On the newly relaunched Mondo 2000 website, R.U. Sirius interviewed Wired founder Louis Rossetto about the origins of Wired and about his new novel, Change is Good. I was an editor at Wired from 1993-1998 and I learned a lot about Wired and Louis that I didn't know. One thing was that Louis wanted to base Wired in my hometown, Boulder, CO, but his partner and co-founder Jane Metcalfe thought San Francisco was a better headquarters. Smart choice!

Any regrets about Wired’s typhoon? (In the first issue, Louis wrote, “The Digital Revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon.”)

LR: Oh jeez. We are evolution’s agents, and we are making and testing mutations on an accelerated basis as we network ourselves and our sensors and our machines together. Some mutations survive, some don’t. The ones that survive may still cause humans (and the universe) problems because they are disruptive. Some are not only disruptive but wildly beneficial — at least they appear that way, at least at first. But can we ever really know what’s good or bad for us in the long run? All we can do is try to shape the flow as best we can with good intention. Regrets about what’s happening? Always. Excited about what’s happening? Immensely. Through it all, I remain a critical optimist. Change is good. Change is hard. Change is good? Change is…

A few years ago, I started seeing evidence of the beginning swells of a nostalgia wave for the iconic 90s "cyberdelic" magazine Mondo 2000 and all things early 90s cyberpunk/cyberculture. One person on Facebook unearthed an old copy of Mondo, photographed it, and gushed all over it in a post. They asked (something like): "What could be cooler than a slick art magazine about virtual reality and cyberpunk, hacking, drugs and mind-alteration, weird art and high-weirdness?" I loved being able to respond: "Writing for it."

I also noticed, in 2014, when I published my writing collection, Borg Like Me, a lot of the focus in reviews was on the pieces reprinted from that era, from Mondo, bOING bOING (print), and my own zine, Going Gaga. People waxed nostalgic about that birth-of-cyberculture era, the creativity and promise that infused it, and the revolutionary dreams it inspired. Several reviews said: We need to bring some of this back. Stat!

It is perhaps that rising sentiment that has prompted Mondo's equally iconoclastic creator, RU Sirius, to resurface Mondo 2000 as an online blogazine. RU tells Boing Boing about the launch:

It seemed like time. What the world needs now is MONDO sweet Mondo. I mean, it’s the only thing that there’s just too little of…. aside from wealth distribution, attention spans, and lots of other stuff.

So far, I've found what RU has posted a surprisingly satisfying mix of reprints of old magazine content, summaries/commentaries on the print magazine (and its predecessors, High Frontiers and Reality Hacker), and new content, including new music from RU Sirius and friends. Read the rest

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

Archive.org posted the first issue of Mondo 2000, from 1989. (It says #7 on the cover because the first couple of issues were called High Frontiers, then Reality Hackers.) I loved Mondo 2000, which was edited by R.U, Sirius, and it was a big inspiration for Carla and I to start bOING bOING, the zine. David was also a fan. I wrote a few pieces for it, and many of the contributors later went to work or write for Wired, which unlike Mondo, paid contributors and came out on a regular schedule.

Mondo 2000 was a glossy cyberculture magazine published in California during the 1980s and 1990s. It covered cyberpunk topics such as virtual reality and smart drugs. It was a more anarchic and subversive prototype for the later-founded Wired magazine.

When I saw my first issue of "Reality Hackers" -- at a bookstore I was working at in high-school -- I knew I wanted to keep reading this magazine, and made my boss place a big order for the next issue, which was called "Mondo 2000." Read the rest

R.U. Sirius, the founding editor of Mondo 2000 (which greatly inspired Carla and me to start bOING bOING) wrote about the beginnings of the late great cyberdelic magazine for the Omni Reboot. (Above, covers of High Frontiers, which was later renamed Reality Hackers, and then Mondo 2000.)

The editorial meeting was running longer than usual. Mu had held the floor for almost an hour with a monologue that veered from her recent argument with Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek about Jim Morrison’s use of Tarantula Venom as an intoxicant—Morrison, according to Mu, had joined a centuries-old secret brotherhood of poets and musicians in the use of this dangerous substance for Orphic inspirations—to the unending details of said tarantula-venom theory, to the connections that simply must exist between our Mormon printers in Nevada, John Perry Barlow, and the CIA and how they were all plotting to destroy us with a new magazine called Wired, and finally to the efficacy of writing after taking a few tokes of marijuana and then putting on Animals by Pink Floyd. When Mu was on one of her strange fantastic rambles, she somehow didn’t seem to need to stop to breathe, so there was never an opportune moment to interrupt. Finally, she decided she was thirsty and went into the kitchen to boil some tea.

R.U. Sirius shares the dirt on the triumphs and excesses of his legendary magazine, Mondo 2000 Read the rest

The first issue of the 'zine High Frontiers (1984), founded by BB pal and co-conspirator RU Sirius, is now online at the Internet Archive. High Frontiers begat Reality Hackers which begat Mondo 2000 which begat the cyberdelic early 1990s. "First Glimpse Of MONDO 2000 History Project Archives: Complete Issue #1 Of High Frontiers" (Acceler8or) Read the rest

Joseph L. Flatley interviews R.U. Sirius for The Verge: "I can't believe how confident and flip and — well, frankly — funny and brilliant and inspired we were... and so very dedicated to unapologetic absolute absurdism and surrealism." Previously. Read the rest