Thread by @davekarpf

Gather 'round, everyone. It's time to discuss the politics throughline in the #Wiredarchive project.

There are three pretty distinct eras of @WIRED political coverage. (1) early WIRED, which runs from 93-03, (2) Web 2.0 WIRED, which runs from 03-15, and (3) what I started calling #WokeWIRED in my archival notes, which runs from '15 through today.
(2/x)

Speaking as a digital politics scholar who started reading the magazine in the mid-00s, there were some surprising gaps in political coverage in early WIRED.

In my discipline, the anti-globalization movement/"Battle of Seattle" is an iconic reference point. Not in WIRED at all.

@WIRED didn't cover early @MoveOn (even though it was founded by former software developers who used to advertise in the magazine!). It didn't cover the anti-globalization movement. It didn't cover the anti-war movement.

That's a LOT of internet politics left to the side. (4/x)

This highlights a broader ideological perspective in early WIRED: the digital revolution and economic globalization were woven together like two strands of DNA.

The Cold War was over. The Net was lowering barriers to trade and information flow. The global marketplace was coming.

Here's an example: a September 1995 piece asking if there is a new politics emerging in the Net/cyberspace/digital culture: wired.com/1995/09/netpol…

"The nation-state is now receding, yielding center stage to 'the marketplace.'"
(7/x)

That wasn't the ONLY digital politics of the time (Believe me... those were my formative activist years.), but they were emblematic of how politics looked to a particularly influential set of technological thinkers.
(8/x)

Still, early @WIRED had plenty of political coverage. And some of it even had a strident, radical edge to it. The @EFF basically had a monthly column throughout the 90s. The magazine covered the Clipper chip, the Communications Decency Act, the '96 telecom act, etc. (9/x)

A few articles stand out as iconic of the early WIRED era. First we have the early @EFF arc:

-1994's "The Merry Pranksters Go to Washington" wired.com/1994/06/eff/
and 1996's "How Good People Helped Make a Bad Law"
wired.com/1996/02/digite…
(10/x)

In the 1994 article, the EFF is turning its sights on Washington. Their influence is on the rise, and they are asking questions like "How hard could it be to hack government?" There's even loose talk about building a "Net Political Party."
(11/x)

The 1996 article reckons with the aftermath of the Digital Telephony Bill. The EFF had tried its hand at insider lobbying, working with congress to help improve bad regulations before they became law. The blowback from techno-libertarians was INTENSE. (12/x)

The EFF shuttered their DC office, and a cofounder left the organization to launch @CenDemTech. Hacking government didn't work so well.

Reading chronologically, you can see how residual anger at Clinton/Gore seeped into the next several years of coverage. (13/x)

John Perry Barlow's famous "Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace" was written the same month that Rogier Van Bakel's '96 article (essentially eulogizing the EFF) hit newsstands.

Barlow wasn't being a starry-eyed optimist in his declaration. He was reclaiming his cred. 14/x

Mid-90s @WIRED also included a yearlong "Netizen" column in 1996, covering the Presidential election.

They hired @jheil to write the column. Stylistically it feels very similar to his coverage of later elections. (Game Change, but featuring Bob Dole) (15/x)

The other iconic articles from early @WIRED political coverage are John Katz's Digital Nation/Digital Citizen pieces. Both are from 1997.

Birth of a Digital Nation: wired.com/1997/04/netize…
The Digital Citizen: wired.com/1997/12/netize…

(16/x)

Katz had contributed to the Netizen column throughout 1996. There wasn't much *digital* to be found in that political campaign. But Katz saw some deeper currents at work -- "the rise of postpolitics and the birth of the Digital Nation."

(17/x)

"Where our current political system is irrational, awash in hypocritical god-and-values talk, the Digital Nation points the way toward a more rational, less dogmatic approach to politics. The world's information is being liberated, and so, as a consequence, are we."-Katz (18/x)

I previously wrote a brief thread about the second digital citizen story:

https://twitter.com/davekarpf/status/1006945422911426565

There's a larger lesson from it, though. Jon Katz in 99 was looking at the segment of the public that was participating in vibrant online discourse. (...) (19/x)

He then imagined that, as more people come online, they (a) would also join the civic discourse and (b) would come to be like the people already there.

That's the systematic problem with (near-)futurism. We take today's trends and imagine more of the same. (20/x)

But it turns out that as a networked system scales, it also radically changes. New users have different interests and preferences than early adopters. Existing institutions respond and react. Regulators take notice. Financiers start looking to monetize. (21/x)

(That being said, I'm now 21 tweets into this throughline, and we haven't even reached the second phase of WIRED political coverage. so let's move on...)

(22/x)

Late 2003 is when @WIRED's political coverage shifts. This is emblematic of a broader shift. It has been a couple of years since the dotcom bust. Those are lean years for tech coverage in general. September 11th and the Iraq War blanket the public consciousness. (23/x)

If the 90s dotcom boom was also about the triumph of globalization, then the crash + 9/11 was doubly jarring. The big tech stories in those first couple years were dour reports on the copyright wars (Napster) and the future of war.

Tech had lost its prevailing metaphor. (24/x)

The Open source movement and "Web 2.0" finally emerged as the new driving metaphor for the digital revolution. And that gave blogging and the Dean campaign center stage. (25/x)

Two iconic examples, both by Gary Wolf:

"How the Internet Invented Howard Dean" wired.com/2004/01/dean/
"Weapons of Mass Mobilization" wired.com/2004/09/moveon/

(26/x)

I'll admit a mild fanboy-bias about these articles. Both had a big influence on me when I was formulating the dissertation.

I think they're still examples of what @WIRED at its finest can look like. Dean and MoveOn were doing impossible things. WIRED helped make sense of them.

We know today that neither early Dean nor early MoveOn would fulfill the revolutionary potential that we imagined during the early Web 2.0 era.

Again, as with the Katz articles, the Dean and MoveOn models would face new challenges as they grew.
(28/x)

But it's striking how the topic and tone of coverage has shifted from early @WIRED. Political coverage had been split between techno-libertarian essays and calls-to-action fighting the latest regulatory proposals in congress. Now political coverage is part of the web 2.0 story.

Now let's jump ahead to the current era, #wokewired. I'll eventually write a separate thread on this topic, but let me make just a few points here.

(29/x)

The web 2.0 metaphor doesn't leave a ton of room for contentious politics. After a few big stories on Dean, MoveOn, and political bloggers, WIRED settles back into mostly focusing on cutting-edge science and technology.

That means basically ignoring economic inequality. (30/x)

Editor-in-Chief @sdadich directly addressed this point in a November 2015 column titled "The Battle for Equality is a WIRED issue." wired.com/2015/10/editor…

(31/x)

This isn't just cheap talk. In 2015, @WIRED starts covering topics like gender in Silicon Valley, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the negative implications of the gig economy.

It's a huge shift from the globalization-optimism of early WIRED. (32/x)

The political stories in this third WIRED era are also both technically deeper and more critical.

Three examples: @vermontgmg's story about @CivisAnalytics wired.com/2016/06/civis-…

@issielapowsky interviewing Al Gore wired.com/2016/05/wired-…

and (...) (33/x)

(...) @page88 on Facebook and elections wired.com/story/mark-zuc…

Those are just three examples. There are tons more, including the entire Free Speech issue from February 2018.

(34/x)

There was a particular flavor of optimism to 90s @WIRED political coverage. And a different flavor of optimism to 00s WIRED coverage.

Today's WIRED is more curious and concerned than optimistic.

(35/x)

I think that's partially because the "digital revolution" is no longer just the future. It also has a history.

Also because digital media is now baked into everything, so it's harder to treat social issues as someone-else's-beat.

And finally (...) (36/x)

(...) because the social mood is indeed darker today. It's harder to claim with a straight face that technology will disrupt inequality along with everything else. It's harder to believe that we're on the cusp of a "more rational, less dogmatic approach to politics." (37/x)

In effect, early WIRED could dismiss politics (except for regulatory threats) because the writers were focused on what the digital future would be.

Today we inhabit that digital present. So WIRED writers are instead helping their readers figure out what just happened. (fin)