OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack.
THE WIRED WEBSITE DIDN’T INVENT the banner ad, despite its official claims to have done so (Prodigy did). And Wired didn’t invent rah-rah way-new business writing.
Elbert Hubbard, Og Mandino, Napoleon Hill, and Steve Forbes’s late dad Malcolm all used to love pontificatin’ and philosophisin’ about industry as the driving force of the human race, commerce as the world’s noblest calling, and the businessman as rightful leader of all things.
All Wired did, and it’s an important little thing, was to marry this motivational pep-talk lingo to the hyperaggressive hipness of techno music and corporate-PoMo design, and to apply it not toward such old-economy trades as shoe selling but toward the Now-Now-Now realm of tech-mania.
But for all its self-promotin’ bluster, Wired never got the mythical sack of gold at the end of the publishing rainbow, and had to be sold to the Conde Nast oldline mag empire.
It’s taken a couple of other ventures to morph the concept into something more reader- and advertiser-friendly.
Wired treated the Way New Economy, ultimately, as just the replacement of an old elite by a new elite. Its fantasy-universe was a rarified hip-hierarchy centered in San Francisco and ruled by a clique of aging Deadheads working as strategic consultants to telecom and oil companies.
In contrast, both Fast Company and Business 2.0 depict the “revolution in business” as something anybody can, at least in theory, get in (and cash in) on. Both mags are thick with second-person features on how you and your firm can get connected, shake off those old tired procedures, and rev up for today’s supercharged Net-economy.
Fast Company (circulation 325,000) has become the cash cow of Mortimer Zuckerman’s publishing mini-empire, which has also included U.S. News & World Report, the N.Y. Daily News, and (until he recently sold it) the Atlantic Monthly.
Business 2.0 (circulation 240,000) has quickly become the American flagship of the British-owned Imagine Media, whose other “Media With Passion” titles include Mac Addict and the computer-game mag Next Generation.
Each of the two has its individual quirks, but they essentially play in the same league by the same rules.
And rules constitute the main theme of both magazines–breaking all the old rules, mastering all the new rules, and, with the right pluck and luck, getting to make some rules of your own.
One of the new rules, all but unspoken, is that everything in the reader’s life is apparently supposed to revolve around the ever-more-aggressive worship of Sacred Business. In the shared universe of Fast Company and Business 2.0, nothing exists that doesn’t relate to (1) amassing wealth and/or fame, (2) having adrenaline-rush fun while doing so, and (3) achieving the ideal life (or at least the ideal lifestyle) via the purchase of advertisers’ products.
Wired, for all its elitism and silliness, did and does acknowledge a larger universe out there. It always has at least a few items about how digitization is affecting art, music, politics, sex, food, architecture, charity, and/or religion.
In the world according to the way-new business magazines, however, none of those other human activities is considered worth mentioning even in passing. It’s as if all other realms of human endeavor are merely unwelcome distractions to the magazines’ fantasy reader, a hard-drivin’ entrepreneurial go-getter with no time for anything that doesn’t contribute to the bottom line.
Fast Company (which is slightly less totally business-focused than Business 2.0) did run a cover-story package last November about businesspeople (especially female ones) who find trouble balancing their careers with their other life-interests and duties.
But even then, second-person narcissism ruled the day. It was all about how You (by identifying with the articles’ case studies) could preserve your personal sanity, and hence become an even better cyber-warrior.
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
IN OTHER NEWS: Last November, I wrote about the hit UK soap Coronation Street, which can be seen on the CBC in Canada (and on some Seattle-area cable systems) but not in the U.S. Since then, the Street has finally made its U.S. debut, on the CBC-co-owned cable channel Trio. The channel’s not on many cable systems yet, but you can get it on the DirecTV satellite-dish service.
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