Mondo 2000 and Re:Search changed everything for me.
During K-12 I was all about art and literature. Science and math were boring.
These periodicals illustrated beautifully the convergence of art, science and culture. It didn’t matter if some of the articles were more junk than science, they changed how I looked at the world and what was possible.
Heh. I remember when I saw the first issue of Wired. I called a friend and told him that there was a new magazine that was like Mondo, but less crazy.
I first picked up copies of Mondo at a psychedelic conference at Stanford in 1991. At that time, their vision was truly mind-blowing and – along with the ReSearch books cited by Garymon above – they really changed my life.
Readers may want to pick up a copy of their seminal “Mondo 2000 Users Guide to the New Edge.”
I’m amused to note, however, that neither Mondo nor Wired nor anyone else saw the internet coming. Everyone knew something big was happening but no one predicted the extraordinary “nervous system of the human race” it has become.
I was already very much a psychonaut and net dweeb when all this was published but have every issue of Mondo2000 and still return to it to compare what was thought of then to what is now. Brilliant stuff. Great mind candy.
I kept all of my copies as well, not a complete set though 
. I really need to rebuild my Re:Search collection. Have lost a couple over the years.
My favorite Mondo image:
My favorite Mondo cover:
Or perhaps this one, since it was my first copy:
IIRC I first heard of both M2k and BoingBoing from a US News & World Report article on zines – both of them were amongst the panoply on display in a photo of, I believe, Mike Gunderloy. I have not been able to source the article or photo since then, however. @frauenfelder - does that ring any bells? It does seem like an unusual source, in retrospect. But my parents subscribed to it, and I don’t think The Atlantic or The New Yorker ran many photos at that time, so they’re nixed.
Ok, so when do I get to read the Wired retrospective in Mondo 2000?
my buddy had this in his dorm, which I devoured over the course of several sequential hang-out sessions back in '93. I remember it had the footnotes in the margins with the corresponding words in the main text formatted to look like hyperlinks, which bothers me in retrospect, since it was a bad analogy–it should have been like a Choose Your Own Adventure. ah well, there really is no good analogy between the digital and print formats anyhow.
I remember liking that they had an interview with Digital Underground, part of which was explaining the concept of their album title Sex Packets–that you could package your sexuality into a bio-chemical powdered drug that you would carry around like a pack of sweet-n-low, then instead of the time and risk involved in doing it, you would just trade packets with whoever you wanted to. I mean, far out, right?
I’m not particularly tech-y, especially compared to the baseline BB user, but I always felt like I grokked the concepts due in no small part to the Mondo book. It was strange to be on the precipice of the digital revolution, to understand it as an observer rather than a participant, but just slightly more informed that the general population.
I was forced to purge magazines some years ago, and had to decide between collections of Heavy Metal, Dungeon, Discover, OMNI, Dragon, Mondo 2000, Analog, F&SF and a nearly complete run of Twilight Zone. When the M2K Kickstarter appeared, it was an easy choice to back, as some reward tiers included copies of Mondo 2000 and High Times. I’m disappointed it hasn’t panned out, but hopeful that someday…
I still have Heavy Metal, Dungeon, Dragon, Analog, F&SF and the Twilight Zone.
I actually got a treasure trove of something like fourteen issues of Mondo2000 off of eBay a few years ago, and I’ve been debating since as to whether to slice the spines (but that art!) and scan them to throw online or not. The idea that Mondo2000 isn’t ALREADY floating about on every torrent site as PDFs is just nonsensical and weird to me.
In '95 I was a depressed 13 year old Floridian with a computer, a hacked AOL account, and a copy of “The Cyberpunk Handbook”, I carried it around while dumpster-diving and red-boxing. There was a email address in it and St. Jude wrote me back. She wrote me back a lot. She was a mentor to me until I was 17 and she got cancer and finally had to say goodbye. She taught me wild idea’s like “always construct/deconstruct”, and said things to me like “live your life as god might, sure of both obliteration and infinity, if that doesn’t make him proud of you nothing will. Or sleep is the Golden Goal.” That someone of her hacker-stature would reach out to some random little nobody kid on the internet has always stuck with me. I ran with it and I own several tech companies now, she was a decade or two ahead of her time. Miss you Jude!
None of the actual issues are in there, but does have un-used cover-art, and other articles.
@frauenfelder - did you do THIS?
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