This rebel futurist publication is very hot in cyberculture circles these days. People love it, hate it, and/or are totally confused by it. Nobody seems to get enough of it (even friends who claim they don't like it, can't wait for the next issue to arrive).
Mondo covers the entire field of "experience augmentation" (sex, drugs and cyberspace) with the flash and irreverence of a rock and roll mag. Each issues creates a "temporary autonomous zone" where people, events, and new technologies pop-up in the strangest situations and combinations. In truly mondoid fashion, the magazine is not locked into any single facet of the "new edge." It covers everything from post-modern critical theory to dangerous fashions and the club scene to tech-talk. Production-wise it careens out of control with bright wild colors, desktop virtuosity, and high-quality printing. Gets slicker and more MONDO with each issue. Definitely the hippest thing in hardcopy (at least for the next fifteen minutes).
Version 1.5 Update:
An anthology of all the back issues of M2 and the old "Reality Hackers" is
available from Harper and Collins. It's called Mondo 2000: A User's Guide to the
New Edge and was edited by Rudy Rucker, RU Sirius, and Queen Mu. It sells for
$20.00. Cool design, lots of new artwork, informative marginalia. Recommended
(especially if you don't have the Reality Hackers/Mondo back issues).
(G. Branwyn)
Links:
Glossary:
Graphic: Photo of Avital Ronell by Bart Nagel
Here is the TEXT POPUP for Mondo 2000...
If you locate the literature of electronic culture in the works of Philip K. Dick or William Gibson -- in the imaginings of cyberpunk projections, or the preserve of Virtual Reality -- then you could say that electronic culture shares a crucial project with drug culture.
- Avital Ronell
Public Enemy came with the bomb and went all the way out. What if a mothafucka like Prince started dropping bombs?
- Digital Underground
Everything I do is riddled with paying close attention to chance.
- Brian Eno
So here we are -- decadent soft-core commercial anarchists operating out of multinational Japan's favorite Banana Republic, this mercenary entertainment state, all glittering on the edges and profoundly stupid in the middle. How can we RESIST the New World Order, irresistible as it is?There's always been the idealistic hope, ever since the League of Nations, that in a time of increased interpenetration and communication, nations great and small could come together to blah, blah, blah, ad nauseam. Forget it! The New World Order is the thousand year Reich of the international well-behaved center, with a small sexually pent-up macho American adolescent core of police protectors and overseas mercenaries.
- R.U. Sirius, Editor-in-Chief
