Whatever Happened to Mondo 2000’s Cyber Revolution?
One fearless leader investigates

by R.U. Sirius

For a brief period at the beginning of the early 1990s, counterculturalists hijacked the mythology around advanced technology. As co-publisher and Editor-in-chief of Mondo 2000, I helped to lead the charge. At Mondo, we trumpeted the arrival of young "mutants and superbrights." The digital era was arriving, and the "kids" were "at the controls"– they were the ones who knew how to make it and how to use it. A hipster magazine with an irreverent, anarchic edge could become the voice of the next era – we could help to define the politics and culture behind the post-industrial revolution. We believed it, sort of. Or at least we thought it was worth a roll of the dice.

We didn’t dream this fantasy without prompting. We had been editing a psychedelic magazine called High Frontiers throughout the 1980s, and increasingly found that our social circles were made up of computer industry insiders, national science foundation networkers, NASA workers and the like. At our frequent parties, depressed hippies and old "new" lefties were being replaced by these science nerds, mixing it up with quantum physicists and chaos theoreticians who were even further out over the temporal edge. And they were a lot more interesting and fun! We were among the first to hear about virtual reality experiments. We were given the original keyboards that were built for the first Mac. We were contacted by people working on computer graphics for ILM, people from the highest echelons of Microsoft (No, not Bill himself). As way-fringie people running a 15,000 circulation ’zine, it was kind of shocking. The people who were building the future were druggie sex maniacal freaks, like us! We decided to trumpet it to the world. I’m glad that we did. Even now, after the dot.com/NASDAQ deluge.

It’s difficult to recall how empty and flaccid the ’70s and ’80s felt. Among counterculturalists and mainstreamers alike, there was an overwhelming sense of torpor. Not even the high-energy blast of punk could reignite the revolution. Not even the upbeat entrepreneurial boosterism of Reagan could hotwire the market. In 1990, Virtual Reality mainman Jaron Lanier expressed the sense of utter desolation that was pervasive at the time, saying "Virtual Reality is *something.* And it’s been a long time since we had something."

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