadman: Wired for “getting it” really didn’t really have much of a clue when it came to the web.
Gary Wolf: One of the things that we didn’t have, for instance, was any way to easily look at traffic on our website. There were no reports. There was not even a way to kind of fake the reports. You could access the data directly from the server, but then you had to have access to the server.
Carl Steadman: HotWired was the biggest website on the web, based on my analysis of the traffic numbers. But we’re going down the wrong path, and I’m not fulfilling my original ambition of changing the course of the development of this new medium. So I determine that I would have to launc
h something. I would have to launch what I called at the time a HotWired killer.
Joey Anuff: Wired had these occasional Friday lunch sessions where six people from across the different departments would go out and just have lunch and talk about whatever with one another. And I ended up on one of these with Kevin Kelly and John Plunkett. And I brought up the idea of the web needing its own version of Mad magazine. And I got a really thoughtful look, like, “Hmm, that could be interesting,” from Kevin Kelly. In my life I would never say that I would think that Kevin’s seal of approval is a great sign of either commercial, artistic, or even intellectual success. But at that moment I thought he was of peerless taste and insight: A goddamn observational genius with his ear to the ground! And I went back and when I told Carl the idea he liked it, too. And that became the logline of the Suck launch. It was like, “Okay, let’s try to do something that’s somehow vaguely inspired by Mad magazine.” Or at least took itself as serious as the Mad magazine editorial voice took itself. In the gang-of-idiots sense.
Gary Wolf: HotWired was traditional journalism. Suck came along and had the good sense and recklessness to shake its hands free from all that pretension and the courage to state what was starting to become obvious: that the internet was going to be about novelty, sarcasm, and microcelebrity.
Joey Anuff: A big part of the premise of Suck was “What if somebody published something new every day?” Nobody was doing that.
Kevin Kelly: Every day is essentially what a blog is about. Because at the time we had home pages. “Build your own home page!” That was the refrain. But these home pages would go up and then they would never change. They were very static. And so the idea of changing things was seen as a big thing.
Joey Anuff: I thought, Oh, we can do that and that would be really hard-core. But that meant that since I was pretty much writing it all, I had to write it every day, and I never got to even midnight with knowing what I was going to write about the next day.
Carl Steadman: So I go and get a bunk bed and just throw it up in the damn office so at least we’ve got this place to sleep.
Joey Anuff: So I would go to sleep there, because I would only finally in desperation write six hundred words.
The Duke of URL (writing in Suck): Shit makes great fertilizer, but it takes a farmer to turn it into a meal. With that thought in mind, we present Suck, an experiment in provocation, mordant deconstructionism, and buzz-saw journalism. Cathode-addled net-surfers flock to shallow waters—Suck is the dirty syringe@hidden in the sand.
Joey Anuff: And Carl would have already gone to sleep, already set up the servers, and set everything, be ready to publish when I would wake him up at like four a.m. And he would be up editing it to make some presentable, shareable edit out of it so we could get it up on the web by like nine a.m. or eight a.m. in the morning.
The Duke of URL (writing in Suck): Suck is more than a media prank. Much more. At Suck, we abide by the principle which dictates that somebody will always position himself or herself to systematically harvest anything of value in this world for the sake of money, power, and/or ego-fulfillment. We aim to be that somebody.
Joey Anuff: So that’s why we were there overnight.
Carl Steadman: There was the little downside where I’d get up in the morning and everyone else was already there, and I’d be charging around in my pajamas. But Wired had the best showers in the world, because you would turn on the hot water and it would run forever, it would never run out of hot water.
Kevin Kelly: One person, two people having something to say every day: In that sense Suck was the beginning of the blog. It proved that a single interesting person or two could have an audience, and you don’t need a whole team of people. And that would change the economics of publishing, because it wouldn’t take that much advertising or whatever to support one or two people.
Gary Wolf: Carl had a very distinctive, extremely dark and ironic voice. Everything that he said was exactly what he thought, so heavily inflected with irony that it was nullified.
Webster (writing in Suck): The Web is the first of the new “interactive media” to give us so little for so much: it demands our attention and forces us to interact, but only as so many mindless automatons basking in the phosphorescent glow of our “terminals,” developing RSI and serving as cancer hosts.
Gary Wolf: Joey was an extrovert and extremely funny and lightning fast with a gigantic range, especially in popular culture and scatological terms of abuse. Both of which came in handy.
The Duke of URL (writing in Suck): There’s something exciting about the breaking of news on the Web that can make an otherwise bullshit-quality story smell sweeter than Glad Potpourri-in-a-Spray.
Kevin Kelly: The supersnarky—that’s the style. A thousand sites do that now, but at the time, it was sort of naked and unabashed. No apologies: There it is. It was sort of like seeing somebody in their birthday suit. It was novel and it was effective in that sense. But their style of humor was not my style. It was very satirical and insider-y and immature. So none of that was working for me at all. I had really zero interest in the content of what it was doing.
Jack Boulware: The early digital publications were all pretty earnest. They came out of this Whole Earth futurist-Utopian kind of vibe. The Well certainly reflected that…
Steven Johnson: I had founded Feed in New York with some friends in May of ’95. We were the first digital-only magazine. We were coming out of this academic- and pop-culturally aware, somewhat left-y zine culture. And then Suck appeared.
Jack Boulware: Doing snark.
Steven Johnson: I just remember thinking, Oh, that’s how to do it!
John Battelle: Suck was the best writing: The voice was unique, it was honest, and it was dead-on about the culture, and it was critical and snarky and I was just like, Fuck, we need this in the magazine! But it didn’t really translate to a magazine. It really was native to the web.
Steven Johnson: They were using the hyperlink as a form of shorthand humor, so the joke would only become fully apparent to you if you actually clicked the link. So they would say “unlike those East Coast idiots” and “idiots” would be a link to something I had written. The use of hypertext as humor I don’t think anyone had done before—it was just a whole new way of doing commentary. Then the other thing that they were doing was making fun of too-serious technology people. Wired hadn’t done that. Wired took that world very seriously. And HotWired was a reasonable extension of the print brand, but it just wasn’t as interesting as Suck. We got this voice that we hadn’t heard before, Oh, it was now possible to make fun of the sacred cows of Silicon Valley! It was very liberating.
Gary Wolf: So what they decided to do was just take aim at the readership that was close at hand: That’s the people who were working on the web. So they take aim at Netscape and Marc Andreessen.
Webster (writing in Suck): If it’s all too seldom that people know when their fifteen minutes are up, it’s rarer still when these same expired starlings have a clue as to what meager gimmickry (quote unquote talent) thrust them into the limelight. And if ever there were a one-trick pony on the Web, it’s Marc Andreessen…
Joey Anuff: After Netscape popped and it became possible to become a millionaire off of the internet, or a “Mozillionaire” as we dubbed it, that became sort of a big target.
The Duke of URL (writing in Suck): The key to understanding Netscape, it seems, is to read through their PR sophistry about “application platforms” and label their product as what it really wants to be: an Operating System. Y’know, like Windows 95, except cross-platform. It’s only fitting that Netscape would strive to emulate the most conspicuously shady tactics of the Microsoft juggernaut.
Jamie Zawinski: I loved Suck. Those guys were awesome. They were hilarious. And I sent them an e-mail saying, “Oh my God, this is amazing.” And then they sent me a T-shirt. That’s pretty funny.
Gary Wolf: And they could see if the shit that they said was being read based on looking at t
he server logs. They can see where these incoming page-views are linking from—the traffic sources. Now you have this crazy feedback loop that is incredibly addictive. In which the effects of what they were doing were visible to them within twenty-four hours. This is like making crank phone calls on a mass scale.
Carl Steadman: I just really fell in love with this genre. Suck would both participate in the culture of celebration of these internet millionaires, but in the process ridicule them.
Gary Wolf: In short order everybody was reading Suck every day. Suck did more traffic than the entire rest of the HotWired site combined. And nobody knew that it was them!
Louis Rossetto: So I didn’t even know who Carl and Joey were! They got sucked up in that wave of needing bodies to do the back-end stuff that needed to get done. On the Wired side of the office there were seventy or eighty people. On the HotWired side there were 110 people in the same amount of space. And they were literally crammed shoulder to shoulder. Stuff is all over the place and wires are dripping off the ceiling. But it just seemed like, Okay, that’s what’s going on here. It’s just crazy. And then people start saying, “Have you seen Suck?”
The Sucksters (writing in Suck): As you rub your eyes and pinch yourself to verify the irreality you see, the thought dawns on you: with all that luscious lucre slithering across palms and winding its way into Swiss bank accounts, what if there were opportunities for someone like you to play in the same economic sandbox as the new media Snuffleupagi? The trick is to put down your crusty bong for ten minutes and draw up some sort of plan. The good news is that once your outline’s been hashed out, you may actually be able to sell that—no further work required.
Carl Steadman: The Suck theme was always “sold out,” which is a wonderful pun.
Gary Wolf: If you read the portrait of the web industry, the early web industry, through Suck, what you see are extremely immature, semidesperate, profoundly overconfident morons on the make setting themselves up as industrial titans. Right?