Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History
by Thomas Rid · 27 Jun 2016 · 509pp · 132,327 words
time kept an entire subculture busy, complete with its own journals. “The closest analogue to Virtual Reality in my experience is psychedelic,” Barlow wrote in Mondo 2000 that summer. The hot new cyberpunk magazine, successor of High Frontiers and Reality Hackers, was still managed by the same crew from a villa in
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have loved this,” Barlow thought. It wasn’t just dazzling. It was revolutionary. The “colonization of cyberspace was beginning,” the would-be frontiersman wrote in Mondo 2000.91 Ironically, the actual colonization of cyberspace began on a rather more primitive device: a Commodore 64. It wasn’t real people in virtual space
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vision of teledildonics. After hearing Stenger’s wild presentation in Austin, Rheingold articulated his own vision of future sex in the summer of 1990 in Mondo 2000. The first fully functional teledildonics system, Rheingold clarified at the outset, would not be “a fucking machine.” Users did not want to have intercourse with
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to actually go out and build one of these things.”127 Barlow was there, and Rheingold of teledildonics fame, and of course the crew from Mondo 2000. Mind expansion gurus Terence McKenna and Timothy Leary were there, telling guests at three in the morning that all reality is virtual. “It was that
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bankruptcy. The company’s fall from grace was vertigo inducing. But this unexpected development turned out to be prophetic. In these years, every issue of Mondo 2000 was sprinkled with ads from virtual-reality companies. “It’s a really remarkable institution,” said Leary, the technology prophet, about the magazine: “A beautiful merger
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.132 The subculture was subsiding. By 1996, all three iconic formative magazines of the cyberpunk era had fallen: the Whole Earth Review, Omni magazine, and Mondo 2000 were no longer. The world everywhere was moving on. Meanwhile, cyberspace was going mainstream. The internet was growing fast, with the dot-com boom taking
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course. “You guys are just a bunch of cypherpunks,” Jude Milhon exclaimed at one of the group’s first meetings.29 Then an editor at Mondo 2000, Milhon was better known as St. Jude, a boisterous feminist hacker remembered for demanding that “girls need modems.” St. Jude’s play on words combined
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virtual-reality trend. Science fiction author William Gibson. In a 1982 short story, he coined the term “cyberspace” to describe the virtual space inside machines. Mondo 2000, a San Francisco underground magazine, shaped the cyberpunk aesthetic between 1989 and 1993. It linked psychedelic drugs, virtual reality, and the rise of computer networks
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suit diagram by VPL. An early virtual-reality machine, similar to the devices on display at theWhole Earth Institute’s Cyberthon in October 1990. A Mondo 2000 illustration of “cyberspace,” the “new frontier” that could be “colonized.” The virtual open range inside the machine was a mythical dimension where physics, laws, and
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sex. In the summer of 1990, colorful writer Howard Rheingold coined the memorable term “teledildonics” to describe futuristic forms of bodily interaction through machine interfaces. Mondo 2000’s guide to cyberpunk, laced with irony. Former Wyoming cattle rancher, Grateful Dead lyricist, and gifted writer John Perry Barlow was one of the most
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, posted January 28, 2015, https://youtu.be/5TrRO_j_efg. 56.For a list of companies, see Rudy Rucker, R. U. Sirius, and Queen Mu, Mondo 2000: User’s Guide to the New Edge (New York: Harper, 1992), 315. 57.“Interview with Mitch Altman.” 58.“Virtual Reality from 1990, Jaron Lanier, Eye
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=5m30s. 81.Ibid. 82.David Sheff, “The Virtual Realities of Timothy Leary,” Upside, April 1990, 70. 83.Ibid. 84.John Perry Barlow, “Being in Nothingness,” Mondo 2000 2 (Summer 1990): 38. 85.Quoted in ibid., 39. 86.Ibid., 36. 87.Ibid. 88.Ibid., 41. 89.Ibid. 90.Barlow, quoted in Fred Turner
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Benedikt (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 109. 111.Morningstar and Farmer, interview, April 24, 2014. 112.Ibid. 113.Howard Rheingold, “Teledildonics: Reach Out and Touch Someone,” Mondo 2000 2 (Summer 1990): 52–54. 114.John Perry Barlow, Lee Felsenstein, and Clifford Stoll, “Is Computer Hacking a Crime?” Harper’s 280, no. 1678 (March
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: ‘Cyphernomicon’ FAQ Available,” e-mail to cypherpunks@toad.com, September 11, 1994. 30.Ibid. 31.Jude Milhon (as St. Jude), “The Cypherpunk Movement: Irresponsible Journalism,” Mondo 2000, no. 8 (1992): 36–37. 32.See cover of Wired magazine 1.02, May/June 1993. 33.May, “Announcement.” 34.Ibid. 35.Lackey archived the
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. Photo of Timothy Leary. Frans Schellekens/Redferns/Getty Images. Psychedelic Buddha illustration in Reality Hackers, Courtesy Ken Goffman Photo of William Gibson in Mondo 2000. Courtesy Ken Goffman Illustration for Mondo 2000. Courtesy Ken Goffman Group photo at Cyberconf. Courtesy of Michael L Benedikt. Photo of Nicole Stenger in VPL gear. Public domain. Jaron
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. Photo of VR machine at Whole Earth Institute’s Cyberthon, Mondo 2000. Courtesy Ken Goffman. Cyberspace illustration, Mondo 2000. Courtesy Ken Goffman. Cybersex illustration, Mondo 2000. Courtesy Ken Goffman. R.U. a Cyberpunk? Mondo 2000, 1993, Nr 10, p. 30. Courtesy Ken Goffman. Photo of John Perry Barlow. Mondo 2000. Courtesy Ken Goffman. John Gilmore. Photo: Kevin Kelly. Timothy C
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of Technology MIT Radiation Laboratory (Rad Lab), 19–21, 32 MIT School of Engineering, 11 Mixmaster Type II remailer, 291 modems, 81 Molander, Roger, 309 Mondo 2000 magazine, 227, 242, 243, 263, 265 money, 257; See also digital cash monkeys, neurological research with, 65–66 “Monkey’s Paw, The” (Jacobs), 94 Moondust
Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)
by Adam Fisher · 9 Jul 2018 · 611pp · 188,732 words
tell you, journalists from all over the world wanted to talk about teledildonics for a little while. It was part of this cyberculture vision, the Mondo 2000 vision. Jaron Lanier: There was a tremendous pressure from the cultural underground: “Oh, I am supercool. I publish the underground magazine from Amsterdam and I
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prime example) had an opportunity to disrupt the “real” publishing world. San Francisco’s techno-underground launched a raft of new titles, including Future Sex, Mondo 2000, and most importantly, Wired. John Plunkett: Where did Wired come from? You have to go back to Nicholas Negroponte and his insight that led to
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on a tech chick. I assumed that they were complete cranks. They didn’t look like any of the Mondo 2000 cyberhippies I was hanging out with at the time. R. U. Sirius: Mondo 2000 was really the first technoculture magazine starting in 1989. Previous to that, computer magazines were sort of like car
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magazines. They were entirely designed and oriented toward the mechanics of it, if you will. Mondo 2000 took technology and treated it as an element of counterculture. Fred Davis: I had been working for Ziff-Davis as editor of A+, PC Magazine
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Jane showed up at my house in Berkeley, literally broke, with nothing but this idea to do Wired as a high-end version of Mondo 2000. Mark Pauline: The Mondo 2000 people were like, “Well, we’ll see about that!” Dan Kottke: Before it was Mondo it was called High Frontiers, and then it
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put together to get funding. I definitely had a visceral reaction, the suspicion that some people within the tech culture, establishment people, had looked at Mondo 2000 and said, “Well, this won’t do.” Louis Rossetto: All this time we’d been trying to get in touch with Nicholas Negroponte. His secretary
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so anarchic and druggy and somewhat disreputable. Coco Jones: Mondo hated Wired. They felt it was completely derivative of what they were doing. Gary Wolf: Mondo 2000 was the drug side of this culture. Wired was the other side. Jane Metcalfe: The world was changing. And so everybody’s seeing it from
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editor in chief of his own magazine. Kevin Kelly: So the question I had for Louis was “What’s the budget?” We paid almost nothing. Mondo 2000 paid almost nothing. Louis mentioned a very adequate, professional editorial budget. I said, “I think this is so good that I’ll help you launch
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by emulsifying what had been an uneven and partial mix of Silicon Valley’s technical culture and the San Francisco counterculture. Then the underground magazine Mondo 2000 gave the new scene a voice and a name: the cyberculture. Wild “cyber-” parties, salons, and happenings held the scene together until the midnineties, when
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. It was the South Bay–ification of the city Jack Boulware: Maybe people were tired about reading about smart drugs and this and that in Mondo 2000? You know it was all really cool for a long time to get a stud put in your dick or whatever it was. But computer
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. The novel’s first line: “He was a man too busy to flush toilets.” R. U. Sirius, aka Ken Goffman, edited an enormously influential magazine, Mondo 2000. It catalyzed something that was then called the “cyberculture”—a wild, half-imagined, half-real phantasmagoria of what the future was going to be like
From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
by Fred Turner · 31 Aug 2006 · 339pp · 57,031 words
LSD. Ultimately, this group included Kevin Kelly and Stewart Brand, but its earliest and most active members were the writers and editors of the magazine Mondo 2000, including John Perry Barlow.61 In the fall of 1988, Alison [ 164 ] Chapter 5 Kennedy (aka Queen Mu) and Ken Goffman (aka R. U. Sirius
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At one level, the notion that digital culture was growing directly out of the counterculture and the LSD scene reflected the editorial ancestry of Mondo 2000. Before coming to Mondo 2000, Goffman had edited a Bay area drug ’zine, High Frontiers, which he had subtitled “Psychedelics, Science, Human Potential, Irreverence & Modern Art.” High Frontiers
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on computer viruses, psychoactive designer foods, and high-tech paganism.63 Later that year, Reality Hackers took up the cause of cyberpunk fiction and became Mondo 2000. Its first issue featured contributions by cyberpunk heroes William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and John Shirley, as well as pieces on hackers and crackers and Internet
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viruses. As Timothy Leary put it, Mondo 2000 soon became “a beautiful merger of the psychedelic, the cybernetic, the cultural, the literary and the artistic.”64 At another level, though, the link between
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t y o n t h e W E L L [ 165 ] in Neuromancer—it could be beautiful, strange, and enticing. In the pages of Mondo 2000, readers learned that this new space was being built right here, right now, and they learned it from at least one writer with solid counterculture
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, like Rheingold, was able to take full and complex advantage of the system. Within four years of joining, he was writing regularly not only for Mondo 2000, but also for the Communications of the ACM, a newsletter for computer professionals. Shortly his work would begin appearing in Wired. Moreover, thanks to his
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Kelly, Wired marked a logical extension of the work he had been doing at the Whole Earth Review and that others had been doing at Mondo 2000. Both of those publications had begun to merge lifestyle issues and technology, but always with the low-rent production values of underground periodicals. Finally, Kelly
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.” 1998. Available at http://members.aye.net/ hippie/barlow/barlow01.htm (accessed November 15, 2004). ———. “Being in Nothingness: Virtual Reality and the Pioneers of Cyberspace.” Mondo 2000, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 34 – 43. ———. “Crime and Puzzlement.” Posted to the WELL June 8, 1990. Reprint in Whole Earth Review, no. 68 (Fall 1990
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on the Information Superhighway, edited by Ziauddin Sardar and Jerome R. Ravetz. New York: New York University Press, 1996. ———. “New Age Mutant Ninja Hackers: Reading Mondo 2000.” In Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, edited by Mark Dery, 11–28. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994. Sproull, Lee, and Sara B. Kiesler
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Lab, 163, 177, 178, 179; new Media Lab, 177; Project MAC, 28; Radiation Laboratory (Rad Lab), 15, 18 –19, 177, 178, 249 Modern Utopian, 80 Mondo 2000 (magazine), 163 – 64, 165, 167, 212 Monitor Group, 194 monocultures, 45 [ 322 ] Index Moore, Frederick L., 102, 115 Moore, Richard, 229 Morning Star East, 119
Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality
by Jaron Lanier · 21 Nov 2017 · 480pp · 123,979 words
circle of roommates who published esoteric psychedelic magazines. They adapted to the VR party aesthetic by concocting a tech magazine with a psychedelic style, called Mondo 2000. (The numeral 2000 conveyed the impossibly distant, undoubtedly transcendent and terrifying future.) Mondo was the prototype for much of what has become the familiar, intoxicated
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. Meanwhile, norms for tech journalism became hell-bent on positivity. VR engaged a new generation of journalists, like Steven Levy, Howard Rheingold, Luc Sante, and Mondo 2000’s Ken Goffman, aka R. U. Sirius. I’ll highlight two figures who were particularly influential as well as dear to me: Kevin Kelly and
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, Margaret Minsky, Marvin MIT Media Lab Mitchelson, Marvin mixed reality term coined mobile phones, cheap Möbius-Orwellian tech talk modeless computation modes molecules Molici, Dave Mondo 2000 magazine monitors Monk, Thelonius Montessori school Monty Python Moog, Bob Moog synthesizer Moondust (computer game) Moore’s Law Moravec, Hans Morley, Ruth Morrow, Charlie Mortgage
The Dark Net
by Jamie Bartlett · 20 Aug 2014 · 267pp · 82,580 words
hopes about what this new form of communication might do to us. Many techno-optimists, such as the cheerleaders for the networked revolution Wired and Mondo 2000 magazines, believed cyberspace would herald a new dawn of learning and understanding, even the end of the national state. The best statement of this view
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Solutions, a business that Gilmore had recently set up. At one of the first meetings in 1992, one member – Jude Milhon, who wrote articles for Mondo 2000 under the alias St Jude – described the growing movement as ‘the cypherpunks’, a play on the cyberpunk genre of fiction made popular by sci-fi
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accompanied by utopian dreams of sex without limits, of fantasies without boundaries. In his famous 1990 article about the future of sex in the magazine Mondo 2000, Howard Rheingold argued that ‘the definition of Eros’ would ‘soon be up for grabs’, because everyone will be as beautiful as they want and will
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technology expert, predicted in 1993 that we were about to evolve ‘a wonderful human culture that is really our birth-right’. Meanwhile the technology magazine Mondo 2000 promised to give readers ‘the latest in human/technological interactive mutational forms as they happen . . . The old information élites are crumbling. The kids are at
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-exploiting-female-classmates. p.187 ‘In his famous 1990 article . . .’ Howard Rheingold, ‘Teledildonics: Reach out and Touch Someone’; http://janefader.com/teledildonics-by-howard-rheingold-mondo-2000-1990/. p.189 ‘“We’re not a community” . . .’ http://twitlonger.com/show/n_1s0rnva, by @thecultofleo. Chapter 7 The Werther Effect p.192 ‘Eighteen per
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1990s predictions about the future of the internet, here: http://www.elon.edu/e-web/predictions/early90s/ p.221 ‘“We’re talking about Total Possibilities” . . .’ Mondo 2000, no.1, 1989. p.221 ‘Nicholas Negroponte – former Director . . .’ http://motspluriels.arts.uwa.edu.au/MP1801ak.html. p.221 ‘“They gaze on technology as” . . .’ http
Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet
by Claire L. Evans · 6 Mar 2018 · 371pp · 93,570 words
of the “cypherpunks,” a computer subculture devoted to matters of encryption and copyright. In the 1980s and 1990s, she’d coedit the influential technology magazine Mondo 2000. Jude was Ephrem’s girlfriend, and she’d met Lee after placing a sex ad in the Berkeley Barb (this was the ’70s, after all
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punk rock fanzine. Loaded onto a consumer Mac, Jaime’s stories came to life with images pilfered from the Village Voice, the Whole Earth Review, Mondo 2000, and Newsweek collaged together on-screen as though they’d been xeroxed by hand. Cyber Rag was programmed in Apple HyperCard, with graphics drawn in
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sold out. The novelty got her national media attention, which she leveraged into mail-order sales. After her magazines were featured in an issue of Mondo 2000, the cyberculture’s magazine of record, she was flooded with orders and fan mail. Although she made only five issues, she sold more than six
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, 123–24, 128, 153 Mitchell, Maria, 10–11, 24 MITRE Corporation, 114 Mittelmark, Howard, 147–49 Mobil, 139–40 modems, 130, 131 Monahan, William, 137 Mondo 2000, 102, 183, 184 Montgomery Ward, 224, 225 Moore School of Electrical Engineering, 37–42, 47, 48, 50, 54–56 Mosaic, 172, 186, 209 Moser, Nora
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition
by Steven Levy · 18 May 2010 · 598pp · 183,531 words
writers like William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Rudy Rucker, a new cultural movement emerged in the early 1990s. When the flagship publication of the movement, Mondo 2000 (a name change from Reality Hackers) began to elucidate cyberpunk principles, it turned out that the majority of them originated in the Hacker Ethic. The
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media was ready to embrace a broader, more positive view of hacking. There were entire publications whose point of view ran parallel to hacker principles: Mondo 2000, and Wired, and loads of fanzines with names like Intertek and Boing Boing. There was an active computer trade press written by journalists who knew
Orwell Versus the Terrorists: A Digital Short
by Jamie Bartlett · 12 Feb 2015 · 50pp · 15,603 words
technology expert, predicted in 1993 that we were about to evolve ‘a wonderful human culture that is really our birth-right’. Meanwhile the technology magazine Mondo 2000 promised to give readers ‘the latest in human/technological interactive mutational forms as they happen … The old information élites are crumbling. The kids are at
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hopes about what this new form of communication might do to us. Many techno-optimists, such as the cheerleaders for the networked revolution Wired and Mondo 2000 magazines, believed cyberspace would herald a new dawn of learning and understanding, even the end of the national state. The best statement of this view
Virtual Light
by William Gibson · 1 Jan 1993 · 365pp · 94,464 words
was coined by scientist Stephen Beck to describe a form of instrumentation that produces "optical sensations directly in the eye without the use of photons" (Mondo 2000). Rydell's Los Angeles owes much to my reading of Mike Davis's City of Quartz, perhaps most particularly in his observations regarding the privatization
Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World
by Joseph Menn · 3 Jun 2019 · 302pp · 85,877 words
about it to Luke and the others back east at every opportunity. One of Misha’s first contacts was the editor of a magazine called Mondo 2000, who reprinted his Information America piece and introduced him to her boyfriend, Eric Hughes, who was about to start the Cypherpunks mailing list, hosted by
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, Kevin, 35, 44 Mixter. See Akman, Kemal modems, 59, 93, 130, 177, 204 early internet use of, 9–10, 15–16, 26, 38, 42, 48 Mondo 2000 (magazine), 65 Monsegur, Hector (Sabu), 148–150 Moore, H. D., 177 moral issues, 79–80, 102–104, 118, 132, 165–166, 201 moral crisis of
Future Sex
by Emily Witt · 10 Oct 2016 · 197pp · 64,958 words
Lurking: How a Person Became a User
by Joanne McNeil · 25 Feb 2020 · 239pp · 80,319 words
Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life
by Colin Ellard · 14 May 2015 · 313pp · 92,053 words
This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers
by Andy Greenberg · 12 Sep 2012 · 461pp · 125,845 words
Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age
by Steven Levy · 15 Jan 2002 · 468pp · 137,055 words