A return to WIRED’s original manifesto

Thirty years ago, WIRED played a key role in jump-starting the future we would all soon inhabit.

"Tell us something we've never heard before, in a way we've never seen before," founding publisher Louis Rossetto urged the magazine's writers in a manifesto that appeared in WIRED'S debut issue: "If it challenges our assumptions, so much the better…"

With those marching orders, WIRED established itself as one of the boldest voices on the frontlines of the Digital Revolution—I immediately was hooked.?

Getting a new issue of WIRED in those years was so inspiring. The cyberspace worlds I'd read about in sci-fi novels like William Gibson's Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash were starting to happen in real life, and every month WIRED offered the most up-to-date map of this new terrain. Reading those early issues helped shape my beliefs about humanity and technology (in ways I recently wrote about in The Atlantic.) And they helped me understand how the internet was a fundamental paradigm shift that would have major impacts on media, the economy, education, personal and professional identity, and so much more.?

Today, as AI is creating the kinds of opportunities for innovation that animated Louis Rossetto's 1993 manifesto—WIRED sounds more like a conscientious objector than a trailblazing revolutionary.

In its recently posted "ground rules" for using generative AI, WIRED pledges to be "appropriately circumspect" in the face of breakthrough technologies like ChatGPT before listing various ways it will limit and even prohibit its staff's use of such tools.

I'm not saying WIRED should embrace AI mindlessly—circumspection is a defining feature of? journalism. But so is technological innovation.

For example, in the 1830s, The New York Sun inspired the "penny press" movement by utilizing new printing press technologies that made daily newspapers affordable to the masses.

In the early 1900s, the Associated Press used the telegraph to radically increase the speed of news transmission.

In the 1960s, CBS Evening News relied on the intimacy and immediacy of TV to establish Walter Cronkite as "the most trusted man in America."

In the 1990s, WIRED was one of the first print publications to fully embrace the challenges and opportunities of the emerging World Wide Web. It launched Hotwired.com in 1994 and pioneered many of the features and techniques that would go on to define online journalism and online content creation in general.?

If ever there was a time news organizations should be looking for ways to extend their capabilities and increase their impact, that time is now.

That's why I included a chapter on journalism in my book Impromptu. More than ever, we need journalists and journalism to bring clarity and accountability to our rapidly evolving world of information superabundance. (We now generate more than 375 billion gigabytes of data per day.)

But also more than ever, to meet the demands of this moment, we need journalists and news organizations committed to experimentation and adaptation.?

Somewhere, I hope, some enterprising news organization is about to emerge as the technological innovator of this current moment—the one who uses generative AI to radically amplify their productivity, increase the scope of their coverage, and create new forms of engagement with their audiences.

Now, I don't mean to suggest that news organizations should be putting 100% of their trust into generative AIs to magically produce news articles at the press of a button. We all know that AIs sometimes produce inaccurate or nonsensical outputs. And good journalism obviously takes a lot more steps than just drafting 1,000 words on a given topic.?

What I am saying, though, is that journalists and news organizations should be aggressively exploring all the ways they can start working with generative AI tools—to bring a bold and ambitious sense of the possible along with appropriate circumspection to this new opportunity.

Thirty years ago, Louis Rossetto closed his first-issue manifesto in the following way: "If you're looking for the soul of our new society in wild metamorphosis, our advice is simple. Get WIRED."

So, come on, WIRED! Get WIRED!?

Or if WIRED doesn't want to be the WIRED of the AI Revolution, okay then. That just means there's room for some other news organization to step up and blaze a new path forward.