Mondo seemed to have that sense of humor down, and that flair for pranksterism and messing with people’s minds and media. when i met people there and played page five girl for Bart Nagel, and wrote for mondo, and got certain completely untrue/hilarious things mentioned in the magazine, all my amusement seemed well founded.

on the other hand, m2k DID inspire some earnest post-60s let’s-fuck-shit-upness, by combining reality with made up stuff and far out stuff. fabulous.

Wired (and yes, i eventually broke down and wrote for them a bunch of times) was a slap in the face, at first. they seemed to plunder the mondo aesthetic and the various cyberdelic weirdnesses going on at the time, and use them in the service of … ugh… business. oh well. Wired lasted. mondo didn’t. that’s how these things work.

back in the proverbial day, i recall we thought we would Change the World with this magical thing called the Internet. we would overhaul democracy (in addition to doing a lot of drugs and watching robots annihilate each other). it would all be great.

interesting thought that is, now.

other zines in the mondosphere: gareth branwyn’s excellent print zine Going Gaga. paco xander nathan & jon lebkowsky & me & wiley wiggins & everybody’s Fringe Ware Review. (erika whiteway & i guest edited an issue on “chicks in cyberspace” beginning in 1993. fifteen years later, even girls have email! o the shock!) Plazm started at that same time, too — now i’m an editor there. boing boing, too, of course. and many of these folks were influenced by the Whole Earth Review, Co Evolutionary Quarterly, and its evil digital spawn, The WELL. (where, dinosaurette that i am, i still hang out. lots.)

sorry i’m kind of sick & incoherent. i should shaddup. glad the mondo conversation is rolling, though.

HOW DAFT ARE YOU?
HOW TENSE?

http://www.hplusmagazine.com/

Joshua Ellis: [Jude Milhon] was the first female hacker, though, if you don’t count Ada Byron.

Jude Milhon started programming in 1967. Grace Hopper started working on the Harvard Mark I in 1943. Jean Sammet was teaching graduate courses in programming in 1956. Frances Allen joined IBM in 1957.

Either you’re terribly prone to hyperbole, or when you say “hacker”, you mean someone involved in hacker fandom, rather than someone involved in deep dorkery proper. (The sets are by no means non-overlapping, but the first makes me think more of Eric Raymond, and the second of Larry Wall or Donald Knuth.)

@Jeremiadist: You know, I was watching a Bill Hicks DVD yesterday morning and thinking the same thing…what happened? I think the answer is that we decided as a collective of culture that earnestness and revolution were, on some level, embarrassing. Better to set back and snipe from the cheap seats, which is so much of modern culture, rather than throwing your towel into the ring. Again, this is why everyone is so in love with metaculture: it’s all just trainspotting and talking about someone else’s better ideas.

I’m utterly bored of the sly cultural commentary that passes for discourse in most of the blogosphere. Quit talking about everybody else and make up your own culture.

@ Jeremiadist: I agree that 9/11 has ruined things for everyone. We’ve become a much more conservative nation since then. However I still think that we’re living in a great time today, as far as the concepts mentioned in your last sentence go. Don’t take teh intrawebz for granted!

@ Joshua: I like your comparison of Mondo/Wired as Dionysian/Appolonian. That hits the nail right on the head.

M2K, while sometimes entertaining, was just another way to sell things to self-important rich people who wanted to feel like they were on the cutting edge. Meh.