An execrable novel by Carla Sinclair, Signal to Noise, begins as a roman à clef about Wired, which she camouflages verbally, but in no other way, as Signal:
At Signal there are two echelons, and as Jim sees it, the two don’t mix very well. Those in his own echelon, which include the publishers and top editors, have cocktail parties and go to private business retreats and meet the digital world’s movers and shakers, while the rest of Signal’s crew… go to raves and smoke a lot of dope and read zines.
This may explain Wired’s inexplicable habit, in its early years, of Photoshopping away the disgusting corpulence of American cable-TV moguls, planting their bald, porcine heads on muscular action-figure bodies, and plastering the ensuing brownnose/encomium on the cover of the magazine.
Anyway, of course there are castes in the digital demimonde. Let’s make a list.
- Standardistas who make Web sites and every other developer in the world, who publish documents that Internet Explorer for Windows can read.
- AOL and everyone else. (AOLers are afraid of the real Internet, whose users look with untrammelled scoron on AOLers.)
- LiveJournal (the bobbysoxer’s blogging service, also the recipient of untrammelled scorn) vs. TypePad (the administrative assistant’s) vs. Movable Type (the Windows system administrator’s) vs. WordPress (the standardista’s) vs. every other platform (the eccentric’s).
I’m a standardista who uses WordPress and who thinks AOL and LiveJournal are a flat-out joke. While I don’t smoke dope or read zines, neither do I drink cocktails, take weekends at Aspen, or know anyone named Negroponte.
So, I mean, fuck you all.