Wired-A Romance by Gary Wolf

Description

How a magazine became the bible of the digital revolution — and what happened when the revolution ate its own. Louis Rossetto started with no money, no home, and no job. Five years later he owned the hottest magazine in America: Wired, whose hyperactive Day-Glo pages declared every American institution obsolete — and were read on television, in Congress, and on the president’s desk.

Gary Wolf, one of Wired‘s most popular writers, watched it all from the inside. Wired: A Romance is his account of the San Francisco headquarters that became a pilgrimage site for everyone who wanted to stand at the white-hot center of the digital age — and of the hubris, brilliance, and chaos that followed.

Essential tech history. For anyone who lived through the nineties — or wants to understand how we got here. The best book ever written about a magazine — and about the dizzying moment the future arrived.

Wired: A Romance is the insider’s account of how a magazine became the bible of the digital revolution — and what happened when the revolution ate its own.

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Louis Rossetto started with no money, no home, and no job. Five years later he owned the hottest magazine in America. Wired’s hyperactive Day-Glo pages declared every American institution obsolete, and the world listened: the magazine was on television, in the halls of Congress, on the president’s desk. Its San Francisco headquarters became a pilgrimage site for everyone who wanted to stand at the white-hot center of the digital age.

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Gary Wolf, one of Wired’s most popular writers, watched it all from the inside. He tells the story of HotWired’s first banner ads for the World Wide Web, the rush into book publishing, broadcast, and foreign editions — and the feedback loop that grew stunningly out of control as the dot-com boom outran reason.

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Thrilling, hilarious, heartbreaking, and absurd by turns, Wired: A Romance goes beyond the dot-com clichés to paint a deeply affecting portrait of an era. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test for our own age — the story of a dreamer who turned American media upside down.