Mondo 2000: Flashbacks From The Future
I can’t help thinking that the world, not just MONDO 2000, came to an end in around 1997. And we didn’t know it. And we’re living in the ruins.
Mondo 2000, created by Ken Goffman (R.U. Sirius) and originally called High Frontiers, found itself as the cyberpunk magazine par excellence in which one could find frenetic writings on everything from smart drugs, house music, and digital sampling; to VR, hyperlinks, and cybersex.
Mondo was full of contributions from psychedelic veterans like Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, William S. Burroughs, and Terence McKenna. Hippy meets hacker. And it was a primordial soup of cyberpunk with authors like William Gibson (Neuromancer), Douglas Rushkoff (Cyberia), Donna Haraway, Rudy Rucker, and Bruce Sterling (Mirrorshades). It was a new literary mutation—“New Edge”—where psychedelic counterculture embraced technology in a wildly anarchic, mystical and punkish way.
The late 80s and early 90s were interesting, strange and exciting times. William Gibson On MONDO 2000 & 90s Cyberculture:
Underground magazines had been very important to me...MONDO 2000 was clearly an underground magazine, and as such I was definitely glad it was there.
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I’d say it was arguably the representative underground magazine of its pre-Web day. It was completely outside what commercial magazines were assumed to be about, but there it was, beside the commercial magazines. Could that even happen, today?
Posterity, looking at this, should also consider MONDO 2000 as a focus of something that was happening, rather than exclusively as a broadcast-point. It was a brave magazine, but it was also a magazine of its day. Stuff was happening all over, with no Internet to pass it instantly around.
I sat down with R.U. Sirius and we talked about what inspired him to move west and try to mutated humanity so that it can be ready for the future. There are moments in History when things become fluid. When Patterns change, and in these moments, the ripple of even a single idea, can make a huge difference. Change the whole wave of consciousness, evolve the reality. In this case, it all starts with 500 microgram LSD trip the day John Lennon died.
I had a lot of fun hanging out with R.U. and listening to weird, silly and funny stories of taking "drugs", going full gonzo to cover the High Frontiers of Reality and then finding the New Edge of Hyperspace.
Here's the full edited show:
and this is some outtakes and with a remix clip from R.U. on Douglas Rushkoff's Team Human
There is a lot of things that are brewing in the background and this brings me to one of the hidden reason for producing this show with R.U. Sirius and tapping back into Mondo 2000. I started this group for Mondo 2000 is please join and check out the group for classic and new Mondo things.
And I just back word from R.U. I am going to produce and edit his new podcast show. So a lot more new stuff to come from Mondo 2000!
Lastly, I will leave you with clip from the first Mondo magazine,
First MONDO 2000 Editorial (1989)
MONDO 2000 is here to cover the leading edge in hyperculture. We’ll bring you the latest in human/technological interactive mutational forms as they happen.
We’re talking Cyber-Chautauqua: bringing cyberculture to the people! Artificial awareness modules. Visual music. Vidscan Magazines. William Gibson’s Cyberspace Matrix — fully realized!
Our scouts are out there on the frontier sniffing the breeze and guess what? All the old war horses are dead. Eco-fundamentalism is out, conspiracy theory is demode, drugs are obsolete. There’s a new whiff of apocalypticism across the land. A general sense that we are living at a very special juncture in the evolution of the species.
Back in the sixties, Carly Simon’s brother wrote a book called What to Do Until the Apocalypse Comes.
It was about going back to the land, growing tubers and soybeans, reading by oil lamps. Finite possibilities and small is beautiful. It was boring!
Yet the pagan innocence and idealism that was the sixties remains and continues to exert its fascination on today’s kids.
Look at old footage of Woodstock and you wonder: where have all those wide-eyed, ecstatic, orgasm-slurping kids gone? They’re all across the land, dormant like deeply buried perennials. But their mutated nucleotides have given us a whole new generation of sharpies, mutants and superbrights and in them we must put our faith — and power.
The Cybernet is in place. If fusion is real, we’ll find out about it fast. The old information elites are crumbling. The kids are at the controls.
Queen Mu
R.U. Sirius
Stay tuned for more from the New Edge...