
The Killer App: Wired Magazine, Voice of the Corporate Revolution (1995) - pron
http://thebaffler.com/archive/the_killer_app_wired_magazine_voice_of_the_corporate_revolution
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pron
"Wired’s distinctive maimed typography and its fluorescent hues may be
interesting, but the magazine’s truly marvelous feature is its corporate-
cultural mission. Wired is technology’s hip face, an aggressive apologist for
the new information capitalism that speaks to the world in the postmodern
executive’s favored tones of chaotic cool and pseudo-revolution."

"Wired ’s vision of the good life is impressively consistent: money, power,
and a Game Boy sewn into the palm of your hand. Equally consistent is the
absence of any serious consideration of the problems that come with business
control of information technology. In order to reconcile its standard pro-
business politics with its rebel image, the magazine makes a great display of
embracing a certain strain of extreme information antinomianism."

"Another Wired cause célèbre is the outlaw hacker. In almost every issue, it
seems, the editors find a new way to stir readers’ outrage over the fate of
one Phiber Optik, a jailed hacker described as having a “colorful urban style
and a near suicidal willingness to demonstrate his prowess at picking the
locks on telephone company systems.”2 While Wired’s ongoing loyalty to the
troubled young man is admirable, its frequent stories do little more than use
him to reaffirm the myth of the rebel entrepreneur so celebrated in
contemporary management literature."

