FEED Magazine

Fifteen years ago, Steven Johnson and I made the same calculation at about the same moment: the web would become a media outlet, and it’d make a fine place for a magazine. The thing was we had in capital and experience something more at the scale of a ‘zine—small, intimate, scruffy, and fervid. Read more

When Stefanie and I first started trading emails, in January of 1995, exploring the nutty idea of launching our own Web magazine, so many of the conventions that we now take for granted about digital media simply didn’t exist. Web-only publications, for starters, were effectively nonexistent. Read more

I really loved Feed. Partly because I felt its sensibility neatly fit my own. Partly because I loved the then-novel notion of putting ideas out into the world with no grownups (read: Boomers) determining what was or wasn’t important. Read more

FEED was the perfect place to be twenty-four, lovelorn, verbose, and hungover. Read more

What I’m struck by, reading through the newly liberated FEED archives, is just how prototypical the exercise of creating a…what to call it? Web 1.0 Silicon Alley dotcom magazine-y enterprise? was. Apart from the incredible thoughtfulness of the contributors, the whole thing just reeks of THE FUTURE and TRANSITION and NEW, but without trashing the past. Read more

I had been writing about technology and popular culture for almost a decade when Feed began, but I had grumpily resisted the march of magazine-style writing and commentary to the web. I was proud of the fact that everything on my site had first appeared on processed trees. Feed seduced me away from this weird principle, and it remains the online organ I most enjoyed writing for. Read more

The Library of Congress has declared the entirety of Twitter suitable for preservation within its digital memory banks, and yet, for years, the World Wide Web’s first great online magazine has been lost to the digital memory of the World Wide Web itself, inaccessible even to those of us who never will and never would have forgotten it anyway. In some ways, this has suited me just fine. Read more

Feed was one of only a handful of collective efforts ever made by members of our generation to put our unfairly maligned self-reflexivity, irony, and ambivalence to use in a positive, creative way — I miss it! Read more

Via the 650-word platform of the Daily FEED--which, let’s face it, established a tone and format now used in thousands of blogs--we were Experts of Everything. Here again, a pattern emerged: our clairvoyant leaders S&S encouraged their employees to be experts in areas where we had no expertise, and no business pretending otherwise. At the age of 22, having majored in English and Semiotics (knowing not a single fact about anything), I was opining on NASA technology, Russian politics, automotive regulations, habeas corpus, teen magazines, Japanese anime, and presidential impeachment. Read more

Time has not been kind to the lede sentence of Cocaine in the Membrane, although my editor Elaine Blair’s title still has zing. “Cocaine,” the article begins, “screws with your mind.” It’s awful. But remember, this was before Gawker, before Slate was a daily must-read, even before the era when everyone’s print editor kept asking them to make their writing more conversational, more like one of those ‘weblogs’. Read more

Sure, there were occasional forays into exuberant postcollegiate theorizing—where pop culture icons and intellectual trends could be semioticized within an inch of their lives. It may even be true that Feed was where I—a notoriously late adopter in all these matters—first encountered the term “meme.” But hey, it was the nineties—and besides, even Feed’s excesses testified to its open spirit. Read more

These were freewheeling days. The rule seemed to be that if you cared about a piece, and could make an argument for its cultural or political or technological importance, or else its downright hilarity, it belonged on FEED. This was editorial heaven. There weren’t even enough of us for feuds or office politics.Read more

When Steven Johnson told me that he and Stefanie Syman were going to start a magazine on the Internet, I had only the dimmest notion of what the Internet was. “Sounds great, Steven,” I said. “Is it going to be written in FORTRAN?” Read more