The Digerati!

WE HAVE TO WRAP OUR brains around 3.05 for a second." John Battelle, the managing editor of Wired, is using softwarespeak to start a meeting about the fifth issue of the magazine's third year. But Louis Rossetto seems to be somewhere else. Wearing sneakers and jeans, his wavy gray hair yanked back into a ponytail, curly wisps escaping around the sides, he stares blankly into space, like some cocky kid on an internship. Actually, he's Wired's 45-year-old editor and publisher, looking lost in a daydream . . . about how he trounced the mass media, maybe, those Second Wave dinosaurs who wouldn't know an Ethernet if somebody hacked one directly into their brainstem. . . .

Rossetto props himself up on a bony elbow. The daydream would go like this: He lopes through the streets of Manhattan -- a tall, skinny figure -- with his partner in romance and business, Jane Metcalfe. It's 1991 and they have no jobs. They're looking for money to start a new magazine about the Digital Generation, whom they call "the most powerful people on the planet today."

Eventually, they get one bite -- from Nicholas Negroponte, director of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who introduces them to certain people who might be forgiven for thinking they are among the most powerful people on the planet. But each one -- Rupert Murdoch, S. I. Newhouse, Christy Hefner, Henry Kravitz and on and on -- politely tell Rossetto and Metcalfe to get lost. A cute couple, but what the hell are they talking about?

It's not a good time to be asking for money. The country is in recession, the gulf war has exploded and the term "information superhighway" doesn't even exist. As magazines fold and advertising budgets are slashed, those lucky editors, TV producers and ad execs who still have jobs are clutching ever more madly for a trend that will define the 90's, any plausible new market for companies to hawk their products to -- Generation X! No, the End of Greed! Wait, Grunge!

O.K., maybe Rossetto's record of reading entrails was spotty. After getting his M.B.A. from Columbia in 1973, he lay on the beach and smoked dope until the inspiration struck to write a novel about a President named Richard Nixon who avoids impeachment by fabricating a national security crisis -- but "Takeover" was published just a week before Nixon resigned. Bummer. A few years later, he was hanging out in Rome working on the set of the raunchy sex flick "Caligula" when he realized that those real, 200-person orgies would make a perfect metaphor for the sexual revolution -- which was history by 1981, when the book he ghostwrote, "Ultimate Porno," finally came out.

But by 1991 Rossetto just knows what the Next Big Thing will be. He and Metcalfe tell everybody in New York who will listen, practically climbing the Empire State Building and blasting it through a bullhorn: DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY IS NOT A TREND. IT'S NOT EVEN A ZEITGEIST. THIS IS . . . A . . . PHREAKING . . . REVOLUTION!

The Digital Revolution is happening now, on the cusp of the millenium. Why can't they see? Why can't they wrap their puny minds around the fact that for a lousy $350,000 they can have control of not only two unemployed dreamers and their new magazine but the key to the new American soul, the whole damn future of media, a worldwide. . . .

"This really doesn't work -- it's creepy." Rossetto has snapped out of his trance. He's talking about a story on techno-pagans.

"I'm not persuaded it's a trend at all," agrees Kevin Kelly, the executive editor. The manuscript is sent flying across the table. Tired, not Wired.

LOCATED IN A FOURTH-FLOOR LOFT IN AN old factory building in San Francisco, Wired's office is almost too techno-chic to be true. Most of the 77 employees are in their 20's. An African gray parrot squawks in the lobby. Healthy meals are prepared daily in the kitchen by the staff chef and on Thursdays you can pay a masseuse named Ratka $10 to knead out the kinks in a private room. And everywhere are blue-gray wires, bunches of them, crawling across ceilings, snaking and twisting down walls and columns, across desks and tables, eventually plugging into four Ethernets and 150 computers -- a self-conscious display of the new American status symbol of hipness and emerging power.

Today, Rossetto's daydream is real: Wired has become one of the hottest magazines in America. It went from an object of derision to a moneymaker just three issues after hitting newstands in January 1993 (five years is considered miraculous for most new magazines). It has won more than a dozen honors, including a National Magazine Award, reached 228,000 monthly circulation, started new editions in Japan and Britain and spawned Hotwired, an already lucrative, if esoteric, new form of journalism delivered on the Internet's World Wide Web.

But Wired is more than a successful magazine. Like Rolling Stone in the 60's, it has become the totem of a major cultural movement. Its leaders -- those "most powerful people on the planet today" -- are mostly affluent white guys in their 30's and 40's. They speak their own language -- of hypertext, data compression, bit strings and bandwidth. They wrap their minds around ideas, jack into computer networks, interface with virtual worlds and grok (meaning, they dig) hacking. They have their own style of dress (sneakers, no ties) and artist icons (Laurie Anderson, Brian Eno). In their universe, science, entrepreneurship and free markets are cool; the mass media, old literary establishments and government meddling are not. They can be arrogant and self-involved, but many are also intelligent, creative and fun -- like big kids, some of them!

"This is the mainstream culture of the 21st century," Rossetto says. "It's a new economy, a new counterculture, and beyond politics. In 10 or 20 years, the world will be completely transformed. Everything we know will be different. Not just a change from L.B.J. to Nixon, but whether there will be a President at all. I think Alvin Toffler's basically right: we're in a phase change of civilizations here."

Those comments come during one of many excitable interviews. Back at the editorial meeting, Rossetto zones in and out, cupping his angular face in one hand, eyes roaming to a corner of the ceiling, skin so pale that just where his long fingers end, you can see blue veins around his eyes.

Behind him, curling on the walls, are pages from the latest issue, splashed with the ground-breaking design that has become the magazine's trademark. Since Wired was conceived as a report from the future, its creative director, John Plunkett, liberally sprinkles the pages with psychedelic Day-Glo colors and places text over spooky images of brains, circuits, globes and TV screens. Some stories are impossible to read -- even laid out sideways. Marshall McLuhan is listed on the masthead as "Patron Saint." In the very first issue, Rossetto warned that "the Digital Revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon. . . ."

The message is clear: Without Wired, you'll drown. The magazine makes the future look like a terrifying, disorienting place. This is no accident. Wired is a magazine for and about the Digital Vanguard -- and anybody else who thinks they are smart and cool enough to join the club.

How they discovered this new digital subculture is explained by Jane Metcalfe, whose office is at the opposite end of Wired's loft space. The 33-year-old company president moves her thin frame around with great bursts of energy and charm, talking rapidly about how she and Rossetto met in Paris and worked together in Amsterdam for Electric Word, a technology trade journal. When the journal folded in 1990, Rossetto made the rounds at industry shows and conferences, trying to figure out what to do next. That was their moment of epiphany.

"We saw this whole new community of people," she says. "There was this gathering political agenda, a perspective on the world, a sense of the future."

At first, the community seemed quite diverse -- architects, film makers, engineers, designers, writers, computer scientists, artists, musicians. Then came the insight: They were all becoming increasingly wealthy and powerful through their pioneering use of digital technology. Rossetto and Metcalfe popularized a nickname for these people that dramatically reflected the tremendous shift in power underway -- the one McLuhan predicted way back in 1964 when he announced the demise of the 500-year-old literary order spawned by Gutenberg's press -- The Digerati!

"The amount of video compression they did," John Battelle is saying at the Wired meeting -- Rosssetto has perked up again -- "it's like 134 gigabytes of video compressed down to two CD's, and that's 650 times 2 megabytes, so that's incredible compression, and he was the guy who wrote the algorithms to make this possible. . . ."

Everybody in the room knows what he's talking about.

Today, the concept of an emerging digital elite seems perfectly obvious. But a truism of American culture is that a trend doesn't exist -- never mind a full-blown Zeitgeist or a once-every-500-years revolution -- until somebody finds a market for it. That's why the whole concept of Wired magazine didn't really click until somebody (nobody remembers who) exclaimed: "It's a consumer magazine!"

The industry experts said to forget about it: nerds simply don't buy Absolut and Volvos. So Rossetto and Metcalfe did what Americans with a dream have been doing for 150 years: They went to California. By the fall of 1992, they scraped together $75,000 from Negroponte and $150,000 from a Silicon Valley entrepreneur named Charlie Jackson and hired a staff to produce the first issue.

At any previous moment in history, a magazine so inscrutable and nearly hostile to its readers certainly would have flopped. But finally, with a Digital Something dawning, Rossetto's timing was flawless. The ensuing deluge of press coverage was mostly fawning, and big-ticket advertisers like Volkswagen and Dewar's bought space to reach this lucrative new consumer niche. The digerati Wired reader is a demographic dream: a 34-year-old man in upper management with a household income of more than $80,000 and a job that includes recommending or actually buying expensive digital equipment.

The genius of Wired is that it makes the Digital Revolution a self-fulfilling prophecy, both illuminating this new subculture and promoting it -- thus creating new demand for digital tools, digital toys, digital attitudes. Now you need to read the "Fetish" and "Street Cred" sections (to know what to buy), "Jargon Watch" (what to say), "Net Surf" (where to go in cyberspace) and "Idees Fortes" (what to think about).

Rossetto upped the ante in October by going on line with Hotwired, a new medium featuring hyperlinked text, sound, photos, video and discussion areas that he claims will revolutionize journalism in the 21st century. So many advertisers signed up for Hotwired that some had to be turned away. Subscriptions, free to anyone using the Internet's World Wide Web, have soared to 180,000 and could reach the millions.

Now the big media moguls get it. By late 1994, Disney, Ted Turner and Cox Communications all wanted a piece of the action. Conde Nast trumped everybody at the last moment by offering $3.5 million for a minority interest in Wired -- no strings attached.

These media tycoons desperately want access to this burgeoning market -- which is visible now, through a window, from inside Wired's conference room. Those bright young staffers do look cool: ripped jeans, black spandex pants, backward baseball caps. Some have body piercings; others slap the gray carpets with bare feet, grooving to thumping techno-pop music. They don't make enough money yet to be considered true digerati. But they give the movement crucial hip cachet, while the older Wired readers provide the dough.

This next generation marks the cutting edge of an enormous cultural gap Wired has exposed -- between the on line and off line, young and old, rich and poor, digerati and literati. Wired's shake-up of the media establishment is a metaphor for the tremendous wealth and power that will be gained or lost -- in business, the arts, education, politics -- according to who most shrewdly associates themselves with the latest technological advances.

Which has triggered a small but fierce backlash: Are Wired's digerati cynical manipulators of techno-babble, hyping a utopian "revolution" that conveniently allows them to cash in before retirement? Or are they truly visionaries, the only ones with enough technological sophistication to lead us into a complex and more egalitarian world?

". . . it would be one of those things that, you know, our core audience would really grok," Battelle is saying.

The editorial meeting ends. Rossetto heads for the door, ponytail bounding. This afternoon, he'll hop into his black Saab and drive to Monterey, where digerati from around the country are meeting at TED6 -- the sixth Technology, Entertainment and Design conference -- to plan the next stage of the revolution and enjoy what Rossetto reverently calls "a celebration of ourselves."

"HAVE COMPUTERS CHANGED YOUR NOTION of God?"

Stewart Brand reads the typed question through half-glasses perched on the end of his nose, his long body cramped into the passenger seat of Kevin Kelly's dusty four-door Mazda.

Kelly is driving them to Monterey. Considered the West Coast center of the Digital Vanguard -- the M.I.T. Media Lab is the East Coast axis -- the TED conferences have been held intermittently since 1984. They are organized by a gregarious writer-architect-corporate consultant named Richard Saul Wurman, who looks like a short Hemingway and says cryptic things like "I sell my ignorance."

Brand is one of Wired's contributing writers. He's reviewing questions for his interview this afternoon with Nathan Myhrvold, a TED6 speaker and the boy-wonder physicist who heads Microsoft's advanced technology team.

"Will we see artificial intelligence in our lifetime?

"Will your children use paper at work?"

These are the kind of questions the digerati love to think about. They've been pondering them since the 60's, where the roots of their movement are firmly planted.

Brand remembers when he saw his first computer, in 1962. He'd just gotten out of the Army and was hanging out with the Beats in San Francisco when he happened into a laboratory at Stanford University, where he saw "wild-eyed, long-haired radical people" playing Spacewar, the first computer game. "Spacewar was pretty psychedelic," Brand says. "But the computer people, the hackers, were not taking drugs. They were stoned on a much more lively drug than LSD. See, LSD never got better. That was the problem. But computers just kept getting better and better."

Brand knows something about hippies, drugs and computers. He was one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and could be found in "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" wearing an Indian-beaded tie and driving Tom Wolfe around in a pickup truck; Brand launched the now-famous symbol of the environmental movement -- a photograph of the planet earth -- and started the Whole Earth Catalogue in 1968. There, he says, he was the first to coin the term "personal computer."

"These hills, I've walked stoned many a time!" he laughs, gazing out the window at the meadows made lush by the winter rain.

Brand is 56, white hair circling his nearly bald head. He doesn't do drugs anymore. Lanky, with a boyish face, he's dressed in jeans, black felt hat, brown leather jacket and carries a white-handled knife on his belt. Now he works as a futurist business consultant for major corporations and tosses off such famous aphorisms as "If we're going to be gods, we might as well get good at it."

Kelly and Brand share a joke about the earnestness of the Whole Earth Catalogue's back-to-the-earth days.

"Hand flour mills!" Kelly says.

"Oh, yeah, and jug and bottle cutters," Brand says. "Cut the top off bottles, make them into glasses and save the world!"

They roar with laughter.

Kelly, who is sometimes referred to as Brand's protege, took over for Brand in the mid-80's as editor of Brand's magazine, Coevolution Quarterly, which later became the Whole Earth Review. At 42, with a hound-dog face, Kelly wears a button-down shirt and smudged black pants and carries the distracted air of a professor. He's Wired's Big Think guy, "the balloon we follow around," as one staffer calls him. Kelly's latest idea is to not read or write for several months to see how well a person would function in a post-literate, electronic society (the result, of course, might be a book).

Kelly champions the magazine's best stories, like the one about the Internal Revenue Service's sinister plot to electronically suck taxes directly from bank accounts. But Kelly also defends stories about bizarre utopian fantasists that Wired regularly embraces -- like the Extropians, who believe we can achieve immortality by downloading the contents of our brains onto a hard disk.

Kelly's conversion to digital technology came in the early 80's, when he was running a mail-order company and began using the Internet to send his catalogue to the typesetter. "I plugged in and had a religious experience," Kelly had said in his soft mumble back at the Wired office. "I discovered that there was this thing out there." It's one of many conversations about computers that turns mystical, drifting from scientific fact to unproven belief. "Technology is not neutral," Kelly said. "Technology is absolutely, 100 percent, positive."

From that widely shared faith, the theology of the digerati flows. "You know, I don't like computers," Kelly said. "But I use them because they're very handy tools. The reason why the hippies and people like myself got interested in them, is that they are model worlds, small universes. They are ways to recreate civilization.

"The first things discovered by people like Jaron Lanier," he said, referring to the pioneer of virtual reality, "is you start to say, 'What is reality?' We get to ask the great questions of all time: 'What is life? What is human? What is civilization?' And you ask it not in the way the old philosophers asked it, sitting in armchairs, but by actually trying it. Let's try and make life. Let's try and make community."

Riding to the TED6 conference, Brand elaborates on Kelly's point, recalling the conflicts that arose in the 60's counterculture. There was the do-your-own-thing crowd versus those into "consensus." The psychedelic trippers in opposition to conventional-reality types. Rebels who disdained politics versus marchers on Washington. People who believed in technology (usually acolytes of McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller) and those who feared computers as evil instruments of the military industrial complex.

Clearly, today's digerati emerged from a convergence of the do-your-own-thing, psychedelic, apolitical technophiles. "Since we started dropping out of college," Brand says, "one of the things we missed was academia's disdain for business and money: 'do your own thing' translated into 'start your own business.' " He mentions some of the most famous hippie entrepreneurs, like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the founders of Apple Computer. "A lot of these people were tremendously rewarded," Brand says. "They didn't change their views. They just became rich and powerful."

What Brand doesn't say is that many of the do-your-own-thing, psychedelic, apolitical technophiles have also become wealthy and powerful by viewing civilization in startlingly Darwinistic terms that are rather, well, unhippie-ish. Kelly's recent book, "Out of Control," for example, argues that our increasingly technological society has begun to resemble a biological system, with computers simply part of a natural evolutionary process that's far too complex for mere humans to control. "And it's better that way," exclaims the book jacket.

Being "out of control," in fact, is central to the idea of the Digital Revolution. And nothing embodies the chaotic, boundless ecosystem of the future more than today's hottest digital craze, summed up by a sign Kelly and Brand notice as they pull into downtown Monterey: "Introduction to the Internet: $149.99 for three two-hour courses." "All the fishermen are getting on line," Brand says, laughing.

The transformation of the Internet has been a techno-hippie's dream: originally designed by the Pentagon as a communications system so decentralized that it could survive a nuclear Armageddon, the Net has since mutated into "the largest working anarchy in the world," as Kelly calls it. Censorship is nearly impossible. Left unfettered, in Wired's view, the Internet will eventually place so much power in the hands of the citizenry that oppressive 20th-century institutions -- government, public schools, the mass media -- will crumble.

The Digital Revolution will reach fruition, Rossetto argues at particularly rapturous moments, when society is organized by a "hive-mind consensus" that allows humanity to evolve into ever higher forms, perhaps even fulfilling McLuhan's prophecy to "make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single conciousness."

Of course, the gnarled fishermen aren't on line yet. But until then, not to worry: the digerati are hard at work getting cyberspace ready for them. As Brand told The Los Angeles Times not long ago, expressing an idea Wired roundly endorses: "I think elites basically drive civilization."

GREAT SWARMS OF DIGERATI (AND FAUX DIGERati) are buzzing -- swarming and buzzing like the Great Hive Mind of the Future -- as they gossip and mingle. Trumpets blare a dramatic fanfare, drums pound the earth and a choir of angels sings. It's the theme music for TED6, which means that everyone should get back into their seats.

Rossetto and Metcalfe have strolled into the Monterey Conference Center and now float up to the lobby on the escalator. They laugh and hug old friends. Metcalfe is beaming; Rossetto looks rested and refreshed, having chopped off his ponytail. He's also lost that spaced-out look from the previous day's editorial meeting.

"We came in as adventurers . . . ," Rossetto shouts over the hive. He's talking about his first TED experience in 1990. ". . . and we came out with a cause." He thrusts a white fist into the air and cries, "The revolution has begun!"

It's easy to see why he's excited. Rossetto was a nobody back in 1990. Now he and Metcalfe are the king and queen of the new digital media. They have been given one of the highest honors at TED6: a prime-time slot on Saturday night -- just before the emotional farewell dinner -- for a live demonstration of Hotwired.

He surveys the throng: they're crowding the table selling New Age books and tapes with titles like "Healing Yourself With Your Own Voice," clustering around giant color computer screens to group Net surf, walking around with cell phones stuck to their ears. Plastic-tube necklaces mark the 650 people who paid $2,000 to watch high-tech demonstrations and hear speeches by people like the architect Frank Gehry, the biologist Stephen Jay Gould and the polio curer Jonas Salk.

It's like a Digital Parallel Universe stretching out before him. Digital Queers (an activist group led by Tom Reilly) talk to Digital Journalists (Kevin Kelly and Stewart Brand), who are represented by Digital Agents (John Brockman), who listen to Digital Musicians (the jazz vibist Gary Burton) and sometimes hang out with Digital Comedians (Penn and Teller), who talk about Digital Films (Jurrasic Park) with Digital Scientists (Marvin Minsky).

"The things that we've dreamed about are becoming real," Rossetto says, gazing around the lobby. "The fire has been sparked and it's spreading."

TED is where Rossetto first noticed the digital wave expanding from the nerdy pioneers to the next stage. These "early adopters" pushed the revolution forward by spending money on primitive equipment -- like that first Macintosh with no hard drive -- and dreaming up new uses for it, demanding that it be better, faster, cheaper.

When Rossetto started Wired, some outsiders had trouble imagining who these "most powerful people on the planet" were. Stories about sci-fi cartoons and Donkey Kong video games ran alongside ads asking the reader to match characters from a Comedy Central sitcom with color photographs of their vomit. (A bunch of 12-year-old boys are taking over the world?) The very same issue also explains how to get stock quotes over the Internet and a list of "deductible junkets," like a three-day conference about the World Wide Web, for $995. (So now it's a business magazine?)

But Rossetto had gleaned a deep truth: his readers were juveniles trapped in the bodies of successful businessmen. The cover of the April issue perfectly sums up this strange phenomenon: the heads of Sumner Redstone and Frank Biondi are stuck onto cartoon bodies of Beavis and Butt-Head, the headline blaring, "Viacom Doesn't Suck!" Somehow, the chairman and C.E.O. of a $30 billion media conglomerate have become way cool.

WELLING TOO MUCH ON MARKETING strategy, however, would ruin the post-hippie sensibility so crucial to these gatherings. We're talking about a revolution! So Rossetto stands amid the buzzing swarms waving his hands, unleashing long volleys of outlandish rhetoric, like this one about the "huge forces in our society starting to surface. And now they're starting to walk on land. And when they do, they're going to change the way the landscape looks in mammoth ways!"

Not bad. A kind of evolutionary, "Creature From the Black Lagoon" thing.

He'll be a bit more modest during his Hotwired presentation Saturday night, reaching back only to 1948, when television was about to radically alter American life. Other times he invokes the Industrial Revolution, Toffler's Second Wave. But he really outdid himself in his first editor's note in Wired: today's social changes are so profound, he wrote, that "their only parallel is probably the discovery of fire."

The TED conference is brimming with evangelism and boundless optimism -- like some rally for Amway or Nu Skin. Empowerment is on everyone's lips, the faster tongues psyching up the others with wild claims, saying outsiders will laugh at you when you compare this movement to the biggest forces in history, which hardly seems far-fetched when a new market starts growing crazily, exponentially, like a force of nature, out of control, with an evolutionary mind of its own!

"When I said there would be one billion people on the Internet by the year 2000, they laughed!" Negroponte tells the TED6 crowd later. "That was eight months ago. People aren't laughing today. Gutenberg's press was a drop in the bucket compared to what's happening now!"

Few speak this hyperbolic language as fluently as Negroponte, who's had 10 years of experience asking Fortune 500 executives for money to help the Media Lab "invent the future." In his best-selling book, "Being Digital," Negroponte even uses the pyramid logic of multilevel marketers, comparing today's technological advances to a child's fantasy in which one penny doubles in value each day for a month, skyrocketing from $2.6 million to $21 million in the last three days. "We are approaching those last three days in the spread of computing and digital telecommunications," he wrote.

American business has done the same math. Just look around: it's a feeding frenzy! Some people on the TED6 guest list are probably authentic members of the digerati, but which ones? Quincy Jones? U2's Edge? William Randolph Hearst III? Jay Chiat of Chiat/Day? Michael Lynton, president of Disney's Hollywood Pictures? And which of the lesser-known but powerful executives from every company and institution you can think of: the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Life, The New York Times, Random House, Polygram, Nike, Viacom, Hoffman LaRoche, Mattel, Levi Strauss, Coca-Cola, AT&T;, Encyclopedia Britannica, MGM, General Motors?

That's exactly why this might be the last TED. The conference has no invitations, news releases or advertisments. Notice travels only by word of mouth -- which kept the gathering pure, for a while. But now any digerati manque with a lousy $2,000 check is just buying his way in and the TED conferences don't seem to have that exclusive quality anymore.

During the morning session, for instance, some lady from a major New York publishing company had the nerve to raise a hand and ask: "But how do we make money if we just put everything up on the Net?"

Rossetto, in the lobby, repeats the question with mocking tones. No reference to huge forces crawling out of the sea? No Tofflerian Second Wave? No discovery of fire?

"It's like these people haven't spent half a millisecond to consider the issues," he says, disgusted.

Look, lady, nobody here is against making money. But for God's sake, don't say it.

Actually, Rossetto has already figured out how to make money on the Net. That's the next phase of the revolution. It began in October when he started Hotwired, widely regarded as the most ambitious commercial media service ever attempted in cyberspace.

"Wired covers the Digital Revolution," Rossetto likes to say, "but Hotwired is the Digital Revolution."

Hotwired, located in a loft adajacent to Wired, is filled with more young people staring at computer screens. The publisher, Andrew Anker, a stocky 29-year-old, sits calmly as his staff rushes to get the latest offerings on line. Hotwired is growing so fast he's about to knock out a wall to double the office space. They are adding more editorial content and the number of advertisers has jumped to 16 -- including Zima, AT&T; and I.B.M. -- who buy discrete billboards that provide a wealth of information if subscribers are interested enough to click.

At least for now, that's how Hotwired makes money. Without the enormous costs of printing and distribution, this service has been profitable since day one, and today at least $200,000 per month in ad revenue comes through the door.

Sitting next to Anker is Hotwired's managing editor, Chip Bayers, 30. He admits they struggled at first to describe what exactly Hotwired is. Finally, they settled on calling it a "cyberstation" containing "a suite of vertical content streams with an integrated community space."

In plain English, that means a broad smorgasbord of magazine-style text, digital photographs, sound clips and short and somewhat jerky video segments, plus room for subscribers to discuss the material and add their own multimedia contributions. Hotwired takes full advantage of hypertext, perhaps the most revolutionary feature of the World Wide Web, which allows users to click to supporting documents or related material located anywhere in the world.

Rather than simply dump printed material on line, Hotwired is cooking up original offerings to take full advantage of the new medium. It's "Way New Journalism," says Joshua Quittner, a Hotwired writer, featuring not only the best devices of the novel but also movies, radio, CD-ROM and networked communication. Bayer describes an example of this revolutionary journalism: a series about a reporter named Robert Levine following the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile across the Rockies. A subscriber could aim a camcorder at Levine as he whizzes by in the Wienermobile, Bayer says, and post a video bite on line as part of the story!

Subscription, which is free, has skyrocketed to 180,000, and Anker says it's growing at the astronomical rate of 1,000 per day. Hotwired is aimed at "digital savvies," who make up an even more exclusive group than Wired readers because they must have both the computer equipment and know-how to navigate the World Wide Web.

With Hotwired, Rossetto is venturing into sensitive territory. The wider digital culture is one thing, but the Net community is distinct. Based on the free sharing of information, the Internet for years has been used by academics, scientists and public-policy makers around the world to exchange ideas, opinions and research. Now the commercialization of the Net has begun and Rossetto -- one of the first to profit in cyberspace -- knows he must tread softly. And speak profoundly.

This "connection of human minds," he says, represents the best hope for regaining that old-fashioned American sense of community that the mass media has stolen from America.

"With Hotwired, people can talk back to us," he says. "And they can talk to each other. People don't just passively consume one too many episodes of 'The Simpsons.' They connect to us to connect to their friends, to connect to a community, to be part of a mind-set and a consciousness that transcends the limits of the old media. And in the process, they start to begin to build a new society, a new culture, a new way of thinking about community."

One trick you aren't likely to perform on Hotwired is to hypertext yourself into a conversation with Jonathan Steuer. A 29-year old Ph.D. from Stanford in interface design, Steuer was instrumental in getting Hotwired off the ground but clashed repeatedly with Rossetto over what "virtual community" means. He quit in January.

"I think Louis's claim that he has any commitment to the idea of community is a lie," he says.

On this particular day, Steuer is wearing purple pants and socks and bright blue shoes. His curly black hair reaches his shoulders and long silver earrings, with stars on the end, dangle from his lobes. He sits in a restaurant near his house in the Mission District, where he works on Cyborganic, a World Wide Web site that he hopes eventually will spawn real coffeehouses where people can meet.

Steuer dismisses Rossetto as a Net latecomer. The first issue of Wired mentioned the Internet only once -- and in a manner that drew some snickering, even from Rossetto's friends. Above Negroponte's column, his E-mail address was printed as "nicholas@internet," which would be like addressing a postcard c/o Planet Earth.

Perhaps realizing his limitations, Rossetto chose as Hotwired's executive editor Howard Rheingold, author of the best-selling book, "Virtual Community." But like Steuer, Rheingold wanted Hotwired to be more about bringing people together and less about selling Volvos.

"Hotwired is a business with a payroll," says Rheingold, who also quit. "There's nothing wrong with that, but don't pass it off as cultural revolution."

Call Rossetto a Net outsider and he gets agitated. "Hotwired is acknowledged to be the best thing out there," he fumes. As for Rheingold and Steuer, Rossetto says that last fall, 11 days before going on line, they had burned through $200,000 to $300,000 without setting any firm deadlines or producing a prototype. Rossetto moved into the Hotwired office, froze out the touchy-feely crowd and elevated Anker, a hard-nosed investment banker.

"To me, it's like the fascination with CB radio," Rossetto says about Steuer's and Rheingold's idea of virtual community. "It is amazing, when you first get into it, to be able to just talk to whomever you want to whenever you want to. But in the long run, people actually want something else out of media. The major thing that's going to be necessary in the future is the ability to take the raw material of the world and make sense of it. Because you as a writer or me as an editor can do a better job of interpreting reality than they could."

Um . . . doesn't that make this supposedly empowering, many-to-many medium an awful lot like the old, one-to-many mass media?

"No," Rossetto insists, "the mass media talks to everybody. It tries to be abstract and discover a voice and attitude that everybody can connect to. I think Hotwired focuses on a voice and attitude that certain people will connect to. We don't need to have an audience of 100 million people. We're happy with an audience of maybe a million. But a million is a lot different than 100 million."

How big Rossetto's audience will ultimately get is anybody's guess. But clearly he has ambitions to be a major media player in the 21st century. And no, he says, the Digital Revolution doesn't mean the end of paper: the printed page is still the best medium for the sensuous graphic art and the "highly intellectual discussions" found in Wired. In fact, Rossetto projects that Wired will eventually reach 450,000 circulation, perhaps spawn an entire series of books about the Digital Revolution, new magazines that might cover every subject -- sports, business, arts -- that will be radically transformed in the new world.

But paper simply can't offer the kind of exponential growth that the Internet does. Hotwired is currently free to subscribers, but Rossetto acknowledges that could change. As Quittner might say, there's some "Way New Economics" at work. If 100 million people are on the Net by the year 2000, the writer points out, and just 1 percent are willing to pay three cents each to read a story about O. J. Simpson, that's $30,000 per story.

Think about it: Ten such stories per day. Twenty! A hundred! Suddenly, the temptations of the mass media are creeping into this empowering new medium. Everybody knows you can sell more stories about O. J. than about a quest for the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. "Pretty soon," Quittner says, "you're talking about real money."

"IT'S MY PLEASURE TO present to you a man who is a visionary in many regards . . . Louis Rossetto."

Wearing green-striped Adidases and black jeans, Rossetto takes the podium, having taken a one-day break from TED6 to fly to San Diego and speak to a national association of college newspaper editors. He gazes at the audience of several dozen students, then pauses. "I don't know how to respond to that introduction."

Rossetto rarely accepts speaking engagements and doesn't often stray outside the digital world. This "visionary" business makes him nervous, too. He frequently disavows any claim to being a leader of the Digital Revolution -- which, by its definition, is not supposed to have one.

"Don't follow leaders, watch your parking meters," he'd said on the flight from San Jose, quoting Bob Dylan.

Rossetto also cringes at being portrayed as a Hot Young Anything. He and Metcalf are walking Gap ads, but they turned down the chance to pose for the company's campaign.

"It's not why we started this thing," he explains. He wants Wired to be taken seriously as an intellectual publication -- not merely about life style but about "mind style." No doubt they're also worried about wading too far into the mainstream and having their faces plastered all over the world by the soon-to-be-extinct mass media.

"The mass media look at this phenomenon as a threat," Rossetto tells the college students. "If you read the front page of The New York Times, they don't talk about the emerging new economy; they talk about some idiot hacker who has just been caught."

Rossetto's thin body sways as he sculptures ideas in the air with his hands. He describes a utopian future in which encryption tools make all our financial transactions private, thus ending the Government's ability to collect taxes -- ending the nation-state itself! Home will become the locus of our lives. Families and neighborhoods will thrive again. As for poor people -- the Information Have-Nots -- he tells the college students not to fret: anyone can buy a computer today for $700 and connect to a network for just $10 a month. He quotes a Wired slogan: "To be information rich today, you don't need to be rich."

After the speech, a woman in a red plaid skirt and green jacket, blond hair pinned up with barrettes, nervously hovers around Rossetto, who is surrounded by three or four students. As he finishes and heads for the door, she approaches him. "I listened to what you said," she says, "and I just had to say something."

She tells him she teaches at a community college in Arizona and takes exception to certain of his comments, especially the part about the American educational system being "as backwards as it was a hundred years ago."

Her face reddens. "I'm out there trying real hard, trying to fight the good fight," she says. "You can't just say that nobody's doing anything."

After the woman leaves, a kid in white shorts says to Rossetto: "You got flamed."

It's a good thing she hadn't read the piece in the first issue of Wired, called "School's Out." Adapted from a book of the same name by Lewis Perelman, the article calls education "the last great bastion of socialist economics" and argues that eliminating all American schools would free up $450 billion, fueling "a high-tech commercial industry" that would do a much better job teaching children skills they'll need to be "knowledge workers" in the new information economy.

"She just took it personally," Rossetto sighs, sitting in the lobby afterward. He's waiting for the limousine to pick him up. Demographic tests, he says, show that the person least likely to buy Wired magazine is an American schoolteacher.

That's hardly surprising, he's told, given that the magazine considers them obsolete.

"I'm sure it's totally scary," he agrees, nodding.

Scary even for some people within the digital elite. It seems the intramural battle of the 60's counterculture -- "do your own thing" versus "get involved" -- are happening all over again, except the combatants are now graying at the temples.

David Bunnell, a computer magazine entrepreneur, knows the technology as well as anyone but has a different idea about what to do with its power. Five years ago, he put up $100,000 of his own money to start "Computers and You," a computer job-skills program in the sleazy Tenderloin district of San Francisco. It's a ragtag collection of drug addicts, ex-convicts, homeless people, midgets, transvestites, blacks, Asians, whites, Hispanics and others who live in poverty. Until they can locate the "enter" button on a keyboard, they're no closer to the TED conference than the young black nanny who could be seen throughout the weekend chasing a white baby around the lobby.

"It's only white people," Bunnell complains of the Wired world, "it's only males and it's survival of the fittest."

Come to think of it, certain comments you hear while hanging around the digerati do make them sound almost like an entirely new race. "The people reading Wired are . . . an entirely new civilization that is still in its infancy," Alvin Toffler told Wired.

It's almost like an invasion from another planet. "It is an invasion from another planet," Kevin Kelly says. "Just like the hippies were an invasion from another planet. I mean, where did they come from?"

The point is driven home by Rossetto as he eagerly fast-forwards to the future. "My sense about this is that we're talking the beginnings of exo-brains," he confides at one point. "Brain appliances. And exo-nervous systems, things that connect us up beyond -- literally, physically -- beyond our bodies, and we will discover that when enough of us get together this way, we will have created a new life form. It's evolutionary; it's what the human mind was destined to do."

One nice aspect of an evolutionary view of technology, of course, is that it provides a biological explanation for why some people -- like Bunnell's motley crew of key punchers -- might not join what the digerati like to call their "self-selecting elite." But there's also a market imperative at work: these people have no money. They can't drive the Digital Revolution ahead. So why should the digerati log off long enough to truly empower them?

Back in the lobby, waiting for his car, Rossetto says he gets three speaking invitations a day. He used to take them all, but now he almost always says no.

Maybe he should get out more?

"What's my job?" he snaps. "I don't know, I. . . . " His voice trails off. He watches bellboys wrestle bags across the hotel lobby. The spaced-out look he'd worn during the Wired editorial meeting returns. The encounter with the teacher seems to have unnerved him.

"I get a certain satisfaction out of this kind of contact," he says, his voice nearly inaudible. "But, in the end, what I have the most leverage doing is just what I do, putting out a magazine."

Rossetto gets up, looks around. Where's his driver? The present is such a dreary place. He's anxious to get back to Monterey in time for the show tonight by Penn and Teller -- back to the glorious future, where the digerati live.