[sireat]

Fondly I remember devouring each issue of Mondo 2000 as if it held some grand promise of future about to happen.

I even bought some "Smart Drugs" and techno t-shirts but it was all for nought.

Even more than Wired, Mondo 2000 was this techno fetish fantasy that was never going to happen.

In some respects I am reminded of a line of Victor' Pelevin's from "Generation P" where the writer for this high concept underground magazine is in reality a balding father of three with a mortage and 4 starving mouths to feed.

[nihonde]

To be honest, I long for the Mondo2000 vision of technology and culture. It seems very quaint and interesting next to the "campus dweeb" culture of Snap, FB, etc.

I have immense nostalgia for the early days of computers, when they were sold in carpeted showrooms with brochure racks by guys who needed a haircut. Those guys were changing the world forever! That heady time continued until right around when Wired replaced M2K.

[spc476]

I'm reminded of "The Guy I Almost Was" [1].

[1] http://www.electricsheepcomix.com/almostguy/

[api]

Another way you can mark the descent of Internet culture into low-effort trash is the rapid decline in the artistic quality of web comics. We went from this to badly drawn sneering blobs, stick figures, and memes.

[Gargoyle]

The early webcomic "Delta Thrives" from the same artist is still one of my touchstones for a utopian vision of the future.

http://e-sheep.sansara.net.ua/www.e-sheep.com/delta/heartoft...

[jtmcmc]

yes! this is such a classic webcomic

[beat]

Wired came along, and the ads were suddenly for cars rather than smart drugs. There was no dreaming in Wired. It felt like a fashion statement, not a manifesto.

Mondo 2000 was something else. A promise of a future we could have, if only we were brave enough and crazy enough to try.

[nihonde]

Those crazy hippies talking about using VR to unlock spiritual awareness through massively multiplayer virtual acid trips is just a whole lot more fun than the awful, terrible Facebook Spaces demo. I guess I'm just partial to the time when we were all freaks and geeks.

[api]

With really big money came intellectual gentrification. Serious People(tm) don't talk or even think about things like psychedelics, consciousness expansion, fringe science, etc. Doing so can lead to excommunication from places like academia and the high corporate world unless you are spectacularly accomplished enough to be indispensable (Watson and Crick, etc.), tenured (though they'll still try), or have enough F-U money to not care (Robert Bigelow, Elon Musk, etc.).

[api]

One thing that leaps out at me any time I revisit 90s visionary culture is the optimism. I can't imagine that kind of optimism post-9/11. We still have not recovered as a culture from that day. If anything it's getting progressively worse with the barely veiled mainstreaming of things like neo-Naziism.

[narrator]

The promise of Smart Drugs eventually arrived. See reddit.com/r/nootropics for example. It took about 15 years to develop, mainly as a result of cheap chemical synthesis in China, advanced drug development in Russia, and a developing generics drug industry in India and elsewhere. If we had been living in a non-globalized world, it would not have happened.

[sireat]

Granted there has been some progress but not to the extent promised by M2K.

I haven't really followed nootropics but besides Modafinil (which is not really a smart drag) what smart drugs actually pass a meaningful double blind test?

[narrator]

There are a lot of smart drugs developed by the Russian pharmaceutical industry for neurodegenerative diseases. They are completely ignored in the U.S except by the online nootropics community. A quick Google search will tell you all about it.