Just finished flipping through Issue 14 you linked. Wow, that's a time I wish I'd been old enough to appreciate. I wonder if anything like Mondo 2000 exists these days. Or maybe it's a time that's just passed us by.
We just have to keep creating the culture. Hacker culture is everywhere. It's here now, you're experiencing it on HN. This board is the spiritual successor to the great BBNs of the 80s and 90s. It might not be at Wired - I think KK tried to dethrone R U Sirius once - but it's out there. Even Mondo is still around. Check out the blog Acceler8or. It's the next chapter of Mondo, and it isn't updated frequently, but it exists. It's gonna be at DNA for their yearly screening of Hackers. It's at your local pawn shop, when you pony up for a used laptop!
We might not have the great hacker collectives and hackerspaces of the past, but the culture is still out there. L0pht might be gone from Boston, sure. But these kids give me a ton of inspiration. [0]
Don't mean to 'go off', but life has no meaning beyond that which you give it. If you 'fictionalize' your existence in the context of cyberpunk, and great science fiction books, and compelling video games, you become a character in those stories. Life is richer for it.
I was 23 at the time and it was pretty awesome (and I'm pretty sure I subbed to that magazine). I was probably playing Burn:Cycle, which was one of the numerous high-concept cyberpunk-y CD-ROM games that came out around then https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burn_Cycle (CD-ROM games, and their massive storage and video capabilities, were still new at that time)... You'll see how wild it was if you read the story summary lol, you can probably find playthroughs of it on YouTube, I'm sure the graphics haven't aged well but I remember "Sol Cutter" vividly... aaand yep, you can LOL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMRggmXbJF4 Had a great techno soundtrack as well.
There was generally a ton of tech promise and a vibe of excitement, libertarian nonjudgmental sexuality that didn't demand both labeling AND acceptance as it seems to now (as can be seen throughout that magazine)... all of this at the cusp of the explosion of the Internet...
We might not have the great hacker collectives and hackerspaces of the past, but the culture is still out there. L0pht might be gone from Boston, sure. But these kids give me a ton of inspiration. [0]
Don't mean to 'go off', but life has no meaning beyond that which you give it. If you 'fictionalize' your existence in the context of cyberpunk, and great science fiction books, and compelling video games, you become a character in those stories. Life is richer for it.
https://www.wired.com/story/mtba-charliecard-hack-defcon-202... [0]