Back in 1988, when the first Apple MacIntosh personal computer had only been available for 4 years, I picked up a magazine that was unlike any magazine that I had read before. It was called Reality Hackers and it had a lot of obscure, but really interesting future oriented topics that no one was really discussing in any mainstream magazines. Reality Hackers was discussing things like nootropics, virtual reality, rave culture, artificial life and cyberpunk culture, back before cyberculture was widespread like it is today. This was before the computer was common place in the home and the average person didn't really know much about them unless they worked in an office, and even then it was used mostly for word processing and bulletin boards, or for industrial design using AutoCAD. Cyberpunk culture was a specialized and underground niche to which most people were oblivious. The people in this magazine were not the ones using the computer for the advancement of corporate culture. They were using it to create music and graphics, components of media culture to explore where technology could take us into the future. These were the subversive individuals who wanted to use it to change society. They were hedonist who wanted to get the party started in your head by helping you form new synaptic connections and set them to firing at an accelerated rate, literally. I remember them having an interview where they advised on how to take a combination of Choline and vitamin B12 to maximize synaptic, and therefore cognitive performance. There was an article about writing a computer virus, with diagrams outlining the code. I did not yet understand the lingo, but I got a sense of the new adventure that awaited me in the cyber-realm. This is the magazine that ignited my, yet to be awakened, curiosity about computers. Previously I had no interest in using a computer, but on reading this magazine I suddenly understood the desirability of owning a computer.
The magazine had previously gone by the name of High Frontiers before becoming Reality Hackers, but then quickly changed its name again, to Mondo 2000. The editor was some guy named R.U.Sirius which seemed like a really oddball name to me at the time, not yet being familiar with the concept of screen names. In a 2015 interview with Kevin Holmes of Vice, he had this to say about user generated media:
Holmes: So you think it devalues as well as democratises?
R.U. Sirius: Canadian internet seer Marshall McLuhan said that with every human enhancement comes an amputation. For an elite (when considered on a global scale) class of literate people, the diminution of power of real literary or even journalistic talent feels like an amputation. But for people who never had the opportunity to speak before, it’s the beginning of something else. Ultimately, we’ll give opportunity for more geniuses of expression to emerge.
What I found to be one of the most interesting and applicable things that they printed wasn't even credited with the authors name. It just had the words "CLIP 'N' SAVE" (so I did) printed at the top and a B/W background pic of a gnarly looking feminine robot behind a TV with the communist hammer and sickle on the screen. Except that, instead of a hammer, there was a martini glass with a tooth-picked olive in it. It read as follows:
"We have made the catastrophic discovery that it is legal to torture and murder people with entertainment. The mass audience is in danger of total extinction through "enjoyment." An international consortium of entertainment criminals has, through telegenetic engineering, created meta-viruses in the form of pictures and sounds. These meta-viruses are virtually indistinguishable from normal pictures and sounds. After entering through the eyes and ears, they devour the imagination of their victim and replace it with the imagination of one of the entertainment criminals.
Forget about the military threat! The genocide of the imagination is at hand! This is no metaphor. The actual electrochemical substances of your brain are being redesigned by the imaginations of the imagination-killers. If we don't stop them, there will soon be a single, united, tragically inbred global imagination, a black hole of insipidly dangerous images and sounds. There will be the unholy perfection of totally destructive "peace." World War Harmony is the covert goal of the entertainment criminals."
One interesting episode in the magazines history was remembered in Wired magazine:
"The magazine once ran an interview with U2 guitarist The Edge conducted by another band called Negativland. The catch was that U2's lawyers had sued Negativland, and The Edge didn't know he was being interviewed by the band until the end of the interview, by which time the band had trapped him into exposing his own hypocrisy on intellectual property issues."
I came back to all of this nostalgia by way of a link, that I came across in the course of searching for something else. It was a mind bending magazine that helped me to see new possibilities in the future, of which I was previously unaware. I did not always agree with the perspectives and conclusions, but the magazine definitely expanded my horizons with it's forward thinking presentations. Mondo 2000 was the precursor to Wired magazine and a prime example of thinking outside of the box. If you were a reader, let me know in the comment section what you remember about it.
Here is a link where you can read some of the back issues to take a peak at what the future looked like from the perspective of late 1980's through the 1990's. You can find other issues if you search around the internet a little bit:
