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Almost immediately after publication, Wired started taking heat from the radical theorists (and money from the advertisers). The most famous critique of the Wired mentality is Richard Barbrook’s "The California Ideology:"
a loose alliance of writers, hackers, capitalists and artists from the West Coast of the USA have succeeded in defining a heterogeneous orthodoxy for the coming information age: the Californian Ideology. This new faith has emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley. Promoted in magazines, books, TV programs, Web sites, newsgroups and Net conferences, the Californian Ideology promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies."
But it wasn’t just Barbrook. Even where I hang out on the WELL, a relatively laid back online community so Californian that Stewart Brand once said, "You can almost smell the sourdough bread," Wired was portrayed as a kind of devil incarnate, harbingers of a cruel new age. It all seems kind of silly now. Wired is just another Conde Nasty publication, its influence on technoculture significantly eclipsed by explicitly business oriented magazines like Industry Standard and Red Herring. Dot.com fever has fucked up the countercultural atmosphere of San Francisco–artists and bohos can’t afford to live here anymore, thanks to the golden noserings with their semi-hip youthful arrogance and buckets of money. And yet, there are still reasons to keep a hopeful if wary eye on the digital revolution. Technological advances like MP3 and Napster threaten the culture owners. Idealistic hacker projects like Linux threaten Microsoft’s global hegemony at least as much as federal intervention. The "Battle of Seattle" has energized an anti-corporate globalist movement, thanks largely to online organizing. And further out on the futurist terrain, nanotechnology is starting to look realistic, the human genome has been tentatively mapped, and some people continue to do websites for adventure and fun, instead of money. The counterculture version of the technocultural trope has been pushed down the top ten by the vibrancy and hysteria of the digital marketplace. But we’re still somewhere in the game, waiting for the inevitable boredom to take root.
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