Our Q&A with R.U. Sirius

R.U. Sirius, real name Ken Goffman, is a writer, musician, talk show host, and cyberculture pioneer. He was co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Mondo 2000, a glossy magazine about digital culture published from 1989-1998. During his tenure there, Mondo 2000 covered digital-paganism, virtual reality, infinite personalities, and cyberpunks; featured articles from William Gibson, David Cronenberg, and other legends of media production; ran contributions from philosophers like Robert Anton Wilson and Arthur Kroker; and had fascinating, unconventional interviews like David Byrne in conversation with Timothy Leary. It went on to influence publications like Wired. Sirius is now editor of H+ magazine.

How did Mondo 2000 come about?
R.U. Sirius: It grew out of a magazine called High Frontiers in 1984 that wanted to combine psychedelic explorations with science and what was then called high tech. We transitioned into a magazine called Reality Hackers. While publishing a psychedelic magazine, we wound up hanging out with the early programmers and participants in the digital culture, so it was a natural evolution.

What was it like in those early days of the internet?
For a small self-published magazine, Mondo 2000 really took off immediately. We felt like we were going to totally transmutate the entire human condition. We were encouraged by media attention, and by a very lively local tech party scene to feel like we were on top of an enormous wave.

You’re now creating an open-source collective-memory multi-media memoir, funded through Kickstarter. You’ve likened it to a kind of Rashomon type thing, collating different people’s perspectives, mixing fact and fiction. What can this technique give your reader that a conventionally written memoir can’t?
It’s like this wide memory net made up of all these people with a wide variety of voices. It also presents a unique challenge and opportunity for breaking the common format for such things both in the online and book version of it. I definitely see memories already coming into conflict. This will be more cacophonous and at the same time, it might be more self organizing. Some parts of it might be very linear indeed while other parts might explode into a metalogue of crazed and sometimes discordant voices.

Sort of like the internet itself?
Yes. And it’s a very experimental approach that I’m taking with this. I’ll be looking for what emerges as the fulcrum to balance the chaos of the book on. I don’t know what it will be going in. It may end up just being my own voice, but we’ll see.

That tallies with the whole Web 2.0 and user generated content paradigm that we are living in now. Do you think it is good that we’ve reached a point where anyone can say or write/make what they want and post it for the world to see?
It’s a huge complicated evolutionary step. The average person actually having a voice in the world!?? Even if the value of that voice is minimized by inflation, it’s still a whole new relationship to the social. If things go well, and life becomes increasingly participatory and open communication oriented, we’ll be figuring out the psychology and sociology of this for the rest of the century. It’s rough on writers, definitely. Our specialization has become the cultural oxygen.

So you think it devalues as well as democratizes?
Marshall McLuhan said that with every human enhancement comes an amputation. For an elite (when considered on a global scale) class of literate people, the diminution of power of real literary or even journalistic talent feels like an amputation. But for people who never had the opportunity to speak before, it’s the beginning of something else. Ultimately, we’ll give opportunity for more geniuses of expression to emerge.

Do you think that one day we’ll function in a socio-political way online? Elect local governments, etcetera?
Sure. So much depends on how things proceed from here, but I think an ideal of participatory democracy combined with strong civil libertarian safeguards could be realized primarily using networked communications. It’s going to be a bumpy ride though.

Where are all the cyberpunks that read Mondo 2000 back in the day? Was someone like Mark Zuckerberg a reader?
Mark was too young. Maybe Sean Parker. I hear from people in the computer industry all the time that they were inspired by Mondo 2000. Also, people working in biotechnology, nanotechnology, AI — all over the place. I think the Mondoids are all over the map, most of them still have many of the same enthusiasms, tempered with experience and a healthy skepticism.

Where do you see the future between humanity and technology?
That’s a mighty big question. We’re either going to co-evolve into a different situation for humans—one in which we no longer have economic scarcity and in which we have some kind of basic control over the structure of matter and can undo environmental damage and meet the needs of the human imagination for an expansive life. Or we’re going to be rocked by huge crises from which we will emerge—if at all—bruised and battered and with most of us dead (and not of natural causes). And after we change the human situation—or while we change the human situation—we may also intervene in the human phenome. This is complex, scary stuff to drop in a paragraph but that’s my conclusion (and the conclusion of Stephen Hawking).