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/