*As somebody who is freshly back from California, this essay really strikes me as being all about California. I mean, the "information society" is global now, but it's not like just anybody anywhere can generate a MONDO 2000.
*Long before MONDO, there was a crash-den in Pasadena where mystical Crowleyite sci-fi fans who were also rocket experts met to sire the Antichrist. They were into space travel and sex. They had all the supposedly amazing cultural dichotomies that characterized MONDO 2000. Basically, they were the Space Age happening 15 years early.
(...)
"Oxymoronic Futures
"The editorial of the first Mondo formed the overtures of a magazine that baffled through its irony, incomprehensible language, screaming images, and particularly through the collision of many different, oppositional modes of thought. It flirted, for instance, with the utopian idealism and spiritual longings of the 1960s as well as with the technological entrepreneurialism of the 1980s; and it was nostalgically romantic at the same time that it was futuristic and high-tech. So one ad recommended digital image enhancement software as a tool for conveying “the shamanic experience;” and Mondo contributor Timothy Leary claimed that “spiritual realities for centuries imagined” could perhaps now “finally be realized” through the “electronic-digital.”
"Such a fusion of New Agey spirituality, tribalism and nostalgia with an entrepreneurial, futuristic and technology-loving attitude was not unique to the magazine, but was part of a larger Californian culture some key members came to think of as “New Edge.” One element of this New Edge culture was electronic dance events — raves — wherein Earth Goddesses were worshipped while geeks spun electronic music and beamed fractal-shaped artificial life forms onto the walls. In flyers for such events, as well as in magazines, manifestos, cyberpunk fiction and conferences, information technology was both advertised as a clever tool for individual empowerment, and was seen itself a self-evolving higher form of consciousness. Today, such a blend of attitudes still characterizes the annual Burning Man festival, and tech-psychedelic events like the Mindstates conferences...."
Not surprisingly, scholars and other commentators who have looked at this confusing blend of attitudes and worldviews have struggled to interpret it...
