I even bought some "Smart Drugs" and techno t-shirts but it was all for nought.
Even more than Wired, Mondo 2000 was this techno fetish fantasy that was never going to happen.
In some respects I am reminded of a line of Victor' Pelevin's from "Generation P" where the writer for this high concept underground magazine is in reality a balding father of three with a mortage and 4 starving mouths to feed.
I have immense nostalgia for the early days of computers, when they were sold in carpeted showrooms with brochure racks by guys who needed a haircut. Those guys were changing the world forever! That heady time continued until right around when Wired replaced M2K.
Mondo 2000 was something else. A promise of a future we could have, if only we were brave enough and crazy enough to try.
I haven't really followed nootropics but besides Modafinil (which is not really a smart drag) what smart drugs actually pass a meaningful double blind test?
As an aside... There is a show of 40 years of Heavy Metal art and such in Santa Monica, CA through Aug. 19, 2017 at the Copro Gallery.
My gut reaction is that "Artificial Reality" culture has not served us as well as a more pragmatic vision of the future may have. There is no doubt deep learning, crypto-anarachy, CRISPR, 3D printing in the extreme environment of low earth orbit and many other current wonders were forecast in these pages. But the prophetic illusion that war, poverty, disease, and crime would evaporate away with accelerating growth seems tragic.
If a new imprint, say MONDO 3k, were to be started today, a little less airtime devoted to pirate punk rock cable access shows and a bit more on how to solve the problems of displaced workers via automation would be welcome.
Oh, and just on page two, already spotted an Easter Egg. The Reduce Productivity with Fractools, an electric kaleidoscope of nature's geometry ad. Distributed by a "Bourbaki, Inc." Named no doubt after the legendary secret math collective in 1930s France!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki
Craving even more 1990s alternative nostalgia? Remember Re/Search magazine? Publisher of J. G. Ballard and much more. They have a podcast that mostly consists of talking about the good old days ;)
[1] https://totseans.com/totse/en/ego/literary_genius/mondo2k.ht...
Extropians archive: https://github.com/macterra/extropians
Cypherpunks archive: https://github.com/Famicoman/cypherpunks-mailing-list-archiv...
It's fun, sometimes a bit depressing, to search those archives for years that have now passed and see what people expected by now. (ag "by 201", ag "by 200")
Serious underdelivery so far on:
- Molecular manufacturing
- Increasing single-thread performance of desktop computers, with ever-growing clock speed
- Robotics outside of industrial facilities
- Therapeutic breakthroughs in medicine from genomics
- Encrypted and networked communications revolutionizing politics/society
You might object that most of these developments, dimly foreseen in the 1990s, are actually significant in this decade in some form. But you have to go back to the originals to appreciate just how quantitatively aggressive the predictions were. (10 GHz desktop CPUs by 2014. Followup in the same discussion: No, the clock speed will be twice that, and arrive before 2010!)
