Mondo 2000 Issue 2 (1990) | Hacker News Reader

Mondo 2000 Issue 2 (1990)

archive.org

55 pointsFamicoman26 comments

Fondly I remember devouring each issue of Mondo 2000 as if it held some grand promise of future about to happen.

I even bought some "Smart Drugs" and techno t-shirts but it was all for nought.

Even more than Wired, Mondo 2000 was this techno fetish fantasy that was never going to happen.

In some respects I am reminded of a line of Victor' Pelevin's from "Generation P" where the writer for this high concept underground magazine is in reality a balding father of three with a mortage and 4 starving mouths to feed.

To be honest, I long for the Mondo2000 vision of technology and culture. It seems very quaint and interesting next to the "campus dweeb" culture of Snap, FB, etc.

I have immense nostalgia for the early days of computers, when they were sold in carpeted showrooms with brochure racks by guys who needed a haircut. Those guys were changing the world forever! That heady time continued until right around when Wired replaced M2K.

I'm reminded of "The Guy I Almost Was" [1].

[1] http://www.electricsheepcomix.com/almostguy/

The early webcomic "Delta Thrives" from the same artist is still one of my touchstones for a utopian vision of the future.

http://e-sheep.sansara.net.ua/www.e-sheep.com/delta/heartoft...

yes! this is such a classic webcomic

Another way you can mark the descent of Internet culture into low-effort trash is the rapid decline in the artistic quality of web comics. We went from this to badly drawn sneering blobs, stick figures, and memes.

Wired came along, and the ads were suddenly for cars rather than smart drugs. There was no dreaming in Wired. It felt like a fashion statement, not a manifesto.

Mondo 2000 was something else. A promise of a future we could have, if only we were brave enough and crazy enough to try.

Those crazy hippies talking about using VR to unlock spiritual awareness through massively multiplayer virtual acid trips is just a whole lot more fun than the awful, terrible Facebook Spaces demo. I guess I'm just partial to the time when we were all freaks and geeks.

With really big money came intellectual gentrification. Serious People(tm) don't talk or even think about things like psychedelics, consciousness expansion, fringe science, etc. Doing so can lead to excommunication from places like academia and the high corporate world unless you are spectacularly accomplished enough to be indispensable (Watson and Crick, etc.), tenured (though they'll still try), or have enough F-U money to not care (Robert Bigelow, Elon Musk, etc.).

The promise of Smart Drugs eventually arrived. See reddit.com/r/nootropics for example. It took about 15 years to develop, mainly as a result of cheap chemical synthesis in China, advanced drug development in Russia, and a developing generics drug industry in India and elsewhere. If we had been living in a non-globalized world, it would not have happened.

Granted there has been some progress but not to the extent promised by M2K.

I haven't really followed nootropics but besides Modafinil (which is not really a smart drag) what smart drugs actually pass a meaningful double blind test?

There are a lot of smart drugs developed by the Russian pharmaceutical industry for neurodegenerative diseases. They are completely ignored in the U.S except by the online nootropics community. A quick Google search will tell you all about it.

One thing that leaps out at me any time I revisit 90s visionary culture is the optimism. I can't imagine that kind of optimism post-9/11. We still have not recovered as a culture from that day. If anything it's getting progressively worse with the barely veiled mainstreaming of things like neo-Naziism.

Old guy here... I always thought of M2k as a text heavy, Heavy Metal. And Heavy metal is still going.

As an aside... There is a show of 40 years of Heavy Metal art and such in Santa Monica, CA through Aug. 19, 2017 at the Copro Gallery.

Wow. Thanks for posting. Reading MONDO 2K after a 20 year hiatus is a real kick in the eye.

My gut reaction is that "Artificial Reality" culture has not served us as well as a more pragmatic vision of the future may have. There is no doubt deep learning, crypto-anarachy, CRISPR, 3D printing in the extreme environment of low earth orbit and many other current wonders were forecast in these pages. But the prophetic illusion that war, poverty, disease, and crime would evaporate away with accelerating growth seems tragic.

If a new imprint, say MONDO 3k, were to be started today, a little less airtime devoted to pirate punk rock cable access shows and a bit more on how to solve the problems of displaced workers via automation would be welcome.

Oh, and just on page two, already spotted an Easter Egg. The Reduce Productivity with Fractools, an electric kaleidoscope of nature's geometry ad. Distributed by a "Bourbaki, Inc." Named no doubt after the legendary secret math collective in 1930s France!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki

Craving even more 1990s alternative nostalgia? Remember Re/Search magazine? Publisher of J. G. Ballard and much more. They have a podcast that mostly consists of talking about the good old days ;)

https://www.researchpubs.com/category/podcast/

Wow - the first thing that hit me was a strong feeling of nostalgia for PageMaker and Quark. I could almost smell a laser printer.

A must-read for the uninitiated: "A history of Mondo 2000" [1]

[1] https://totseans.com/totse/en/ego/literary_genius/mondo2k.ht...

Coincidentally, EXTROPY magazine and its associated brand of techno-libertarianism was more reflective of where we have actually ended up. I have an old issue from 1995 that focuses on digital money that more or less advocates what we know now as cryptocurrency, including an imaginary monetary unit called Hayeks. With that said, stuff like cryonics and immortality is still pretty marginal.

The Extropians and Cypherpunks mailing lists had a fair bit of overlap in temperament with Mondo 2000 and with each other. They're also easier to search.

Extropians archive: https://github.com/macterra/extropians

Cypherpunks archive: https://github.com/Famicoman/cypherpunks-mailing-list-archiv...

It's fun, sometimes a bit depressing, to search those archives for years that have now passed and see what people expected by now. (ag "by 201", ag "by 200")

Serious underdelivery so far on:

- Molecular manufacturing

- Increasing single-thread performance of desktop computers, with ever-growing clock speed

- Robotics outside of industrial facilities

- Therapeutic breakthroughs in medicine from genomics

- Encrypted and networked communications revolutionizing politics/society

You might object that most of these developments, dimly foreseen in the 1990s, are actually significant in this decade in some form. But you have to go back to the originals to appreciate just how quantitatively aggressive the predictions were. (10 GHz desktop CPUs by 2014. Followup in the same discussion: No, the clock speed will be twice that, and arrive before 2010!)

Hey, my repo! Thanks for mentioning Extropians, haven't heard of that one.

I have 2 issues of EXTROPY myself and hope to scan them at a point after Mondo. The issues rarely hit ebay, and when they do they are listed at incredibly high prices. I'm always looking to find them.

I had all these, bought on the newsstand, and Wired back to issue 1. At some point I just had to clean house, during a move, and they all went. Mondo 2000 was both inspiring and, even to me back at the time, a little bit laughable, especially the fashion parts. But fun.

Amazing how little as changed. Back then, just like today, the magazine was talking about cold fusion, data clouds, 'artificial light' aka VR/AR, viral marketing, and teledildonics.

Took me a minute to realize you could actually flip through the pages (just click on the pages). Nice little feature.

Hmm, the article on page 21 about the "cyberpunk computer" seems to describe RPi and similar.

Man, I loved that magazine, back in the day.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com