Mondo 2000

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Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Claude Shannon: information theory, conceptual framework, connected car, domain-specific language, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Extropian, full employment, game design, global village, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kubernetes, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snow Crash, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, The Hackers Conference, Timothy McVeigh, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, Zimmermann PGP

Psychedelic Buddha illustration in Reality Hackers, Courtesy Ken Goffman Photo of William Gibson in Mondo 2000. Courtesy Ken Goffman Illustration for Mondo 2000. Courtesy Ken Goffman Group photo at Cyberconf. Courtesy of Michael L Benedikt. Photo of Nicole Stenger in VPL gear. Public domain. Jaron Lanier. Photo: Kevin Kelly. VPL suits and gloves. Photo: Kevin Kelly. Full-body VPL suit. Photo: Kevin Kelly. VPL diagram. Photo: Kevin Kelly. Photo of VR machine at Whole Earth Institute’s Cyberthon, Mondo 2000. Courtesy Ken Goffman. Cyberspace illustration, Mondo 2000. Courtesy Ken Goffman. Cybersex illustration, Mondo 2000. Courtesy Ken Goffman. R.U. a Cyberpunk? Mondo 2000, 1993, Nr 10, p. 30.

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An early virtual-reality machine, similar to the devices on display at theWhole Earth Institute’s Cyberthon in October 1990. A Mondo 2000 illustration of “cyberspace,” the “new frontier” that could be “colonized.” The virtual open range inside the machine was a mythical dimension where physics, laws, and identities would have new meanings, with its walls held up by cryptography. One of the most persistent topics of human-machine interaction in cyberspace was sex. In the summer of 1990, colorful writer Howard Rheingold coined the memorable term “teledildonics” to describe futuristic forms of bodily interaction through machine interfaces. Mondo 2000’s guide to cyberpunk, laced with irony.

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When Garcia was back in the reality he was used to, Barlow wanted to know how it was. “Well,” Garcia said, “they outlawed LSD. It’ll be interesting to see what they do with this.”88 This tech-drug comparison at the time kept an entire subculture busy, complete with its own journals. “The closest analogue to Virtual Reality in my experience is psychedelic,” Barlow wrote in Mondo 2000 that summer. The hot new cyberpunk magazine, successor of High Frontiers and Reality Hackers, was still managed by the same crew from a villa in the lush Berkeley Hills. “Cyberspace is already crawling with delighted acid heads,” Barlow reported.89 In fact, the comparison was so common that it had its own term, the “cyberdelic.”

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

Jane was wearing some very handsome shoes, the kind you would never see on a tech chick. I assumed that they were complete cranks. They didn’t look like any of the Mondo 2000 cyberhippies I was hanging out with at the time. R. U. Sirius: Mondo 2000 was really the first technoculture magazine starting in 1989. Previous to that, computer magazines were sort of like car magazines. They were entirely designed and oriented toward the mechanics of it, if you will. Mondo 2000 took technology and treated it as an element of counterculture. Fred Davis: I had been working for Ziff-Davis as editor of A+, PC Magazine, PC Week, MacUser.

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Fred Davis: I had been working for Ziff-Davis as editor of A+, PC Magazine, PC Week, MacUser. Louis and Jane showed up at my house in Berkeley, literally broke, with nothing but this idea to do Wired as a high-end version of Mondo 2000. Mark Pauline: The Mondo 2000 people were like, “Well, we’ll see about that!” Dan Kottke: Before it was Mondo it was called High Frontiers, and then it changed to Reality Hackers. It was a mixture of technology and culture and literature and music and film with drugs and consciousness studies. R. U. Sirius: So it was this merger of the psychedelic influences, technological influences, and strange ideas that were going around in the area of science and pseudoscience and quantum physics and pop culture.

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Howard Rheingold: A lot of it was, “Okay, we’re going to have sex at a distance through computers somehow.” David Levitt: The term teledildonics quickly became common. Howard Rheingold: I got so much weird attention for that one word. There were, I’ll tell you, journalists from all over the world wanted to talk about teledildonics for a little while. It was part of this cyberculture vision, the Mondo 2000 vision. Jaron Lanier: There was a tremendous pressure from the cultural underground: “Oh, I am supercool. I publish the underground magazine from Amsterdam and I know Tim Leary.” It was, “I did this and that and I’m the coolest and you have to give me a demo.” There were a lot of people like that.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, book value, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Californian Ideology, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Dynabook, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, new economy, Norbert Wiener, peer-to-peer, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Yom Kippur War

But their mutated nucleotides have given us a whole new generation of sharpies, mutants and superbrights and in them we must put our faith—and power. The cybernet is the place . . . The old information elites are crumbling. The kids are at the controls.62 At one level, the notion that digital culture was growing directly out of the counterculture and the LSD scene reflected the editorial ancestry of Mondo 2000. Before coming to Mondo 2000, Goffman had edited a Bay area drug ’zine, High Frontiers, which he had subtitled “Psychedelics, Science, Human Potential, Irreverence & Modern Art.” High Frontiers featured lengthy interviews with LSD adventurers like Albert Hofmann, Timothy Leary, and Terence McKenna. In 1988 Goffman retitled the now-biennial magazine Reality Hackers, to mark its new emphasis on technology.

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In 1988 Goffman retitled the now-biennial magazine Reality Hackers, to mark its new emphasis on technology. It soon began running articles on computer viruses, psychoactive designer foods, and high-tech paganism.63 Later that year, Reality Hackers took up the cause of cyberpunk fiction and became Mondo 2000. Its first issue featured contributions by cyberpunk heroes William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and John Shirley, as well as pieces on hackers and crackers and Internet viruses. As Timothy Leary put it, Mondo 2000 soon became “a beautiful merger of the psychedelic, the cybernetic, the cultural, the literary and the artistic.”64 At another level, though, the link between digital technology and hallucinogens reflected a shared dream of disembodiment.

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Autodesk, for instance, hired famed acid guru Timothy Leary to appear in its promotional video for its cyberspace initiative. Various journalists and science fiction writers also collaborated to link virtual reality to LSD. Ultimately, this group included Kevin Kelly and Stewart Brand, but its earliest and most active members were the writers and editors of the magazine Mondo 2000, including John Perry Barlow.61 In the fall of 1988, Alison [ 164 ] Chapter 5 Kennedy (aka Queen Mu) and Ken Goffman (aka R. U. Sirius), publisher and editor-in-chief, respectively, used their first-ever issue to announce that digital technologies had inherited the transformational mantel of the counterculture: All the old war horses are dead.

The Dark Net by Jamie Bartlett

3D printing, 4chan, bitcoin, blockchain, brain emulation, carbon footprint, Cody Wilson, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, degrowth, deindustrialization, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, eternal september, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, global village, Google Chrome, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Lewis Mumford, life extension, litecoin, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mondo 2000, moral hazard, moral panic, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, pre–internet, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, slashdot, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

Users saw it as ‘a new kind of place’, with its own culture, its own identity, and its own rules. The arrival of millions of ‘ordinary’ people online stimulated fears and hopes about what this new form of communication might do to us. Many techno-optimists, such as the cheerleaders for the networked revolution Wired and Mondo 2000 magazines, believed cyberspace would herald a new dawn of learning and understanding, even the end of the national state. The best statement of this view was the American essayist and prominent cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow’s 1996 ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, which announced to the real world that ‘your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us . . . our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion.’

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What was needed, May argued, was new software that could help ordinary people evade government surveillance. The group was set up to find out how. Soon the group began to meet every month in the office of Cygnus Solutions, a business that Gilmore had recently set up. At one of the first meetings in 1992, one member – Jude Milhon, who wrote articles for Mondo 2000 under the alias St Jude – described the growing movement as ‘the cypherpunks’, a play on the cyberpunk genre of fiction made popular by sci-fi writers such as William Gibson. The name stuck. ‘It was a bit of a marketing ploy, to be honest,’ May told me over the phone from his home in California.

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For all the social panic about the ubiquity of hard-core porn on the net, there is something quite comforting about this. The net has always been accompanied by utopian dreams of sex without limits, of fantasies without boundaries. In his famous 1990 article about the future of sex in the magazine Mondo 2000, Howard Rheingold argued that ‘the definition of Eros’ would ‘soon be up for grabs’, because everyone will be as beautiful as they want and will be able to have virtual sex with anyone, anywhere. But most people don’t want fantastical sex with robots or supermodels. They want ordinary sex with real people.

Orwell Versus the Terrorists: A Digital Short by Jamie Bartlett

augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Edward Snowden, eternal september, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Free Software Foundation, John Perry Barlow, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Laura Poitras, Mondo 2000, Satoshi Nakamoto, technoutopianism, Zimmermann PGP

The early nineties were ablaze with utopian ideas about humanity’s imminent leap forward, spurred by connectivity and access to information. Harley Hahn, an influential technology expert, predicted in 1993 that we were about to evolve ‘a wonderful human culture that is really our birth-right’. Meanwhile the technology magazine Mondo 2000 promised to give readers ‘the latest in human/technological interactive mutational forms as they happen … The old information élites are crumbling. The kids are at the controls. This magazine is about what to do until the millennium comes. We’re talking about Total Possibilities.’ Many of the net’s early advocates believed that, by enabling people to communicate more freely with each other, it would help to end misunderstanding and hatred.

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Users saw it as ‘a new kind of place’, with its own culture, its own identity, and its own rules. The arrival of millions of ‘ordinary’ people online stimulated fears and hopes about what this new form of communication might do to us. Many techno-optimists, such as the cheerleaders for the networked revolution Wired and Mondo 2000 magazines, believed cyberspace would herald a new dawn of learning and understanding, even the end of the national state. The best statement of this view was the American essayist and prominent cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow’s 1996 ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, which announced to the real world that ‘your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us . . . our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion.’

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans

4chan, Ada Lovelace, air gap, Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, crowdsourcing, D. B. Cooper, dark matter, dematerialisation, Doomsday Book, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, East Village, Edward Charles Pickering, game design, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Network effects, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, PalmPilot, pets.com, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, rolodex, San Francisco homelessness, semantic web, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Soul of a New Machine, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K

The cultural work of making Community Memory approachable to the people fell largely to Jude Milhon, a notorious female hacker and writer who would later come to be known as St. Jude, patroness of the “cypherpunks,” a computer subculture devoted to matters of encryption and copyright. In the 1980s and 1990s, she’d coedit the influential technology magazine Mondo 2000. Jude was Ephrem’s girlfriend, and she’d met Lee after placing a sex ad in the Berkeley Barb (this was the ’70s, after all). The trio got along famously. Jude seeded the Community Memory database with provocations designed to lure users to the screen. She’d post proto-crowdsourcing questions, like: WHERE CAN I GET A DECENT BAGEL IN THE BAY AREA (BERKELEY PARTICULARLY) / IF YOU KNOW, LEAVE THE INFORMATION HERE IN THE COMPUTER.

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For her master’s thesis, she combined the do-it-yourself ethos of punk with the emerging possibilities of desktop publishing, producing an electronic magazine, Cyber Rag, on floppy disk. With color-printed labels Krazy Glued onto each disk, Cyber Rag looked the part of a punk rock fanzine. Loaded onto a consumer Mac, Jaime’s stories came to life with images pilfered from the Village Voice, the Whole Earth Review, Mondo 2000, and Newsweek collaged together on-screen as though they’d been xeroxed by hand. Cyber Rag was programmed in Apple HyperCard, with graphics drawn in MacPaint. Along with her animations, she added edgy interactive games (in one, you chase Manuel Noriega around Panama), hacker how-tos, and catty musings about hippies, sneaking into computer trade shows, and cyberspace.

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But Jaime’s disks, packaged on floppy, were accessible to anyone with a Mac, and with their hypertext links and interactive animations, they were exactly like Web sites—long before the Web existed. Although she had a day job as a typesetter, she distributed Electronic Hollywood to indie book and record stores, where they routinely sold out. The novelty got her national media attention, which she leveraged into mail-order sales. After her magazines were featured in an issue of Mondo 2000, the cyberculture’s magazine of record, she was flooded with orders and fan mail. Although she made only five issues, she sold more than six thousand copies at six bucks a pop—not bad for disks that cost less than fifty cents to produce. When Jaime finally moved back to New York, she became Silicon Alley’s first real celebrity, a poster girl for a new generation of twentysomething media titans ready to reboot the world.

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier

4chan, air gap, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, cosmological constant, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, game design, general-purpose programming language, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, hype cycle, impulse control, information asymmetry, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lifelogging, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, peak TV, Plato's cave, profit motive, Project Xanadu, quantum cryptography, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

In a sprawling, haunted-beautiful nineteenth-century wooden mansion above a gurgling spring in the Berkeley hills there lived a circle of roommates who published esoteric psychedelic magazines. They adapted to the VR party aesthetic by concocting a tech magazine with a psychedelic style, called Mondo 2000. (The numeral 2000 conveyed the impossibly distant, undoubtedly transcendent and terrifying future.) Mondo was the prototype for much of what has become the familiar, intoxicated-by-neoteny style of the Valley ever since. Brightly colored psychedelic goofiness. Nonsense rhyme names for whatever is new in the world.

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My head might float by. Flattering Mirror Fiction about VR has mostly been quite dark ever since cyberpunk. The Matrix movies; Inception. Meanwhile, norms for tech journalism became hell-bent on positivity. VR engaged a new generation of journalists, like Steven Levy, Howard Rheingold, Luc Sante, and Mondo 2000’s Ken Goffman, aka R. U. Sirius. I’ll highlight two figures who were particularly influential as well as dear to me: Kevin Kelly and John Perry Barlow. Kevin is a fine example of a trusted friend with whom I disagree completely. When I met him, he was editing and writing in publications connected to Stewart Brand’s world, post–Whole Earth Catalog; he later became the first editor in chief of Wired.

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See also surgical simulation mega-octopus Mekas brothers memory memory palaces Menke, Joseph Menlo Park Metropolis magazine Mexican-Americans Mexico Michael (gorilla) MicroCosm project micro- or nanopayments Microsoft Microsoft Research Faculty Summit Midas, King military contracts mind control Minecraft Minority Report (film) Minsky, Margaret Minsky, Marvin MIT Media Lab Mitchelson, Marvin mixed reality term coined mobile phones, cheap Möbius-Orwellian tech talk modeless computation modes molecules Molici, Dave Mondo 2000 magazine monitors Monk, Thelonius Montessori school Monty Python Moog, Bob Moog synthesizer Moondust (computer game) Moore’s Law Moravec, Hans Morley, Ruth Morrow, Charlie Mortgage-backed securities motion capture suits motion parallax motion sensing motor cortex mouse, computer MSNBC Mu, Queen multiperson experiences multiperson organizationas multitouch designs multiview display Muppets music royalties and musical instruments musicians music technology music videos Musk, Elon mystery mysticism MythBusters Mythical Man-Month, The (Brooks) Naimark, Michael Naked Lunch (Burroughs?)

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World by Joseph Menn

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Rubin, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, commoditize, corporate governance, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, Google Chrome, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Naomi Klein, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, pirate software, pre–internet, Ralph Nader, ransomware, Richard Stallman, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, tech worker, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

He smoked a prodigious amount of marijuana and kept hammering away through trial and error. By 1998, Josh was getting a fair amount of encouragement in person. Misha had moved to San Francisco in 1992 and had bragged about it to Luke and the others back east at every opportunity. One of Misha’s first contacts was the editor of a magazine called Mondo 2000, who reprinted his Information America piece and introduced him to her boyfriend, Eric Hughes, who was about to start the Cypherpunks mailing list, hosted by John Gilmore. Misha spread the word among hackers. The dot-com boom that began with Netscape’s initial public offering in 1995 lured more waves of cDc members and friends to California.

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See also Hong Kong Blondes Medium (website), 99 Mentor, the, 44 Mercer, Rebekah, 196 Mercer, Robert, 196 Merry Pranksters, 22–23 Messiah Village, 48–49 Metasploit, 177 #MeToo, 158 Microsoft, 37, 63, 108, 196, 212 BackOffice software, 66, 69 Back Orifice, response to, 67–69, 77, 82–83, 96–97 hackers working for, 38, 50, 111–112, 122–124, 193 security vulnerabilities, 45, 56, 72–73, 82–83, 85, 111–112 See also Back Orifice; Windows military, 74, 78, 117–118, 136, 185, 209 See also United States government Miller, Charlie, 178–179 Miloševic, Slobodan, 102–103 MindSpring, 68 MindVox, 30–32, 63, 145 MIT, 37–38, 40, 45–46, 50, 53, 72–73 Mitnick, Kevin, 35, 44 Mixter. See Akman, Kemal modems, 59, 93, 130, 177, 204 early internet use of, 9–10, 15–16, 26, 38, 42, 48 Mondo 2000 (magazine), 65 Monsegur, Hector (Sabu), 148–150 Moore, H. D., 177 moral issues, 79–80, 102–104, 118, 132, 165–166, 201 moral crisis of technology, 78, 85, 125, 197, 212 moral reasoning, 43, 117, 124, 155, 161, 181, 211 opposition to immoral conduct, 193 See also ethics Morris, Chris, 147 Moss, Jeff (Dark Tangent), 33–34, 61 Motor 308, 17–18 Moussouris, Katie, 122 Mudge.

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition by Steven Levy

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, air freight, Apple II, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, corporate governance, Donald Knuth, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, Free Software Foundation, game design, Gary Kildall, Hacker Ethic, hacker house, Haight Ashbury, John Conway, John Markoff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mondo 2000, Multics, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, Paul Graham, popular electronics, RAND corporation, reversible computing, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, software patent, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, The Hackers Conference, value engineering, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

When the flagship publication of the movement, Mondo 2000 (a name change from Reality Hackers) began to elucidate cyberpunk principles, it turned out that the majority of them originated in the Hacker Ethic. The implicit beliefs of MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club (Information Should Be Free, Access to Computers Should Be Unlimited and Total, Mistrust Authority . . .) have been shuffled to the top of the stack. By the time cyberpunk hit the zeitgeist, the media was ready to embrace a broader, more positive view of hacking. There were entire publications whose point of view ran parallel to hacker principles: Mondo 2000, and Wired, and loads of fanzines with names like Intertek and Boing Boing.

Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Rubin, benefit corporation, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Chris Wanstrath, citation needed, cloud computing, context collapse, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, decentralized internet, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, eternal september, fake news, feminist movement, Firefox, gentrification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, green new deal, helicopter parent, holacracy, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julie Ann Horvath, Kim Stanley Robinson, l'esprit de l'escalier, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Mondo 2000, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, pre–internet, profit motive, Project Xanadu, QAnon, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing complete, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, web application, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, you are the product

It was the design persuasion of self-taught hobbyists, those who made their own zines or built their own web pages, and had an intuitive notion of how to work around the limitations of Kinko’s copiers or create an eye-catching layout with basic HTML skills. Videos on MTV and indie magazines like Mondo 2000 sometimes channeled this style, but it was always cyberspace-aware and cyberspace-native; the signature of the first years of pages on the World Wide Web. Archives reveal only so much. The camgirl documentation that exists is incomplete and perplexing to a visitor from its future. “I turned my cam off for good in 2003, and when Flickr launched in 2004, my archives were the first images I thought to post,” wrote Melissa Gira Grant in an essay reflecting on her time in the lifecasting community.

Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life by Colin Ellard

Apollo 11, augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, classic study, cognitive load, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, Dunbar number, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Lewis Mumford, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, megastructure, mirror neurons, Mondo 2000, more computing power than Apollo, Oculus Rift, overview effect, Peter Eisenman, RFID, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, sentiment analysis, Skinner box, smart cities, starchitect, TED Talk, the built environment, theory of mind, time dilation, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen

no-ist 10Much illuminating information about the video game industry can be found at the website of the Entertainment Software Rating Board. Available at: http://www.esrb.org/about/video-game-industry-statistics.jsp 11An early and entertaining account of teledildonics titled “Teledildonics: Reach Out and Touch Someone” was written by Howard Rheingold in the journal Mondo 2000 (Summer, 1990). The article, complete with an opening cheeky limerick, is available in the book Arthur Berger (Ed.), The Postmodern Presence: Readings on Postmodernism in American Culture and Society (Rowman Altamira, New York, 1998). 12Project Syria and the virtual Aleppo experience is described at the Immersive Journalism website at: http://www.immersivejournalism.com/ 13The article by Rosenberg, Baughman and Bailenson describing the virtual superhero effect, titled “Virtual Superheroes: Using Superpowers in Virtual Reality to Encourage Prosocial Behavior,” was published in the journal PLOS One (2013, Volume 8, pages 1–9). 14George Stratton’s description of the inverting goggles experiments can be found in an ancient paper titled “Some Preliminary Experiments on Vision Without Inversion of the Retinal Image,” in the journal Psychological Review, (1896, Volume 3, pages 611–617).

Virtual Light by William Gibson

Alvin Toffler, Day of the Dead, edge city, Jaron Lanier, late capitalism, Mondo 2000, telepresence

(From another work commissioned for this exhibition, Richard Rodriguez's powerful 'sodom: Reflections on a Stereotype," I appropriated Yamazaki's borrowed Victorian and the sense of its melancholy.) The term Virtual Light was coined by scientist Stephen Beck to describe a form of instrumentation that produces "optical sensations directly in the eye without the use of photons" (Mondo 2000). Rydell's Los Angeles owes much to my reading of Mike Davis's City of Quartz, perhaps most particularly in his observations regarding the privatization of public space. I am indebted to Markus, aka Fur, one of the editors of Mercury Rising, published by and for the San Francisco Bike Messenger Association, who kindly provided a complete file of hack issues and then didn't hear from me for a year or SO (sorry).

This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers by Andy Greenberg

air gap, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Burning Man, Chelsea Manning, computerized markets, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disinformation, domain-specific language, driverless car, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, hive mind, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mondo 2000, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, operational security, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, profit motive, Ralph Nader, real-name policy, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, SQL injection, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Teledyne, three-masted sailing ship, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Zimmermann PGP

But it was Jude Milhon, Hughes’s girlfriend several decades his senior, who provided the group’s name. At the time, science fiction authors like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson had adopted the “cyberpunk” genre, stories of bohemian hackers fighting steely megacorporations in virtual worlds. But Milhon, a writer for the early technoculture magazine Mondo 2000, told Hughes that the group he and May were creating wasn’t composed of mere cyberpunks, but a new species of hacker: “cypherpunks.” So Gilmore’s e-mail forum was christened the Cypherpunk Mailing List. As it blossomed to nearly a thousand subscribers over the mid-1990s, its physical meetings would expand too.

Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age by Steven Levy

Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, disinformation, Donald Knuth, Eratosthenes, Extropian, Fairchild Semiconductor, information security, invention of the telegraph, Jim Simons, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knapsack problem, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mondo 2000, Network effects, new economy, NP-complete, quantum cryptography, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web of trust, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

Only dedicated individuals, willing to suffer the consequences of government sanction, could assure that the tools got circulated into the Internet’s bloodstream. After that, John Gilmore said, “It would take a pretty strong police state to suppress this technology.” One unexpected highlight was an observation made by Hughes’s companion, a leather-clad writer who penned articles for the digital hippie magazine Mondo 2000 under the name St. Jude. Listening to the visions of overturning society with modular arithmetic, she made the connection with the recent rise of so-called cyberpunks—hackers turned hipsters by linking the in-your-face iconoclasm of punk-rock rebels with the digital revolution. “Hey,” she called out, “you guys are cypherpunks!”