DON'T DISS THE DIGERATI

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

I'm sorry, but I just can't do it. Yes, I saw the monthly media directive from the Trilateral Commission--the bulletin that tells the media the spin we're to put on certain stories. I'm O.K. with the go-negative-on-Dole stuff and the Richard-Jewell-is-a-long-suffering-victim mandate. But I can't bring myself to trash Louis Rossetto and Wired like the rest of my media sibs.

I admit certain biases. I've written for Wired a lot in the past three years; in fact, I have an 8,500-word masterpiece in the current issue (the one with the cantaloupe-and-eggplant-colored "Burning Man" cover and the acid-green-paisley Absolut ad on the back). And some time ago, I received, along with many other contributors, 2,000 shares of Wired Ventures stock, recently declared worthless. So what? Denounce Louis and Wired just because Wall Street's skepticism forced him to withdraw his public stock offering for the second time? This I will not do--though others in the press have, mistaking bad timing for snake oil, confusing hubris for venality.

"We live in a Calvinistic culture," says Rossetto, meaning everyone loves a good flop. I called him a few days ago, and Wired's 47-year-old editor-publisher was oddly upbeat. Never mind that now Wired Ventures must go hat in hand to private investors for capital to further extend the Wired brand name into new magazines, TV shows, books and online publishing. A Wired friend says Louis "thrives on being told something's impossible. The more you tell him it's doomed, the happier he gets because he knows it will happen."

The birth of Wired proved that. "Who wants to read about the life-style of nerds?" people asked Louis and his partner Jane Metcalfe. It took them two long years to raise backing for the magazine. The pundits of publishing said Wired shouldn't be a print magazine. "They said we should be doing the next big thing: CD-ROMs." He ignored them, and three years later his publication is not only required reading among the digerati, but is thick with ads. Nobody digs a guy who beats conventional wisdom.

I do. I like Louis and his gray ponytail (recently clipped off). I like the way he always wears sneakers, even to formal dinners. I like the unapologetic conviction with which he speaks about the great millennial Wired enchilada: the collapse of governments and economies under the weight of a gajillion interconnected, deregulated fiber-optic strands; the rise of the global village; the triumph of one-to-many communication; the demise of the clueless press. So what if he's such a tightwad that he makes his employees buy their own pens? His vision of the future inspires a dedicated young staff to work unbelievably hard; one of them brought a bunk bed into the office and lived there for months.

Wired invented geek mystique and made the promise of the wired world palpable. Perhaps if Louis had tried to go public a few months earlier--at the height of the Net mania he helped create--I would have been the latest, um, thousandaire. But he didn't. It's a mistake his competitors now celebrate like an armistice. Why? Louis tweaked the established media, by beating them to a rich new market. That was forgivable. But then he terrified them by predicting their demise--just as everybody now predicts his. Everybody but me.

Read the Netly News daily on the World Wide Web at netlynews.com