_Although_ Wired _communicates extensively by e-mail with its readers, conducts forums, and makes back issues available on-line, its much-repeated goal of creating a magazine—currently called_ HotWired—_that is especially designed to exist electronically remains fuzzy. For the moment this is no open democracy, and_ Wired _is no computer screen—its bright graphics would make a fashion magazine envious_. Wired _celebrates what doesn’t yet exist by exploiting a format that does: it’s as if a scribe copied out a manuscript extolling the beauty that would one day be print_. Strange. Just what’s so odd about using old technology to spread word of alternatives, especially the dazzling e-magazines that already enliven the Web? When Nicholas Negroponte published _Being Digital_ (New York: Knopf, 1995), a bestselling collection of his lively _Wired_ essays, some Generation Xers bought it not for themselves but for their parents—which was exactly what Negroponte wanted. Max is especially off target about _HotWired_. Today, just months after he wrote of the publishers’ “fuzzy” goal, the magazine is one of the most successful on the Net with far more than 100,000 readers. It makes massive use of hyperlinks—the technology I described by way of the Civil War example. Within discussion areas, readers can create links from their posts to text, pictures, and sound elsewhere in the World Wide Web, including their own electronic pages—they needn’t confine themselves to tiny letters to the editor. Simply put, _HotWired_ both praises and exemplifies the new medium. I couldn’t care less, moreover, if this electronic magazine runs long articles that have come out in print or could have—just so _HotWired_ also gives me new material. Not everyone on the Internet reads the printed _Wired_. One of joys of the Net, moreover, is the ability to offer greater levels of detail for those wanting it. What a grouch Max is. He might as well be a monk lecturing Gutenberg about the glories of calligraphy.