Wired Wrong. (In honor of B Week at Sundance)

I'll never forget Sundance 1993. A whole bunch of us rented a little house on Park Avenue. I had just come back from one of my first screenings, Robert Rodriguez's debut "El Mariachi" when I found a stack of magazines being given away for free at the Festival Headquarters on Main Street. It was called WIRED and I brought it with me back to the rental and I sat down with it and read it cover to cover. I loved it. "This is going to be my generation's Rolling Stone," I told one of my housemates (a professional magazine editor, who examined the magazine and ads and suggested it would never make it). Everything about that first issue spoke to me. I subscribed on the spot. I've subscribed ever since.

It's had good years and bad years, odd changes over the decades... but I still tend to like WIRED, in spite of its success. So it was strange today as I was cleaning out some piles in my office, when I sat down with a stack of issues, before I threw them out (why do I save these things?) and flipped through them. Sure the topics were still interesting, but I was shocked to discover just how wrong so much of what I read happened to be. Yes- I could pick out the occasional gem - some comment or article that was amazingly prescient. But i have to say, on average, so much was wrong it made me sick. Products and companies that never materialized. Prognostications that were embarrassingly off... things to watch and things that were hot that - perhaps hot in 2004 or 2007, were utterly gone.

Perhaps this would be the case with many magazines -- if you went back even 10 years you'd find just absurd predictions and warnings, more wrong than right... but I always liked WIRED and continue to find it nice for trendwatching and futurethinking. When it says X is hot, or Y is the company to watch... I tend to care. But maybe I shouldn't. My romp down memory lane was sobering. Hard to pick winners. Even for the experts.