The concept of an inverted pyramid isn't quite what you're looking for here, is it? The inverted pyramid is the idea that a newspaper article leads with the most important facts first, followed by lesser and lesser details, so that one will always have read the most important facts for a given amount of reading no matter how long that amount of reading is.

But that's not really the problem with the Wired article. It's not in a newspaper, so it's legitimate to write it assuming the reader will read the whole thing. It's perfectly fine for the author to tell the story in chronological order (or whatever order is appropriate for communicating the important ideas).

Instead, I think the problem you and I have with it are the unnecessary artistic flourishes and the non-standard chronology designed to "pull" the reader into the article. Does anyone know what this aspect is called?

Edit: On second thought, maybe I'm just projecting. Do you really think that this article would have been better as a reverse pyramid?