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Editor: R.U. Sirius

Original MONDO 2000 logo by Brummbär, revised by Bart Nagel

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  • OH THE HORROR! WE MAY ACTUALLY NEED FORBIDDEN MODIFICATION OF THE WEB!

     

    In any wilderness is beauty and fruitfulness and vicious predators and wandering madmen and disease and flooding and fires and regeneration…

    by John Shirley

    First, let’s quickly review the scale of the thing: In excess of a billion people are active on Facebook. Every month a hundred million use Instagram. There are three hundred twenty eight million plus monthly users of Twitter. More than half the world’s population is online in some way. Eighty percent of Americans go online. For years now, public school classes have given homework requiring online activity to complete it (indifferent to the fact that some of the poor don’t have steady access to a browser.)

    There are more than a billion websites.

    That’s not a system, it’s a series of  randomly interlocked systems; it’s not a grand network of self expression. Envisioned in cyberspace, it may look like an endless stochastic city, like a megalopolis of data. But it’s really a kind of wilderness.  In any wilderness is beauty and fruitfulness and vicious predators and wandering madmen and disease and flooding and fires and regeneration… Chaos is beautiful, chaos is necessary, chaos also destroys if it’s not modulated. (more…)

  • Deeper Into The Magick Grant Morrison Interview Part 2

    “You wind back into your mother’s womb, she winds back into hers, like branches retreating into buds on a tree and it all goes back in billions of unbroken lines to the first mitochondrial cell dividing in the pre-Cambrian ocean 3 and a half billion years ago.

    Interview by Robert Anton Wilson biographer Prop Anon, and Laura Kang, February 2017 in Brooklyn NY

    You’ve told us that your take on magick is a little different than RAW’s. Can you explain how it is different? 

    GM: Maybe I’m wrong. I think he saw magic  in the Crowleyan, ritual, alien contact sense — as some collision of psychology and quantum weirdness. For me, it’s much more literal and it’s all about emphasizing the transcendent, psychedelic aspects of the ordinary by following logic to its conclusion. Magick for me is all about maintaining a fluid and creative relationship with things as they are.

    Simple things, like adding time, or the 4th dimension to the picture can eliminate a lot of apparent psychic phenomena, like clairvoyance, action at a distance, ESP, reincarnation etc. When you add time, you realize fairly quickly that all living things are intrinsically connected as one singular organism. You wind back into your mother’s womb, she winds back into hers, like branches retreating into buds on a tree and it all goes back in billions of unbroken lines to the first mitochondrial cell dividing in the pre-Cambrian ocean 3 and a half billion years ago. It’s no surprise that sometimes people get a sense of other parts of the structure they belong to, or experience “past lives” — those lives are all still happening, all simultaneously.

    That same original, immortal cell is still at it, separating inside all of us. Maybe mitochondrial DNA might be what humans have been calling “soul” for centuries. The fact is, we actually do have an immortal indwelling presence living deep inside the perishable structure of our bodies. Maybe mitochondrial DNA has consciousness and when we narrow down on that waveband, we experience the feelings of timelessness and divinity people refer to as a religious experience… (more…)

  • White Babbits Trevor Boing & Grace Schtick

    Lyrics by R.U. Sirius (based on Grace Slick)

    One pill makes you smarter
    And one pill makes you small
    and the ones that mother gives you
    ritalin or adderall
    And your phallus
    Needs Viagra after all

    and if you go fleecing babbits
    cause the banks are gonna fall
    tell ’em the hookah smoking anarchist
    has got you by the balls
    call alice — she’s totally appalled
    (more…)

  • Magic Works: An Interview with Grant Morrision Part 1

    Given the options, who wouldn’t prefer to be rampaging around in higher planes, interacting with eternal archetypes and pop culture gods?

    Interview by Robert Anton Wilson biographer Prop Anon, and Laura Kang, February 2017 in Brooklyn NY

    I first encountered Grant Morrison at the Disinfo.com conference of 2000, organized by Disinfo’s founder, media magician, Richard Metzger. As I walked upstairs from the basement hangout zone of NYC’s Hammerstein Ballroom, at the beginning of his now legendary lecture, I heard Morrison’s bone-chilling scream into the microphone, which reminded me of another Morrison, and thought “Who the fuck is this guy?’ He then announced that he was drunk and had just eaten some hash and it was about to kick it in, all with a thick Scottish accent. Such punk rock antics won the rapt attention of the wild crowd, myself included, and over the course of the next hour or so, he voiced all the countercultural excitement of the moment. During that cold February day in New York City, Morrison’s message was clear, Magick works, but you should not take his word for it, you have do it yourself to learn how it works. (more…)

  • From “Freaks In The Machine: MONDO 2000 in 20th Century Tech Culture”

    From the MONDO 2000 history book/memoir Freaks In The Machine: MONDO 2000 in 20th Century Tech Culture, yes, still in progress

    by R.U. Sirius

    Definition Of Vital Terms & Concepts (As Used In The Book)

    DMT

    The extremely powerful psychedelic drug DMT – Dimethyltryptamine — was a big part of the MONDO weltanschauung, subject to quite a bit of use and even more discussion. DMT is smoked and its effects last about 5-10 minutes. It is arguably the most powerful psychedelic experience, although that is not to be confused with deleriants. Deleriants such as Belladonna (Scopolamine) can take you even further from ordinary reality but the experience generally can’t be remembered and offers no insights or alterations to the imbiber. (more…)

  • Alternative Facts

    by Paul Krassner

    Between the choice of a one-man-one-vote (Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia) and fake news of Weapons of Mass Destruction, invasion of Iraq, and horror of ISIS, George Bush was elected president in the year 2000. It was due to the electoral college (a rigged system which originally intended to prevent slaves from voting and which evolved to gerrymandering), even though Bush’s opponent, Al Gore, won the national popular vote.

    Hillary Clinton was elected senator that year, and she announced that the first thing she would do was to get rid of the electoral college. A few years later, as a columnist for the New York Press, I sent her a letter asking about the status of that promise. She didn’t reply. (more…)

  • La Petite Mort: The Death Of Sex

    By M.Christian

    It’s gonna happen – and probably sooner than you might think.

     

    Sure, the idea of it, the basic concept, is frightening to pretty much anyone out there with genitalia … but the fact is that, indeedy, one day sex is going to die.

    Now we probably should define what sex actually is.  I’m not going to bore you – and me – by pulling up a dictionary but for the sake of simplicity let’s call sex “sexual pleasure that may, or may not, result in orgasm and/or procreation.”

    As I’ve said more than once I’m not frightened of the future: in fact I like to buck the trend of reflexive snark about the coming years, decades, centuries to actually dare to look at what’s coming with hope and excitement – when accepting that “sexual pleasure that may, or may not, result in orgasm and/or procreation” is eventually going bye-bye. (more…)

  • William S. Burroughs in High Frontiers 1987 About Mind Technologies

    In 1987, Faustin Bray conducted an interview with William S. Burroughs by phone, mostly using questions suggested by Terence McKenna and R.U. Sirius. Below is the opening exchange, about mind technologies. (more…)

  • The Next Fifty Years: Why I’m Optimistic Because Everything Will Be Terrible…

    by John Shirley

     

    The following is the complete text of the speech the author had originally planned to give at TEDx in Brussels (November 2011). The speech he gave used high points from this off-the-cuff essay, but, of necessity, only half as long. He prefers this version.

     

    It’s a contradiction in terms—two singularities. But there are two, there’s the fanciful technological singularity of the imagination and the singularity that’s likely to come about. The false singularity, supposed to come between 2035 and 2045, is almost a “supernatural event” in the minds of many people. With its dream of technologically achieved eternal life, it has the reek of religious mythology about it, the unconscious fear of mortality; the second singularity is the real singularity—it is more modest but impressive enough… (more…)

  • Interiorizing The Body, Exteriorizing The Mind

    High Frontiers launched in 1984 and was the publication that eventually became MONDO 2000 in 1989 via Reality Hackers.

    Interiorizing The Body, Exteriorizing the Mind

    by Terence McKenna, from Issue #1 of High Frontiers, 1984

    Through electronic circuitry and the building of a global information-system, we are essentially exteriorizing our nervous system, so that it is becoming a patina or a skin around the planet. And when you telephone people, and when you watch TV, when you do all these things, you’re essentially projecting your consciousness over great distances. And as technology becomes more miniaturized, less physically and spatially obtrusive, we are going to naturally lose the distinction between the body-image, and the technical projection of the body-image, which is all this information transfer technology. (more…)