Bees of the Invisible


	Caitlin Pulleyblank, a senior editor at HotWired, works on a story. (Photograph by Kim Komenich)

rom the frontlines of the digital revolution, HotWired editor Steve Silberman files this report.

HotWired headquarters is two floors of a five-story building with a forgetful elevator in an old neighborhood of San Francisco. Incense drifts up the stairs from the tea importer and fabric factory below, where Chinese seamstresses labor, sewing in rows.

We have no pleated mountains of cloth to show for our toil. Day and night, over 140 computers shine the myriad-hued plumage of dataspace into this cavernous converted warehouse. Miles of pink Ethernet cable snake across the bare concrete ceiling. We are indeed wired.

But that's just the hardware. The real transforming power in this room is not in the boxes -- or even in the fingers busy over the chattering keys -- but in the relationship of the people here to everyone else in the world, a relationship intensified by the machines.


	HotWired was among the first online services to blacken its pages to protest the passage of the Communications Decency Act, which limits free and open discussion on the Net of certain subjects deemed "indecent." The black gags symbolize censorship, and the blue ribbons stand for the defense of constitutional freedoms in cyberspace. (Photograph by Kim Komenich)


	Collaborators Zach Waller (left) and Pete Danko (right) help Mark Durham edit a story for The Netizen, HotWired's politics channel. (Photograph by Kim Komenich)

Describe the Web as an online magazine, or an undeveloped global marketplace, or the latest trend, and you've missed its essence. The word web sprouts from the same Indo-European root as weave -- to connect.

What we do here is significant only insofar as it connects us to a kid building her first home page in Manitoba, who gets excited realizing that she can use her skills and imagination to reach out from where she is, so that others can see through her eyes, and so that she too might see through the eyes of others.

The great Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke praised the human soul for its ability to distill the honey of insight from the pollen of experience. At HotWired we are, as Rilke put it, "the bees of the invisible,"building a hive of connection.

The energy in this room is essentially collaborative. Working at HotWired is more like jamming in a band than being a solitary minstrel. It's not accurate to speak of Web "writing" alone, unless your text is destined to reside on the Net as bare ASCII on a gray background. The interweaving of words, graphics, sound, and interface means the writers, designers, audio experts, and engineers must pool their intelligences to nourish a beauty greater than the sum of its parts.

The only fame that outlasts the fickle hype of the digital world comes from adding something to the commonwealth that is subtly useful.

Is what you're doing making everyone's participation in the community of humankind a little easier, a little richer -- whether they're wired or not? It's a tribute to the vitality of our evolving medium that such a question simply appears before us one day, in the course of our taxing labors, as something green and unexpected, sprouting from what looked like bare concrete and wires.

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