R.U. Sirius & Shira Chess are pleased (and a little
frightened) to announce that we have contracted with
Strange Attractor Press to publish Freaks in the
Machine: Mondo 2000 in Late 20th Century Tech
Culture. With a forward by Grant Morrison.
Before the entire world was online, before it was divided
into social media enclaves and corporate-sanctioned
“likes,” before even WIRED magazine, there was Mondo
2000. Published from 1989-1997, Mondo reached a peak
distribution of about 100,000, but the magazine was even
more influential than its distribution implied. M2K was
raved about by 90s media outlets, consumed by early tech
culture, and demonstrated a transition from the literary
cyberpunk style of Gibson and Vinge into an aspirational
cyberpunk aesthetic that leaked into the material world. In
1994, Douglas Rushkoff described Mondo as the “voice of
cyberculture.”
Published by a rag-tag team of psychonauts and
counterculture weirdos, and based out of a Berkeley Hills
mini-mansion, the parties and strange goings-on were
almost as legendary as the magazine itself. The Mondo
publishers — editor-in-chief R.U. Sirius and Domineditrix
Queen Mu — were not technologists. Yet their Bay Area
publication created a desire for the technological zeitgeist
of the coming millennium. In turn, the high (and sometimes
low) weirdness of Mondo established a kaleidoscopic onramp
that rocketed a lot of early adaptor mutants (or
“Mondoids”) onto the so-called “information superhighway”
of the late 90s and early 00s.
Part memoir, part history, and part critical analysis, Freaks
in the Machine tells the storied adventures of the
magazine’s tumultuous history, its strange cast of
characters and its irreverent content.
“Mondo was the next bold stage in an evolutionary advance where street
cred and an underground ethos would come with the potential to appeal to
a mainstream audience, to wake up the straight world, announcing its
arrival like a flare over the horizon so everyone could see and know this
was the signal they’d been waiting for.” -Grant Morrison
R.U. Sirius is still best known as the editor-in-chief of the
great 1990s cyberculture magazine Mondo 2000 although
some historians insist that he should be most remembered
for his skills as a second baseman in the West Islip New
York little league while others have raved about the
infrequent and disturbing live appearances of the band
Mondo Vanilli. [Note from Shira: There were no historians.]
He has written for Time, Rolling Stone, Salon, WIRED and
a bunch of other publications that are stored on the tip of
his tongue. Books include Counterculture Through The
Ages (with Dan Joy), Design for Dying (with Timothy
Leary) and Cyberpunk Handbook (with St. Jude & Bart
Nagel).
Shira Chess is an Associate Professor in Entertainment &
Media Studies at the University of Georgia and a
recovering game studies scholar. She is the author of
several books on digital culture and video games,
including the forthcoming MIT Press book The Unseen
Internet: Conjuring the Occult in Digital Discourse. She
joins this project to add context and history, to referee any
nonsense, to try to make sense of Sirius’s lunatic ravings,
and to excise any excesses of cringe.