by Mark Dery
In 1984, Sirius’s heady blend of gadget pornography, guerrilla humor, human potential pep talk, New Age transcendentalism, and libertarian anarcho-capitalism took shape in the typewritten, newsprint version of what would later become Mondo 2000. Subtitled A Space Age Newspaper of Psychedelics, Science, Human Potential, Irreverence and Modern Art, it was christened High Frontiers, a name borrowed from the book that inspired the L-5 Society. The society was founded in 1975 in response to the Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill’s call, in his book The High Frontier, for the establishment of an orbital colony equidistant between the Earth and the Moon at a gravitationally stable point known as Lagrange Point 5. According to the SF writer Norman Spinrad, the L-5 colony held forth the promise of “an escape from the ecological pollution, resource depletion, poverty, collectivism, and unseemly, unplanned natural chaos of . . . Earth.”48 High Frontiers crossed the L-5 colony with Fun City in a theme park Utopia characterized, in Sirius’s words, by “abundance and leisure, self-fulfillment, play, adventure, limitless space, limitless time, [and] limitless pleasure.”49 Sirius’s vision recalls a symbolic coup staged by several hundred yippies in 1970 when antiwar demonstrators infiltrated Disneyland, planting a Viet-cong flag on Frontierland’s Mount Wilderness before Orange County riot cops threw them out. Now, the techno-yippies had taken Tomorrowland!
High Frontiers begat Reality Hackers, which begat Mondo 2000, an increasingly slick, sumptuously illustrated glossy now in its thirteenth issue. Over the years, Mondo’s design–a product of the desktop publishing revolution made possible by Macintosh computers, digital scanners, and software such as QuarkXPress and Adobe Photoshop–has accelerated into a postliter–ate blur: jumbled fonts that buzz against fluorescent backgrounds, digitally enhanced photos that flow under, over, and around article copy. Mondo’s art direction, like that of its competitors Wired and Axcess, accepts on faith the cybercultural truism that information overload is the operating mode of computer mavens accustomed to surfing the Internet or bouncing around in hypertext programs. The prototypical Mondo reader is one of the “Third Wave people” imagined by Alvin Toffler in The Third Wave,
at ease in the midst of this bombardment of blips-the ninety–second newsclip intercut with a thirty–second commercial, a fragment of song and lyric, a headline, a cartoon, a collage, a newspaper item, a computer printout. Insatiable readers of disposable paperbacks and special–interest magazines, they gulp huge amounts of information in short takes.50
Gutenbergian throwbacks who attempt to read Mondo from cover to cover will suffer from stop-the-mag-I-want-to-get-off vertigo; it is intended to be skimmed, grazed, subliminally absorbed while doing something else, à la MTV, the paradigmatic “blip culture” form. Ironies abound here: Mondo is a print medium counterfeiting a virtual one, a cutting-edge nineties “mutazine” whose cyberdelic layout occasionally recalls the pop/op graphic design of the sixties. The Mondoid prose style is likewise an MTV cutup of the slangy, run-on, first-person voice associated with the New Journalism of the sixties.
Sirius describes the magazine’s evolution as a “field shift,” with the “psychedelic psychoactivity” foregrounded in High Frontiers gradually giving way to Mondo’s coverage of cyberculture. Its cover line notwithstanding (“’60s INTO ’90s: ANTI-NOSTALGIA”), the fourth issue of High Frontiers (1987) is a quintessentially Californian mishmash of patchouli-scented nostalgia, New Age kook science, and reefer madness. It features interviews with the LSD manufacturer Captain Clearlight and Allan Cohen, the founding editor of The Oracle, a psychedelic newspaper that flourished in the sixties, a news brief on the theoretical use of ultrasound to stimulate “uncharted neural tissue . . . very much like the ‘Krell Mind Booster’ in Forbidden Planet”; and a how-to article on “sexing” crystals that begins with the matter-of-fact query, “Is your quartz crystal male or female?” Though no less blinded by technology’s bright promise, Mondo 2000’s twelfth issue (1994) is light-years from the faded, Day-Glo Zeitgeist of High Frontiers, with a guided tour of the Internet, a roundup of virtual reality games, and an article on “nanocyborgs” that augurs the arrival, within five years, of the “ultimate transhuman, who can choose the design, form, and substance of his/her own body.”51
Even so, Mondo cannot entirely escape its countercultural heritage. The left hemisphere of Mondo’s political brain may be libertarian, but the right half’s politics are the politics of the pleasure principle, founded on a sixties faith in the power of Eros and childlike play to unfetter the civilized ego and return us to the Garden of Earthly Delights. Sirius ends his on-line rebuttal of Sobchack’s critique with the declaration, “Revolution through guilt or revolution through desire? I’ll stand by my own opposition to these ever-present, dominant, ‘Catholic’ notions of goodness.”52
Mondo’s universal cure-all for society’s ills is a potent brew of hedonism, humor, and play. In a minimanifesto published in High Frontiers (1987), Sirius laments humanity’s fall into “individual ego-consciousness,” out of the “orgiastic, Dionysian, non-differentiating form of intelligence” that supposedly prevailed before the rise of civilization.53 He counsels the creation of a “humanistic, intuitive” technoculture that will return us to our former state–a cyberdelic gloss on the popular sixties thinker Norman O. Brown’s argument, in Life against Death, that repressive modern society can only be healed through a return to something resembling the undifferentiated infantile sexuality Freud called “polymorphous perversity.”
Mondo essayists have embroidered this thread. In issue number five, the cyberdelic philosopher Hakim Bey theorizes “temporary autonomous zones”–impermanent Utopias-in which the collective libido of “repressed moralistic societies” might obtain brief release. The temporary autonomous zone, or TAZ, “does not engage directly with the State”; rather, it is a “guerrilla operation which liberates an area-of land, of time, of imagination-and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it.”54 One example of a TAZ, writes Bey, is a party “where for one brief night a republic of gratified desires was attained. Shall we not confess that the politics of that night have more reality and force for us than those of, say, the entire U.S. government?”55
In the same issue, the pseudonymous Mondo regulars Gracie and Zarkov admonish “Mondo’s technoerotic voluptuaries” to
[c]reate and communicate examples of intense eroticism to others! . . . High technology enables us to explore sensuality far out on the New Edge. . . . Why settle for passé kinkiness when you can actualize techno-aphrodisia from the infosphere?56
The obvious problem with a psychopolitics whose challenges to the status quo are a return to Dionysian excess and abandon is that consumer culture eats such challenges for breakfast. The sexually repressed puritan-ism that is the bane of Mondoids runs deep in the national psyche, to be sure, but it is subverted by a consumer culture that offers instant, oral gratification and a return to adolescent, even infantile, fun–“social irresponsibility” with a vengeance. As William O’Neill points out in Coming Apart: An Informal History of America in the 1960s,
Where consumption was concerned, [capitalism] urged people to gratify their slightest wish. . . . It was, after all, part of Aldous Huxley’s genius that he saw how sensual gratification could enslave men more effectively than Hitler ever could. . . . Sex was no threat to the Establishment. . . . [T]he shrewder guardians of established relationships saw hedonism for what it partially was, a valuable means of social control.57
What’s more, taking refuge in “republics of gratified desire” diverts attention from governmental and corporate challenges to personal liberty right now, all around us. “To ‘turn on and drop out’ did not weaken the state,” notes O’Neill. “Quite the contrary, it drained off potentially subversive energies.”58
Finally, it takes only a modicum of class consciousness to see Mondo’s visions of Dionysian liberation and its Revenge of the Nerds fantasy of a high-tech cultural elite of chemically pumped-up me
gabrains for what they are: the daydreams of the relatively privileged. According to the East Bay Monthly, Queen Mu (née Alison Kennedy), a self-styled “New Age Pollyanna” who believes that “fun . . . is going to be the saving grace of our universe,” grew up in a sixteen-bedroom mansion in upscale Palo Alto and attended boarding school in Switzerland; the “comfortable legacy” she inherited from her “prominent, eccentric family” provided the seed money for Mondo, which is headquartered in her sprawling Berkeley Hills home.59
Similarly, many of Mondo’s readers are sufficiently insulated from the grimmer social realities inside their high-tech comfort zones to contemplate the power of positive hedonism without irony. In a 1990 interview, Sirius asserts that a “large portion” of Mondo’s audience consists of “successful business people in the computer industry.”60 A 1991 advertising brochure claims that the magazine’s readers, 80 percent of whom “work in information or communications fields” and whose median income is sixty-five thousand dollars, “have the money to indulge their taste for high-end quality techno-gear.”61
To its credit, Mondo (in its current and previous High Frontiers incarnations) has served a useful purpose as a wake-up call to liberals and leftists to cut loose the politically correct neopuritanism that is a millstone around their collective neck. True radicalism, as Ellen Willis points out in her essay “Let’s Get Radical: Why Should the Right Have All the Fun?” must affirm “the right to freedom and pleasure.”62 As Sirius and his fellow Mondoids make abundantly clear, the Left and the Right make common cause in their cultural conservatism, specifically in their puritanical fear of unchained desire. In a cogent, thought-provoking High Frontiers essay on the failings of Left/liberal politics in the Reagan eighties, Sirius berates “morally priggish, self-righteous” Left/liberal elements for their puritanical mistrust of money and sensual pleasure and their antitechnological bias, which renders them increasingly powerless in an accelerating technoculture.63 He argues,
The left (and the liberals . . .) handed America over to the far right by embracing a philosophy of entropy, the “era of limitations,” Muddling Towards Frugality, Small Is Beautiful. . . . The nation desperately needs a politics to capture and reflect the imaginations of the post-Hiroshima generations.64
Again, cyberdelia replays the political dynamics of sixties counterculture. The issues raised by Sirius came to a head twenty years earlier in what Gitlin calls the “comic collision” that shattered the SDS’s “Back to the Drawing Boards” conference in 1967. It was a confrontation between the “sobersided” SDS old guard, most of whom were “leery even of marijuana,” and three Diggers who crashed the proceedings in a storm of exhortation, castigation, and howl-at-the-moon lunacy. “You haven’t got the balls to go mad,” jeered Digger ringleader Emmett Grogan.65
Unfortunately, Mondo’s idea of a political alternative is an end-of-the-century cyborgasm for “technoerotic voluptuaries”—a fantasy of escape from the constraints of time, space, and the human body rather than a reasoned, realistic response to the politics of culture and technology in peoples’ everyday lives. “Mondo 2000 doesn’t have an ideology,” Sirius confirms.
The only thing we’re pushing is freedom in this new territory. The only way to freedom is not to have an agenda. Protest is not a creative act, really. . . . We’re coming from a place of relative social irresponsibility, actually. But we’re also offering vision and expansion to those who want it.66
“Vision and expansion,” here, are shorthand for unbounded personal potential of the sort offered by corporate motivational gurus and self-help evangelists, and for the posthuman evolutionary potential envisioned on the far fringes of artificial intelligence research. True to Sirius’s words, social responsibility is left behind on the launchpad as Mondo’s posthuman-ists rocket toward techno-mystical transcendence.
Significantly, Mondo readers continue to demand political accountability from the magazine. In a letter to the editor published in issue seven, Jaye C. Beldo demands, “Why don’t you start addressing the crucial political/economic and social issues at hand instead of indulging in this infantile escapism?” On the WELL, Laura Fraser writes,
Mondo 2000 is the same old romance with technology, the gee-whiz boosterism that’s been a theme in our culture since the ’50s, without any social consciousness. . . . Just new toys. Toys rich people can buy. Toys that solve no problems, just let us escape. Vision in the limited sense of “what’s new.” But not what can get us out of this mess we’ve made.67
Grokking the “Submolecular Shamanic Visionquest”: Cyberia
The Mondo fantasy of escape velocity has taken root among the ravers, technopagans, hippie hackers, and other cyberdelic subcultures explored by Douglas Rushkoff in Cyberia. Actually, Rushkoff doesn’t explore, he “groks”–a sixties verb meaning to instantly, intuitively apprehend. It is a method of uncritical inquiry appropriate to the Northern Californian corner of fringe computer culture he traverses, which is nothing if not defiantly antirational. In it, an utterly uncritical embrace of the proto-New Age aspects of sixties counterculture has been freed from the shackles of back-to-nature romanticism and hitched to the liberatory promise of technology (mind machines, smart drugs, BBSs, virtual reality).
Much of Cyberia is given over to speculations about the eschatological zero hour, which is scheduled for sometime around the millennium. In the course of these musings, Rushkoff’s cyberians give voice to nearly all of cyberdelic culture’s received truths, foremost among them the techno-pagan axiom that rationalism and intuition, materialism and mysticism, science and magic are converging. For example, the “urban Neo-Pagan” Green Fire believes that “[m]agic from the ancient past and technology from the future” are synonymous. Rushkoff contends that Western reason, with its emphasis on linear, rational thought, is unable to make sense of the “overall fractal equation for the postmodern experience,” where the “rules of linear reality no longer apply.” In fractals, he finds confirmation of the cherished article of hippie faith that P. J. O’Rourke memorably described in his essay “Second Thoughts on the 1960s” as the notion that there is “a throbbing web of psychic mucus and we [are] all part of it somehow.” Now, writes Rushkoff,
inconsistencies ranging from random interference on phone lines to computer research departments filled with Grateful Deadheads all begin to make perfect sense. . . . The vast computer-communications network is a fractal approach to human consciousness. . . . At the euphoric peak of a [psychedelic] trip, all people, particles, personalities, and planets are seen as part of one great entity or reality–one big fractal.68
Bored and disillusioned with political strategies, Rushkoff’s cyberians place their faith in a fuzzily defined program for personal and social change that bears a distinct resemblance to Freud’s “omnipotence of thoughts,” the primitive mode of thought that assumes a magical correspondence between mental life and the external, physical world. Primitives, wrote Freud, “believe they can alter the external world by mere thinking.”69
So, apparently, do Cyberia’s neoprimitive cyber-hippies, who Rushkoff believes are individually as well as collectively engaged in the creation of “designer realities.” Writes Rushkoff,
We may soon conclude that the single most important contribution of the 1960s . . . to popular culture is the notion that we have chosen our reality arbitrarily. The mission of the cyberian counterculture of the 1990s, armed with new technologies, familiar with cyberspace and daring enough to explore unmapped realms of consciousness, is to rechoose reality consciously and purposefully.70
According to Rushkoff, cyberian hackers see the computer as “a whole new reality, which they can enter and even change.” In some way not entirely clear, their immersion in digital media such as the low-resolution cartoon world of virtual reality casts “further doubt on the existence of any objective physical reality.”
The psychedelic experience (“a psychopharmacological virtual reality”) likewise leads cyberians to conclude that they “have
the ability to reshape the experience of reality and thus-if observer and observed are one-the reality itself.” Underground chemists creating illicit designer drugs “decide what they’d like reality to be like, then-in a submolecular shamanic visionquest-compose a chemical that will alter their observations about reality in a specific way. . . . The world changes because it is observed differently.”71
Citing chaos theory’s premise that order can spring from seemingly random phenomena, Rushkoff asserts that “[e]very chaotic system appears to be adhering to an underlying order,” then rushes in where angels (and chaos theorists) fear to tread:
This means that our world is entirely more interdependent than we have previously understood. What goes on inside any one person’s head is reflected, in some manner, on every other level of reality. So any individual being, through feedback and iteration, has the ability to redesign reality at large.72
By this logic, we arrive at an implausible cyber-reality where the “omnipotence of thoughts” prevails. Rushkoff uses the Gaia hypothesis as a springboard for his speculation that the planet may become self-aware once it passes through “the galactic time wave of history” (whatever that is). Formulated by the English scientist James Lovelock in 1974, the Gaia hypothesis (after the Greek Earth goddess) proposes that the Earth is a homeostatic system. Lovelock theorizes that the global ecosystem’s attempts to maintain its equilibrium may be causing it to shift into a state unfavorable to human life as humanity becomes an ever greater threat to life on this planet. Global warming can be seen as an example of this process. In New Age circles, variations on Lovelock’s thesis are used to justify claims for a planetary consciousness.
