‘We Were Wrong’: An Oral History of WIRED’s Original Website

October 30, 2024:

Jill Atkinson Codding (project manager): In hindsight, it is what it is. You had to monetize it somehow. And we tried to figure out the least obtrusive way to do it.

John B: That was the original sin of the internet: that we decided advertising needed to sort of be irrelevant and not contextual.

John P: We weren’t sure anybody would put more money in. And then we got four sponsors, six, eight, 10, 12. It turned into an advertising model. I don’t think any of us expected that we were ushering in, effectively, the largest revolution in economics maybe since the steam engine.

Barbara: Cookies came along very quickly after that. There was a lot of discussion about the appropriateness of tracking.

Brian: In my defense, while I had a role in inventing the cookie, I would not have combined advertising and cookies. In fact, when somebody proposed, “Hey, you could assign a cookie to somebody, serve that ad from a third-party site, keep that cookie so you can follow where they go across different sites,” my response was, “Yeah, if you’re a psychopath.”

Brian did it anyway. And we, the users, blindly clicked. Nobody knew the consequences, least of all the HotWired employees. And anyway, who doesn’t want money? Even the cool kids at ’90s HotWired had expenses, like corduroy overalls and Jolt cola and tickets to raves.

Will: SF rave culture was a forerunner of HotWired. Brian Behlendorf ran SFraves.

Brian: I was pretending to go to school, but I was actually throwing parties and running this SFrave mailing list. I met Jonathan Steuer seeing Terence McKenna play with Spacetime Continuum.

Justin: For a Halloween party one year, they gave me a $1,500 budget for the party. I spent $900 on LSD microdots. I was 19. Young people working there were into music, psychedelics, dancing, or just finding themselves through kink. There were a lot of takers for the microdots.

June: There were certainly people on the team who would wake and bake. We had a masseuse once a week and free food. Things that are standard now in Silicon Valley.

Susanna Camp (producer of “Piazza”): At one point there were some funders or potential buyers coming around, and we were playing kickball in the conference room. It was not a good look.

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