Cyberpunk pioneer RU Sirius of Mondo 2000 magazine infamy has released a delightful new ditty taking the piss out of NFTS. The song, titled "I'm Against NFTs," is available for free until August 14 after which, the site promises, it will become (drumroll)… an NFT. — Read the rest

Thanks to RU Sirius and Mondo 2000 on Twitter, I just found out about @GumbysBand, an account that posts The Gumbys (Gumby and Pokey's band from the 50s/60s kids claymation series) playing rock, pop, and avant garde classics.

Here they are doing NIN's "March of the Pigs." — Read the rest

Howdy, welcome back to Spoken Word with Electronics. As with all episodes, we submit the following report on urban life:
1. This week my wife showed up at home with a piece of plastic connected to a purchase. It was human error that retained the suspicious item, post-sale.

The legendary DC nightclub, the 9:30 Club, was originally located at 930 F Street NW. It opened in 1980 and quickly became the epicenter of DC's punk and new wave scenes. It was a beloved hell hole, cramped, stanky, a strange maze of odd-shaped rooms, hallways, and a crooked stage. — Read the rest

I love it when you discover the often surprising musical influences of your favorite musicians. Years ago, when I was writing for Mondo 2000, I interviewed Trent Reznor. During the interview, I asked him who some of his favorite artists were. — Read the rest

This morning, I launched a new series of posts that I'm going to be writing on Adafruit on the history of cyberpunk science fiction and how it has evolved, how it has influenced culture and technology, what it got right (and wrong) about the near future in its fictional speculations.

The wonderful folks at Paleotronic (previously) have rounded up scans of articles from 1980s-era computer magazines that advised new computer users on navigating the burgeoning world of dial-up BBSes.

Pioneering psychonaut Ralph Metzner who co-led the seminal psychedelic research at Harvard University in the early 1960s with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) and co-authored The Psychedelic Experience, has died at age 82. (Above image, Metzner at left with Leary.) — Read the rest

The End of Trust is the first-ever nonfiction issue of McSweeney's, co-edited by McSweeney's editors and the staff of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; on December 11, we held a sold-out launch event in San Francisco with EFF executive director Cindy Cohn, science fiction writer and EFF alumna Annalee Newitz, and me.

Cyberpunk is Marianne Tranche's 1990 documentary about the early cyberpunk scene. It features interviews with the likes of William Gibson, Scott Fisher, and bOING bOING patron saint Timothy Leary. While the brilliant Brenda Laurel appears, the film unfortunately missed many of the other badass female cyberpunks of the day like St. — Read the rest

Over at Mondo 2000, our old pal RU Sirius interviewed Douglas Rushkoff, Jake Dunagan, and I about the "The Biology of Disinformation," a new research paper we wrote for Institute for the Future about how media viruses, bots and computational propaganda have redefined how information is weaponized for propaganda campaigns. — Read the rest

Pioneering engineer Bill Atkinson was the lead designer/developer of the Apple Lisa graphical user interface, creator of MacPaint and QuickDraw, and part of the original team that developed the Apple Macintosh. In 1985, Atkinson dropped acid and came up with HyperCard, the groundbreaking multimedia authoring program that was really a precursor to the first Web browser. — Read the rest

Lisa Rein writes, "DJ Spooky is having a record release party Wednesday night for his new Phantom Dancehall album, which utilizes samples from legendary VP Records' Greensleeves sublabel."

Image: pinguino

I first encountered Grant Morrison at the Disinfo.com conference of 2000, organized by Disinfo's founder, media magician, Richard Metzger [founder of Dangerous Minds]. As I walked upstairs from the basement hangout zone of NYC's Hammerstein Ballroom, at the beginning of his now legendary lecture, I heard Morrison's bone-chilling scream into the microphone, which reminded me of another Morrison, and thought "Who the fuck is this guy?' — Read the rest

Andy Warner says:

A comic by Maki Naro that I edited for the Nib just came out which I thought you'd dig. It's about how we're actually living in a 1990s cyberpunk dystopia.

Fun fact: the hacker character in this strip is based off the "R.U.

I first started writing about the remarkable Joi Ito in 2002, and over the decade and a half since, I've marvelled at his polymath abilities -- running international Creative Commons, starting and investing in remarkable tech businesses, getting Timothy Leary's ashes shot into space, backing Mondo 2000, using a sprawling Warcraft raiding guild to experiment with leadership and team structures, and now, running MIT's storied Media Lab -- and I've watched with excitement as he's distilled his seemingly impossible-to-characterize approach to life in a set of 9 compact principles, which he and Jeff Howe have turned into Whiplash, a voraciously readable, extremely exciting, and eminently sensible book.

I want to thank Boing Boing for allowing me to introduce my music collection titled The Triumph of the Will Not.

MIT has a complicated relationship with disobedience. On the one hand, the university has spent more than a century cultivating and celebrating a "hacker culture" that involves huge, ambitious, thoughtful and delightful pranks undertaken with the tacit approval of the university. On the other hand -- well, on the other hand: Star Simpson, Bunnie Huang, and Aaron Swartz. In Nightwork, first published in 2003 and updated in 2011, MIT Historian T. F. Peterson explores this contradictory relationship and celebrates the very best, while suggesting a path for getting rid of the very worst.

Johannes Grenzfurthner talks about Traceroute: On the Road with a Leitnerd(*)
(*) Leitnerd is a wordplay referring to the German term Leitkultur.

In 1982, Rochester, NY post-punk/dadaist/political musical group Party Dogs — cyberculture pioneer RU Sirius (Mondo 2000, Reality Hackers) along with Matt Sabo, Pat Lowery, Hugh Edwards, and Kwashe — recorded some catchy numbers that sat in the dustbin of reel-to-reel history. — Read the rest