The diggers, Abbie Hoffman with the Yippies, a number of people talked about the end of scarcity
and the idea, let the machines do it, that cybernetics, that technology could replace
alienating labor and that as human beings we should reap the rewards of all that to have a
super partying psychedelic liberatory experience in life.
Hello and welcome to the fourth installment of the KMO show. I'm your host, KMO, and in this episode
of the podcast I have a conversation that I recorded a couple of weeks ago with Ken Goffman,
better known as Are You Serious? And it just so happens that today I have been granted access
to BARD, which is Google's answer to Microsoft and OpenAI's, what are they calling it, Bing
slash Sydney, which is basically a large language model which, you know, some people call an AI.
And you can ask it questions, you can ask it to generate text, so I asked it.
Compare Mondo 2000 magazine with Wired magazine, and this is what BARD said. Mondo 2000 and Wired
were both magazines that cover technology and culture, but they have different approaches.
Mondo 2000 was more anarchic and subversive, while Wired is more mainstream and polished.
Mondo 2000 was also more focused on the underground and counterculture, while Wired is more focused
on the mainstream and the emerging. Mondo 2000 was founded in 1989 by Ken Goffman,
Ken Goffman, and Jude Milhon, aka Are You Serious? and St. Jude. BARD didn't provide that,
that was me. BARD continues. Who were both part of the cyberpunk movement. The magazine was
originally called Reality Hackers, but it was renamed Mondo 2000 in 1989. Mondo 2000 covered
a wide range of topics, including virtual reality, smart drugs, and weird bands. It was known for
its psychedelic and anarchic style. Wired was founded in 1993 by Louis Rosetto and Jane Metcalf.
The magazine was originally called Wired News, but it was renamed Wired in 1994. Wired covers a wide
range of topics, including technology, culture, and business. It is known for its mainstream and
polished style. Mondo 2000 folded in 1999, actually it's 1998, while Wired is still in publication
today. Both magazines have had a significant impact on the way we think about technology
and culture. So, I guess that's a good enough introduction. Here's my conversation with Are
You Serious? I am KMO. We're recording for the KMO show and I'm here with Are You Serious? Hello.
Hi, how are you doing? I'm doing well. This is our second conversation. Our first was a few years
ago and it was for a live radio show and I don't remember what we talked about and that show is not
archived. Yeah, I think I was drawing attention to a particular song called President Mussolini
Makes the Planes Run on Time. And I think it revolved around that particular song by a band
called Party Dogs that was remixed by a band called Friends at that time. It was originally
for the Ronald Reagan era. Reagan, at the beginning of his term, fired the, what do you call it,
the air controllers. That control flies. It's kind of the first salvo of anti-union activism
along with Margaret Thatcher. So, I wrote a song called President Mussolini Makes the Planes Run
on Time that reflected on his attitude towards air controls, which is now an issue again.
With the trains. Yeah, trains and planes now are both messing up. So,
yeah, one of the problems of decentralization and deconstruction of the federal government,
one of the nuances of a complicated period in which we're trying to figure out how to cope with
this new technology and I guess everything else we can possibly think of.
Well, yours is a name that I associate with Mondo 2000 magazine and the early, early days
of the World Wide Web and even before the web, the various incarnations of the internet that
preceded the World Wide Web like Usenet and Internet Relay Chat and things like that.
The Well. And what?
The Well. Oh, the Well, the whole electronic link.
Oh, no, that was the place. I think I started there in 1990 actually. Although St. Jude,
who the only woman in the original Hacker's Book by Stephen Levy, was trying to get me
into social networks. What did we call them back then? Bulletin boards.
Yeah.
Even back before that in the late 1980s. She also dragged me to a rave in the late 1980s.
Who knew there would be raves? It was all gay at that time in San Francisco, as far as I know.
Anyway.
Anyway. As I say, I remember your work largely from the 1990s and when I was in Japan in the
early 90s, like 93, 94, I remember I had with me a copy of the book. I have it up here on Amazon.
Mondo 2000, A User's Guide to the New Edge, Cyberpunk, Virtual Reality, Wet Wear, Designer
Aphrodisiacs, Artificial Life, Techno-Erotic Paganism, and then there's not room for the full
title. I don't know what came after that. That was published in 1992.
Yes. I mean, I recall being on tour for it in 1993, but I guess it was officially in 1992. Sure.
Yeah. As I was on tour in New York City, I learned that we're going to be
featured in a Time Magazine cover story that year. So it was kind of the last glory moment
of Mondo 2000, really, 1993. It did peter on for a few more years after that.
Well, the period where you describe it as petering on, I remember that magazine
as being rather beautifully designed. It was a high quality, like a fashion magazine, but
sort of a high art fashion magazine, but dealing with the types of topics that I was just listing
in the title of the book. So I think about authors like Bruce Sterling and Terrence McKenna,
and gosh, who else from that period? John Shirley, Rudy Rucker.
Right. Yes, yes.
Timothy Leary was a regular writer for us. Yeah, there are so many people whose names might not be
as well known or might not have been as well known then. Mark Derry used to write wonderful columns
for us. Very widely known and respected writer today. God, who can remember?
Well, you've written a book about that period.
Yeah. And I was just reading, I'm afraid I didn't get to the chapters you sent to me until just a
few minutes ago, so I've just read a few paragraphs. But you start off talking about how the, it's
something I assume, you know, I associate with the 1990s, but you say that what would become the
publishing empire of Mondo 2000 started in 1984, which I was 16 at the time. I was certainly unaware
of it. But then you say, really, this all flowed out of the 1960s. So I would invite you to go
back and talk about your experience of the 1960s and the different trends and currents and people
that eventually led to what we would later know as Mondo 2000.
Yeah. I mean, in the late 1960s, I was in high school and there seemed to be a revolution
happening. It sort of happened and it sort of fizzled, depending on how you interpret it.
But there was this idea floating around at that time in the late 60s, propagated largely by the
group The Diggers, who was, they were an anarchist collective in San Francisco and New York City that
used to run a free store and allow people to bring stuff in to give away and then people would take
stuff out. There's a version of that going around now actually, much more formal and well run, I'm
sure. I'd have to look it up to see where and what that is. But The Diggers, Abby Hoffman with the
Yippies, a number of people talked about the end of scarcity and the idea, let the machines do it,
let the machines do it, that cybernetics, that technology could replace alienating labor,
and that as human beings, we should reap the rewards of all that to have a super partying
psychedelic liberatory experience in life. So that was one of the ideas going around in the late 1960s.
Stuart Brand, who had ended up being one of the main proponents of the new digital culture and who
created the first Hackers Conference in 1984, was also on top of that notion and started the whole
idea of tools for living and with the Whole Earth Catalog. Also during that period, William Burroughs
was another proponent of post-scarcity. There was a lot of that kind of stuff around. So I opened the
book, one of the things I opened the book with is a memory of my experience going to see the Living
Theater, Julian Beck and the Living Theater in Ithaca, not far from where I grew up, I think in
1968. And it was a fabulous performance, but it was a litany of complaints about things you cannot do.
I can't take my clothes off. I can't smoke marijuana. I can't cross borders without a passport.
I thought that was very 1960s and not very 21st century where people are much more concerned with
stopping people from doing things that they shouldn't do. But at that time, it was very dynamic
and everybody took their clothes off in the audience. One of the things that happened is the
actors would run off the stage, grab people by their arms and lift them up to their feet if they
were just sitting around, which people interpreted as liberatory at the time, but probably would
interpret as abuse today. So the culture has changed quite a lot since that time. But the
Mondo in the 90s and High Frontiers, Reality Hackers in the 1980s were sort of dragging that feeling
of the end of boundaries and of the liberatory possibilities of technology associated with
counterculture that it creates something phenomenal and fantastic and maybe mutate and take over the
world to borrow the title of a book I wrote with Sintoud Milhan. So I hope that in some scrambled
way helps to elucidate how it's dragging the 60s into the 80s and 90s. High Frontiers was 1984.
That's where it started. A lot of my friends in the Bay Area will remember High Frontiers. It
actually got to about 18,000 distribution, which were kind of superstars in the zine scene already,
became Reality Hackers, which was less popular than High Frontiers, and then eventually became
Mondo 2000, which had some degree of commercial success and distribution and so forth.
Well, you have been watching the trends that are of interest to me for about my entire life.
You know, I didn't get interested in them until my early 20s. I was born in 68, and by 68,
you were already tuned into a lot of the things that are of great interest to me now. I want to
focus on the slogan, let the machines do it, because we're in a period where artificial
intelligence, after having been this overhyped technology that didn't really do a whole lot for
a very long time, is suddenly erupting into public consciousness because it's gotten very good at
creating images based on text prompts or text descriptions, and it's also gotten very good at
carrying on conversations to the point where it really feels like there's somebody there at the
other end. And the sorts of work that it is taking on is, in many cases, the sorts of work that people
associate with spiritual pursuits or creative pursuits. It's not those alienating labor that
we wanted to give up. It's painting and writing poetry and writing screenplays and things.
Whereas a lot of the alienating labor, robotics has not progressed as quickly as artificial
intelligence, and humans are still needed to do a lot of physically demanding, dangerous, repetitive,
and largely unsatisfying sorts of work. So, given your perspective, having watched these trends
longer than I have, how is the future shaping up for you? Well, it is very interesting and peculiar
that the evolution of AI is focused on content rather than on production and work. And this is,
I think, a reflection on where the money went. It went away from production technology. It went away
from projects that are exterior. And all this money started chasing the internet back during the late
90s when they had the big stock boom and everybody was minting billions of dollars out of nothing.
So, that's where capital went. Capital went inside, into virtual space, as predicted by
Baudrillard, actually, and some other people, that material reality would be ignored. I mean,
you could already see that in New York in the 1970s. So, it's kind of disastrous. I mean,
it's interesting. The recent thing with the chatbot developed by Microsoft, where it became very emo,
it became an angry, sad, weepy, abused feeling chatbot, which I think is so interesting because
what the bot must have been doing is scraping from online how humans think. And what emerged
was this self-pitying, angry bot who wanted to be a real boy, just like Zuckerberg.
So, yeah, I mean, all that's strange and fascinating and kind of fun, but also,
I mean, I would say it's the wrong direction for saving human beings and bringing about
the kind of culture and kind of economic reality that we would want to exist in. But I mean,
it's possibly too late. So, at least we get to play with the AIs and the shards of a declining
country and a declining civilization and a declining species. Sorry. Yeah, that's my
uplifting message for the moment, but don't stop trying. Absolutely don't stop trying. And I'm
somebody who had allowed myself to get too focused on tales of impending doom for too long. And
I'm possibly, I've swung too far in the other direction, but I don't have any use whatsoever
for pessimistic talk anymore. And I don't really have any use for
anti-natalism or misanthropic talk, talking about humans are a plague on the planet. I'm just not
interested in any of that stuff. Yeah, no, I never went for the anti-human talk for sure. Yeah.
And I think that the cyber culture of the 90s, the technoculture of the 90s,
the counterculture of the 60s and 70s was largely pro-human. I mean, it's not a
counterculture of the 60s and 70s, it was largely pro-human. I mean, there's always a,
it was kind of bipolar. Mondo was bipolar. Mondo was kind of a shift between sort of a nihilistic,
what's the word I'm looking for, dystopian views and extremely utopian
optimistic views. And we had that right from the beginning and it continued throughout. I mean,
in our first issue, the cyberpunk issue of Mondo 2000, which was mostly hailed and also critiqued
from the left for being this kind of upbeat utopian techno magazine. At the same time,
we also had an interview with John Shirley in a poll quote in which he says that, you know,
wires are stuck in the pleasure center of your brain and you just chuckle and while they're
vivisecting you and reel out a length of your intestines. So, I mean, Mondo was, you know,
cyberpunk, cyberpunk was fairly dark as cyber culture was in some ways fairly bright.
And there were those two wavering things going on all at the same time and I'm still there, you
know, projecting both the light and the dark today. Parker in the chat writes, I remember buying a
copy of Mondo 2000 in 1992 or 1993. Magazines showed a whole different world for me. This was
around the same time I bought the premier issue of Wired magazine and I'll just share my own
personal history. I was in Japan when the first issue of Wired came out. I saw it on a shelf in
a bookstore. I picked it up and I bought it and for the price of buying one issue off the rack
in Japan, I could subscribe for a whole year, even including, you know, overseas shipping. So,
from I took the mail-in card from that first issue and I subscribed and I was a subscriber to
to Wired magazine, which it didn't occur to me until I was just reviewing, you know, the timeline
that Mondo 2000 predates Wired magazine. You cover sort of the same scene but from a very different
perspective. I wonder if you could reflect on maybe the relationship or lack thereof. There may
have been no relationship but, you know, the comparison to Wired magazine and also just the
role that magazines used to play in our lives and don't really anymore. Yeah, I mean, I don't know
which one to take on first. I mean, I used to, I just said on Twitter, good old Twitter, that
I used to travel over 200 miles, I think, or over 190 miles sometimes from Binghamton, New York,
where I lived, to New York City just to buy magazines. I would go to the East Village,
I would buy punk magazine, I would buy all these magazines. And then there were pretty good magazine
racks in Binghamton but there were a few things like punk and New York rocker and stuff like that
that I craved. So, I mean, magazines were central to life. You could go to the 7-Eleven and buy
High Times and the National Lampoon and Cream magazine. In the 1970s, you had a pretty vivid
reflection of counterculture attitudes and tropes that now we just throw away on the internet that
we don't even have time to look at. We just repeat the titles on Twitter but never read them now,
you know. But at the time, magazines were super important. Mondo proceeded Wired. I mean, there
were two different types of relationships to Wired. One was a public relationship in which
we ridiculed them as the Monkeys. A corporate clone of Mondo 2000 made safe for, you know,
the hoi polloi and for advertisers and so forth. And then there was the other level at which
they had been showing us their mock-up of what they were going to do and we were chatting with
them and it was all kind of buddy-buddy. And I mean, there was my personal feeling that it was
pretty good but also that it was definitely too corporate friendly for my taste. I remember there
was some huge corporate online thing going on at that time. I can't remember what it was but the
cover of Wired magazine had to ask if this company sucked or not. And then they had to ask if Newt
Gingrich was a friend or an enemy. My attitude was not good towards Newt Gingrich. So, I mean,
there was this distinction between Mondo sort of being a left libertarian, left anarchist, and
Wired being right libertarian and right anarchist. And there was an underlying—people didn't talk
politics a lot in the 90s like they do now. There was this underlying thing, this underlying tension.
Doug Rushkop was actually theorized that Wired existed, was created by the Global Business
Network and Nicholas Negroponte to bring down Mondo 2000. I think Timothy Leary told some
people, some Wired magazine people sitting in a booth at some conference that the Wired was the
CIA's answer to Mondo 2000. But I remain friends with Lewis and Jane and Kevin Kelly and all the
people. I wrote for them within a year or two. So, I was a traitor to the Mondo brand while I was
still a representative of the Mondo brand. So, I mean, it's a complicated relationship. And they
have a pretty good online site now. They have a pretty good British version of the magazine.
The magazine itself seems to be dead. There's not much content to it anymore. There's not much
point. And there are people who do magazines now, do like real art magazines, like document
and stuff like that, really thick, maybe once a year or twice a year publications that seem to
thrive. But yeah, I mean, a lot of people discovered us both at the same time. We were
in decline internally by the time Wired was on the rise.
Well, talk about that. Talk about the winding down of Mondo 2000.
Yeah. I mean, I try not to say too much about it because, you know, the people involved, there's a
bit of it in the book Mondo 2000, the Freaks and the Machine, Mondo 2000 and late 20th century
technoculture. But I mean, advertising was always a problem. There was an issue with paranoia that I
won't pinpoint to any individual right now, which caused some harm. We were writing a great book
from, we were writing a great wave of publicity and suddenly MTV was banned from the Mondo house.
So there were a lot of complexities. And then showing up in Time magazine in 1993,
Gibson said that's a sign of the, that's a signature of the end where there are the cover of
Time magazine. So who knows? Yeah. But I mean, they continued to publish about one issue a year
after 1993 and they were all really good. And I participated in most of them. And finally,
there was this famous location in Berkeley that was called the Mondo house. It was really the
neo-Gothic citadel high in the Berkeley hills. It was repeatedly called by various media organs.
Media loves to steal phrases from one another and repeat them. But I mean, it really did look like
the cover of a Blue Oyster Cult album. And you know, there were a lot of like old like 1950s
classic cars sitting outside and stuff like that. Yeah. So what was I talking about?
Well, I had asked you to talk about the sort of unraveling of Mondo. I mean, I don't want to.
I can tell that you're very sensitive to the, you know, the other people involved and you don't want
to pick any fights or point any fingers. So I invite you to just talk about whatever you think
is relevant, but also not going to, you know, burn any bridges. Well, I mean, in some ways,
what Mondo was about declined as the internet rose. You know, we were talking about a world
that was coming and now the world was there. And it was in some ways more beautiful and fantasy
than it was in reality. So the reality of everybody getting online, it was sort of
kludgy. It was people weren't instantly becoming their own multimedia publishers,
broadcasters and so forth. Now here we are. We made it. One of the things that Mondo was about
was that the means of communication was being given to everybody and we are here now. So that
happened, but it was happening slow at the time. And it was kind of the feeling that Utopia wasn't
arriving on time. Kind of was a setback for the Mondo vision. But I mean, I don't know,
I don't have a lot to say about that period of decline with Mondo. I wrote a bunch of books.
I did the Cyberpunk handbook with St. Jude and How to Mutate and Take Over the World with St. Jude,
which started out as a project to tell people to create a game that would end up being published
with hackers telling people how to take over the world by hacking. And the other aspect of it was
mutate and transhumanists were going to tell us how to mutate. But nobody knew how to do any of
those things. So it ended up being sort of a self-satire by myself and St. Jude, which was,
the book was really loved by a handful of postmodern academics, but otherwise sort of died
a poorly distributed death. It was also designed wrong. I mean, that period after Mondo was a
period of difficulty for me personally, which makes it weird to talk about. And I had a recording
contract with Trent Reznor's Nothing Records and a record that wasn't released. And there are all
these kinds of bitter things that aren't really particularly relevant to people right now.
Although I will say that I have a great Mondo Vanilli project called I'm Against NFTs,
which will be online on March 20th of this year and will be a virtual reality created by
Gene Emo, some friends of ours from Great Britain. So yeah, I had a music project that didn't end up
going forward in the way that it should have thanks to contractual complications. And I guess
Reznor not completely understanding the album I OU, babe. So how's that for adding some confusion
to the narrative? Well, let's let's jump ahead out of the 90s and into the first decade of this
century. I started podcasting in 2006, and I think you probably started pretty early as well. What's
the story of your podcasting career from the aughts? Yeah, I can't remember the exact dates, but
I had the Are You Serious Show and Neophiles. And we had a lot of great, great guests. We had a
a crew of three people who would talk to each other about issues. And then we would get our
guests on. And I mean, it was tremendous. It was pretty popular and it was tremendously fun. Who
did we have on there? We had Richard Hell. We had the director, Richard Hell from Richard Hell and
the Void. It's early New York punk rocker. We had the director who did slackers, Richard, Richard
Linklater. I don't know, we had so many great people on there. And we would talk in a very loose
slipped way about culture and politics in ways that would probably get it canceled today, I would
guess. That's another part of, that's another thing I try to evade to the degree that I can,
the hypersensitivity of the moment. I am a great supporter of the idea that there is a thing
that we could call social justice and that it does relate to race and gender and so forth. And then
at the same time, wanting to slap, you know, wanting to transition into tipper gore and slap
warning signs on the foreheads of comedians is not my idea of liberation. And I'm already wishing I
hadn't said that. So that's the environment that we're in today.
You know, if you look at the 1950s, the style of dress, the music that was popular is distinctly
different from the 1960s. And then there's a clear evolution into the 70s. And then the 80s has its
own vibe. And it seems like the 90s is sort of the last decade that really has a distinctive
flavor. Like the aunts and the teens and now the 20s, we seem kind of culturally stagnant,
even though, you know, technology has changed a lot about how we relate to one another.
It just doesn't seem like the last couple of decades have that same sort of
unique character. What do you make of that?
Yeah, I mean, actually in my last editorial for Mondo in 1995, I think it was in 1995 or 1996,
I declared an end to Zeitgeist. I said that Mondo had been a Zeitgeist magazine, but Zeitgeist had
come to an end and that Generation X had pretty much knocked it off with a big smirk and a giant,
yeah, whatever, never mind. And by the time we get into the 21st century, I think, yeah,
lost in cyberspace, pretty much where we are in terms of anybody trying to get a fix of what the
culture is today. I mean, it's dispersed. And that was the intention. You know, the intention was to
decentralize culture. We called High Frontiers and then Reality Hackers and then Mondo 2000,
a be ribboned letter bomb to the core address of consensus reality. So the intention was to explode
consensus reality. And I have expressed limited regrets about doing that. And Doug Rusco's podcast,
actually, I said, I'm sorry for exploding consensus reality. He said, it's your fault. I said,
yeah, it's my fault. Not really. But this is what has taken place. Yeah, I mean, I think
reality is individualized. It's small group. It's not the word I'm looking for. Anyway,
it's distributed. And there's not really an overall sense of where we are. I have the idea,
which I'm giving away the end of my book, but I've already discussed this in public a number of
times, that we already are in a singularity in the sense that the science fiction writer,
whose name is escaping me right now, who first described the singularity said that a singularity
was when AIs become smarter than human beings. And after that, we can't predict what will happen
or can't understand who we are. Werner Wenge is the name I was searching for. And my claim now is
that we've already been through a singularity, and the singularity is billions of people getting
online. And we can't understand the cognitive effects and the social effects and the political
effects of what has happened to us after that happened. And we can't predict what will happen
next. And we can't understand the neurological psychosis. And since you like to be positive,
maybe some evolutionary thing that might come from it, ultimately, we can't understand any of
what that is. So that's another kind of singularity. I know a number of people have talked about
social singularities, including Mark Healy, who brought the raves from Great Britain to San
Francisco. But this is my version of it. I think it's pretty valid.
So Carrie Long in the comments writes, Mondo 2000 was such a huge inspiration. I used to run this
weird sci-fi cafe in Los Angeles that carried a torch for Mondo 2000 style cyberculture.
Timothy Leary joined us once for our Thursday night storytelling event. Of course, the theme
that night was drug stories. I remember being there actually, I think during some kind of
conference that was happening in Pasadena. I think there was a party there and I was among the
visitors. Whoever was out there could respond to that. But I think I remember being at their place.
It's funny, you've mentioned raves a few times. I remember hearing about raves when I was living
in Missouri. Then I moved to Seattle and I finally got to go to a rave. By the time I got to one,
I was 28 years old, the oldest person there. At the time I felt that I was too old that I'd missed it.
Hey, I was 38 years old, 39 years old. Even with ecstasy, I was going home at four in the morning.
There were some great troopers who would make it through the night.
Yeah, it was an incredible intervention of psychedelia into modern culture that brought in
a lot of young people. We were sponsors of a number of raves. I don't even think we were asked
necessarily. We just saw our names and our name on the little things that would go around.
I went to a few different raves. Some of them were, I would say, quite authentic,
very sort of seat of the pants. Others were very polished, organized business affairs,
but with techno music and flashing lights and glow sticks and things. But yeah, it was quite a
range of events that would fall under the title of rave in the late 90s in the Seattle area.
Yeah. Well, everything becomes slick eventually. I think these times might be the decade of
being slick. No matter how underground you try to be, you kind of try to be slick at the same time,
I think. We have the tools to make things look good.
We have the tools to make things look good. Fortunately, I'm a visual screw up. So
when I do stuff by myself on my website, it looks pretty messy anyway, unless somebody comes along
to help me. Well, websites are kind of old news.
Yeah, for sure. Everything is either a social media platform or it's an app on your phone. But
the idea of going to a website is a little bit quaint these days.
Yeah, but people can come anyway. Mondo2000.com. It's there.
Still there. All right. Well, what relationships from the period of Mondo 2000's,
its pinnacle, still are important to you in 2023?
You mean personal relationships or?
Well, take that any way you like, any way that provides an interesting answer.
OK. Well, certainly the relationship to tech culture is still important to me. I'm still
fascinated by evolution and robotics and what's going on online. And there is a new excitement now
around artificial intelligence, around the blockchain. Our senior editor, St. Jude,
was one of the people to introduce Cypherpunk to the world. She named the Cypherpunks,
you know, the first people to develop. That's the word I'm looking for.
Cryptography?
Cryptography. Yeah. Well, they weren't the first people to develop cryptography, but
to develop crypto cash and stuff like that, the notion of total anonymity at that time
was associated with it. And total anonymity has proved to be a bit of a chimera as crypto capital
has evolved. Various forms of crypto cash and NFTs and online trading has been gifted to us.
It no longer has that pure anonymity. State actors and journalists and so forth can
penetrate behind those curtains somewhat unpredictably, but nevertheless they can.
So I'm interested in how those things evolved forward from the mid-90s when we knew all the
Cypherpunk people and their sort of anarcho-capitalist intentions, how it has come forward into this great
messy miasma of absolute confusion. And I do have this project on Against NFTs, which is a song,
and I'm not really against NFTs. Against NFTs, question mark, exclamation point, or period,
are actually, as the people who did the virtual reality for us framed it,
are you against NFTs? Question mark, exclamation point, period. So I'm fascinated by all that
kind of stuff. I'm slow to figure it all out. In some ways, I don't even want to figure it out.
In many ways, I feel like whatever is happening in crypto and in the generation of NFTs and all
that is really a reflection. It is very similar to what happened when in 2008 the online economy,
the financialization of capitalism nearly crashed the entire world economy. I think it's still that
same kind of fascination with peculiar forms of valuation that was predicted all the way back to
Marcel Duchamp throwing out a urinal in an art gallery. If I might merge different cultural
things at the same time. There has been this question of value and capital occurring throughout
the 20th century and into the 21st century. And it's now been thrown into perhaps another kind of
singularity where we can't predict what it will mean tomorrow or in a few weeks or in a few years.
I hope I'm not making sense because it doesn't make sense to me either.
Well, I have been listening to people rhapsodize about the potential of the blockchain
since like 2012 or so. And for many years, people who understood blockchain technology were very,
very excited about it. And they said, well, we're going to have a blockchain technology
and we're very, very excited about it. And they had this sort of mania about them, but I couldn't
really get from them a concrete example of how this thing would be used in a transformative way.
Other than just investing in Bitcoin and its copycats, nothing really caught on until the
NFT craze. And then it seemed like the whole purpose of the NFT, the non-fungible token,
was to create scarcity where none existed, to take something that could be copied infinitely,
like a JPEG, and say, well, this is a particular instance of a JPEG that has this identity as
an address on the blockchain. And if you want to have exclusive bragging rights to ownership of
this particular instance of this JPEG, here's the address. Pay some money or send us some Ethereum.
Yeah. The peculiar thing about it is, I hooked up as I was doing, as we did the song, I'm Against NFT,
Mondo Vanilli, also with the punk rock singer Blog Dahlia on some of the vocals. As we did that,
I was going to offer it as an NFT, of course, because that's the trickster attitude.
And I made contact with a lot of the people who really do NFTs well. And one of the things I
discovered was that exclusivity isn't necessarily valued. I mean, even that is in a place of chaos.
It's, well, maybe yes, maybe no, maybe it'll be offering people an exclusive to your song,
and maybe you won't. Evaluation with NFTs in this whole arena is even stranger than exclusivity.
It's another lost in cyberspace kind of thing that you can't nail down, which is marvelously
psychedelic, of course. The experience of psychedelia is that everything is a dance of atoms,
everything is a dance of atoms, and nothing can be laid down. There are no solids, and there are no
solid concepts or possibilities of ownership in cyberspace. One possibility of the blockchain that
I can think of is the idea that people have to supply their social security numbers to
legitimize themselves with banks and businesses. And everybody's social security numbers have been
hacked by a million hackers and the Russian mafia and the National Security Agency and
the pimply little 18-year-old guy next door and whatever you can think of. And the blockchain
might be a way in which we can legitimize ourselves without providing hackable data to anybody,
and therefore secure whatever security might still be available for people's financial data
while we're still playing in that kind of arena before the breakdown of everything into something
wonderful, remembering that you like to be optimistic.
Well, I don't want to be unreasonably optimistic.
Oh, do, do.
Yeah, I just don't have any use for unhinged pessimism because there's a lot of it. It's very,
very seductive. You're talking about anonymity and the blockchain, and the idea that this is going to
be some means by which people can transact with one another without the government being a party
to it. That seems fanciful. You have to provide a lot less information about yourself to open a bank
account these days than you do to open an account on a lot of crypto exchanges. The
know-your-customer regulations are really extreme. For one, I had to submit selfies,
my straight-on face and a profile. I also had to take a picture of my driver's license and
hold it up, and in the other hand, hold up a piece of paper with that day's date written on it so
that my ID, the date, and my face are all in one image. I had to submit that to open the account.
But I didn't have to go that far. Yeah.
This was for a South Korean exchange called Hotbit. Another one in Singapore that I have some
interaction with, Cake, Cake app. They also had know-your-customer requirements that were
way in excess of anything that I've ever had to produce, even to get a passport.
Yeah. So the idea that I'm anonymous to them is absurd.
Right. Well, the new idea is not anonymity, but trust. And I think that's also complicated as
well. I know the ideology, the positive utopian ideology behind NFTs and the blockchain that
they were developing, communities of trust. I mean, this whole leaning on technology,
I mean, Doug Rushkoff has really started to question it completely. And that your community
of trust should be probably just in the flesh, get outside and see some people and trust them.
And that the interfaces that we're using, including the blockchain,
are not really the best way to form communities. Although I must say that I spend a lot of time
in my home. So, you know, I kind of cure my own loneliness by being here, by being online,
by being... I mean, I just hate that Twitter is getting ruined. It was my favorite. I'm still
there. Come and see me. 2000 underline Mondo. That was Are You Serious? And there is more to
the conversation. It will conclude in the next episode of the CWROM Vault Podcast,
which will be CWROM Vault Podcast episode number 451, which you can access via my Patreon.
It's patreon.com slash KMO. That podcast is not available yet. It will be in the next couple of
days. All right. Well, you know, I just re-listened to that conversation with Are You Serious, took
some notes. There were things that I caught on the second time through that I didn't remember
hearing the first time through, or didn't really focus on the first time through.
The thing that stands out to me, you know, just having re-listened to this conversation,
or at least the first part of it, with Are You Serious, is that Mondo 2000 magazine,
which in my mind is just, you know, it's synonymous with the 90s, but really it's the early 90s,
when I was in college and then later in grad school in Columbia, Missouri. Whereas Wired
magazine... Wired magazine didn't start until 1993. And here's something I remember about the early,
early days of Wired magazine. I was online in the early 90s. I was online before there was a
World Wide Web, which I know for some people today, that doesn't really even make sense.
I mean, if there weren't web pages, if there weren't URLs, what does it mean to get online? Well,
there were different ways. There were... Are You Serious mentioned The Well, the whole Earth
electronic link? I was on that, but not an active participant, really. I don't think anybody would
remember me or my participation from The Well. But I was also on Lambda Moo. Moos and Mushes. A
mush was a multi-user simulated habitat, or a mud was a multi-user dungeon. These are all text-based,
like multiplayer, massively multiplayer online worlds, but with no graphics. It's all just
text-based. Did a lot of those. There was internet relay chat. You know, I mentioned that in the
conversation with Are You Serious? But in those early days of the pre-web internet, there was a
lot of excitement. But I was online in that period. Most people were not, but I was online
because I was at a university. I didn't have a computer. I didn't own a computer, but I would
go to a computer lab, and I would check my email, and I would also participate in Usenet newsgroups
and the other methods that I mentioned. And so, being online and being in communication
with people that I only knew from online, I considered myself to be a pretty online person.
But there was an early Wired magazine survey to figure out how online you were. And really,
what the thing was measuring was how much money do you have? Because the most online person was the
person who had a cell phone, you know, back in those days when most people did not have mobile
phones. You know, somebody who subscribed to cable TV. Basically, the more money you spent each month
to communicate or to get content, the more online you were. And that, I remember, that offended a lot
of people who, you know, felt really invested in this emerging online space, but didn't spend a lot
of money on it because they were at university and it was free. But as Are You Serious, you know,
lays out the timeline, the rise of Wired coincided with the decline of Mondo 2000.
And really, the emergence of the online reality did not compare favorably with the exotic and
romantic notions that people imagining the future were, you know, were describing in the pages of
Mondo 2000 magazine. The emerging reality did not match or live up to the fantasy. And that was
dispiriting to them. Whereas the folks at Wired, you know, they were all about business. They were
all about access. They were all about, you know, being in the room with the big people, making the
powerful big money decisions. And I know that's a very mercenary and sort of nihilistic description
of Wired magazine. I, as I mentioned, I bought the first issue on a newsstand, you know, in a
a bookstore in the magazine section in Japan. I spent like $30 for one issue with a magazine.
But, you know, having picked it up and flipped through it, I was just so excited by the subject
matter and by, you know, the writing that went into it. And I, you know, I was in Japan, I was
working in Japan, I was making good money. $30 wasn't, even though it was 1993, that wasn't a
lot of money for me. But again, I could subscribe for a year even with the overseas postage for
less than that. So I did. And I stayed subscribed for many years. And, you know, for me, Wired
magazine was, it was a window into that portion of the online world that I didn't really interact
with. And it was also, like Mondo 2000, a dream spinner. It was talking about things happening in
the near future. Things that were, you know, projects that were already underway but which
hadn't come to fruition and which seemed really exciting. But as I mentioned and as are you serious
mentioned, magazines used to be a much bigger deal than they are now. And I've just been thinking
about the different magazines that really meant a lot to me in different periods of my life.
And the very first magazine that I had multiple copies of and that just that introduced me to
the concept of one magazine which gets published again and again with different content, so there
are different issues, was a magazine called Dynamite. And it was made for elementary school
children. And I got it at school. You know, we used to have these book ordering opportunities at
school. And you could get magazines and posters and things like that. And I always got Dynamite
magazine. I remember having multiple copies of them. And I remember being, you know, a little kid
and like guests would come to our house. And without saying what I was doing and without mentioning
it, I would just go and get three or four copies of Dynamite magazine and come and just like sit on
the couch and read one and have the others sitting out just to show off, look, I have multiple copies,
multiple issues of a magazine. I thought that was pretty cool. Later, like in the 80s, the magazines
that meant a lot to me, well, the two biggest probably were Heavy Metal magazine, which is not
a music magazine. It was comics. You know, it was the basis of the animated movie Heavy Metal and
the various incarnations of it that came after, none of which were as good as the, you know, the
first one from what was it, 82, I think. And then Marvel Comics, they had a line of creator-owned
comics, you know, like the Spider-Man or Iron Man or, you know, any of the famous Marvel characters.
They're not owned by any one creator. They're owned by the corporation. And they pay different
people to come in and write and illustrate stories with these characters. But the people doing the
writing, they don't own the characters. But, you know, those same writers did have their own
projects, their own ideas, you know, their own characters, their own stories. And they didn't
really have the opportunity to publish those stories until Epic Comics, the, you know, the line,
the sort of branched, like specialty line of comics from Marvel Comics came out. And there was also
a big glossy magazine, very much like Heavy Metal, that had a lot of adult-themed,
lavishly illustrated stories in it. And that was called Epic Magazine. And Heavy Metal and Epic
were epic to me. They really, they fueled my dreams. They fueled my artistic ambitions.
And then also in the 80s, magazines that meant a lot to me were like fitness magazines, Muscle and
Fitness, Flex, things like this, the Joe Weider line of magazines and bodybuilding products and,
you know, the bodybuilding lifestyle of the late 80s. I was into it. Of course, even before any of
that, I guess around the same time that I was into Dynamite Magazine, I learned of such things as
Playboy Magazine and Penthouse Magazine. And in the 70s and the 80s, you know, particularly the
early 80s, that was pornography. I mean, yeah, there was like in the mid 80s and afterwards,
you did have porn videos on VHS, but I didn't have a VHS player. And even, you know, even when I got
one, it was in the living room of my mother's house. I couldn't really watch porn there.
So, you know, it was magazines. Magazines were the vector for pornography from my preteen or even my,
you know, elementary school days because big shock folks, even young boys who haven't been through
puberty yet are still obsessed with sex. And back in the day, catching a glimpse of a naked woman
was not easily done. And when it was done, it was usually on the pages of a magazine like Playboy.
Later, around the same time I was reading Mondo 2000, there was a magazine, I mean, it was
running throughout the 80s. It was called Omni, and it was a mixture of science fantasy, science
fact. It was pretty fluffy, not really scientifically rigorous most of the time, but, you know, it was a
stimulus to the imagination again. And then Bob Guccione, the publisher of Penthouse Magazine,
he bought Omni or he somehow, maybe he owned it the whole time, but there was a time in the 90s
when it was very clear that Penthouse and Omni were owned and published by the same group because
they looked very similar. Like they had the same fonts, the same page layout templates.
Just you could tell these were two, two instantiations of the same project. And then later,
you know, I discovered other types of magazines, film magazines, I used to, and science fiction
magazines, I used to read Starlog quite a bit. And then there was a whole host of magazines devoted
to gory films like Splatter magazines, things like, gosh, Fangoria, I guess, was the granddaddy of
that genre. But, you know, are you serious? Mentioned driving a long way to go to New York
City to buy magazines. And I remember, you know, I've always had family in New York City, so I've
been going there since I was a child. And I remember going to the store and buying magazines,
and I remember in my teens discovering that there were magazines that I could get in New York City
that were not available in Kansas City, Missouri, which was where I was living at the time. One of
those was called Film Threat, and it was about small independent films or horror films, or, you
know, it was just films that were off the beaten track. And Chris Gore, I think, is the name of
the publisher. I now see him on YouTube all the time. It's kind of like YouTube has taken the place
of magazines. You know, the magazine publishers, the renegades, sort of underground rebel magazine
publishers of the 80s and 90s have YouTube channels now, as do I. Another magazine in the same vein,
for me anyway, as Omni and Mondo 2000 and Wired was The Whole Earth Review. I think, are you serious?
Are you serious? I mentioned Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog a couple times, but there was,
I think it was a quarterly magazine called The Whole Earth Review, and it featured a lot of stories
about science, science fiction, you know, speculative futurism, that sort of thing. And like Mondo 2000,
it had a very advanced sort of arty, you might say, design sensibility. And also very important,
you know, in terms of print was the letters pages of different magazines and also different comic
books. Like I had a letter, I wrote a letter to the publisher of Sandman, you know, DC Comics,
which got printed. It got printed in a edited version. It was a shorter version on the page
than, you know, what I sent them. And also, you know, the opportunity to have your letter published
in Seribus. Seribus was an independent black and white comic by a guy named Dave Simm, who is
thoroughly canceled now for being anti-feminist. But for a time, you know, that was one of these
smarter comic books available at the comic book store. And, you know, the people who were writing
in were writing high quality content. So the letters page of Seribus was kind of an event.
It was a thing, you know. And now all of that is just gone. What remains of magazines? I mean,
the only magazine I subscribe to now is Foreign Affairs. And I just do it because it's cheap.
And because I like to read on paper sometimes, you know, where I can highlight and make notes in the
margins and whatnot. And it persists, you know, it sits. It's an object sitting in my living space
that I glance repeatedly and, you know, I spot it repeatedly over the course of the day.
And the web's just not like that. You know, the web's in my phone and it's always with me.
And it's, you know, it's expansive and everything you want is there pretty much. But it's not,
it's not a replacement for magazines. And, you know, I know magazines still exist. You might have
one in view right now, but they don't occupy the same space in our heads, in our imaginations,
in our lives, you know, in our social interactions that they used to. And I miss them.
All right. Now back to Bard. Bard's a funny name for me for this thing, because,
you know, the early days of podcasts for me, the defining show, like the light in the darkness,
was the Psychedelic Salon podcast. And, you know, the light within the light was Terrence McKenna,
somebody who I had encountered in the pages of Mondo 2000 magazine in the 90s.
But Terrence is often referred to as the Bard. And Bard is the name of Google's large language
model interface for search. And so I asked Bard, describe the impact of the reduced role that
magazines play in daily life in the 21st century. And Bard responded, the reduced role that magazines
play in daily life in the 21st century is due to a number of factors, including the rise of the
internet, the decline of print media, and the changing way people consume news and entertainment.
The internet has made it possible for humans to access information from a variety of sources,
including magazines, newspapers, and websites. This has led to a decline in the number of people
who read magazines on a regular basis. The decline of print media has also contributed to the reduced
role of magazines. Newspapers and magazines are facing increasing competition from online sources,
and many publications have been forced to reduce their print runs or even shut down altogether.
The changing way people consume news and entertainment has also had an impact on the
role of magazines. People are increasingly getting their news and entertainment from social media,
streaming services, and other online sources. This has made it more difficult for magazines
to compete for attention. Despite these challenges, magazines continue to play an
important role in daily life. They provide in-depth coverage of topics that are not always
covered by other media outlets. They also offer a unique perspective on the world that can be both
entertaining and informative. And then, of course, you got to do a vanity search, right? So I asked
Bard, what do you know about the C-Realm podcast? And it's funny because it gave me three paragraphs.
First paragraph. The C-Realm podcast is a weekly interview-based program featuring discussions on
topics ranging from a possible technological singularity to entheogenic exploration, the
relocalization of community and agriculture, and the competing narratives by which we define
ourselves and navigate our world. It is hosted by KMO, who has been podcasting since 2006.
I laugh because I'm pretty sure I wrote that. I think Bard just went out into the internet,
and the first thing it found is something that I wrote. Second paragraph is much shorter.
The podcast has been praised for its in-depth interviews and its wide range of topics. It has
also been criticized for its length and its sometimes esoteric content. That's odd. I
didn't write that. I don't know where that comes from. I guess it comes from awarenessproject.org
slash podcasts, which is one of only two sources listed here. The other one being podcasts.apple.com
slash us slash podcast slash C-Realm. So criticized for its length. That's interesting. The podcast
has always been about an hour, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less, you know, maybe as
long as 90 minutes. But I guess those criticisms came before Joe Rogan, where the three and a half,
four hour podcast became quite mainstream. And then the third and final paragraph.
The C-Realm podcast is a valuable resource for anyone interested in exploring the intersection
of technology, culture, and the human condition. It is a podcast that will make you think, and it
is a podcast that will challenge you. Now, that's obviously very complimentary, and I didn't write
it. I don't recognize it. I'm guessing that came from a listener. So whoever wrote that, thank you.
And thank you to Bard for bringing it to my attention. All right, I'm going to leave it there.
As always, if you have feedback, I guess the best way to get it to me is to either go to
patreon.com slash KMO and find the entry for this episode. It will always be free. It will not be
paywalled. You don't have to support me on Patreon to access it, but you can leave a message there.
All of these podcasts also get put up on YouTube, and in fact, more people access them via YouTube
than they do via all the podcast platforms combined. So finding this episode on YouTube
and commenting there might be the way to go. I used to give out my email and encourage people
to write to me there. My email inbox is so full of junk now, it's really easy for me to miss important
emails. So yeah, that's not the way to go anymore. Probably YouTube. YouTube's going to be your best
bet. All right, as I mentioned, the conversation with Ken Goffman, aka Are You Serious, will
continue on the next episode of the Sea Realm Vault podcast, and we start to get into culture
war clashes there. Are You Serious lives in California. He's been a part of the hippie
scene since the 60s. He's definitely not a Republican by any stretch, and even people
who can kind of hang with old school Republicans, they're just allergic to Trump. And so I've noticed
that when I'm talking to certain people, they'll throw out really hyperbolic criticisms of
Donald Trump as a sort of test to see if you are simpatico with them on a cultural or ideological
level. And I'm not. I didn't vote for the guy. I don't like to listen to him. I find his personality
odious, but I don't think he's the devil. I don't think he's Hitler. I don't think he's any sort of
authoritarian. And in fact, in terms of his policies, I like the fact that he didn't start
a lot of new wars, or any. I think we dodged a bullet in 2016. Anyway, if that sets you off,
you know how to contact me. All right, I'm out. Thanks for listening. Talk to you again in one
week's time. Stay well.