Wired
| Timothy Leary descried the magazine as “the CIA’s answer to Mondo 2000" |
Started: 1993
Founders: Louis Rossetto,Jane Metcalfe,Ian Charles Stewart,Charlie Jackson,Nicholas Negroponte,Peter Schwartz
Constitutes: magazine
Wired is a bimonthly American magazine that examines the impact of emerging technologies on culture, the economy, and politics.
Pro intelligence agencies
Children's Health Defense told of its origins
The magazine’s initial funding came from MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte, whose brother John Negroponte was the first director of National Intelligence, notorious for his sponsorship of Central American death squads.
Wired’s central function was to “scrub every last particle of progressive thinking from reporting on the then-developing online world and to promote a pro-military/pro-corporate/pro-intelligence agency view within the digital media and technology community,” according to an interview Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had with tech entrepreneur Ken McCarthy, who lived and worked in San Francisco in the 1990s and organized the first conference on monetizing the web.
Wired quickly earned notoriety as a clearinghouse for intelligence agency chatter. Prior to Wired, Mondo 2000, the Bay Area’s original tech and culture magazine, reflected the progressive, idealistic viewpoints of many of the pioneer tech innovators.
In contrast, Wired, which appropriated Mondo 2000’s look and feel and no small number of its employees, glorified military and intelligence agency celebrities and corporate CEOs. Wired gained snowballing prominence in the early 2000s at the same time that the CIA launched its investment firm, In-Q-Tel, to infiltrate the tech industry and put Silicon Valley on steroids with easy terms and government contracts.[1]
Timothy Leary described Wired as “the CIA’s answer to Mondo 2000.”[2]
