Leading Into the Light While Playing in the Dark
an interview with Mondo 2000’s Editor-in-Chief, R. U. Sirius...

A couple of years ago a friend introduced me to a magazine which was unlike any I’d seen. It was a luscious maze of computer-generated images and fonts, and had ads for items like the Cranial Electro-Stimulation Device and contained interviews with special-effects wizards, radical feminist writers, intellectual rock musicians, and fringe scientists.

There was a conversation between William S. Burroughs and Timothy Leary, a guide to life-extending vitamins, reviews of computer hardware and software, news about Virtual Reality breakthroughs, a fashion spread on fractal patterned mini-skirts, and a lot more. It seemed as if some benign god of technology had created a fold in time that allowed the youth of the 60’s counter-culture to mate with the cyberbrats of the Information Age, and this magazine was their Bible. The magazine was called Mondo 2000, and it also featured a hysterical editorial by someone named, R. U. Sirius.

Mondo 2000 is San Franciscan in origin and spirit and it is quickly becoming the international forum for an alternative computer culture. Mondo’s Editor-in-Chief R. U. Sirius, its “Domineditrix” Queen Mu, along with physicist/writer Rudy Rucker have just published a book, Mondo 2000 A User’s Guide to the New Edge (Harper Perennial). The book presents the magazine’s greatest hits which have been updated, indexed, and annotated in such a clever way that even the densest, computer-illiterate, slow-time dweeb can glide through its corridors and come out a hyper-informed explorer of life on the New Edge.

I met R. U. Sirius at the Limelight club in New York City where he was promoting and celebrating the release of the book.

Dike Blair: Could you brief me on your magazines that preceded and evolved into Mondo 2000. I couldn’t find any back issues of High Frontiers or Reality Hackers.

R. U. Sirius: Well, High Frontiers printed approximately 4 issues over 5 years, beginning in 1984. It was printed on the cheapest possible news print and was a psychedelic-oriented magazine with long, unedited conversations with people like Terence McKenna, Tim Leary, Andrew Weil, Albert Hofman—the inventor of LSD, and it went on from there. Science, technology, and all that edge stuff was a background phenomena at that point, so we reversed field and engaged the cyborgization of humanity, what the street culture that evolves around that is, as well as covering the intellectual influences and cultural theory that went with it. All that stuff came together into a rich stew.

Gibson’s Neuromancer came out in 1984, was this a big influence?

I was behind the curve on cyberpunk/Science Fiction stuff. Like a lot of people in the psychedelic community, I was turned on to it by Leary. What really blew me out was Mirror Shades and Bruce Sterling’s introduction to Mirror Shades. Like a lot of people who read it, I said “my God, that’s it!” That’s not “it,” Science Fiction—that’s “it,” what we’re into, what’s worth exploring, what we want to write about, what we want the magazine to be about. So this was the transition when High Frontiers became Reality Hackers. Basically, Reality Hackers was a much nerdier attempt than Mondo 2000. With Mondo 2000 we put in the funk, the humor, the snap, and the pop culture that turned it into an explosive commodity.

I take it you would have no problem seeing Mondo 2000 evolve into another magazine?

Well, Mondo 2000 has an expiration date. Eventually its gotta be something else.

You mix the sophisticated with the inane. An esoteric interview with a physicist runs next to a fleshy photo spread featuring thermo-responsive, cybernetic jewelry. Is this to reach a broader audience, to be more entertaining, or is there another strategy?

Well, fashion in general is kind of inane. It’s very hard to find people in the fashion area who are doing anything that directly relates to what we’re doing.

But you’re insistent on including it.

Yeah, well it’s basically for the photo ops. It's for the visual material. It has to be a beautifully done magazine. It’s a good excuse to get sexy people in the magazine. I often wish it we had more of that actually.

I try to push this at Purple Prose

Yeah, I was hoping it was a porno magazine.

You do a lot of reportage on Hacking and Cracking, but you don’t publish or advocate anything illegal.

Well, it’s not 2600 (a magazine dedicated to freedom of information, with the emphasis on “free”). We don’t advocate anything. It’s not really a medium for advocacy, it’s a presentation, really. I don’t really see it as journalism, I see it more as performance art. It’s sort of a conceptual presence. If you consider what sort of culture we’ve interacted with most frequently over the last few years, it is computer culture. Most of my time over the last 3 or 4 years, has been spent going to computer conventions and listening to talks on really dry stuff – you know, people talking about their processors and programing. This is such a powerful culture, and I think that Mondo has been a major subversive influence within it. The economic structure of the entire Western World, as it now exists, has been designed by people who we would have called “freaks” back in the 1960’s, so that subversive element was there all along. It was just so submerged, and business certainly wasn’t going to bring it out, so it had to be brought out through the media. We led that into the light, and I think that is a political act.

One of the biggest criticisms of your magazine, and I would note that you relish printing other’s rabid critiques in the magazine, is its consumerist quality. One of your readers asked, “why do exploration and analyses of new types of consciousness and cyber realities have to be so expensive and accompanied by so many toys for the wealthy?”

It doesn’t have to be. There’s no attempt in Mondo to say that you must do this, or you must have this product. On one level, for whatever liberation Mondo offers, the price is $5.95. It’s like going to a high-tech film that shows these people playing with neat toys. Nobody says that it’s necessary for them to acquire these things in order to get something from the film. It’s interesting that people hold us to a higher standard than ... than I do! I was very interested in a review on us in The Face. They took us to task for the consumerist aspect of the magazine. What they didn’t mention was that they were quoting from paid advertising. Well, I started going through The Face—here are cigarette ads, here are beer ads – and I think there was even something on the military. I wouldn’t say The Face is about cigarettes, beer, and the military. I deny that our magazine is about what people pay us to rent space.

Do you reject any ads?

Queen Mu rejects ads on aesthetic grounds and she won’t accept tobacco products. People have to submit advertising as if it were a work of art.

Mondo 2000 is a visual feast. Who is your Art Director?

Bart Nagel. He’s really good and gets better with every issue. He did the book (Mondo 2000 Users Guide). It really explodes, visually.

It’s extremely readable and user-friendly.

One of the purposes of the book was to think about the average literate person out there who doesn’t know squat about this cultural phenomena, or technology, and write the book for them. We did that, but never-the-less, I just did a radio interview in Boston and this woman said, “this is so bizarre, nobody can understand where this is coming from.” Well it’s like noun-verb-adjective-whole sentences, with terms defined on the side of the page, historical data, information—all you have to do is think. Generally it’s not a question of whether it’s understandable or not, it’s a question of whether it intersects with something people have seen previously.

It seems that Mondo could only have happened in California or, more specifically, the Bay Area. Rudy Rucker describes Californians as having the naive belief that (a) There Is a Better Way, and (b) I Can Do It Myself.

I read a book named, The Intelligence Agents by Timothy Leary which basically said that anyone living east of the Rockies is brain dead. So I took that as a challenge and moved to California. Leary was talking about Ralph Abraham and his Gaia theory and observed that in California any weird idea will find something to bind to. That was what happened to me, there were other molecules for me to bind my vision to.

Is there a stronger urge to synthesize there?

It’s a younger place, it’s just new. It’s the youngest place in the world.

It may be young, but I notice that your magazine and some of the cyber writers, are recently quite attracted to the prehistorical.

It seems that what we have is sort of an attempt to bring everything into the present. It’s, like, suck everything, all information, all history, all human experience into a particular point in time.

Among other things, Purple Prose is an art magazine so I’d like you to address computer art. As much as I’d like to, I have yet to see any computer art that affects me as much as, say, a Joseph Cornell box, or a Gerhard Richter painting.

Have you ever been to a SRL (Survival Research Laboratories) show?

No. I’ve seen the tapes but I guess that’s not quite the same.

Gosh, it’s not the experience at all. It’s almost completely unrelated. I think computer art sucks for the most part. It’s a new area. Conceptually it’s very interesting to be able to take your visions and your most perverse fantasies and put them directly into the eye stalks of your virtual friend or enemy. I don’t know that this has anything to do with art, it’s more like post-art. We may be past art and into an ongoing metalogue among all human beings. I can relate to what you’re saying in the sense that as much as I like modern techno music, I don’t find anything that touches my soul as much as Exile on Main Street or Blonde on Blonde.

There’s a loose theme to this issue of Purple Prose, “To Dream.” I’m curious about your good and bad dreams as they apply to Mondo 2000, the culture, cybernetics, you name it.

Um, to dream. I’m looking forward to dreaming tonight, I’ve slept about 3 hours a night for the last week. The good dream for me and Mondo is overcoming the limits of biology without necessarily leaving sensuality or sexuality behind— cyborging human beings to make us less vulnerable. I learned in philosophy class that there was this inevitable downside to hedonism- there was a payback. I think that maybe technology is really an attempt to have the pleasure and not have it be a zero-sum game. That’s the upbeat part of it. The downbeat part of it is around us all the time. It’s just exploding insides, human beings being psychologically raped and replaced by power-driven, hard-edged technology. The world of Neuromancer is pretty much what we have—a mega-multinational dominated place where individuals and tribes have been exploded. That’s the nightmare, but it’s also kind of a fun nightmare. At a talk in Minnesota somebody asked me“where’s the joy in these dark visions?” I was feeling very joyful at the time and said, “sometimes it’s fun to play in the dark.” That’s part of the cyberpunk thing.