Women’s magazines are so obviously facile and patronizing that many women turn to other, supposedly “better” magazines—the New Yorker, Harper’s (hell, even the Atlantic, even when it’s so boring you can barely stand to read the damn thing).
But then came WIRED. Which, as a respectable nerd girl, I always thought I should like—except that in the late nineties, it was full of the same black-pants-clad, cell-phone-toting jerks I had to deal with at work, and sifting through that dreck to get to the occasional nugget of tech-wisdom just wasn’t worth it.
Nonetheless, I thought there was something wrong with me. Boys dug WIRED. Tech people dug WIRED. And it seemed kind of gender-neutral, or something. I was clearly out of step, no matter how much the damn magazine irritated me.
WIRED landed on my desk again about a year ago, after I started at idfive, and so I decided to give it a fair second look. I figured most of the gadget porn was meant for boys anyway, so I skipped the monotonous articles about add-ons to console games, laudatory tidbits about 8-bit graphics, and the-cell-phone-you-can’t-live-without, trying to get directly to the “real content”.
It took me six months or so to admit that the “real content” didn’t actually exist. Every article was shallow, refused to present a contrary point of view, ignored the real lede, and was evidently written by a bunch of gerbils running a maze devised by the editors. After all, I was being fair, so it didn’t matter that reading the same issue 7 times yielded no more content than the first skim-through: I should like WIRED, I would like it!
Turns out that WIRED has the same rah-rah, advertiser-y boosterism that turned me off magazines in the first place—because, actually, all magazines ignore the Chinese wall: that sacred boundary between editorial and advertising which newspapers so pride themselves on.
Yet WIRED is smug in a way that women’s magazines aren’t: WIRED pretends to wink at the Wall, while it ignores it; it pretends to objective “journalism”, even while it whores journalism (even by magazine standards); the magazine pretends to be all the things which we thought they were because they have good “branding”—but can’t fulfill on any of it.
Look, any advertising person can tell you this: Talk to a magazine ad rep for ten minutes and you’ll realize that the entire issue’s up for sale—the editorial, the space, the advertorial, for the most part. Even as august an institution as the Atlantic sells (and I use that word to be politic) its columnists to its advertisers. Whether the columnists bite or not is a different story, but it’s not for lack of trying on the part of the ad department. It’s ever thus, because the advertisers pay the bills; I actually don’t have much of a problem with all the off-the-record interactions between the advertisers and the editorial department. This is business, after all. But let’s not all play nicey-nice and pretend it doesn’t happen–those columnists, dear reader, may or may not be your friends.
What’s disturbing about a publication like WIRED is that it holds a privileged place in what I think is a very important discourse about the intersection between society and rapidly-changing technology, but the magazine is so unabashedly cynical that it does it tongue-in-cheek twice: once, laughing at the advertisers, and a second time, laughing at us suckers who don’t seek to question its implicit assumptions, its lazy journalism, and its relationships with the people who pay its bills. Like the smug CIO who refuses to fix your computer, WIRED laughs behind your back while it pretends you’re in on the joke; it creates a culture that makes all of us engaged in the business of technology suffer, while pretending to glorify it; and it picks our pockets while it pretends to deliver dubious insight. In fact, WIRED is a product of its age: the dot-com mentality hasn’t gone away, at least within its pages.