Wired's Louis Rossetto on the Death of the Mega-State and the Digital Revolution

"The priests, the pundits, the politicians and the generals" who create positive change.

"We came out and said there was a digital revolution happening and it was going to change everything," says Louis Rossetto, who co-founded Wired magazine 20 years ago in 1993. "And [that] it wasn't the priests, the pundits, the politicians, and the generals who were creating positive change."

Rossetto was no stranger to bold predictions. In 1971, he co-authored a cover story in the New York Times Magazine announcing that libertarianism was the next great transformative ideology and that young people were rejecting the played-out politics of the right and the left. After editing a publication called Electric Word in the late 1980s, he and Jane Metcalfe launched Wired, the publication that not revolutionized magazine design but chronicled, critiqued, and in many ways created the Internet Age. The concept was to cover the real change makers, far from the halls of power in Washington or established business capitals such as New York, who were ushering in a new digital era that would transform society. "That meta-story," says Rossetto, "was absolutely spot on."