: When we went to IPO it was very, very clear that the digital side was much more valuable than the magazine side. This was the beginning of the madness. Here is a magazine with high income, prestige, great excitement and support from its readership. And here’s this really weird digital side that’s worth 10 times the magazine.

Jane: When Condé Nast acquired WIRED and Lycos acquired HotWired, the total value of the company was less than the value of the spun-off company. Today we compare it to Nike deciding to sell its shoes to Puma and its clothes to Adidas. Why would you do this? Why take a premium brand that has both technical reliability and lifestyle and cultural upside and tear it apart?

What are you doing? This was a very traditional and typical technology acquisition where the startup is acquired and grows into a larger corporate culture. It doesn’t work very well.

Jane: Louis and I were so sad, heartbroken and distraught that everyone said, “Yes, but everyone got rich.” That wasn’t the point. It was a very, very difficult time.

June: Almost all of us have begun to feel a deep loss and pain due to the loss of the culture we know as innovative and creative and the values ​​we believe in. That the industry is no longer about innovation, invention, creativity and certainly not democratization. That it’s all about money.

Maybe. There are 5.45 billion internet users on planet Earth, and some of them are bad actors, of course; WIRED has no objection to this. But most of us still surf the Internet like crazy, hanging out with friends, looking for jobs and friends, following gossip and news, buying and selling things, and finding companions who share our troubles and passions. And yes, some of us are into fraud, abuse, and bad ideology. Didn’t HotWired predict that humans would become humans?

A day at the HotWired office

Photo: Courtesy of Julie Chiron; TREATMENT: JAMES MARSHALL

Ian: In those days we used to say: The nice thing about the Internet is how secure it is. Everyone is there to help you and everyone just wants to do good things. People asked: Why do you need passwords for some things, because who would do something terrible on the internet?

: Something new comes along today and people immediately say, “I don’t know what it is, but it’s going to hurt. “He will bite me.” This is definitely a change that wasn’t available when we started.

What are you doing? But nostalgia can be dangerous. What we were doing was really hard, stressful and we didn’t know what we were doing. When people say, “I wish we could go back to that time,” I say no, we just had modems. It was terrible.

John P: HotWired failed as a business. But all these things we did were scientific research.

Jonathan: We thought the internet would be useful to people. We were wrong.

What are you doing? I still think anyone with an idea can start hacking the internet, making apps, or something like that. They’re all still there. I think the core of the business we started back then is still available online, and that still makes me really happy.

John: We were lucky with WIRED. There was no choice at HotWired and we couldn’t have done it any differently if we went back and tried. However, we were unlucky not to be first.

Condé Nast eventually acquired WIRED’s website as well in 2006.

Animation: James Marshall

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