[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.).