Mondo 2000 bridges the hippie counterculture and the hacker underground, and Wired professionalizes both

JUN 01 1989 · 12:05

Video: Mondo 2000: The Chaotic Dream of 90s Cyberculture Date: 1989-06-01 · Type: literature · Hub: bay-area · Tags: mondo-2000, ru-sirius, jude-milhon, counterculture, bay-area, techno-utopianism, hacker-culture, smart-drugs "The magazine that invented the nineties before the nineties knew what they wanted to be." R.U. Sirius (Ken Goffman) and Queen Mu (Alison Bailey Kennedy) edited *Mondo 2000* from a rented Berkeley hills mansion that served simultaneously as production studio, party venue, and informal salon for the Bay Area cyber scene. The magazine's lineage was longer than its masthead admitted: it had begun as *High Frontiers* (1984), an acid-and-aerospace zine that evolved into *Reality Hackers* (1988) before the *Mondo* rebrand. Issue 1 (Summer 1989) cover-teased "Beyond Computer Sex." Subsequent issues covered smart drugs, virtual reality, cryonics, Timothy Leary's tape archive, MDMA pharmacology, and artificial life, a roster that would now be described, without irony, as the pre-Web3 techno-utopian canon. Jude Milhon, St. Jude, the senior editor who would name the cypherpunks, was on the masthead. The contributors list overlapped almost perfectly with the cypherpunk mailing list and with the early EFF board: William Gibson contributed; Pat Cadigan contributed; Hakim Bey contributed; Timothy Leary had a running column; Bruce Sterling was a regular. *Mondo* was the scene's social medium before social media; it was where the ideas circulated before the list was founded. *Wired* launched in January 1993 and killed *Mondo* not with competition but with transformation: it took the same ideas, stripped the drug-culture substrate, added venture-capital source material, and sold the resulting product to the emerging professional class of the digital economy. Sirius left *Mondo*'s editorship in early 1993. The magazine staggered to a final issue in 1998. It is the missing link between *Whole Earth Catalog* and the cyber-libertarian commercial register that *Wired* would make hegemonic. Facts • Founded as High Frontiers (1984), renamed Reality Hackers (1988), renamed Mondo 2000 (1989). Final issue: #17, 1998. • Editor-in-chief: R.U. Sirius (Ken Goffman). Senior editor: Jude Milhon (St. Jude), who later named the cypherpunks. • Headquartered in a rented house in the Berkeley hills, 1989–1996. • Contributors: Sterling, Hakim Bey, Timothy Leary, Gibson, Cadigan, Terence McKenna, John Shirley. • Louis Rossetto (Wired founder) acknowledged Mondo 2000 as a precursor and prototype to professionalize. Primary Documents • Mondo 2000, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondo_2000 • Inside Mondo 2000, Document Journal https://www.documentjournal.com/2021/01/inside-mondo-2000-the-cyberpunk-magazine-that-gave-us-a-glimpse-of-the-utopian-future-that-never-was/