I’ve heard from a number of people over the years that they read WIRED for exactly one reason: Steven Levy. I fully get it. Steven’s a legend. He’s been there—here—since the beginning. Since before the beginning. Steven wrote his now-classic book, Hackers, a decade before WIRED even existed. (Just don’t tell him he’s old. I made that mistake once.) As much as anyone in tech, Steven made this world possible.
But does that come with certain … is regrets the right word? How much responsibility should Steven take for, say, the Department of Government Efficiency—which, as an enactment of core tech principles at the highest levels, was basically the wet dream of early WIRED? Or, if Steven never thought something like DOGE would happen, does that call into question his credibility as a future-minded thinker? (As far as I can tell, only one of Steven’s colleagues from back in the ’90s, the great Paulina Borsook, saw Silicon Valley for what it really was.)
What makes Steven a must-read to this day is that he’s totally unafraid of these hard questions—and in fact set himself the task of answering them for a sweeping essay, just published in our first-ever Politics issue, about the state of Silicon Valley today. (Note my double meaning there: the state the Valley is in now, and the fact that we might be living, state-formationally speaking, in a state of Silicon Valley’s making.) It’s personal, confessional, even emotional—a major piece in a career full of them.
May he write a million more. P.S. I mentioned Paulina Borsook above—whose name should be as recognizable as Steven Levy’s but, alas, is not. Look into her work, and if you’re so inclined, help support her here. |
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Story originally published in April 2010 |
In his Big Story, Steven tries to uncover what he got wrong about the Valley’s vaunted geniuses. It’s remarkably reflective, but it is not the first time Steven has taken a moment to pause and look back. In early 2010, after Hackers turned 25, Steven set about measuring just how much the intrepid idealists in his book had changed.
In his check-ins, Steven’s hackers extolled the open source movement, puzzled over monetizing online news articles, and bemoaned the inelegance of HTML. Reading his piece now, amid AI’s existential threat to both journalists and coders, you may find yourself longing for a new, 40th-year update. Could there still be lessons to learn from the revolutionaries who occupied those humming computer basements of yesteryear? On the other hand, Steven’s 2010 reflection focused on the promise of a younger hacker cohort, those coming up through an exciting new incubator called Y Combinator and whose commercial proclivities were seen as an advantage.
As Steven writes this week, we’ve since watched that generation become corrupted heroes much more quickly and profoundly than those who came before them. Might it be time to abandon reverence entirely? Send your thoughts to samantha_spengler@wired.com or comment below the article.
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With SpaceX and Starlink, Elon Musk controls more than half the world’s rocket launches and thousands of internet satellites. That amounts to immense geopolitical power. |
The Signal Foundation president recalls where she was when she heard Trump cabinet officials had added a journalist to a highly sensitive group chat. |
The Story of DOGE, as Told by Federal Workers
BY ZOË SCHIFFER, LEAH FEIGER, VITTORIA ELLIOTT, MAKENA KELLY, KATE KNIBBS, DAVID GILBERT, MOLLY TAFT, AARIAN MARSHALL, PARESH DAVE, AND JAKE LAHUT | 17-MINUTE READ
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WIRED spoke with more than 200 federal workers in dozens of agencies to learn what happened as the Department of Government Efficiency tore through their offices. |
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Every time I write a message in a birthday card or jot a thought down on a sticky note, I am struck by how, well, bad my handwriting seems to be. Last month senior editor Angela Watercutter explained that I’m suffering from a very real and widespread problem called “character amnesia.” In “The End of Handwriting,” Angela also explored how learning to write is cognitively beneficial but also why, practically speaking, we may need it less. WIRED readers jumped to the pen’s defense, saying, “You can pry my fountain pens from my cold, dead hands” and arguing that computers will not obliterate the need for writing: “Socrates argued that writing would degrade memory. People would no longer bother to memorize thousands of lines of poetry, and thus memory would fade as a useful skill.”
Tell us about your favorite WIRED stories and magazine-related memories. Write to samantha_spengler@wired.com, and include “CLASSICS” in the subject line. |
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