[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.).