Many thanks to all the supportive "fuck those yuppies" emails I've been receiving over the last 24 hours, in response to The Recent Unpleasantness (a.k.a. me trying to volunteer for Wired magazine's Nextfest this week, having a pathetically comic experience at it the first day, and then getting fired the second day for writing about it at my journal). I've received a number of letters now asking if I'm angry at Nextfest for the way I was treated, or pissed off over the whole thing. Angry? No, not really - I mean, they had every right to fire me in that situation if they wanted, and I can't really blame them for doing just that. (Of course, as someone who's studying business right now, I can also declare that this was the absolutely worst way they could've dealt with the situation; better maybe to actually listen to what I was saying, acknowledge that I had valid points, and change the way things were actually being run.) You could definitely say, though, that I'm intensely disappointed by the experience...and not with the Nextfest staff as you might expect, but rather Wired magazine itself. I'll explain...

Believe it or not, I've actually been reading Wired since its very first issue (back when it was known as "that Mondo 2000 wannabe"), and until recently it was one of the few companies on the planet that I had an immeasurable amount of respect for. The reason I had such a profound respect for them was that they've been so damn consistent over the years, when it comes to embracing the avant garde, thinking smartly, and always paying a lot of respect to the people with whom they deal. That's a rare thing to find in a private company, I think, and is one of the big reasons I've been such an obsessive fan of the magazine all these years. My experience at Nextfest this week, however, was the opposite of this - the people I dealt with were thinking stupidly, treating no one with respect, and immediately reverting to outdated fascist responses the absolute moment something started going wrong for them. And it's really just profoundly disappointing for me to see Wired sell their good name like that to such a group of assholes - to whore themselves, in other words, just like all those other damn companies out there who make me sick with rage, and for whom I have dedicated most of my adult life fighting against.

Why is it that every single thing in this world that we admire eventually has to disappoint us so profoundly? Can't there be a single company in the world that says, "You know what? We don't have to make a billion dollars. We don't have to have our company's name known by every person on the planet. We don't have to screw over the customers that made us the success we are, just so that our executives' salaries can go from insanely high to stupid insanely high. We're all making plenty of money, our customers will lay down in front of tanks for us, and we're simply going to be happy with that without thinking that we now have to take over the world too."

Dungeons & Dragons. Tandy Computers. Apple. IRS Records. Microsoft. Google. SuicideGirls.com. Throughout my entire life, every time I've developed a profound respect for a company, and started to emulate in my own life the way they did things, not even ten years later that company has turned into the very thing they were trying to fight against. They turn into one of those companies who simply stop caring about their customers' happiness - about delivering a quality product to them, or keeping them satisfied, or selling their goods for a fair market price, or responding to complaints in a rational, timely way. Wired magazine was literally one of the last companies on the planet I felt this profound respect for (in fact, I think Southwest Airlines is the only one left), which I guess is why it's so heart-crushingly disappointing to learn that they're instead simply one more group of assholes in expensive clothes, sitting around a mahogany table in some glass building, busily thinking up yet more ways they can fuck over their customers while simultaneously making more money from them. That's the emotion I take away from my Nextfest experience that I guess hurts the most.