
Mondo 2000 Issue 2 (1990) - Famicoman
https://archive.org/details/Mondo.2000.Issue.02.1990
======
sireat
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 underground magazine is in reality a
balding father of three with a mortage and 4 starving mouths to feed.

~~~
nihonde
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 replaced M2K.

~~~
spc476
I'm reminded of "The Guy I Almost Was" [1].

[1]
[http://www.electricsheepcomix.com/almostguy/](http://www.electricsheepcomix.com/almostguy/)

~~~
api
Another way you can mark the descent of Internet culture into low-effort trash
is the rapid decline in the artistic quality of web comics. We went from this
to badly drawn sneering blobs, stick figures, and memes.

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justgottasay3
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.

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indescions_2017
Wow. Thanks for posting. Reading MONDO 2K after a 20 year hiatus is a real
kick in the eye.

My gut reaction is that "Artificial Reality" culture has not served us as well
as a more pragmatic vision of the future may have. There is no doubt deep
learning, crypto-anarachy, CRISPR, 3D printing in the extreme environment of
low earth orbit and many other current wonders were forecast in these pages.
But the prophetic illusion that war, poverty, disease, and crime would
evaporate away with accelerating growth seems tragic.

If a new imprint, say MONDO 3k, were to be started today, a little less
airtime devoted to pirate punk rock cable access shows and a bit more on how
to solve the problems of displaced workers via automation would be welcome.

Oh, and just on page two, already spotted an Easter Egg. The Reduce
Productivity with Fractools, an electric kaleidoscope of nature's geometry ad.
Distributed by a "Bourbaki, Inc." Named no doubt after the legendary secret
math collective in 1930s France!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki)

Craving even more 1990s alternative nostalgia? Remember Re/Search magazine?
Publisher of J. G. Ballard and much more. They have a podcast that mostly
consists of talking about the good old days ;)

[https://www.researchpubs.com/category/podcast/](https://www.researchpubs.com/category/podcast/)

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

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

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

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rdp
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.

~~~
philipkglass
The Extropians and Cypherpunks mailing lists had a fair bit of overlap in
temperament with Mondo 2000 and with each other. They're also easier to
search.

Extropians archive:
[https://github.com/macterra/extropians](https://github.com/macterra/extropians)

Cypherpunks archive: [https://github.com/Famicoman/cypherpunks-mailing-list-
archiv...](https://github.com/Famicoman/cypherpunks-mailing-list-archives)

It's fun, sometimes a bit depressing, to search those archives for years that
have now passed and see what people expected by now. ( _ag "by 201"_, _ag "by
200"_)

Serious underdelivery so far on:

\- Molecular manufacturing

\- Increasing single-thread performance of desktop computers, with ever-
growing clock speed

\- Robotics outside of industrial facilities

\- Therapeutic breakthroughs in medicine from genomics

\- Encrypted and networked communications revolutionizing politics/society

You might object that most of these developments, dimly foreseen in the 1990s,
are actually significant in this decade in some form. But you have to go back
to the originals to appreciate just how quantitatively aggressive the
predictions were. (10 GHz desktop CPUs by 2014. Followup in the same
discussion: No, the clock speed will be twice that, and arrive before 2010!)

~~~
Famicoman
Hey, my repo! Thanks for mentioning Extropians, haven't heard of that one.

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paulrpotts
I had all these, bought on the newsstand, and Wired back to issue 1. At some
point I just had to clean house, during a move, and they all went. Mondo 2000
was both inspiring and, even to me back at the time, a little bit laughable,
especially the fashion parts. But fun.

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oh_sigh
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.

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strictnein
Took me a minute to realize you could actually flip through the pages (just
click on the pages). Nice little feature.

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

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beat
Man, I loved that magazine, back in the day.

