by Yasha Levine
I asked Stephen Wolff about the stealth privatization of the Internet, wanting to know how it was possible that a decision of such magnitude was carried out with no input from the public or discussions about what it would entail. It was shocking to me that one person, or even a group of people, would have that much power.
Aside from interindustry wrangling, there was no real opposition to Stephen Wolff’s plan to privatize the Internet—not from NFSNET insiders, not from Congress, and certainly not from the private sector.67 “I had people working for me, and we all agreed this was the way to go,” Wolff said. “There wasn’t any conflict there.”68 In fact, the opposite was true. Whether inside or outside the NSF, it seemed everyone supported this plan.
Cable and phone companies pushed for privatization, as did Democrats and Republicans in Congress.69 “There was little public debate or opposition to the privatization of the NSFNET,” write Jay Kesan and Rajiv Shah in their detailed dissection of the Internet privatization process, “Fool Us Once Shame on You—Fool Us Twice Shame on Us.” “By the early 1990s, telecommunications policy for both political parties was based upon notions of deregulation and competition. At numerous junctures before the privatization of the NSFNET, politicians and telecommunication executives made it clear that the private sector would own and operate the Internet.”70
Senator Daniel Inouye, a Democrat from Hawaii, was one of the few elected officials in Washington who objected to this wholesale privatization. He wanted to soften the push for privatization with a proposal that would reserve 20 percent of future Internet capacity for noncommercial use by nonprofits, local community groups, and other public-benefit groups.71 His reasoning was that because the federal government had funded the creation of this network, it should be able to reserve a small part for the public. But his modest proposal was no match for the industry lobbying and the privatization fervor of his colleagues in the Congress.
In 1995, the National Science Foundation officially retired the NSFNET, handing control of the Internet to a handful of private network providers that it had created less than a decade earlier. There was no vote in Congress on the issue.72 There was no public referendum or discussion. It happened by bureaucratic decree, and Stephen Wolff’s government-funded privatized design of the network made the privatization seem seamless and natural.
A year later, President Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, a law that deregulated the telecommunications industry, allowing for the first time since the New Deal nearly unlimited corporate cross-ownership of the media: cable companies, radio stations, film studios, newspapers, phone companies, television broadcasters, and, of course, Internet service providers.73 The law triggered massive consolidation, culminating in just a handful of vertically integrated companies owning the bulk of the American media market. “This law is truly revolutionary legislation that will bring the future to our doorstep,” President Clinton declared when he signed the act.
A handful of powerful telecommunications companies absorbed most of the privatized NSFNET providers that had been set up with funds from the National Science Foundation a decade earlier. San Francisco Bay Area’s regional provider became part of Verizon. Southern California’s, which was part-owned by the military contractor General Atomics, was absorbed by AT&T. New York’s became part of Cogent Communications, one of the largest backbone companies in the world. The backbone went to Time-Warner. And MCI, which had run the backbone along with IBM, merged with WorldCom, combining two of the biggest Internet service providers in the world.74
All these mergers represented the corporate centralization of a powerful new telecommunications system that had been created by the military and ushered into commercial life by the National Science Foundation.75 To put it another way, the Internet was born.76
Amid all this consolidation, a new tech publication appeared on the scene, one that grafted the utopian ideals of Stewart Brand’s cybernetic communes to the free-market fervor of the 1990s. It helped sell this emerging privatized Internet as a true countercultural political revolution: it called itself Wired.
Whole Earth 2.0
Louis Rossetto, a lanky preppy with a Patrick Swayze haircut, started Wired in 1993. Rossetto grew up in Long Island in a conservative Catholic family. His father, Louis Rossetto Sr., was an executive at a printing company and had worked in missile development and weapons production during World War II.77 The younger Rossetto enrolled at Columbia University in the late 1960s and was there during the student protests against the Vietnam War and ARPA’s militarization of academic research.78 He watched as his fellow students occupied buildings and clashed violently with police, but he didn’t share their zeal.79 Rossetto was on the opposite side of the barricades. He was against the left-wing antiwar politics that dominated New York’s radical student circles. He was president of Columbia’s College Republicans and a diehard Richard Nixon supporter.
All the political activity on campus and the increasingly violent nature of the protests only made him move further to the right: to Ayn Rand, libertarian anarchism, and the ideas of nineteenth-century antigovernment fundamentalists and Social Darwinists. He coauthored an essay in the New York Times Magazine that explained the philosophy of libertarianism and criticized the New Left’s focus on wealth redistribution and democratic reforms. To him, this kind of expansive government was the enemy.80 Among his heroes were Ayn Rand and Karl Hess III, former speechwriter for Senator Barry M. Goldwater who rebranded himself as a radical libertarian and saw computer technology as the ultimate antigovernment weapon: “Instead of learning how to make bombs, revolutionaries should master computer programming,” he told a journalist in 1970.81
Rossetto did not heed Hess’s advice. Instead, he enrolled in a business program at Columbia, graduated, dreamed of becoming a novelist, and then spent the next decade drifting around the world. For a man with right-wing libertarian tendencies, Rossetto sure had a penchant for showing up in places with left-wing insurgencies: he was in Sri Lanka for the Tamil rebellion and appeared in Peru just in time for the Maoist Shining Path insurgency. He also managed to hang out with mujahedeen in Afghanistan and filed glowing reports in the Christian Science Monitor on their fight against the Soviet Union with American-made weapons.82 Rossetto traveled to the war zone by hitching a ride in a pickup with jihadi fighters.83
Amid all this, he found a job writing editorials for a small investment firm in Paris; met his future partner Jane Metcalfe, who hailed from an old family in Louisville, Kentucky; and launched an early tech magazine called Electric Word that was funded by a Dutch translation software company.84 The magazine went out of business, but during his time there Rossetto got in touch with Stewart Brand and his crew of Bay Area tech boosters. Contact with this influential subculture made him realize that the world lacked a solid technology lifestyle magazine. He was intent on bringing one to life.
In 1991, Rossetto and Metcalfe moved to New York to start up the magazine, but all their stateside business and investor leads fizzled. For some reason, they couldn’t drum up excitement. The computer and networking industries were on fire in the Bay Area, yet no one wanted to back their project. No one, that is, except one man: Nicholas Negroponte, a wealthy engineer and businessman who had spent more than two decades working for ARPA.
Negroponte came from an affluent, highly connected family. His father was a Greek shipping magnate. His older brother, John Negroponte, was a career diplomat and Reagan administration official who had just finished a stint as the highly controversial ambassador to Honduras, where he was accused of playing a central role in a covert CIA-backed counterinsurgency campaign against the left-wing Sandinista government in neighboring Nicaragua.85
Nicholas Negroponte, like his older brother, was also connected to America’s military-intelligence apparatus, but from a slightly different angle. He was a longtime ARPA contractor and had worked on a variety of military computer initiatives at MIT.86 He had been a prominent member of the ARPANET Cambridge P
roject. He also ran his own ARPA-funded research outfit at MIT called the Machine Architecture Group (MAG).87
MAG did all kinds of research for the military. It worked on video conferencing technology that would enable the president and his top generals, scattered across the country in underground bunkers, to interact with each other in a natural manner in the event of a nuclear war.88 It developed an interactive “video map” of Aspen, Colorado, an experimental virtual reality environment that could be used to practice military raids.89 Perhaps MAG’s creepiest experiment involved creating a robotic maze populated by gerbils. The project, called SEEK, was a giant cage filled with light blocks that the animals would bump into and shift as they moved through the environment. A computer watched the scene and deployed a robotic arm to reorganize the shifted blocks and place them into spots it “thought” the animals wanted them to be in. The idea was to create a computer-mediated dynamic environment—a “cybernetic world model”—that changed according to the demands and wishes of the gerbils.90
In 1985, Negroponte pivoted Machine Architecture Group into something cooler and more in line with the personal computer revolution: the MIT Media Lab, a hub that connected business, military contracting, and university research. He aggressively pursued corporate sponsorship, trying to find ways to commercialize and cash in on the development of the computer, networking, and graphics technology that he had been developing for ARPA. For a hefty annual membership fee, sponsors gained access to all the technology developed at the Media Lab without having to pay licensing fees. It was a runaway success. Just two years after opening its doors, the Media Lab racked up a huge list of corporate sponsors. Every major American newspaper and television network was part of the club, as were major automobile and computer companies, including General Motors, IBM, Apple, Sony, Warner Brothers, and HBO.91 ARPA, which by that time had rebranded as DARPA, was a major sponsor as well.92
The MIT Media Lab was a big sensation at the time—so much so that Stewart Brand practically begged Negroponte for a chance to hang out there. In 1986, he was given an opportunity to spend a year at the Media Lab as a “visiting scientist.” Later, he published a book about Negroponte and the cutting-edge technology his lab ushered into the world. It reads like marketing copy, giddy for a world of computer gadgets, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and globe-encompassing computer networks. Brand described Negroponte as a “visionary” singularly driven to “invent the future,” and he helped cement Negroponte’s status as a rebellious High Tech Priest, who straddled the worlds of big corporations and big governments but transcended them both.
In the early 1990s, when Rossetto and Metcalfe were desperate for investors for their tech lifestyle magazine, Negroponte was one of the most respected and sought-after computer visionaries in the world. So, in 1992, armed with a mockup issue of Wired and a business plan, Rossetto and Metcalfe cornered him at the $1,000-a-head Technology, Entertainment, and Design Conference—today known as TED—in Monterey, California. They made their pitch, and to their surprise, Negroponte was impressed and agreed to help them get funding. He lined up meetings with Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch, but neither expressed much interest. In the end, Negroponte decided to back the project on his own. He provided $75,000 of seed capital in return for a 10 percent stake. It was a paltry amount for a huge chunk of the business, but Rossetto and Metcalfe agreed. They smartly saw the opportunity: Nicholas Negroponte was a huge name with deep connections to the highest echelons of business, academia, and government. They bet that Negroponte would help prime the investment pump, with his money and involvement brining in other big players who would be willing to invest far greater sums in Wired. They were right. After he came on board, investment money flowed in like water.
To help him craft the new magazine, Rossetto hired Stewart Brand’s old apprentice as Wired’s founding executive editor: Kevin Kelly. Pudgy, with an Amish-style beard, Kelly had worked for Stewart Brand in the late 1980s, just as the aging counterculture promoter was beginning to push his publishing business away from communes and into the booming personal computer industry. Kelly was an energetic and eager acolyte, a man ripe for a righteous mission.
The son of a Time magazine executive, Kelly spent most of the 1970s backpacking around the world. In 1979, while he was traveling through Israel, he had a divine vision. By his own account, he was locked out of his hotel and was forced to wander around Jerusalem at night. He fell asleep on a stone slab inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and upon waking had a religious vision in which he realized that Jesus was the son of God and had come back from the dead as humanity’s savior. “In the end, it comes down to a decision that one makes. You go down one road and within that road, everything makes complete sense,” Kelly later said of his conversion experience. “I think that is sort of what I did. It took going to Jerusalem on Easter morning out to the empty tombs to really trigger an acceptance of this alternative view. Once I accepted it, there is a logic, comfort, leverage that I have because of that view.”93
Leverage is a good word for Kelly’s sudden religious inspiration. His faith in God matched his faith in the power of technological progress, which he saw as a part of God’s divine plan for the world. Over the years, he developed the belief that the growth of the Internet, the gadgetization and computerization of everything around us, the ultimate melding of flesh and computers, and the uploading of human beings into a virtual computer world were all part of a process that would merge people with God and allow us to become gods as well, creating and ruling over our own digital and robotic worlds just like our maker. “I had this vision of the unbounded God binding himself to his creation. When we make these virtual worlds in the future—worlds whose virtual beings will have autonomy to commit evil, murder, hurt, and destroy options—it’s not unthinkable that the game creator would go in to try to fix the world from the inside. That’s the story of Jesus’ redemption to me. We have an unbounded God who enters this world in the same way that you would go into virtual reality and bind yourself to a limited being and try to redeem the actions of the other beings since they are your creations,” Kelly explained in an interview with Christianity Today.
At Wired, Kelly injected this theology into every part of the magazine, infusing the text with an unquestioning belief in the ultimate goodness and rightness of markets and decentralized computer technology, no matter how it was used.
The first issue of Wired hit newsstands in January 1993. It was printed on glossy paper in neon inks and featured jarring layouts that deliberately copied the chaotic DIY zine aesthetic used by Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog. Just like Whole Earth, Wired positioned itself as a publication for and by a new and radical digital counterculture that lived on the cutting edge of a new networked world. It was also a guide for outsiders who wanted to be a part of this exciting future, teaching readers how to talk and think about the technology revolution.94 “There are a lot of magazines about technology,” Rossetto explains in the magazine’s inaugural issue. “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.”95
Wired was an immediate financial and critical success. It had thirty thousand subscribers by the end of its first year. In its second year of publication, it snagged a prestigious National Magazine Award and racked up two hundred thousand subscribers. It launched a television subsidiary and a search engine called HotBot. By 1996, Louis Rossetto was ready to cash in on the boom and take the company public. He recruited Goldman Sachs to make it happen, which gave Wired an estimated value of $450 million. The magazine was the face of the dot-com boom and an evangelist for the New Economy, a revolutionary moment in history in which technological progress was supposed to rewrite all the rules and make everything that had come before irrelevant and outdated.
Amer
ica’s computer industry press dated to the 1960s. It wasn’t flashy or hip, but it covered the emerging computer and networking business very well—it did not shy away from critical reporting. Publications like ComputerWorld were at the forefront of covering the privacy debate and the danger of centralized computer databases in the 1970s and provided in-depth coverage of the NSFNET privatization scandals of the 1990s. Wired was different. Just like Whole Earth, Wired was not fully a journalistic enterprise; nor was it an industry publication.96 It seemed more a networking hub and marketing vehicle for the industry, a booster intended to create a brand around the cult of technology and the people who made and sold it, and then repackage it for the mainstream culture. It was continuing a tradition that Stewart Brand had started, overlaying an increasingly powerful computer industry with images of the counterculture to give it a hip and grassroots revolutionary edge.
This wasn’t just posturing. In those first few years, the energy and evangelism soaked every neon-colored page of Wired. The magazine covered cutting-edge Pentagon virtual reality battlefield technology.97 It profiled cryptographers and fringe entrepreneurs rebelling against the federal government. It reported on a new class of computer capitalists building a new tech world among the ruins of the Soviet Union. It cheered the dot-com boom and the red-hot stock market, arguing that this was not a speculative bubble but a new phase in civilization when technological advances meant that the stock market would never crash again.98 It reviewed books and films, showcased the latest computer gadgets, featured interviews with musicians like Brian Eno, and commissioned sci-fi authors like William Gibson to do investigative reporting. And, of course, Stewart Brand frequently graced the magazine’s pages, starting with the inaugural issue. In Wired’s world, computers and the Internet were changing everything. Governments, armies, public ownership of resources, traditional left-right alignment of political parties, fiat money—all these were relics of the past. Computer networking technology was sweeping it all away and creating a new world in its place.