I’ve been a fan of Wired Magazine since issue number 1. Many think the collection of striped magazine covers that are still displayed on one of my bookshelves should be discarded, but I won’t budge. This issue marks Wired’s 10th anniversary and there is a great recap of the past ten years and the excellent articles the magazine has produced.
“What a dull, distressing decade it promised to be. San Francisco was taking the early ’90s hard. The city had always been a boomtown, and now, in the aftermath of recession and the Gulf War, it languished in the stale atmosphere of a boomtown in distress. There had been a drought for five years, and the sidewalks were lined with sickly trees.
The old revolutionary spirit was hard to discern. Two decades after most of the flower children had vanished, their slogans were derided as antiquated wishful thinking. And things were not so fresh on the other side of the political spectrum, either. The anticommunist crusaders and free-market fundamentalists who triumphed in the age of Reagan were desperate for new battles. The Soviet Union was dead. Capitalism had won. What was left to fight about?
There was no point in looking for inspiration overseas. Europe was scratching its head over what to do with all those poor countries east of the ex-Iron Curtain, and the Japanese were still searching for the bottom after their bubble economy burst.” Full Story