Romancing wired magazine.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Soundbite - Interview

As a defining media presence of the 1990s, Wired did more than change the way magazines looked (though it certainly did that, in vivid Day-Glo colors). The brainchild of editor/publisher Louis Rossetto, Wired gave the world a way of talking about how digital culture is revolutionizing society and radically reshaping human destiny. Wired: A Romance (Random House), by Gary Wolf, tells the story of how Rossetto and his partner Jane Metcalfe put their path-breaking publication together and how they were ousted just a few short years later.

Partly a smart social history of the '90s and partly a high-stakes business tale, the book richly evokes the tech-bubble world and its collapse. The 41-year-old Wolf, who worked at Wired in its early days, lives in San Francisco and is the coauthor, with Joey Anuff. of Dumb Money: Adventures of a Day Trader. Still a Wired contributing editor, he is currently at work on a novel.

Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie interviewed Wolf via e-mail in July.

Q: You call your book "a romance." Why?

A: I use "romance" in a novelist's sense, to refer to the uncanny, the supernatural. Ghosts and demons are not permissible in journalism, but there are other forces in the world that hauntingly take possession of individuals. Ideas--powerful new ideas--often appear unexpectedly in several places at once. Like ghosts, they are "in the air."

Once they begin to work, they can have an uncanny, almost demonic effect, causing otherwise...