In the autumn of 1997, along with the arrival of cooler weather and light rain in San Francisco came the final plans for a house-cleaning at Wired Inc. The in-house coup d’é·tat would result in the removal of scores of people, including the founders Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe.
In their stead, the company was going to be dismantled and sold off in pieces. The founders would be rewarded with a fair amount of compensation for their efforts, so they would be “fine.” Not so much everyone else.
Near the top of the hit list was my name. The very fact that made me irreplaceable in the old order — my relationship with Louis — made me all too disposable in the new one.
So, on a late afternoon when the sun was going down to the west, suddenly and strangely there were no further meetings on my calendar. It was wide open. Then I was summoned to Louis’s office.
I walked in to see three people waiting, none of smiling. Just three senior execs stiff and grim in manner. I was thanked for my service, given a small severance check, and summarily dismissed.
Louis was one of the three and he looked immensely sad. But he had nothing to say. This was not of his doing. And that, I suppose, is the end of my story at Wired.
Unlike many of the other difficult transitions in my life, I had prepared myself emotionally as much as possible for this one. I’d packed up my family pictures and prepared my goodbye message. But as I drove away from 660 Third Street, I realized you can't really prepare yourself for losing something you love.
EPILOGUE
Perhaps the most significant accomplishment during my tenure on Third Street was Wired News, which survived the purge in 1997 and exists to this day.
And in one of life’s strange ironic twists, my oldest daughter, who would soon become an award-winning journalist herself, worked as as an intern at Wired News during the first decade of the new millennium.
Apparently none of her colleagues knew that her father had been one of the executives involved in creating their company or what that experience had been like.
Many years later, now that our society has become divided by conspiracy theories, fake news and social media demagogues, I remember how hard in the 1990s a few of us tried to prevent that outcome.
I’d be less than truthful if I said we fully anticipated how bad the media collapse would turn out to be. We saw the danger signs, but we could not imagine the world as it’s turned out to be.
The problem is once the old media world — like Humpty Dumpty — teetered and fell off of the great digital wall of the Internet and burst into a thousand pieces, how could we ever put it together again?
The answer is, sadly, I don’t know how we can.
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