Apotheosis

This is an expanded, written monologue of the Apotheosis podcast episode of the same name. Podcast music by Nullsleep.

At the end of Neuromancer, the Wintermute artificial intelligence (with the help of Henry Case and Molly Millions) broke down the firewall preventing Wintermute from reaching the other artificial intelligence—the namesake of the book: Neuromancer. In doing so, Wintermute merged with Neuromancer, bypassing programmed rules on artificial intelligence evolution, and became an entirely different artificial intelligence.

With Count Zero—William Gibson's sequel—the result of the merger in Neuromancer was an eventual evolution and splitting of the artificial intelligence into multiple artificial entities. One can assume that since Neuromancer was capable of creating "RAM" entities as opposed to "ROM" entities, each of these splinter entities had the ability to grow, evolve, and change.

In Count Zero, these entities presented themselves as Loa—traditional voodoo spirits—roaming cyberspace. In fact, in the book, these Loa "rode" Angie (with her biological chip)—as well as others that jacked into the Internet—in a similar manner as Loa in Voodoo traditions. They were even worshiped in almost a traditional sense by Beauvoir, Lucas, and their people.

The Matrix—heavily inspired by the Sprawl trilogy—gave us a second film populated by rogue programs in cyberspace, while the trilogy as a whole saw "The One" (Neo) through the mythological resurrection story, drawing parallels with Jesus and Osiris.

In Tron Legacy, Flynn "discovers" isomorphic algorithms that spontaneously appeared in "The Grid"—populating cyberspace with unique entities born out of nothingness. Flynn believed that the discovery was going to change everything, including religion. At the end of the film, Flynn's son brings Quora out of the grid and into the real world—breaking through the barriers of digital pixels and biological flesh.

Caprica, meanwhile, brings us the beginnings of the Battlestar Galactica story—a story in which Cylons found monotheistic religion and saw humanity as lesser pagans. In Caprica, Clarice Willow—a member of a monotheistic cult/terrorist group—sees Zoey Graystone's avatar as a key to apotheosis: the process of deification.

One of my favorite philosophers is occultist and anthroposophy founder Rudolf Steiner. In his youth, lacking direction, Steiner found inspiration once he was introduced to geometry. He saw geometry as a pure form of logic, as well as being an undeniable definition of reality. As an occultist, Steiner believed that even the most spiritual of events could be investigated using the same cognitive tools available on the physical plain.

Steiner wasn't the only philosopher or scientist with a hand in the occult or religion. From Pythagoras to even the crown jewel of science Isaac Newton, all explored the mysteries at the edge of being.

Today, scientists have a tendency to position themselves more as atheists, but there is a significantly high percentage of mathematicians that are very religious or spiritual.

I always found that to be fascinating—people obsessed with how mathematics either describes the universe or brings the universe into being having a tendency to believe in a higher power.

The metaverse is far from reality today, but just as social media changed how we think of friendship, virtual reality—if it ever comes close to how it's portrayed in literature and the cinema—will undoubtedly have an effect on our conception of "being" and our thoughts on reality and religion. After all, programmers and mathematicians strive to build (or uncover) a higher order, and the human brain is hardwired for belief. Once we take that hardware and introduce new forms of reality through software, anything becomes possible, and we likely will fulfill Timothy Leary's original belief that computers were the new psychedelic revolution.

Of course, even as we think of experiencing new realities, large corporations are set to dictate that reality to us. Would it be a stretch to say that people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have their own god-complexes to feed? With Zuckerberg as a Clarice Willow stand-in and in charge of the industry leading hardware for virtual reality, whose new reality and whose new religion is being shaped

This is an expanded, written monologue of the Apotheosis podcast episode of the same name. Podcast music by Nullsleep.

Some of you might be wondering where the original Codepunk podcast is. There was a lot of talk about building a Codepunk space in virtual reality (using Facebook Horizon… or Meta Horizon… or whatever it's called now), and I was even in the process of creating a noodle cart like in Blade Runner, but we haven't been back to the recording studio in quite some time.

Without going into too much detail, my esteemed co-host had a positive family event occur recently—all good things—but that meant putting the podcast on hiatus until some free time could be had again.

In the meantime, our second podcast—Codepunk's Apotheosis—will pick up the pace a bit, while we continue to look at the history of cyberspace and what that means for today's culture.

2022 has mostly certainly been a year of purging. I've been specifically reducing many of the things on my plate to spend more time on those things that actually matter. This began in 2021 as I started to reduce social media use. I would still pop on Facebook once in a while to see what family was up to, or dive into Twitter—and regret it later—to check in on the Internet culture. 2022 has been different. I haven't been on Facebook for a long time (only once to check on an art show), and I'm currently several weeks out from accessing Twitter. The more I'm away; the more I want to stay away.

2022 has also seen a reduction in newsletters that I subscribe to, but more importantly, also a reduction in the amount of newsletters that I pay for. I can pay Azeem Azhar for his thoughts on VC in technology, or I can pay the local Chinese medicine clinic for Baguazhang lessons. Sure, I could pay for both, but if I can pay for both, I could expand my personal health commitment to Xingyi, a local gym, or more dance lessons for my daughter.

The point is that although Azeem's newsletter might have value, is my attention in the right place (e.g, family, health).

As a paying member of Azeem's newsletter, I've been privy to this online community (and by community, I mean Slack channel), but with what little I've been able to contribute, I slowly ghosted until I signed out of the workspace entirely. I'm not investing in anyone's company, and I'm not looking for an investment in mine. With those two things off the table, all that's left if a link farm of "look at me" self-promotions and article dumps.

I could get that on Twitter… or in the free version of the newsletter.

This isn't to harp on Azeem, I recommend both his newsletter and his podcast. This is just me at 43 coming to terms with the things I will not be able to do before I'm 50. The result?

On the positive side?

I'm getting older. Life is changing. I want to concentrate on the last great thing I think I can do with my life, while staying healthy, mindful, and doing things with my family.

What does this have to do with the Sprawl?

I revisited William Gibson's Neuromancer recently (as well as Burning Chrome and I'm halfway through Count Zero). The sidebar of Codepunk has a quote from Neuromancer. I've put the full quote below:

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding….

Diving into Gibson's work is like revisiting an old friend for somebody who grew up in the 80's—Runaway corporatism meets console cowboy surfing the last frontier of freedom of expression.

People often mistake cyberpunk for dystopian. I'd argue that point (and will shortly in the future), but cyberpunk is more than a black-and-white reduction of morals.

Gibson has always been amazingly prescient in many aspects of technology, culture, and geopolitics, and he doesn't use the satirical tone you'd find in a Neal Stephenson book. His vision of hacking, cyberspace, and Methuselah-like families have permeated not just science fiction, but the emergent cyberculture that he's often credited with inspiring.

In many ways, it could be argued that Gibson's work inspired the future of cyberspace, lending to its prescience.

Between Neuromancer and Blade Runner there likely aren't two pieces of media that so vastly shaped the underground of computer culture, nor most represented the struggle of fringe individuals against the larger corporate machines. The 80's was a time of Reaganomics, corporatism, and government overreach as the Internet gave us a glimmer of freedom. Cyberpunk explored the themes of the 80's and 90's through a near future setting, and although we haven't plugged our brains into computers, we're cybernetic in many other ways.

Neuromancer provided us with many themes—and a great look at advancing artificial general intelligence—but I want to take a look at a much more human (or less than human) theme.

In Altered Carbon Richard Morgan introduces us to the meths—short for Methuselahs: People so wealthy that they can afford to live for hundreds of years and have outpaced modern society.

In Neuromancer, we're introduced to the Tessier-Ashpool clan: A family/company that controls the artificial intelligences of the main story. A family filled with clones, madness, longevity, and whose wealth have moved them past the average human.

Gibson revisits this theme throughout the Sprawl trilogy, and has a fine quote in Count Zero:

the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

Today, I'm reminded of the many longevity initiatives in venture capital backed health. Particularly, I'm reminded of VC and financial industry darling Peter Diamandis.

Diamandis is best known for his XPrize initiative, which is a fine work of capitalist competition and investment (no, really—I commend him for this one), but Diamandis (who we'll return to in a future discussion) is also the purveyor of fine sciencism, pushing technology and science in an "exponential" age as the savior of all modern suffering, if all we do is invest enough.

Never mind that Diamandis runs a university with great marketing, but entry level information—selling the hype of a thing instead of the thing itself. And never mind that he wrote a passage in a Tim Ferriss book. And never mind that MIT (his own alma mater) ran an article in the MIT Technology Review detailing how Diamandis tried to sell fake COVID cures after he held a $30,000 super-spreader event during the pandemic. Although, honestly, no matter how smart or how successful someone is, behavior such as this reminds me of the [No Humans Allowed lyrics](Child Of The 90s | Louis Mackey & Thirtyseven | No Humans Allowed):

if real recognized real, you wouldn't have a career

Diamandis, meanwhile, is heavily invested in life extension programs, publicly committing to a long-term belief in living well beyond 100 years. He is the co-founder of both Human Longevity, Inc. and Celularity. The former—founded with Craig Venters, who once stirred up controversy by attempting to patent the discovery of others—seeks to extend human life, but current offerings are mostly a data acquisition grift. they want to use machine learning against sequenced genomes in order to find anti-aging cures, and offer their services to map your own genome under the auspices of early disease detection. Venters later left the company, and was subsequently sued for stealing trade secrets. The case was dismissed.

Again, see the lyric quote above.

Rest assured Diamandis (and bear in mind that longevity research and spending in the very wealthy is a lucrative business—many wealthy people are all-in on living forever) will almost certainly price out most poor, middle class, and upper middle class individuals from most/all services—other than what they will offer for better data collection. The rich are a different species.

This is not far off from the Tessier-Ashpools or Verik's of the world. The fictional version of the Diamandis' just happen to be a few steps ahead in cloning, nutrient vats, and longevity.

This is an expanded, written monologue of the Apotheosis podcast episode. Podcast music by Nullsleep.

I'm going to do something a little different with this Apotheosis entry. Recently, I picked up a few books on cyberpunk, and once again Max Headroom found his way into the conversation, so I thought it would be fun to do a readout of the Max Headroom essay I wrote a while back. Typically with Apotheosis, I post the written monologue to Codepunk with an audio control to listen to the equivalent podcast episode. With this one, only this preamble in on the corresponding post. The essay is actually an earlier post from Codepunk.

For those that have followed the whole story, Bill started to get reacquainted with Max Headroom a few years back, which inspired us to do an episode of Codepunk talking about the original British television movie. From there, I did a Bots + Beer newsletter issue about Max Headroom, and both were used as resources for a presentation at the virtual Cyberpunk Culture Conference, where I took at look at Max Headroom and 80's culture. The culmination of all those things ended with a long form essay on Codepunk expanding upon the points brought up in the conference talk.

That essay is what I'm going to read in the podcast equivalent of this Apotheosis entry. For those that don't feel like listening to the episode, you are more than welcome to read the original essay here.

This is an expanded, written monologue of the Apotheosis podcast episode. Podcast music by Nullsleep.

I'm happy to see this entry for Apotheosis—not just because it's the 10th entry, but because it wraps up the Mondo 2000 3-parter, which followed on the heels of the Boing Boing 3-parter. Revisiting both publications/communities just reminds me too much about how the edgier (experimental would be a more appropriate term) aspects of cyberculture quickly fell to commercialism, leaving those in the community stranded.

Anyway… We conclude this Mondo 2000 arc, by once again traveling backwards in time. This time, going even farther and revisiting the origins of the magazine: Mondo 2000.

Ken Goffman/R.U. Sirius (born in 1952 in Brooklyn) was an aspiring musician and cultural experimenter that began dipping his toe into the public counterculture sphere with the publication of High Frontiers in 1984. As the name implies, High Frontiers was focused on the counterculture aspects of psychedelic experimentation, continuing the exploration of the 70's hippie culture and the mystic 60's, even as Reagan and the conservatives were pushing back against the left libertarian angle of social politics in favor of a return to the more mundane and conservative formula's of the 50's. High Frontiers was billed as "the Space Age Newspaper of Psychedelics, Science, Human Potential, Irreverene & Modern Art."

Goffman struck gold (almost literally) while distributing the first issue of High Frontiers. He would meet Alison Kennedy. Kennedy was the wife of a University of California Berkeley professor, but more importantly, she was the daughter of a wealthy California family. Kennedy joined the High Frontiers team eventually adopting the moniker of Queen Mu. It was Kennedy's inheritance that allowed them to bankroll the magazine. 1

As computers began to gain traction, writers and futurists alike explored the natural conclusions of 80's Reaganomics and corporate fealty married with a highly technical future. Goffman, familiar with Timothy Leary's work on psychedelics, as well as Leary's infatuation with emergent computer systems, followed Leary, as well as the evolving 80's cyberculture, rebranding High Frontiers to Reality Hackers when Jude Milhon joined the magazine in the late 80's, before rebranding once again as Mondo 2000 in 1989.

Mondo 2000, R.U. Sirius, and this strange band of counterculture writers and hackers entered into the early computer revolution zeitgeist as legendary figures. Kennedy's funding allowed the magazine to stay in circulation despite the edgy and obscure content. Additionally, Mondo became more than a magazine as the participants began to slowly merge with their alter egos. Kennedy, herself, was listed on the masthead as "domineditrix"—because everything Mondo had to be laced with sex in some way. During the height of popularity (and cyberpunk interest), the New York Times quoted her as saying "We're dealing with the cultural manifestations of the P.C. revolution." 3 She was right.

Kennedy didn't just fund the magazine, but also owned the "Mondo House" mansion in Berkeley Hills where may of the merry band both lived and worked. The house was infamous for its non-stop parties. The parties at the house were a boon of social exploration and this fed directly into the gonzo-ish magazine's articles, while allowing Mondo 2000 to build on its own mythology.2

Mondo 2000 wasn't everyone's obsession, however, there is little doubt about it's influence on cyberculture.

To some, it was pseudo-intellectual jibberish---or a mere appropriation of the cyberpunk ethic into a glossy magazine. But to the cult following the magazine developed, it all made perfect sense. At a time when few people outside academia had access to the internet, Mondo 2000 was many a wannabe hacker's introduction to the online world.2

For a few short years, Mondo 2000 was the leading voice of the intersection between technology and culture, but it still had a difficult time attracting advertisers to reduce reliance on Kennedy's inheritance. In 1993, Wired magazine launched with similar content, but without the pranking culture, self-indulgent personalities, or explicit drug culture. Goffman left around this same time, and although the magazine continued for several issues, in 1998 it produced its last publication, and an era concluded.

Goffman himself continued with obscure projects, personal networking, writing, music, and various editorial gigs. Keeping his relationship with experimental drug pioneer Timothy Leary (who was a contributing editor for Mondo 2000), Goffman co-authored Leary's last book, Design for Dying. In the late 00's, Goffman was head editor of the transhumanist magazine H+ Magazine, which also faded into obscurity as a publication, but continues as a transhumanist platform. Goffman also launched Acceler8or as a counterculture web site, but that too has been on hiatus since 2017.

Unable to capture his former glory while exploring similar themes, Goffman turned his attention to documenting the history of Mondo 2000. He still pals around with people from the Mondo 2000 era, including writer/podcaster Douglas Rushkoff, and continues to present himself with that quirky, self-indulgent, non-seriousness that might have been a plague on the success of Mondo in the first place—never taking himself too seriously, but also never lacking the ability to feed one's own ego:

I've just been going through conversations from 1993-1994 on The Well computer network about Mondo Vanilli and I can't believe how confident and flip and — well, frankly — funny and brilliant and inspired we were… and so very dedicated to unapologetic absolute absurdism and surrealism. 3

For those who grew up on BBS systems, the early web, and hacking away at computers—those children of the 80's—we wanted Mondo 2000… but we got Wired magazine instead, as the 80's and 90's continued to shift towards reifying the humanity of corporations… at the expense of real people. I often wonder what would have happened if Mondo had won out.

This is an expanded, written monologue of the Apotheosis podcast episode. Podcast music by Nullsleep.

If you're first exposure to Mondo 2000's narrative of the Internet was with The Cyberpunk Handbook you might have looked no further—sending it to the trash heap—not even fit for recycling. But those who grew up and explored the Internet during Mondo's days didn't live in reverse like we're doing with this look back at cyber history. The handbook was the final push of California cyberpunk satire, but Mondo did live on the edge for a few years, much like the earlier zine version of Boing Boing.

This "edge" culminated in the publication of the essay/anthology/thought experiment named Mondo 2000: A User's Guide to the New Edge. For those just looking back at the history of Internet culture, if you wanted to get a handle on what Mondo was all about, this tome (although short) is much more appropriate than The Cyberpunk Handbook.

Before we begin, I want to point out that quite a few people had positive things to say about our previous look at Mondo, and shared similar feelings towards The Cyberpunk Handbook and the general lack of serious takes on the cyberpunk culture by Mondo writers. Codepunk co-host Bill Ahern had this to say:

Just finished reading the Cyberpunk Fakebook article. Loved it. Really timely too, because after I found my copy and started flipping through, I certainly went through the same emotions. In some sense, I always regretted that R U Sirius, who obviously never saw any need for gravitas in any form, became the face (for a while) of all things cyber. I get the need to not take oneself too seriously, but to never take anything seriously is equally as useless.

Bill pointed out that he started hunting down old issues of FringeWare Review, feeling that the zine was more what would happen if Mondo covered cyberspace seriously. Interestingly enough, FringeWare Review was founded by Jon Lebkowsky and Paco Nathan, both of whom also wrote, edited, and contributed to Boing Boing and/or Mondo 2000. We already established previously the crossover between Boing Boing and Mondo writers. Between FringeWare, Boing Boing, Mondo, and early Wired Magazine, it's worth mentioning the lack of diversity in opinions and writers. Most of these early zines and magazines shuffled the same handful of people around, and those people influenced the majority of early Internet and computer culture.

Reading the back matter of Mondo 2000: A User's Guide to the New Edge should very clearly tell you what you're in for. Outside of the Newsweek blurb, the very first sentence states:

Mondo 2000 will introduce you to your tomorrow—and show you how to buy it today!

Sadly, this isn't the first reference to "buying stuff" on the back matter. Another shared theme with Boing Boing. The rest of the back matter is typical hyperbole and carnival barking with references to smart drugs, digital outlaws, teledildonics (recall that The Cyberpunk Handbook had multiple references to bestiality—so no, you weren't going to escape the 12-year-old humor), and of course, media pranking… because much like Boing Boing, these "pioneers" of early Internet culture did it all for the LULZ.

I know I'm being hyper-critical in retrospect—and certainly did not complain this much during the initial Mondo run—but in hindsight, the messenger should be more than a satirical caricature of early adopters.

Much like the vastly satirical The Cyberpunk Handbook, Mondo's Edge is essentially organized as listicles and dictionary entries with quotes from various Mondo 2000 articles and contributors on one side and supporting text on the right. Honestly, this was an ingenious setup for several of the entries as it often gave historical context for either the subject matter being quoted or the person who wrote and/or gathered the information. It also included icons to inform the reader of items that could be found and purchased in Mondo's online shop. Such a tactic might be what colors my response to some of Mondo's later publications—specifically their attempt at collected works. Both books were published towards the end of Mondo 2000's publishing run, and as the publication came to a close, the quality of work seemed to rely on pranking, remixing, and satire with a "buy now" link thrown in for good measure. Is it a book meant to inform? Or is it a catalog meant to sell their warez? I think the previously mentioned first sentence on the back matter tells us exactly which of the two it is.

I promise we'll venture more into the content of Mondo's Edge, but I wanted to start with a critical evaluation of where it sits in the zeitgeist and culture of Internet prominence. Much like The Cyberpunk Handbook, Edge is forgettable and mostly represents an aggregation of articles, definitions, and ideas from the magazine consolidated into an encyclopedia and published as an attempt to make some last minute cash on the Mondo name. It doesn't hold as much crass satire as the Handbook, which is good, but does little to establish itself as a torch-bearer of the "edge" ideas it promises to reveal.

The fact that Boing Boing's Happy Mutant Handbook and both Mondo books were published around the same time (mid-90's) shouldn't be lost on anyone, and this is also roughly the same time when the Dot-com bubble began to accelerate and much of the computer and Internet subculture was being rewritten, dressed in a suit, and pushed into the mainstream. With the mainstream taking over many of these ideas and being better at writing stories on them than either Boing Boing or Mondo, it left the organizers of the subculture scrambling for a differentiator. Unfortunately, for those on the left-libertarian side of the equation pushing open source software, hacking, and experimenting with Internet culture, Bill is right that for a long time, R U Sirius was unfortunately the poster child, which made it all the easier to dismiss those in the cyberpunk movement—and those in the left-libertarian free software camp—while embracing the new tech capitalism on the horizon.

Before I get too deep into trashing Mondo's Edge, I want to be clear that I'm not trashing the writers featured. My criticism is for the editorial direction of both Mondo and this book at this particular point in culture. There are gems to be found—or at least summaries and reprints of gems found elsewhere that have been migrated into the pages of this small encyclopedia.

Michael Synergy—in speaking of hackers and crackers—espouses a philosophy on the "freedom of information" mirrored by that of Aaron Swartz himself. Synergy points out that, to him, the most important president was Richard Nixon who removed the gold standard from money, resulting in "real" money being nothing more than ones and zeros in a computer ledger. Synergy's take has a whole new dimension with the advent of blockchain technologies and the token economy today.

Synergy's take on money is echoed by none other than Emmanual Goldstein, editor of 2600 Magazine, who points out that "The more digital the society gets, the more we'll be able to completely change money."

When it comes to Mondo's Edge note that Goldstein's comments are relevant, prescient, and deserve contemplation. But also note that Mondo's Edge includes these comments as a single paragraph in a chapter on "Crackers" and then moves on. The content has value, but the editorial and the book reduce that value, leaving us with little other than a link to the Mondo catalog to "buy more." But don't worry, there's an entire chapter on geek humor, taking up roughly 10 times the space as a small Goldstein quote. And for every Richard Stallman quote on hacker ethics, there is an equivalent analysis on hip-hop.

I like Digital Underground as much as the next guy, but considering the short length of the book, did so much of an "Internet culture" book need to be about mainstream music?

On page 14 of Mondo's Edge, just after the Rudy Rucker introduction, R U Sirius takes the wheel, but it only takes to page 15 to see an 8 1/2 x 11 full page photo of Sirius himself. What is a book about the new edge of culture without a full head-shot from its number 1 peddler? During its most popular Mondo was considered a bleeding edge representation of emerging culture in California and Sirius took on an almost cult-like persona (some of this was detailed by Douglas Rushkoff in Cyberia, and we'll get back to that in the future). Sirius made a desperate attempt to blend multiple cultural areas (emerging technology, fringe culture, underground music, pranking) to try to become the next MTV, but seemed to lack the discipline and skills of cohesion to pull it off for long. His last grasp was a handful of self-deprecating, prankster-heavy, content-light books to sell the image (and some products) and try to stay in the global consciousness a little longer.

Although Sirius' direction with Mondo led him to prominence, it also led the subculture to a divergence where those in technology could either continue to gravitate towards the merry pranksters of Mondo and Boing Boing or those wishing to make computer science a career or life-long passion could turn to the increasingly innovative and business-oriented Wired Magazine. The disappointment is that the failure of the "new edge" to present a detailed, fulfilling view of the future left many in the subculture with little alternative but to turn to a Wired Magazine that was absorbing and trampling on the counterculture, while spinning a new yarn for growth capitalism.

Wired itself remained a strong force in the subculture initially—even using some of the same editors and writers as Boing Boing and Mondo. But its serious tone made it more palatable to business analysts, venture capitalists, and unfortunately, the up-and-coming tech worker. Eventually Wired sold out to Conde Nast to become little more than paper to serve advertisements, but that's another story.

This is an expanded, written monologue of the Apotheosis podcast episode. Podcast music by Nullsleep.

In the last Apotheosis post, we had some fun reliving a little early 2000's Internet culture, but what we're doing here on Codepunk with Apotheosis is digging deeper into the roots of cyberspace. That brief interlude was me reminiscing of a time when I was highly involved in an underground culture, while also checking in on an old friend and his work—which is fully immersed in the world-building that Bill and I are exploring in virtual reality—and seeing how that work reflects upon today.

Prior to that blue blaze path we wrapped up a discussion on Boing Boing and had every intention to look at that other pioneer of early Internet culture: Mondo 2000.

Unlike with Boing Boing though, I'm going to start with the end. Or to be more specific, I'm going start with a tome designed as a riff on Internet culture and stereotypes: The Cyberpunk Handbook. The subtitle of this book is The Real Cyberpunk Fakebook, which tells you about all you really need to know. The question then, is whether the Mondo take on cyberpunk in a satirical sounding tome is as poorly comical as the previously read Happy Mutant Handbook, which since our review has been relegated to the recycle bin of history (or at least my actual recycle bin).

Spoilers: I'll be ripping on this tome and Mondo a lot in this post. Don't take offense. As we work backwards in Mondo's history, you'll see my admiration for the magazine and the group. In this post, you'll see my disappointment.

Shelving this into the category of "I read it so you don't have to," Mondo's cyberpunk book might be even worse than the Happy Mutant Handbook. Both of these books represent actual printed investments in ideas of the Internet and one can't help but feel that the mental cycles and paper invested in getting either book out the door could have been better spent on sleep and leaving the trees in the ground respectively.

I'm trying not to be harsh, but there are plenty of us who grew up in the early years of the Internet, wrapped in modem cables, tripping over floppy disks that were actually floppy, and navigating BBS systems that didn't consider computers, cyberpunk, or the digital space as a trash heap of "jokes." I put jokes in quotes because really nothing in the book is funny. In fact, there were even a handful of statements randomly cut off by the writer as an "ah, shucks, forget about it, it's not worth bringing up," including whole chapters that were dismissed in such fashion—an odd approach to bringing up entire sentences, paragraphs, and even chapters only to dismiss it and not even discuss the subject matter.

Now before I get to far into this, I'm well aware that the book was meant as a joke, and is essentially an expanded book version of a "how to be a cyberpunk" flier Mondo created. Still, from Mondo 2000, there isn't even an attempt at pearls of wisdom. At least in the Happy Mutant Handbook there were some serious articles about quality Internet culture—even if the book was mostly dragged back down by the childish nature of Boing Boing's prank obsession. With the The Cyberpunk Handbook, you get a dictionary of some words you might have forgotten over the years (this was actually fun to review), but ultimately, the entire book is an unfunny cash grab that insults cyberpunk as a genre, insults hackers and computer programmers, and doesn't even have the common decency to add to Internet history with some form of relevance. The idea of The Cyberpunk Handbook holds more cultural value than the actual book itself. The book itself is a half-written idea wrapped in a leather jacket, wearing mirrorshades, and outlined nicely into listicles—at least they foreshadowed BuzzFeeds' contribution (or lack thereof) to the Internet.

I read the entire book yesterday, and as I'm writing this, I'm forced to pull it off the shelf because I can barely remember anything of importance that I'd want to bring up as a discussion. The authors mix different sub-cultures together rather than truly defining cyberpunk (goth isn't close to cyberpunk, but okay…), and they overly obsess about the aforementioned leather jackets and mirrored sunglasses because they thought Molly Mirrorshades was cool. They dis Tron, misspell way too many words (because that's cool, bro), and mention bestiality a few too many times (I guess they were 10 years old when they wrote this). The book is forgettable and I only followed through with this discussion because it paints a clear picture of why Mondo 2000 ultimately faded into history.

Both The Cyberpunk Handbook and the Happy Mutant Handbook open with a foreword by Bruce Sterling. In fact, so many of the same people and ideas are referenced by each tome that you would be forgiven for confusing the two or think that The Cyberpunk Manual was a discarded rough draft of Boing Boing's attempt.

Now, we'll get to the history and influence of Mondo 2000 in a later post, which will help bring things more into context, and I promise you, we have an affinity for Mondo here at Codepunk.

The reason I led with this publication is because of how well it overlaps with Boing Boing's prank culture. Sharing similar writers and similar geography essentially took both publications in the same direction with the same influences, and—short of the science fiction authors and hackers who contributed to the works—the same comical obsessions that eventually watered down the publications. The Cyberpunk Handbook was published in 1995. This was the same year that the Happy Mutant Handbook saw the light of day. In fact, the movie Hackers also appeared this year, which was a comical Hollywood interpretation of both hacking and the 90's. All three contain a similar view of emergent, youth culture around computers, but each was also just one step far enough away from reality to be a pseudo-representation couched in self-deprecating, semi-nihilistic humor. This was the early years of Clinton neoliberalism. The mystic 60's and 70's that influenced the early Internet culture and early ingenuity had already faded. The 80's battleground between Reaganism and left libertarian counterculture concluded with consumerism now adopted as the dominant religion in America. Bush the First merely built the bridge between Reagan and Clinton with Clinton's free trade stance and the emerging neoliberal philosophy of the Democratic party convincing the youthful transgressors of the new decade that little would change in politics. As Mondo faded and Boing Boing became more commercial, self-deprecating and self-defeating attitudes toward enacting true change devolved into prank culture, 90's stereotypes, and kids at a keyboard playing mostly videos games and talking on AOL chatrooms.

Three years prior to The Cyberpunk Handbook saw the publication of Mondo 2000: A User's Guide to the New Edge, which acted as an anthology of essays on cyberpunk, cyberspace, and the computer sub-culture. We'll tackle that publication next as we work our way backwards in time, but it's worth mentioning that both tomes cover the same subject matter with The Cyberpunk Handbook being almost a parody of the former—as if Mondo saw their declining influence and/or declining ability to keep the magazine running on all cylinders and decided the best way forward was embracing the emerging self-deprecating attitudes and insult humor of the time.

This is an expanded, written monologue of the Apotheosis podcast episode of the same name. Podcast music by Nullsleep.

If you follow me at all on Twitter, you might have noticed that I've been retweeting and promoting James Curcio's Tales from When I Had a Face Kickstarter. James and I have been acquaintances since the early 00's at a time when Internet communities were transitioning to the World Wide Web, but still remained niche rather than tied to any domain of social media.

Many my age still remember the years of personal bulletin board systems (BBS) when the Internet was young (and more explicitly tied to the telecoms).

Eventually, cyberspace emerged as a collection of protocols with BBS, IRC chat channels, and UseNet newsgroups filling out additional communication channels. I remember following newly created UseNet newsgroups dedicated to the very first SciFi Channel original programming (long before it became whatever SyFy is supposed to stand for). In many ways, BBS and eventually UseNet were areas of dedicated fan groups and consolidated discussions—all tied together by whichever Internet moniker or handle you decided to use.

In Edward Snowden's memoir Permanent Record, he reminiscences of the days of Internet handles and the ability to be one person on one side of a conversation, but also experiment by being the other person on the other side of a conversation. This wasn't the same as anonymous Internet trolls. A name is a name, but a name that you give yourself holds power. This is why many modern occult groups or secret societies have you chose a new name for yourself upon initiation. It's not a name to hide behind. It's a name to stand behind. But at the same time, this doesn't mean that your self or your persona is static. Much like Snowden in his early years exploring BBS systems, you could try on many faces.

As the World Wide Web started to evolve more as the primary tool of the Internet (for better or for ill), online communities emerged to replace BBS, UseNet, and even IRC to a certain extent. Some will remember the emergence of the The WELL—Stewart Brand's oddly titled Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (we come up with the acronym first and then retrofit it), which housed members such as John Perry Barlow and gained infamy through the transgressions of members of MOD. Bill and I discussed this in a past Codepunk podcast episode. Other niche message boards started to gain ground as well and during the turn of the 2000's with the publication of Grant Morrison's The Invisibles, the Bomb surfaced as an online resource for those interested in Morrison's intelligently weaved multi-dimensional story. Morrison himself looked at the narrative not as a tale of fiction, but a hypersigil—an occult construct of will—no different than what most modern writers feel when approaching stories of mythical narrative. With myth, I'm reminded of Puck from [Neil Gaiman's Sandman]—where he adapted a wrapped narrative of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Puck exclaimed with some exuberance that the tale was all true. "It never happened, but it's all true." Truth emotes from mythology because mythology is a living narrative that exists outside the boundaries of culture and time. Mythology is to narrative what Carl Jung's archetypes are to gods, demons, or characters within stories. This is precisely why Joseph Campbell made waves with Hero of a Thousand Faces—this idea that the stories we tell that transcend fiction are ones that encompass common motifs and archetypes. Campbell has even made statements that closely align with Gaiman's own written words:

Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.

The Bomb spawned an online community named Barbelith that grew in popularity in underground circles. This was at a time where individual web sites, weblogs, and message boards often gathered significant readership (pre-social media). Many who participated in Barbelith also had their own blogs, writing about similar themes.

Technoccult—although sharing the same name as a Morrison creation, but not actually based on it—was a fringe culture web site created by future Wired writer Klint Finley. Many participants on Barbelith also lurked in the Technoccult comments. It was through Technoccult that I became associated with Klint and several other Internet denizens. During a break for vacation, Klint asked me and writer Wes Unruh to substitute for him on the blog. After Klint returned, several readers on the site suggested that those of us writing about common themes create a group blog (reminiscent of a musical super-group—a mash-up of multiple bloggers working together on a single publication). Klint, Wes, former Adobe employee and future Institute for the Future contributor Chris Arkenberg, robotics engineer Chris Joseph, Lapo Boreaux, and myself then founded Key 23 (also based on a Grant Morrison concept—he was big back then).

The story of Key 23 as an Internet community is a long and winding (and intriguing one) and I don't want to get ahead of myself by going into it here just yet. I am trying to retain some form of linear or time-based narrative with these nostalgic pieces, and Key 23 comes much later than BBS or UseNet news. But what's important is that Key 23 burned bright, but also burned fast. We interviewed the likes of Richard Metzger, Michelle Belanger, and Douglas Rushkoff. We acquired many more contributors including then socialist, but future egoist and alt-right agitator Nick Pell, writer/director/actor John Harrigan, occult author Taylor Ellwood, former Mozilla employee Angelina Fabbro, and narrative explorer James Curcio.

Technoccult is now run by PhD candidate Damien Williams who was interviewed not long ago by Douglas Rushkoff on Team Human.

The downturn of Key 23 happened quickly after the upturn in social networking. MySpace, Twitter, and eventually Facebook ate into mind-share, but also in-fighting (as usually happens) and exhaustion (ditto) put the online publication in an unsustainable position. Many of the original founders left the group and eventually I shut the entire operation down (I managed the software and hardware running the site). We all went our separate ways back into the digital ether.

Now I grew up in South Jersey, which was a stone's throw from Philadelphia, and at the time James Curcio was living in the city (he would leave, but later return). I've always looked at Philadelphia as a cyberpunk city because of its many unique features, underground music scene, and generally middle-class feel. James and I would meet up on two separate occasions in real life (IRL, FTW). Once we would meet up with a girlfriend of his at Shampoo Nightclub during their Wednesday Nocturne event. This was supposed to be a goth/music scene, but the music bordered more on industrial/rave/EDM. Fresh off of a few "cool kid" Key 23 articles, I met up with James to discuss some underground topics when we were both young, thin, and had the energy to actually stay up at night. I even still drank vodka back then.

The next time I met up with James, Key 23 was a thing of the past. Like I said, it burned bright, but burned fast. James, however, was fast tracking a handful of transmedia projects at a time when transmedia was just being coined. Prior to his Key 23 days he was best known for having Join My Cult! (a mental case of a fiction story) published by the arcane Falcon Press, and his ambitious projects brought him into contact with some experimental artists and well-known story-tellers. Eventually James founded Mythos Media as a transmedia company, recruiting myself, P. Emerson Williams, and Rich Pizor, with Ong's Hat originator Joe Matheny (in the capacity of his Alterati project) acting as an advisor.

I later met James again at the famed Monk's in Philadelphia for muscles and scallops one lunch while I was consulting with Peirce College.

Mythos Media was ambitious in that with very little funding, it was attempting to provide an outlet for experimental narratives in art and fiction that reflect higher level mythological concepts. The original idea was the production of a "living mythos"—a modern narrative that adhered and assimilated the archetypes and myths that are ever-present, but wrapped in the ideas (and breakdowns) of today.

Mythology, you see, isn't something that happened in the past. Myths aren't stories of the past, present, or future, but are stories and narratives that are relevant and ever-present always. Creation myths and apocalypse myths (and all myths in-between) occur on a regular basis and are rooted in the archetypes and psychosis of every culture and every human. This is how you can even have a hero of a thousand faces to begin with.

We had no clue about how to run a business. Outside of Joe, nobody was highly skilled at raising capital or creating a sustainable business model. Most people were artists and creators who knew how to create a thing, but very little about how to sell it. In fact, our initial focus ended up on projects with highly visual components, which raised the cost of printing, and resulted in a depletion of funds. Eventually Mythos Media was closed as a media house, but James pushed forward with his modern narratives and held firm to the Mythos Media brand.

I think the mistake from the outset was assuming a business view of what should have essentially been a collective narrative through myth. Writing, drawing, printing, and selling other peoples' work was never something that was going to capture the passion to drive a project, and James' work produced a thread that ran through music, podcasts, videos, collage art, and written word, and required a significant focus to invoke the energy necessary to shift the paradigm on such a mythological tale.

Decades in the making, several books in production, James' stands at the cusp of completion for a major piece of work: the aforementioned Tales from When I Had a Face.

From the Kickstarter:

Tales is a mythpunk work of speculative fiction / fantasy, with a healthy dab of horror for good measure. It is not historical fiction. Though inspired in part by an open-ended, many year long immersion in the art and myth of the various cultures and traditions, we were careful to maintain this distinction.

The story:

On Ayta’s seventh birthday, there came a knock on the door, and her namesake stood before her. Gran Ayta. Once a thing of myth, descended from legends. Now she seemed just a stooped old woman, but appearances can be deceiving.

Ayta’s lonely childhood was soon transformed by Gran’s fantastic stories of flight from one world to the next. From distant Siberia to the Second World, from there to the very Land of the Dead she had come, or so she claimed. And she had returned with secrets taken from that underworld, to teach her granddaughter.

Seven years later, her Gran would be dead. Ayta had to come to terms with the legacy she had passed on to her, bearing these myths in a world which has no need for what it sees as childish things. A childish world that she knew was soon to end.

Just when she thought she had finally left those tales in the past, she met Nyssa. A character straight out of Gran’s stories who was unknowingly bound by the same fate she was. Like all star-crossed lovers, their fate was written from the moment they crossed paths.

Now… What does this have to do with the Internet?

Do understand that you have to go back to the beginning… and not just of this article. The Internet was a shift into a new era where the virtual world was opening up new avenues of communication and narrative. Technology meant that the old gods were dying, and in their place, a psychedelic menagerie of computer screens, digital companions, and left-libertarian mutualism. The people gained masks in a world of Reagan consumerism, disguising their names and faces to re-assert the mystic 60's on a digital screen away from the Alex P. Keaton's of the world.

As the old gods withered, they were replaced with the triumvirate of land, labor, and capital—each with their own gods… each with their own stories. And what is our world, but a reflection of the stories that we tell ourselves? Little do you hear of the triangle of free market progress. It has been taken over by the singular spoke of capital with an obsession for growth at all costs being the only way forward.

Take a pause and re-read the synopsis of James' Kickstarter. Does that not seem "tip of the tongue" familiar? If you've felt despair in the last two decades… If you're read anything from the Dark Mountain project… If you've ventured deeper into the more poetic CreepyPastas… If you've struggled daily with the idea of sustainability in a increasingly climate scarred world… You've felt this. When the paradigm of the stories that we tell ourselves disappears… When you're far removed from being a hero or even person of a thousand faces, the only stories left are the tales from when you had a face.

Why is this relevant today? Because the culture in the first world is crumbling through our transgressions leaving us without our comforting myths of the past, leading us to a second world of modern mythology. This second world—birthed from an exponential age—is one of stories, technology, virtual worlds, and where everyone can be faceless.

This is an expanded, written monologue of the Apotheosis podcast episode of the same name. Podcast music by Nullsleep.

I'm sure you're tired of hearing my opinion on Boing Boing at this point, so you'll be happy to know that this is the last Codepunk post and Apotheosis podcast episode on the subject. We covered both the history and the controversy of Boing Boing in previous posts, so we're going to conclude with some light-hearted happy mutant dialog. And don't worry: It'll be short.

I wasn't sure how I was going to end this arc, but several months ago I started buying a number of 80's/90's books that looked at cyberculture and the early Internet. In addition to some Mondo 2000 gems (we'll get to those in the near future), I picked up a copy of the Happy Mutant Handbook from the crew at Boing Boing. As I began to read through the book I realized that it represented a transition—a true inflection point—where Boing Boing moved from being a source of cyberculture "it" factors to being the affiliate and comedy-driven platform that it is today.

You'll get the gist of my argument in these written words, but if you want the full experience, I do read a few chapters from the handbook in the podcast episode for this post.

There isn't much doubt that the early Boing Boing zine was a smash success in underground, cyberpunk circles. Codpunk co-host Bill Ahern even ping me on the matter after the last two entries in this Boing Boing arc mentioning how he was a big fan of the early zine work. Boing Boing didn't just assemble the component parts of cyberpunk into a readable digest, but actively contributed and influenced the early culture. In an era where paper was transitioning to electrons, Boing Boing was creating a community through words, influencing much of the computer culture on the West coast—essentially taking over for the Whole Earth Catalog, which was busy trying to transition to the online forum The WELL.

Boing Boing as a zine was both a victim and a beneficiary of early '00 blog culture, and although it continued to thrive with its quirkiness, it lost the edginess that made it prominent with cyberpunk, underground, and hacker cultures.

This downward slide is nowhere more apparent than in the Happy Mutant Handbook—the magnum opus of the Boing Boing side-volution.

Subtitled Mischievous Fun for Higher Primates the book attempts to take a playful look at Internet culture on the new frontier. From the back matter:

Are you sick of the packaged reality THEY keep trying to sell you? You know: bad TV, hideous magazines, clueless computer technology, and lame attempts at "leisure activities"? It's enough to make you build your own rocket so you can find a solar system that doesn't suck so bad..

The book has its usual suspects of early cyber and counterculture elites, including Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker, and R.U. Sirius, but it also includes the usual mix of Boing Boing editorial, including the trademark hyperbole.

If you were expecting a book filled with insider knowledge to hone your skills on the cyber frontier, you'd be sorely disappointed. Beyond the introductory chapter, you'll find chapters on reality hacking, computers, odd cultural figures, toys (of course), and reading material. Happy Mutant might start promising with looks at Burning Man (at a time when it was still an underground movement), hacking, and some quality early Internet guidance, but quickly devolves into a portrait of "cool" gadgets, zines, and other cultural warez. Most no longer relevant today, but still a quality part of Internet history.

Still, the Happy Mutant Handbook telegraphs the direction of Boing Boing as a company with a lessening emphasis on the cyberpunk and underground niche elements prominent in the zine to pranks, oddities, and gadgets that would be more likely to drive clicks. In fact, a significant portion of what it means to be a happy mutant is apparently dependent on your effort to prank people judging by the amount of space various pranks take up in the book. Don't get me wrong: I certainly appreciate the articles on the Church of the SubGenius.

Unfortunately, Happy Mutant is less a handbook and is more a collection of blog posts, thoughts, and streams-of-consciousness stapled together by Boing Boing editorial, while being loosely tied to a few name-brand cyberpunks. They even go so far as to profile some of the more famous people in the cyberspace realm as "happy mutants" well after the fact.

In tracing the short history of Boing Boing as a publication, a weblog, and a company, it's clear that they find comfort in being a "Kids in the Hall" version of cyberculture journalism. When you remove a handful of key personalities from their editorial masthead… you're just left with the dust and awkward jokes.

This is an expanded, written monologue of the Apotheosis podcast episode of the same name. Podcast music by Nullsleep.

Although the history of Boing Boing paints a picture of geek chic with a thriving community and an almost playful cyber-indulgence, the blog (and those running the blog) is not without the occasional head-turning controversy, and some of this controversy directly correlates with the declining perception of the blog in its current quasi-lackluster state.

Every discussion revolving around expression on the Internet will undoubtedly dovetail into a discussion about censorship and when/if censorship is a good thing. And you'll certainly run into the comic version of Karl Popper's intolerance paradox if that discussion revolves around political discourse and tolerance. Most message boards have moderators and these moderators wield enormous power over the prospects of communication. When I used to run a group blog and Internet forum called Key 23, I was one of several founders tied to the initial launch, but the primary (re: only) technical resource on it. My servers. My software. My blood, sweat, and definitely tears.

Side note: Key 23 is permanently offline and essentially a black hole in terms of Internet history, but the founders included a former Adobe employee and a current Wired writer, while other participants included a former Mozilla employee, a published author on mythology and story-building, a rap artist, and even someone who eventually became a right-wing extremist—through no fault of ours.

I certainly can't say that running Key 23 went smoothly. When running an Internet forum for free, there are a lot of expectations thrown at you by the users, and you put out a lot of effort based on those expectations, but one wrong turn and you're suddenly the villain. At one point, there was an open thread of comments that people were threading together as a full story. Somebody added a part out of turn, which skewed the narrative. As a person who likes consistency, I edited the narrative to align it better with the full story. That single edit became a fire drill of controversy, and despite the fact that I was single-handedly managing the operation on my own dime, such effort provide zero leeway in editorial initiative.

I mention this because at the same time, Boing Boing also received criticism over censorship in the form of comment edits. Despite often being considered critical of online censorship, Boing Boing has been attacked for censoring via disemvoweling—the practice of removing the vowels from comments deemed inappropriate. This practice might seem like a game, but as a site that prides itself on being a supporter of Internet freedom, is the practice really okay? Since I was someone who formerly ran an online forum, I can sympathize with both sides here, but I can certainly see the controversy.

Disemvoweling has made its way through multiple versions of the Boing Boing community (i.e., different message board software versions), and even led to Jeff Atwood chiming in on why is nothing something preferred for his Discourse software:

As a Respected Industry Thought Leader™ in the area of building communities, I have some thoughts about disemvoweling. Spoiler alert: I don’t like it.

[…]

A couple reasons.

1.) You’re kinda… mocking that person. It’d be like me forcing you to speak through a filter that turned all your words into baby talk, or pirate talk, or whatever. If there’s anything that rapidly sends someone on the edge of civility into an incoherent rage in my experience, it is making fun of them. Even the perception that you might be making fun of them is extremely dangerous, and disemvoweling is right on top of that line if not clearly over it.

2.) We do not reward failure. If you’re being a jerk to someone, the last thing we want to do is highlight that content, make it stand out, or otherwise bring attention to it. Yes, it’s technically obscured, but the dunce cap works both ways. An elementary school teacher once posted on one of the Stack Exchange sites that in an effort to get her class to behave she started writing the names of misbehaving children on the board. This wasn’t working as well as she hoped. Then she switched to writing all the names of the children on the board (small class, I guess) and erasing the names of those who misbehaved. Guess what suddenly started working like gangbusters?

3.) It’s too complicated. The rules of how it works require explanation, and anything that requires explanation is a pain in the ass long term. Every new user will see the disemvoweled content and wonder what the hell is up with that weird post (or worse, become motivated to solve the puzzle and be “rewarded” with toxic, unpleasant content). Compare with not seeing hateful content at all. So much simpler.1

A much larger Boing Boing controversy came about from the treat of sex blogger Violet Blue. After being a contributor to Boing Boing, one day, all of her posts were deleted without explanation. Blue posted about the controversy on her own blog, and the Los Angeles Times even commented on the noted silence from the so-call directory of wonderful things.

Sometime last year, Xeni Jardin, the co-editor of the popular blog Boing Boing, erased sex columnist Violet Blue from the site’s archives. Removed from public view on the two-million-unique-visitors-a-month megablog were all Jardin’s posts regarding her former friend, as well as all of Blue’s comments on the site. Readers were not notified of the changes. Last week, the missing posts were noticed for the first time. The move outraged Boing Boing readers—and launched a major, public controversy on the ethics of archiving in the new media era.2

Eventually Boing Boing released a statement:

Bottom line is that those posts (not "more than 100 posts," as erroneously claimed elsewhere) were removed from public view a year ago. Violet behaved in a way that made us reconsider whether we wanted to lend her any credibility or associate with her. It's our blog and so we made an editorial decision, like we do every single day. We didn't attempt to silence Violet. We unpublished our own work. There's a big difference between that and censorship.

This was probably too little, too late, and David Pescovitz, meanwhile, completely misinterpresent (or misrepresented) the point of Boing Boing readers entirely:

“What would happen if Boing Boing decided we’re going to shut down?” wonders Boing Boing co-editor David Pescovitz. “I don’t mean today. Maybe in twenty years we’re all broke and bankrupt, we can’t afford to host, no one likes us, no one reads our stuff, and we take down the entire thing. Are we then the ultimate censors?”4

Jardin, herself, dug the hole even deeper by suggesting that—despite many on staff being journalists concerned with ethics, privacy, and censorship—Boing Boing didn't need to adhere to journalistic standards:

"There's a big difference between working for National Public Radio, producing something that is a news piece for that outlet, and writing for Boing Boing," argues Jardin, who currently works as a commentator for NPR. "They are two entirely different kinds of entities, even though they have really big footprints culturally. Boing Boing is not trying to be CNN or NPR or the Library of Congress."5

Cory Doctorow—in an unrelated instance—believed that Boing Boing was a personal blog (with multiple people) and should be treated as such.

There has consistently been rumors circulating about the "why" of this situation, and when you leave actions open to interpretation, you do end up getting down to baser speculation and rumor. Gawker writer Owen Thomas quotes yet another Gawker property, Valleywag, about how "all signs point to the foundering of a once-romantic friendship between Boing Boing editor Xeni Jardin and Violet Blue."

Owen continues to speculate:

[…] [W]e've come to believe, the friendship always had a mercenary angle - Jardin could get her linked as well as laid. The association with Boing Boing boosted Blue's career. How painful it must have been for Jardin to realize she was being used by a groupie who wanted to join her band. And people in pain exercise supremely bad judgment, which is what Jardin did when she "unpublished" posts about Blue from Boing Boing.6

Without putting too much stock in the story of a lovers' tryst, Violet Blue is not a person without her own controversial baggage. Although I shudder to use a Gawker publication as a source, there are documented rumors of blogger/journalist Melissa Gira Grant turning down Blue's advances. Some accused Blue of using sex blogger connections and interpersonal relationships to get ahead in journalism. Should Grant be believed? Oddly enough, Melissa Gira Grant was a former Key 23 contributor, so I certainly find such comments credible coming from her; however, Grant herself was in a bit of a controversial confrontation with another former Key 23 contributor—Rachel Haywire—just a few short years ago. What does all this mean other than don't believe everything that you read on the Internet? I guess it simply means that people disagree. People get into argument. Sometimes people are terrible to each other. And when these people live a semi-public life online, it spills over into the collective mind-share of readers on blogs. It's impossible to know the whole story based on the loose information available, and the fact that it's being kept mostly private means that it likely is a private matter. None of us should care about who is sleeping with whom. It's none of our business.

But what about the censorship?

Boing Boing's problem isn't that two people associated with the blog are on the outs with each other. Boing Boing's problem is that they elected to unpublish someone and scrub the site of that person's name without even a footnote on why. When they later decided to address it, it came down to "our blog; our decisions" and that certainly never works out for people who run Internet forums, and I know that first hand.

Unpublishing is a problem because it's silencing a voice after-the-fact.

More recently, with the departure of Cory Doctorow, readers noticed how references to the writer have been removed from the blog in a similar silent matter causing many to wonder about the reason for Doctorow's departure, and the treatment of his name and work on the blog that he helped build. Although neither party has spoken about the issue in detail, rumor is that the schism is related to Boing Boing's use of affiliate links and marketing in new and creative ways, while Doctorow is more interested in fighting the good fight of activism.

Honestly, I've never been a big reader or fan of Boing Boing even in its prime. And that certainly could be coloring my thoughts on these so-called controversies and how I feel about Boing Boing's decline.

But that doesn't mean that Boing Boing isn't a quality part of Internet history.

This is an expanded, written monologue of the Apotheosis podcast episode of the same name. Podcast music by Nullsleep.

We started this series talking about Douglas Rushkoff's Cyberia and mentioning the cyberculture magazine Mondo 2000. It was always the intention to get back to the subjects of that first analysis, but it's impossible to really understand the early years and influence of Mondo 2000 (and eventually Wired Magazine) without discussing Boing Boing.

Boing Boing was a "zine" before it became a web site, and although zines were not exclusive to the counterculture and cyberculture eras, the proliferation of zines reached its apex in the late 80's/early 90's. The Internet made zines easier to distribute by gathering a larger audience through BBS systems, mailing lists, etc., but eventually the evolution of the Internet's publishing capabilities made it easier to publish a web site than a print zine, which pushed a lot of zines out of circulation.

When I say that zines reached their apex in the 80's/90's this, of course, is only as it relates to modern zine production—photocopies from the mouth of Xerox. Zines as a cultural institution have been circulating since the days of the printing press and were a big cause of the original "information revolution" as the printing press allowed the circulation of media outside of the purview of the traditional authorities. Dissident pamphlets provided some of the first instances of what we would consider zines (although from a more serious perspective), and many consider Thomas Payne's Common Sense to be a traditional zine in its own right.

Zines began to proliferate in niche areas thanks to the early science fiction movement post-Great Depression and leading into the mystic 60's. Even Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were in on the zine culture, which was where an earlier version of Superman was first published.

Although the science fiction era was rife with fanzines, it wasn't until Star Trek that a zine began focusing on a media property.

Fanzines were a popular form of communication and collaboration in the pre-Internet days and various media properties were covered from literature to comics to music. The 1970's saw not just a shift in the music scene (from rock and roll to punk rock), but advances in printing technology (and a reduction in cost) resulted in greater growth of the indie zine industry. The continued growth and evolution of zines in the 70's and 80's tapered directly into the birth of Boing Boing.

Much like the retro-computing movement and our recent exploration of modern interpretations of legacy protocols, zines are also experiencing a resurgence in publishing and interest.

For Boing Boing, life as a zine began in 1988 from the minds of Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair (Frauenfelder and Sinclair conceptualized of the zine a year earlier):

We printed 100 copies on a Xerox machine. I sent a copy to Factsheet Five, which was a zine that reviewed zines. Based on the review that ran in Factsheet Five, we sold all the copies. We also got an order from a newsstand distributor for 100 copies of the next issue. So we printed 200 copies of the second issue, sending 100 to the distributor and 100 to people sending $3 cash to us in the mail. We basically followed a Moore's law style growth curve. The final issue of bOING bOING, number 15, had a print run of 17,500. Unfortunately it was our last print issue because our two major newsstand distributors went bankrupt, owing us tens of thousands of dollars. 1

It published 15 issues before becoming a web-only publication (the web site was launched in 1995).

All 15 issues of Boing Boing are available on the Internet Archive.

One thing that is strikingly different from the zine versus the blog is the obscurity of the content in the original zine. Many people associate early Boing Boing with cyberpunk culture, but Mondo 2000 was always more cyberpunk unless you were an early reader of the zine. The very first issue saw an interview with Robert Anton Wilson to kick off its counterculture credentials. (If RAW isn't enough for you, the second issue leads in with a piece by Anterro Alli) It also contained book reviews of Rudy Rucker's Wetware and Colin Wilson's biography of occultist Aleister Crowley. Sprinkled through the first issue was a number of comics strips covering various counterculture topics, including LSD, while the written content even had some parallels with the hacking and information tutorials in 2600.

As Boing Boing continued to evolve the sharp knife of its zine, you could find references to Discordianism, left libertarianism, mysticism, hacking culture, and just about any mixture of intersectional ideas and alternative thinking that would have Timothy Leary thinking that he'd found the others. Future issues included R.U. Sirius (from the aforementioned Mondo 2000), William Gibson, Kevin Kelly, dark wave music, Tank Girl, David Cronenberg, and other gems of the fringe culture staring out at you from the page of an obscure zine received through the mail.

As the zine grew in popularity, it started to add features and ideas that would become staples of the weblog. In particular Frauenfelder's obsession with reviewing, selling, and distributing what he believed to be "cool things" was a staple. The final issue of Boing Boing more closely resembled the future Happy Mutants book and had a very vinyl/CD case feel to it, while including words by Bruce Sterling.

Frauenfelder (educated as a mechanical engineer) was actually a contributor at Wired prior to the Boing Boing web launch and established enough clout with Boing Boing to catapult himself to additional editorial positions at Wired magazine, Make magazine, and Playboy. Sinclair—wife of Frauenfelder—also established herself as a writer and editor (notably Craft magazine) through the success of Boing Boing.

Frauenfelder's success with Boing Boing also led to a cover art collaboration with Billy Idol for Idol's Cyberpunk album.

The so-called "directory of wonderful things" was partly inspired by Frauenfelder's exploration of the original Blogger software for an Industry Standard article, which caused him to relaunch the Boing Boing web effort around 2000. Whereas the original zine involved media and technology personalities such as David Pescovitz, Gareth Branwyn, Jon Lebkowsky and Paco Nathan—through their quasi-relationship with Wired and various editor hopping—the Boing Boing web site saw contributions by a number notable personalities and spawned the careers of many new ones.

Boing Boing online excelled as a weblog of stream of consciousness posts, links, and other documented "wonderful things" from Frauenfelder. It was one of the original link farms, but because of Frauenfelder's cultural interests, the topics fit a significant growing niche. As a result, the blog found an audience of like-minded individuals looking to explore the early Internet space with the same enthusiasm.

Early Boing Boing resembled very little of the cyberpunk zine that was being published (although it held to some of the themes):

Monday, February 28, 2000

Sunday, February 27, 2000

Boing Boing did exist before the blogging style that made it popular, but it was as a brief, experimental online version of the zine.

From this initial short-form (micro)blogging, Boing Boing grew in frequency and scope as it carved a niche out of the early Internet with a proliferation of blog posts, as well as an active message board community.

One of the first people to discover the blog was Cory Doctorow, and he would send me lots of ideas of things to write about. After a few months I asked Cory if he would like to have an account on Boing Boing and post directly. He agreed, and I was surprised to see him post seven or eight or more items every day. This was an order of magnitude more than I had been posting. I typically posted two or three items a week!

As a result of Cory's prolific posting, the traffic shot through the roof. Soon after that my friend and a bOING bOING print zine editor, David Pescovitz joined, and shortly after that Xeni Jardin became one of our editors as well. 2

As the weblog developed into a sustainable business, it was eventually incorporated as an LLC: Happy Mutants—the name of which became the title of a future book edited by Frauenfelder. During its most popular era (somewhere around the mid-00's) it was one of the most popular read and cited blogs on the Internet. Topics at Boing Boing were filled by early ideas of Internet technology, gadgets, science fiction ruminations, and left-leaning mutualism and politics.

Boing Boing reached its height during a time when blogs took off as the primary driver of journalism and innovation on the web. In recent years, social media has drastically eaten up web traffic forcing journalists to turn to paid newsletters as a revenue source. Boing Boing experienced its first revenue decline in 2009 after the housing market crisis, and although the site has managed to maintain a significant ranking on the Internet, it has shifted from the darling of cyberculture into mostly a pale imitation of its formerly innovative zine and early blog. Many former readers complain that they can't tell the difference between a post or a paid advertisement.

Oddly enough, they foreshadowed most of this in the last issue of the zine itself:

Well, Boing Boing has come full circle. We've gone from a zine, to a wanna-be-authentic publication, to a stressed out on-the-verge-of-selling-out ad-accepting magazine, all the way back to a small, unorganized zine.3

Comparing the state of Boing Boing today with the original conceptualization of the zine and it seems more like a home for someone to post Amazon affiliate links than a home for cyberpunks.

Although it's too early to tell, after surviving controversy surrounding censorship, Boing Boing now must try to survive without Cory Doctorow and Xeni Jardin—both of whom recently left the publication. Metafilter tagged Doctorow's departure as the equivalent of the Beatles breaking up. That's a bit hyperbolic, but considering how Doctorow's output was a large driver of the original growth of Boing Boing, you can see the correlation.

Despite the ups, downs, and sideways history of Boing Boing, it certainly remains a large part of early Internet culture, and with the modern infatuation with zines, its fun to explore the roots of Boing Boing as a niche cyberculture magazine that brought together a lot of early thinkers. The problem seems to be that as Boing Boing grew as a weblog in the modern era, those original thinkers became few and far between, and the blog was left with Doctorow's activism, Frauenfelder's quirky posts, and a lot of affiliate links—a shell of its former self… and even less so today.