Last chance to support "Mondo 2000: An Open Source History" on Kickstarter

In April, I posted about Mondo 2000: An Open Source History, an effort to document the history of the brilliant, trippy, and pioneering cyberdelic magazine of the early 1990s. Mondo 2000 founder RU Sirius launched a Kickstarter campaign to gather funding for the project and I'm pleased to report that they've exceeded the goal! With just a few days left, RU and friends are hoping to generate even more support to expand the project and keep everyone fueled with enough pizza, soda, and Vasopressin to do this thing justice. For a taste of the tales to be included in this Web and print history, I encourage you to read the strange-but-true account of RU Sirius meeting Trent Reznor in 1992 while high on Ecstasy at the home where Sharon Tate and several others were murdered by the Manson Family. From the Kickstarter entry:

I must have had an empty stomach because it came on quick and rather strong for a low dose. Reznor's new home was only a few blocks from Leary's, but it was on some windy roads and getting there became interesting when a red Ferrari started tailgating and some guy began gesticulating wildly out the window. He cut in front of us and made us stop. Out popped Gibby Haynes, shouting. He wanted to know if we knew "the way." He didn't even have to say the way to what. Yes. He let us get in front again and we made our way to the Reznor party.

On arrival, an enthusiastic Gibby jumped out of the car to meet Tim and bragging that the red Ferrari was on loan from Johnny Depp. With the ecstasy coming on, the entire L.A. media world started to seem like a serene and glittery playground filled with happy children playing grownup and I settled into a comfort zone. The world was a friendly place. Relatively speaking, of course.

"MONDO 2000: An Open Source History"

• [Anonymous]

  You would be the one to write about this…
  Was just telling someone about the importance of this mag on us all back then…
  Much love from the east coast. – nix

• [Rob Myers]

  I loved Mondo back in the day and I’ve signed up to support this project.

  Mondo was visionary. The cynicism and exploitation of Web 2.0 doesn’t invalidate the fact that in the early 90s, technology was a tool with the potential to change individuals and society rather than to reify them.

• [mwiik]

  Well, I met R.U. Sirius and at least one other of the Mondo 2K crew at the Borders Books which used to exist on Leesburg Pike near the western edge of the Tysons Corner area in northern VA. This must have been sometime in the early 90′s, I recall the book ‘How to be a cyberpunk’ or some such had just come out.

  Some friends accompanied me, one of them bringing along their teenaged daughter wielding a cream pie which she intended to plant on R.U. Sirius’ face. After the presentation, she had second thoughts about this, and asked for permission prior to the pie-plant. R.U. Sirius was gracious enough to permit this, and said pie was firmly planted, with a twist.

• [Elliott C. ‘Eeyore’ Evans]

  I remember an issue of the bOING bOING print zine where the editors mercilessly lampooned Mondo 2000. Time heals all wounds?

  • [mwiik]

    Was that the one with the fake Kathy Acker/Avital Ronell interview? Something about how the (fake) Acker’s new book was composed entirely of Garfield comic strips, taken w/o permission. The ‘interview’ ended with an argument over which of them had invented the term ‘de-narrative’. I have that issue around here somewhere, along with tons of pre-web cyberculture stuff…

• [romulusnr]

  What I remember most about Mondo 2000 is that it reported on a technology world that didn’t exist in this universe. And yet people read the thing like it was visionary and somehow giving them insight into the state of the coming new technology era.

  And thanks to that, for over a decade people referred to the Internet as “cyberspace” and think a network is a series of tubes with balls of light flying through them. Etc.

  Um, yay.

  • [Ultan]

    “And thanks to that, for over a decade people referred to the Internet as “cyberspace” and think a network is a series of tubes with balls of light flying through them. Etc.”

    Um…actually it really, literally is a series of tubes with balls of light flying through them. And proper core network management systems such as Lucent Naviscore have a spatial interface that lets one zoom in on an ATM switch, into a physical port representation then into the attributes of the virtual circuits on that port, just like cyberspace is supposed to be.

    I read Mondo from back when it was Reality Hackers, (1989) and a decade later I had complete administrative rights over all systems related to the broadband, ATM and phones for 20% of the US. Mondo 2000 was visionary, stylish and smart; they got a lot of predictions right and the rest is reality’s fault, not Mu and the gang.

• [Francesco Fondi]

  Reading BB comments in the last few months makes me feel that the FB and Steve Jobs definitely killed “digital culture”.
  There are not many “Happy Mutants” anymore, just consumers…

• [Anonymous]

  I admit my ignorance, so please enlighten me: who are the three persons in the picture which accompanies this article? I am guessing that the seated fellow is R. U. Sirius, no?

  • [David Pescovitz]

    Those are the members of RU Sirius’s band from the 1990s, Mondo Vanilli. RU is standing, along with Simone Third Arm. Seated is Scrappi Duchamp.