Wired’s newest discovery: an atom of humility

  • One para­graph in the lat­est issue of Wired makes me think that maybe they have found a lit­tle bit of hon­est self-doubt. But we’re talk­ing a very lit­tle bit. Still, it’s a start.

    I’m an occa­sional reader of Wired mag­a­zine, but when I do read it, I usu­ally get dis­gusted and have to stop. All they’re sup­posed to be doing is report­ing on what new and hot in e-technology, but some­where along the way they’ve become pur­vey­ors of a phi­los­o­phy I find dis­turb­ing. Increas­ingly, they have shown them­selves to be zeal­ous believ­ers in what­ever hap­pens in the next five min­utes and zeal­ous athe­ists about any­thing that hap­pened in the last five minutes.

    Beside my obvi­ous objec­tion to that — that it makes lit­tle things like his­tory, real wis­dom and Chris­tian­ity worth­less — I just don’t under­stand how they can think them­selves above their own crit­i­cism. After all, they’ve been around more than five min­utes. But then, the edi­tors of Wired never seemed to look back, never seemed to ques­tion their judgment.

    So I noticed with a lit­tle sur­prise that there was a lit­tle one-paragraph fea­ture in the July issue that indi­cated a change in that pol­icy. Enti­tled ’5 Things We Pro­nounced Dead Pre­ma­turely,’ it was a tiny lit­tle list of times they’ve been wrong: Web browsers, online song swap­ping and others.

    Amaz­ing. They can admit mistakes.

    Hey, it’s a start. But then, it’s an inch-high fea­ture buried on page 56. What I’d really like is a whole arti­cle called some­thing like ‘Things We Lost Our Minds Over (and Encour­aged You to Do the Same).’ That would include:

    • Y2K melt­down: They were one of the first and the biggest to say that on midnight-plus-one on the year 2001, all the com­put­ers every­where would go nuts. “What hap­pens at 00:00:01 on Jan­u­ary 1? Try deadly, black, and very, very cold.” Uh huh.
    • The Seg­way: Remem­ber how CRAZY all these guys went for this thing? This “per­sonal trans­porter” was only ever a kind of skate­board for yup­pies, but that didn’t stop Wired from think­ing life would never be the same again. (“It may not change the world, but …” “It’s too soon to tell whether Seg­way will take the world by storm but …”) Apart from mall police, I can’t think of any­one who has the least inter­est in the things.
    • Global warm­ing: I know, I know. Lots of peo­ple — though still less than half the world’s sci­en­tists — believe in this. But only Wired could believe it as utterly and be as breath­less in its hero-worship of peo­ple like Al Gore (“using the power of tech­nol­ogy to save the world”), who it pic­tured on its cover on May 2006 look­ing almost saint­like. Can’t find a link, so you’ll just have to trust me. It was really, really weird.

    The the­ory of these sorts of neo-Realists is that sci­ence will usher in a glow­ing Age of Man. And of course, all those awful “super­sti­tions” will have to go. If it were treated as a the­ory, you could dia­logue with peo­ple about it. But the Tech­no­log­i­cal Utopia believ­ers con­sider it a “the­ory” in the same way they believe Dar­win­ism is a “the­ory,” which is to say that it’s not really a the­ory at all. It’s a fact that doesn’t quite seem to be a fact yet, so you just have to believe in it extra hard for now.

    It’s just as well that the opinion-shapers at Wired aren’t inter­ested in his­tory. Because if they were, they’d find out that this the­ory has been tried since the 1700′s — long enough for us to find out that things don’t work out quite the way they’re sup­posed to. But then, that infor­ma­tion is only a few hun­dred years old at this point. You can’t really expect Wired to get the news quite that fast.


    Related posts:

    1. Slightly bro­ken
    2. And speak­ing of Harry Potter …
    3. Peo­ple power

    June 30th, 2008 | Grace | 2 Comments |

2 Responses and Counting...

  • Kyra­lessa 06.30.2008

    Seg­ways are too expen­sive, and not fast enough for prac­ti­cal com­mut­ing, but I still get jeal­ous when­ever I see the air­port cop rid­ing one.

  • Grace

    I admit I’d like to try one out. But apart from large indoor venues — air­ports, casi­nos, malls, con­ven­tion cen­ters — I can’t imag­ine where they’re sup­posed to be prac­ti­cal. The first time I saw one I thought, “Well yeah, but you couldn’t take it out on the street, so what would you do with it.” The fact that geeky sorts never thought of that just cracked me up.

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