Cyber Send-Ups

The
Internet has provided a handy medium for those with a silly sense of humor to unleash their jokes onto the world. Lately, a
lot of websites have appeared that parody various magazines. Wired, the
much-hyped monthly magazine of cyber-culture and commerce, is the best and
worst of parody subjects. On the one hand, it’s the fattest target since Martha
Stewart, with a prose style simultaneously snide and oracular, and an
unmistakably lurid, cyberdelic look. On the other hand, why bother? What parody
could top Wired itself?

But parody we must. The online age is the age of parody — first, because the
Web is such a handy medium for it, and second, because parody, like cybermania,
is the special province of the young, male, and emotionally stunted. That’s not
to presume that Tom Connor and Jim Downey are geeks. But they did take the time
to produce two (quite funny) lampoons of super-domesticity, Is Martha
Stewart Living? and Martha Stewart’s Better Than You at
Entertaining. After those, a foray into tech hype might at least be
purgative. Ergo, Connor’s and Downey’s latest lampoon, re>Wired, was
released October 1 from HarperPerennial.

re>Wired has the Wired look down cold, or hot, in all its
bilious hurl-green and hot-pink glory. And it hits Wired’s defining
editorial points. There’s drooling gadget lust (for “Air Einsteins — the first
ion-driven athletic shoes”). There’s cybermacho, as in “Digital Outlaws, Part
VII” by R.U. Sysiphus: “He’s got an attitude, he wears leather briefs, he’s
wanted by many governments and most women. And you thought hackers were
losers!” There are outlandish corporate intrigues, such as Bill Gates
“instituting a hostile takeover of Ben & Jerry’s,” which he will give to
Seattle “as a present” to atone for the times his overwired house accidentally
shut off all the respirators in the local intensive care unit and gave 8,000
neighbors the same number as a phone sex line in Beirut.

And there is, inevitably, an overload of Gates baiting; re>Wired‘s
weakest item is its cover piece, “Bill Gates’ Guide to Picking Up NetChicks,”
which wallows in years-old geek clich�s. Better is “The Coolest Chat
Rooms,” your guide to “#Meatweavers” (“I guess I got into it because of the
pork. It works very well for living room accessories”) and the “Zen Chat
Garden” (“Enjoy the silent flicker of the cursor on the pure whiteness of the
screen”). Better still, the “re>Wired Brain Trust Symposium”
featuring “Benjamin Blancoponte, Digital Being,” “Stewart Burnt, organic
cybernaut,” and “John Barry Barleycorn, Wyoming psychedelic Republican.” (If
those names don’t ring funny, your diet’s deficient in futuristic blather.)
Best of all is “Future Design,” a four-page addition ad absurdum of
Wired graphic style that sums up all the hubris of the original. We have
seen the future, but damned if we can figure out what it says.

If Wired marked cyber-sensibility’s conquest of print, than
re>Wired is print’s revenge, a guffaw hurled back in the future’s
face. But it’s taken three years to arrive and costs a forbidding $12.50.
Meanwhile, the Web has moved ahead; cyberparody, in particular Wired parody, is already a genre there. On a sketchy level, there’s Haywired (http://www.geocities.com), How Tired (http://www.howtired.com), and
Wasted, “The Magazine for Blind Worship of Geekdom”
(http://www.dts.apple.com/mystuff.temple). UnderWired (http://www.covesoft.com/underwired) is a more concerted effort with a
beguiling copyright disclaimer: “Lighten up, guys. This is a parody. A satire .
… It’s fun, fer cryin’ out loud. If I wanted to rip off a design, I’d
pick something I could read.”

As a target, Wired has a special status; even Weird Al Yankovic has
his own on-line Wired-cover parody (W.E.I.R.D., natch, at
http://www.scottibros.com), complete with “linkovics.” But Wired is far
from the only target; even the hype-heavy search engine Yahoo!! comes in for
lampoon as “Yecch!!” (http://www.smartlink.net/~yeeeoww/ yecch).

And if, as any smart target will always claim, parody is the sincerest form
of flattery, then the producers of Slate, Microsoft’s on-line political
magazine, should feel even more flattered now than at their much-touted
start-up. In just two months, they’ve already been lashed by at least two
on-line parodies. The newer of the two, Mike Rosoff’s Stall (www.3cf.com/stall), is a freewheeling, half-baked job with a candor one can
only wish were catching: “Consider, then opt out. To get the most out of
Stall: Download it, print it, then lose it in a stack of papers. Like
the Web, Stall is for talking about, not for reading.” Other high
points: “Political Thought: It may not be `just for morons’ anymore,’ by Jack
Kemp and Carrot Top,” and “Klaus Kinsky” subbing for Slate editor
Michael Kinsley.

But the full-tilt parody is Stale, a sometimes-uncanny and inspired, if
uneven, rendering of the whole Slate package. Its creators clearly
misspent their youths in close reading of The New Republic, The
Atlantic, and the other print magazines whence Slate emerged. Who
else would attempt an endless parody of a Nicholas Lemann article on minority
groups, which finishes with a lame reprise of an old National Lampoon riff on the “Dutch peril.” Likewise feeble is a Slate “Diary” feature as
written by the perfect stereotypical diary keeper — a teenage girl. Phat!!!

But Stale has plenty of sharp moments. Its version of Slate‘s
“In Other Magazines” digest handily skewers The New Yorker, the
Tweedledee and Dumber newsweeklies, and by implication Slate, for taking
them seriously: “Time opens with a selection of humorous quotations from
newsmakers …while Newsweek reports on some funny things that
newsmakers have said in the past week.” Stale’s “Scribblennium” version
of a Stamaty cartoon, with Kinsley as Gulliver pinned down by real on-line
magazines, is deft. Likewise its version of the opening colloquoy “Is Microsoft
Evil?” with which Slate showed its independence. In the Stale version, Satan, Hitler, Charles Manson, and Evel Knievel join Microsoft
executive veep “Steve Belial” at the table. Says Belial: “Satan, I must clarify
your statement regarding an alleged deal between yourself and Mr. Gates.
Various agencies have looked into this time and again and each time, without
fail, they have stopped looking before they found anything.”

All this could be done as well in print, but not as quickly or cheaply.
Parody, like terrorism, is a weapon of the weak, and cyberspace is its pipe
bomb. And hypertext offers referential opportunities that in-print satirists
could never dream of. “Check Out a Lame Parody of Stall,” reads one
Stall legend. Clicking on it takes you to the original Slate.

This article appears in November 15 • 1996 and November 15 • 1996 (Cover).