Fourth in a series. Previous installments:
Read More
Leave a comment on The Standard, Part 2: “The Internet Weekly”
The Standard, Part 2: “The Internet Weekly”
Tag: wired
The Standard, Part 1 – The End and The Beginning
Note: Third in a series. First post, second post.
The Oak Grove cemetery in Tisbury, Massachusetts encompasses roughly ten acres of rolling woodlands and narrow dirt roads. Its 1,800 or so headstones date back two centuries, making Oak Grove a relative newcomer as New England graveyards go. I’ve been visiting this sacred, spectral spot on the island of Martha’s Vineyard for nearly five decades. Half my family is buried there.
Read MoreGet Wired: The Launch (1992-93)
(continuation of a previous post)
If you ever have a hit on your hands, my advice is to take notes. Living in the whirlwind of blinding success is a little like experiencing your own wedding – everyone tells you to enjoy it, to remember every detail. But decades later, all you can recall is leaving the reception, relieved that everyone seemed to have a good time.
Read MoreOne Fateful Phone Call: How I Ended Up At Wired
Living at the cutting edge of technology in the early ’90s required either a magical token forged of copper and silver, or the capacity to memorize a ridiculously long string of numbers. Either the token or the code would connect you to a vast telecommunications network driven by immense computers housed in bunker-like buildings scattered around the world.
Labor Day 1992. I squeezed into a pay phone behind the oldest bar in California, The Iron Door, pride of Groveland, California – the “gateway to Yosemite.” I never could remember my access code, but I did have a token – also known as a quarter – which I slipped into the pay phone, then dialed my voicemail, a state of the art service that cost me an extra five bucks a month. Back then everybody used voicemail, it was an asynchronous lifeline to the rest of the world.
Read MoreWhat Media Must Do To Succeed
(image)
Man, there’s been a ton of hand wringing over “the media” of late, from all the fuss over First Look and the New Republic to questions about whether a publication can survive if it’s not at 20-30mm uniques and growing – like current darlings Vox, BuzzFeed, and Vice.
Read MoreElse 5.5.14: Stay Sober, My Friend (And Watch Your F8)
Cinco de Mayo on a Monday? What fresh hell is this? Just another week of links worth reading, if you care about the most muscular narrative in our beer-goggled world. Facebook (and Wired) dominated thanks to news from it F8 developer conference, but policy and politics were not far behind. To those links…
Beyond net neutrality: The new battle for the future of the internet – Vox
Read MoreNearly 30 Years In Less Than an Hour
Pinch me: Last week I gave a “distinguished” lecture in Engineering at Berkeley. It was an honor to do so – I don’t really see myself as distinguished in any academic sense – and certainly not when it comes to engineering. (I do think my greying temples are starting to look distinguished, if I do say so….) Anyway, it was a lot of fun – in particular because my hosts asked me to spend a bit of time reviewing the past 30 or so years of my own work. Should you want to take a spin through the early days of Macweek, Wired (and HotWired), The Industry Standard, Web 2 Summit, my last book, the launch of and present adtech resurgence of FM, as well as the next book – well, here ya go. Bonus: I had a cold, so I was totally hopped up on Actifed.
The Future of War (From Jan., 1993 to the Present)
(image is a shot of my copy of the first Wired magazine, signed by our founding team)
I just read this NYT piece on the United States’ approach to unmanned warfare: Do Drones Undermine Democracy?. From it:
There is not a single new manned combat aircraft under research and development at any major Western aerospace company, and the Air Force is training more operators of unmanned aerial systems than fighter and bomber pilots combined. In 2011, unmanned systems carried out strikes from Afghanistan to Yemen. The most notable of these continuing operations is the not-so-covert war in Pakistan, where the United States has carried out more than 300 drone strikes since 2004.
Read More