Comment by csixty4 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by csixty4 | Hacker News Reader

There was a discussion about Mondo 2000 here on HN maybe a year ago, and I remember someone commenting that they & all their friends growing up in California saw Mondo as a huge joke. Their parents and older friends were all working with VR and the Internet and it was nothing like Mondo made it out to be. They couldn't believe anybody took it seriously.

One of the replies really resonated with me. Growing up in the midwest in the mid-90s, where scarcely anyone had heard of the Internet, Mondo was paradise. It portrayed a humanistic, technophilic world of sex, drugs, and high technology so far away from the humble, conservative "Breadbasket of North America" around us.

I have a full run of Mondo 2000 I intend to scan someday. Flipping through those back issues, it really does feel silly today. But back then, each of those issues symbolized hope for me. I kept a stack next to my bed for inspiration. I would dream about the future I was about to create.

Looking back, that's why I was so disappointed with college the first time around. I spent the last couple years of high school drooling over virtual reality rigs and cyberspace, only to have a required COBOL class my freshman year. I dreamed of dropping out and moving to San Francisco where all the cool people were, people who understood technology and the limitless future that lies before us.

Timothy Leary was my hero, and I wept the day he died. I tried reading Chaos and Cyberculture[1] again a couple years ago and it felt like barely-coherent word vomit. But in 1994 it blew my mind.

I worry that this will be the legacy of Mondo 2000 and its ilk. Taken out of context, I'd say it's 90% "weird for the sake of weird" crap. Although I must say that it's beautifully illustrated crap, pushing the limits of 1990s hardware and software. And that's the thing - so much of Mondo's value is in its context. The team behind Mondo were cyberspace missionaries spinning tales of a digital utopia, inspiring us to realize it. When the mainstream went grunge, they went digital. I feel like my passion for open source today springs from that same dream of a global kumbaya we were promised decades ago.

[1] https://drytoasts.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/timothy-leary-...

I think a lot of people miss that it was in in part literally a joke. It seems a lot people look at that "R.U. a cyberpunk" bit and think that it was meant to be serious. Hell, it was all right there in the editor-in-chief's name.

But of course it was also more than just a joke. Have you read "The Guy I Almost Was," mentioned in another comment here? I asked R.U. Sirius about that when I interviewed him in 2002 [1] and he said:

"I say that all the time in public interviews, 'We made it all up.' Which in a sense is true — some of it we made up and some of it we didn’t. Mondo 2000 clearly wasn’t journalism in the conventional sense. It was mostly composed of interviews, very subjective, really dedicated to people speaking in their own voice. It was very playful and very surrealistic. I never really wanted to do journalism — I do now because I have to to make a living. And we do it at Thresher, I guess because it’s become a habit now. To say we made it all up is kind of flippant, but we weren’t concerned with responsibility or credibility. We were more concerned with creating a sense of excitement and energy and a sense of belonging to the next wave of culture. And we were concerned with making people laugh."

* I think a lot of people miss that it was in in part literally a joke. It seems a lot people look at that "R.U. a cyberpunk" bit and think that it was meant to be serious. Hell, it was all right there in the editor-in-chief's name. *

Reminds us that what Poe's Law describes exited before the internet.

This sounds quite similar to Hunter S. Thompson and Gonzo Journalism:

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

There was a lot of that. I was one of the people behind Fringeware, well-acquainted with the Mondo crew.

I named my son Hunter Speed Thompson.

In the mid-nineties, I discovered "Mondo 2000: A User's Guide to the New Edge" by chance in a discount bookshop. At the time I was a teenager in working class rural England. I was working menial jobs while teaching myself to code and I was pretty depressed and alienated from my surroundings. This book was almost a lifeline to the place I wanted to be, the kinds of things I wanted life to be about. It was a real inspiration and encouragement to me in those years.

I had no internet then, so I just read the Mondo 2000 book again and again, along with the Hacker Crackdown, and Howard Rhinegold's book on VR. That was the tech culture I wanted to be a part of.

Please contact me if/when you scan the issues. I've been collecting back issues here and there, but I fear it's not possible to assemble a complete collection anymore.

I have this on my desk if you want it. Make me an offer.

http://imgur.com/RH6zsIq

edit: I can see from the Amazon link below it's still easy to get a hold of.

> the midwest in the mid-90s, where scarcely anyone had heard of the Internet

Something only people who never lived far from the coasts would believe. Ha ha.

Depends on when you're talking about. When I got my Ripco internet account in 1994, they made me get a parents' signature on a waiver before I could have access because I might encounter adult conversations and pictures of naked people.

This led to an hour-long discussion starting with "what's the Internet?" and "admit it, you just want to go on there to see naked people" before my dad signed off.

They younger people around me were exposed to the Internet first, through BBSs, Prodigy, and AOL. But the adults around me couldn't care less. Maybe it was a suburban vs urban thing?

What's funny is how quickly all that changed. It only took a couple years for the Internet to become a household word where I grew up.

I mean assumedly "some" people had heard enough about the internet to make a GUI browser for it...

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