Black Gate

I used to read Wired magazine back in the days when it was actually cool to have an email address (you had to be in academia or some tech savvy business). This was in the dark ages before web browsers and the Internet wasn’t just a place to buy stuff, host porn, post cute cat videos and spread fake news. The only people who used Apple computers were in advertising and not everyone had a cellphone; the ones who did liked to showoff by appending their email with “Sent from my Blackberry” — remember Blackberry?

It was when I was just getting into cyberpunk, which was the magazine’s patron saint of sorts. Bruce Sterling was on Wired‘s inaugural cover and William Gibson (see below) was featured on the fourth issue (1.4 in Wired parlance). Wired was for the cultural technoliterati, the folks “wired in” (hence the title in the days well before Wi-Fi) to how computer technology was going to change the world. And, boy, did it ever.

It was also hard to read, because graphic designers thought they were making some sort of statement using odd and multiple fonts along with disorienting colors and just stuff that gave you a headache to look at but had the appearance of cutting-edge style. Fortunately, someone finally realized that jettisoning the visual clutter made it possible for people to actually read the articles instead of just being bedazzled to gaze at them. Though certain tics remain even today, like sticking a 0 in front of double digit page numbers — pagination doesn’t actually being until page 21, or as Wired likes it, 021 — in a vertical position that isn’t easy to see and mostly only on the left hand even pages. C’mon.

Somewhere about the time when the Internet stopped being an interesting forum of discussion and innovation and turned into a wasteland of constant connection and commerce, I let my subscription lapse. But this past January, Wired published its first ever all-fiction “sci-fi issue.” Despite the unfortunate terminology (which has connotations of bad adventure flicks in futuristic settings, although perhaps the disdain is just insider snobbery — do people nowadays still care and argue about such things?), I thought I’d check out the issue’s idea to, according to editor Scott Dadich, “Think about what is possible, what is plausible, what is terrifying, what is hopeful.”

Lot of plausible here with not much hopeful. Which might be terrifying were it not so close to actual experience (both psychological and technological) that today is, alas, more mundane than profound.

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