Wired magazine sucks!

I was an early adopter of Wired magazine. I have issue #2 (May/June 1993) and on the cover are some "black hat" hackers with masks on behind an American flag. The cover text reads, "Rebels with a Cause - Your Privacy" and one of them in the photo is wearing a t-shirt with the Electronic Frontier Foundation's name and URL, www.eff.org.

Ah, the good old days! Lou Rossetto Jr. is an interesting character and a Libertarian type associated with the Ayn Rand inspired "Reason" magazine. He also wrote a fictional book about Richard Nixon and a coup d'etat, titled "Take-Over" which is worth a read regardless of your politics.

Anyway, enough of lamenting the loss of the original Wired, because I want to focus on how crappy the new one has become. I receive a gift subscription from my father who knows I like tech, but I am not obsessed with gadgets at all, if anything I avoid them like the plague since they are to me little more than vanity accessories for the status conscious. Wired sucks because of their parent corp., Conde Nast Publications which has turned a very cool thing with counter-cultural roots and Libertarian leanings into a high-tech Vanity Fair with all the crappy adverts and hype and, well, crap! In the past year the British "grimehall" entertainer known as Lady Sovereign has been in Wired three times... so what is so "wired" about this girl? Nothing at all, but she is on Jay-Z's Rocafella label and the hype machine has it's hooks in print media as much as it has in cable TV or any other medium.

I then turned to issue #2.06 with the classic Mad magazine Spy vs. Spy guys choking and knifing each other, one wearing a propeller beanie with the text, "Spy vs. Nerd: The super-secret NSA answers Clipper critics" and "The EFF is fighting for your rights in cyberspace". Ah, the good old days... if you REALLY want to know more, click here... because if you think Wired cares about you and your privacy you are a fool because the mags advertisers PWN THEM!