Wired’s Louis Rossetto on the Death of the Mega-State and the Digital Revolution

“We came out and said there was a digital revolution happening
and it was going to change everything,” says Louis Rossetto, who
co-founded Wired magazine 20 years ago in 1993. “And
[that] it wasn’t the priests, the pundits, the politicians, and the
generals who were creating positive change.”

Rossetto was no stranger to bold predictions. In 1971, he
co-authored a
cover story in the New York Times
Magazine announcing that libertarianism was the next
great transformative ideology and that young people were rejecting
the played-out politics of the right and the left. After editing a
publication called Electric Word in the late 1980s,
he and Jane Metcalfe launched Wired, the
publication that not revolutionized magazine design but chronicled,
critiqued, and in many ways created the Internet Age. The
concept was to cover the real change makers, far from the
halls of power in Washington or established business capitals such
as New York, who were ushering in a new digital era that would
transform society. “That meta-story,” says Rossetto, “was
absolutely spot on.”

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