Mondo 2000 Issue 2 (1990) • Hacker News Board

Re: Mondo 2000 Issue 2 (1990)

#11

Post by narrator » Tue, Jul 18, 2017, 6:52 PM UTC

sireat wrote: post #2

Fondly I remember devouring each issue of Mondo 2000 as if it held some grand promise of future about to happen. I even bought some "Smart Drugs" and techno t-shirts but it was all for nought. Even more than Wired, Mondo 2000 was this techno fetish fantasy that was never going to happen. In some respects I am reminded of a line of Victor' Pelevin's from "Generation P" where the writer for this high concept undergroun…

The promise of Smart Drugs eventually arrived. See reddit.com/r/nootropics for example. It took about 15 years to develop, mainly as a result of cheap chemical synthesis in China, advanced drug development in Russia, and a developing generics drug industry in India and elsewhere. If we had been living in a non-globalized world, it would not have happened.

Re: Mondo 2000 Issue 2 (1990)

#12

Post by sireat » Tue, Jul 18, 2017, 7:25 PM UTC

narrator wrote: post #11

sireat wrote: post #2

Fondly I remember devouring each issue of Mondo 2000 as if it held some grand promise of future about to happen. I even bought some "Smart Drugs" and techno t-shirts but it was all for nought. Even more than Wired, Mondo 2000 was this techno fetish fantasy that was never going to happen. In some respects I am reminded of a line of Victor' Pelevin's from "Generation P" where the writer for this high concept undergroun…

The promise of Smart Drugs eventually arrived. See reddit.com/r/nootropics for example. It took about 15 years to develop, mainly as a result of cheap chemical synthesis in China, advanced drug development in Russia, and a developing generics drug industry in India and elsewhere. If we had been living in a non-globalized world, it would not have happened.

Granted there has been some progress but not to the extent promised by M2K.

I haven't really followed nootropics but besides Modafinil (which is not really a smart drag) what smart drugs actually pass a meaningful double blind test?

Re: Mondo 2000 Issue 2 (1990)

#13

Post by justgottasay3 » Tue, Jul 18, 2017, 7:27 PM UTC

Old guy here... I always thought of M2k as a text heavy, Heavy Metal. And Heavy metal is still going.

As an aside... There is a show of 40 years of Heavy Metal art and such in Santa Monica, CA through Aug. 19, 2017 at the Copro Gallery.

Re: Mondo 2000 Issue 2 (1990)

#14

Post by brandonmenc » Tue, Jul 18, 2017, 7:45 PM UTC

A must-read for the uninitiated: "A history of Mondo 2000" [1]

[1] https://totseans.com/totse/en/ego/literary_genius/mondo2k.ht...

Re: Mondo 2000 Issue 2 (1990)

#15

Post by criddell » Tue, Jul 18, 2017, 8:09 PM UTC

Wow - the first thing that hit me was a strong feeling of nostalgia for PageMaker and Quark. I could almost smell a laser printer.

Re: Mondo 2000 Issue 2 (1990)

#16

Post by oh_sigh » Tue, Jul 18, 2017, 8:21 PM UTC

Amazing how little as changed. Back then, just like today, the magazine was talking about cold fusion, data clouds, 'artificial light' aka VR/AR, viral marketing, and teledildonics.

Re: Mondo 2000 Issue 2 (1990)

#17

Post by digi_owl » Tue, Jul 18, 2017, 8:56 PM UTC

Hmm, the article on page 21 about the "cyberpunk computer" seems to describe RPi and similar.

Re: Mondo 2000 Issue 2 (1990)

#18

Post by api » Tue, Jul 18, 2017, 9:02 PM UTC

beat wrote: post #6

nihonde wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, I long for the Mondo2000 vision of technology and culture. It seems very quaint and interesting next to the "campus dweeb" culture of Snap, FB, etc. I have immense nostalgia for the early days of computers, when they were sold in carpeted showrooms with brochure racks by guys who needed a haircut. Those guys were changing the world forever! That heady time continued until right around when Wired replace…

Wired came along, and the ads were suddenly for cars rather than smart drugs. There was no dreaming in Wired. It felt like a fashion statement, not a manifesto. Mondo 2000 was something else. A promise of a future we could have, if only we were brave enough and crazy enough to try.

With really big money came intellectual gentrification. Serious People(tm) don't talk or even think about things like psychedelics, consciousness expansion, fringe science, etc. Doing so can lead to excommunication from places like academia and the high corporate world unless you are spectacularly accomplished enough to be indispensable (Watson and Crick, etc.), tenured (though they'll still try), or have enough F-U money to not care (Robert Bigelow, Elon Musk, etc.).

Re: Mondo 2000 Issue 2 (1990)

#19

Post by api » Tue, Jul 18, 2017, 9:14 PM UTC

sireat wrote: post #2

Fondly I remember devouring each issue of Mondo 2000 as if it held some grand promise of future about to happen. I even bought some "Smart Drugs" and techno t-shirts but it was all for nought. Even more than Wired, Mondo 2000 was this techno fetish fantasy that was never going to happen. In some respects I am reminded of a line of Victor' Pelevin's from "Generation P" where the writer for this high concept undergroun…

One thing that leaps out at me any time I revisit 90s visionary culture is the optimism. I can't imagine that kind of optimism post-9/11. We still have not recovered as a culture from that day. If anything it's getting progressively worse with the barely veiled mainstreaming of things like neo-Naziism.

Re: Mondo 2000 Issue 2 (1990)

#20

Post by rdp » Tue, Jul 18, 2017, 9:17 PM UTC

Coincidentally, EXTROPY magazine and its associated brand of techno-libertarianism was more reflective of where we have actually ended up. I have an old issue from 1995 that focuses on digital money that more or less advocates what we know now as cryptocurrency, including an imaginary monetary unit called Hayeks. With that said, stuff like cryonics and immortality is still pretty marginal.