The New York Times Archives

WE HAVE TO WRAP OUR brains around 3.05 for a second." John Battelle, the managing editor of Wired, is using softwarespeak to start a meeting about the fifth issue of the magazine's third year. But Louis Rossetto seems to be somewhere else. Wearing sneakers and jeans, his wavy gray hair yanked back into a ponytail, curly wisps escaping around the sides, he stares blankly into space, like some cocky kid on an internship. Actually, he's Wired's 45-year-old editor and publisher, looking lost in a daydream . . . about how he trounced the mass media, maybe, those Second Wave dinosaurs who wouldn't know an Ethernet if somebody hacked one directly into their brainstem. . . .

Rossetto props himself up on a bony elbow. The daydream would go like this: He lopes through the streets of Manhattan -- a tall, skinny figure -- with his partner in romance and business, Jane Metcalfe. It's 1991 and they have no jobs. They're looking for money to start a new magazine about the Digital Generation, whom they call "the most powerful people on the planet today."

Eventually, they get one bite -- from Nicholas Negroponte, director of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who introduces them to certain people who might be forgiven for thinking they are among the most powerful people on the planet. But each one -- Rupert Murdoch, S. I. Newhouse, Christy Hefner, Henry Kravitz and on and on -- politely tell Rossetto and Metcalfe to get lost. A cute couple, but what the hell are they talking about?

It's not a good time to be asking for money. The country is in recession, the gulf war has exploded and the term "information superhighway" doesn't even exist. As magazines fold and advertising budgets are slashed, those lucky editors, TV producers and ad execs who still have jobs are clutching ever more madly for a trend that will define the 90's, any plausible new market for companies to hawk their products to -- Generation X! No, the End of Greed! Wait, Grunge!

O.K., maybe Rossetto's record of reading entrails was spotty. After getting his M.B.A. from Columbia in 1973, he lay on the beach and smoked dope until the inspiration struck to write a novel about a President named Richard Nixon who avoids impeachment by fabricating a national security crisis -- but "Takeover" was published just a week before Nixon resigned. Bummer. A few years later, he was hanging out in Rome working on the set of the raunchy sex flick "Caligula" when he realized that those real, 200-person orgies would make a perfect metaphor for the sexual revolution -- which was history by 1981, when the book he ghostwrote, "Ultimate Porno," finally came out.

But by 1991 Rossetto just knows what the Next Big Thing will be. He and Metcalfe tell everybody in New York who will listen, practically climbing the Empire State Building and blasting it through a bullhorn: DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY IS NOT A TREND. IT'S NOT EVEN A ZEITGEIST. THIS IS . . . A . . . PHREAKING . . . REVOLUTION!

The Digital Revolution is happening now, on the cusp of the millenium. Why can't they see? Why can't they wrap their puny minds around the fact that for a lousy $350,000 they can have control of not only two unemployed dreamers and their new magazine but the key to the new American soul, the whole damn future of media, a worldwide. . . .

"This really doesn't work -- it's creepy." Rossetto has snapped out of his trance. He's talking about a story on techno-pagans.

"I'm not persuaded it's a trend at all," agrees Kevin Kelly, the executive editor. The manuscript is sent flying across the table. Tired, not Wired.

LOCATED IN A FOURTH-FLOOR LOFT IN AN old factory building in San Francisco, Wired's office is almost too techno-chic to be true. Most of the 77 employees are in their 20's. An African gray parrot squawks in the lobby. Healthy meals are prepared daily in the kitchen by the staff chef and on Thursdays you can pay a masseuse named Ratka $10 to knead out the kinks in a private room. And everywhere are blue-gray wires, bunches of them, crawling across ceilings, snaking and twisting down walls and columns, across desks and tables, eventually plugging into four Ethernets and 150 computers -- a self-conscious display of the new American status symbol of hipness and emerging power.

Today, Rossetto's daydream is real: Wired has become one of the hottest magazines in America. It went from an object of derision to a moneymaker just three issues after hitting newstands in January 1993 (five years is considered miraculous for most new magazines). It has won more than a dozen honors, including a National Magazine Award, reached 228,000 monthly circulation, started new editions in Japan and Britain and spawned Hotwired, an already lucrative, if esoteric, new form of journalism delivered on the Internet's World Wide Web.

But Wired is more than a successful magazine. Like Rolling Stone in the 60's, it has become the totem of a major cultural movement. Its leaders -- those "most powerful people on the planet today" -- are mostly affluent white guys in their 30's and 40's. They speak their own language -- of hypertext, data compression, bit strings and bandwidth. They wrap their minds around ideas, jack into computer networks, interface with virtual worlds and grok (meaning, they dig) hacking. They have their own style of dress (sneakers, no ties) and artist icons (Laurie Anderson, Brian Eno). In their universe, science, entrepreneurship and free markets are cool; the mass media, old literary establishments and government meddling are not. They can be arrogant and self-involved, but many are also intelligent, creative and fun -- like big kids, some of them!

"This is the mainstream culture of the 21st century," Rossetto says. "It's a new economy, a new counterculture, and beyond politics. In 10 or 20 years, the world will be completely transformed. Everything we know will be different. Not just a change from L.B.J. to Nixon, but whether there will be a President at all. I think Alvin Toffler's basically right: we're in a phase change of civilizations here."

Those comments come during one of many excitable interviews. Back at the editorial meeting, Rossetto zones in and out, cupping his angular face in one hand, eyes roaming to a corner of the ceiling, skin so pale that just where his long fingers end, you can see blue veins around his eyes.

Behind him, curling on the walls, are pages from the latest issue, splashed with the ground-breaking design that has become the magazine's trademark. Since Wired was conceived as a report from the future, its creative director, John Plunkett, liberally sprinkles the pages with psychedelic Day-Glo colors and places text over spooky images of brains, circuits, globes and TV screens. Some stories are impossible to read -- even laid out sideways. Marshall McLuhan is listed on the masthead as "Patron Saint." In the very first issue, Rossetto warned that "the Digital Revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon. . . ."

The message is clear: Without Wired, you'll drown. The magazine makes the future look like a terrifying, disorienting place. This is no accident. Wired is a magazine for and about the Digital Vanguard -- and anybody else who thinks they are smart and cool enough to join the club.

How they discovered this new digital subculture is explained by Jane Metcalfe, whose office is at the opposite end of Wired's loft space. The 33-year-old company president moves her thin frame around with great bursts of energy and charm, talking rapidly about how she and Rossetto met in Paris and worked together in Amsterdam for Electric Word, a technology trade journal. When the journal folded in 1990, Rossetto made the rounds at industry shows and conferences, trying to figure out what to do next. That was their moment of epiphany.

"We saw this whole new community of people," she says. "There was this gathering political agenda, a perspective on the world, a sense of the future."