About 28 years ago, I was reporting a story from my desk at Wired titled “The Hot New Medium Is … Email.” This was an unusually personal report because I was partly its subject — a creator of a then-novel phenomenon: the viral internet newsletter. Think Substack circa 1995, made by hand, when maybe there were only 16 million people on the internet.
As I explained to Wired readers back in the day: “Meme is my newsletter, delivered once a month via electronic mail to 4,400 subscribers… What counts is who reads it.” I was, in today’s language, an early influencer. The early internet offered “an idealized picture” where “ideas flow freely” — and I desperately wanted to believe it could work.
