Let’s dip back into the pages of 90s-era WIRED magazine. There are a pair of articles that illustrate who the old WIRED ideology was aligned against . Both stories use grandstanding wagers to make a broader point about the expected trajectory of society.
I’ve written previously about who the heroes were in the 90’s tech optimist narrative. I’ve also written about the continued relevance of the worldview. The magazine is no longer the intensely ideological outfit that it once was, but today’s tech moguls are staunch disciples of its teachings.
So today I want to talk about the people who get framed as villains in this narrative. The villains represented everything that WIRED’s masthead thought was ailing contemporary society. They were worriers, instead of optimists. They believed governments, not entrepreneurial capitalists, ought to be the main arena for sorting through social transformations. Instead of showing faith in the emancipatory potential of Moore’s Law and the gospel of abundance economics, they fretted over the “limits to growth.”
It’s something that has occasionally bogged me down while reading through the WIRED back catalog.