When WIRED launched in 1993, few people had seen anything like it. Unlike other computer magazines, it focused on people instead of machines. It was colorful---psychedelic even---at a time when computers were beige boxes made by and for the sort of people that Dilbert was about. But WIRED wasn't totally alone.
Before WIRED, there was Mondo 2000, a magazine that fused counterculture and technology together into a surreal glossy magazine that first appeared on newsstands in 1989. A typical issue would cover everything from DIY micro-satellites to smart drugs to weird bands like The Residents.
"Mondo 2000 is here to cover the leading edge in hyperculture," an introduction by editor Ken "R.U. Sirius" Goffman and publisher Allison "Queen Mu" Kennedy announced in the first issue. "We're talking Cyber-Chautauqua: bringing cyberculture to the people! Artificial awareness modules. Visual music. Vidscan Magazines. Brain-boosting technologies. William Gibson's Cyberspace Matrix---full realized!"
To some, it was pseudo-intellectual jibberish---or a mere appropriation of the cyberpunk ethic into a glossy magazine. But to the cult following the magazine developed, it all made perfect sense. At a time when few people outside academia had access to the internet, Mondo 2000 was many a wannabe hacker's introduction to the online world.
Apart from the eccentricity, what really set Mondo 2000 apart from other technology magazines was its irreverence. In 1996, editors Goffman and the late "St." Jude Milhon appeared on an episode of television show Internet Cafe, ostensibly to discuss writing online, but what followed ended up being pure Mondo (see video above).
Milhon explains cyberpunk with the assistance of a sneering human prop adorned in an over-the-top cyberpunk getup complete with a fake neural implant sticking out of his head. The Internet Cafe played the segment straight, and whether they were in on the joke---or just the butt of it---isn't quite clear.
Either way, these sorts of ironic media stunts were typical of the Mondo crew. 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.
Mondo 2000 started life in 1984 as High Frontiers, billed as "the Space Age Newspaper of Psychedelics, Science, Human Potential, Irreverene & Modern Art," edited by Goffman. High Frontiers was a bit like High Times in that magazine's earlier days, when it was more interested in Timothy Leary's psychedelic futurism than photographing weed in pornographic detail. That same year a former hippie named William Gibson published his novel Neuromancer and cyberpunk exploded into the collective consciousness. As the influence of cyberpunk spread, High Frontiers gravitated more and more towards technology and hacker culture.
Milhon joined the magazine in 1988 when it was rebranded as Reality Hackers and honed its focus on technology. It was finally rechristened Mondo 2000 with issue seven in 1989. Confusingly, the numbering started over with the next issue, numbered issue two.
Though the thematic elements of Mondo 2000 were firmly in place by the time it rebranded, Mondo 2000 was still, for its first few issues, a fairly conventionally designed black and white magazine, not unlike other early cyberculture zines like Boing Boing and Fringeware Review. Issue three was the first to feature interior color, but issue four, published in 1991, was the first issue to feature all of the design elements Mondo 2000 is remembered for: the computer generated graphics, Photoshop collages, insane experimental layouts and the trademark spine-art that WIRED would later, ahem, borrow.
And it was more than just a magazine. The so-called "Mondo House" in the Berkeley Hills where the team lived and worked was home to legendary, non-stop parties. It seems strange today that it was this offline presence that gave rise to a publication so thoroughly associated with being online, but the house was a hub of social activity that fed the magazine's coverage and built the mythos surrounding the publication.
For a few years, Mondo 2000 was at the leading edge of a new culture emerging around digital technology. Then 1993 happened. Time ran a cover story on cyberpunk, complete with a design by Mondo 2000 art director Bart Nagel. WIRED debuted. Commercial providers opened the internet to the unwashed public. And Billy Idol released his Cyberpunk album. Suddenly everyone wanted in on cyberculture.
That period spelled the beginning of the end for Mondo 2000. Goffman stepped down as editor-in-chief after issue 10 was published in 1993. SF Weekly ran what would have been the the magazine's first post-mortem in 1995, except that Mondo 2000 just wouldn't die. Somehow, it managed to keep publishing for three more years, with Goffman on board as a regular contributor and, eventually, guest editor.
For the past few years, Goffman has been working on an extensive Mondo 2000 history project, interviewing people who spent time at the Mondo House and documenting the publication's rise and fall. Maybe that fall happened because cyberculture went mainstream, or because of infighting at Mondo 2000, or because of competition from the more advertiser friendly WIRED, or because of some combination of different issues. Whatever the cause, it was clear Mondo 2000's moment had passed.
The bursting of the Mondo 2000 bubble came a couple years before the dotcom bubble burst. Which is appropriate since Mondo was always at least a couple years ahead of everyone else.
