The Gap Nobody Filled
The German edition of Wired is shutting down and I’ve been sitting with that longer than I expected to. I never loved it exactly—I’d pick it up occasionally, put it down, find it somehow both too optimistic and too anxious, a magazine that hadn’t fully decided what it was afraid of. But the idea of it—a rigorous technology publication in German, for a country that’s overdue for that kind of thinking—that idea still feels right. The execution just never caught up to it.
Thomas Knüwer, who edited the first issue, described what it eventually became with a precision that stings a little: a startup gazette with a Berlin-Mitte view of the world, a website that insisted on being different in ways that made it unusable, social media handled without much seriousness. The early issues were tech-optimistic; later ones tilted toward dread. Condé Nast launched it in 2011, pushed harder from 2014, and apparently never resolved what it was supposed to be in a market where the mainstream press was simultaneously covering technology and remaining quietly hostile to it.
The claim Knüwer makes that I keep returning to: The assertion that digitally literate people won’t read anything printed is simply false—it just has to be good.
That matches my experience exactly. I buy Offscreen and +81 and IdN—small, focused publications that know precisely who they’re for and why they exist on paper rather than on a screen. The Wired Germany problem wasn’t format. It was that the magazine never found a reason to exist beyond the brand license.
Germany right now is having genuinely important conversations—about digital infrastructure, about what transformation actually means for an industrial economy built on manufactured things, about data and surveillance and what Europe’s relationship with American tech platforms should look like. A publication that could hold those conversations seriously, not as cheerleading and not as fear-mongering but as real engagement, would have readers. The gap is there. Knüwer sees it. I see it.
Whatever fills it next will have to be built from scratch by people without a Condé Nast brand to protect—something smaller, probably angrier, maybe something that reads like Offscreen crossed with a political quarterly with a grudge. The space exists. I’m just not convinced anyone is about to step into it.