R.U. Serious

May 7, 2022 7:39 PM

This Interview is a Mistake | Spike Art Magazine.

From writing about the internet with Timothy Leary to releasing music under the techno-rock moniker “Mondo Vanili”, R.U. Sirius has shaped digital culture since its inception. He dishes to Lydia Sviatoslavsky about (what’s left of) cyberpunk, stoner-inflected French theory, and the drab cruelty of American politics.

posted by zengargoyle (47 comments total)

Ken is little more than a joke, hence his alias. His 15 minutes was up long, long ago. Let’s just say I’ve known him a long time, and leave it at that.
posted by dbiedny at 7:56 PM on May 7, 2022 [5 favorites]

I stand by what I wrote back in 2004:
"These useless fuckers were peddling intellectually empty bullshit wrapped with a kind of arrogant "we're so cool" chic that instantly made me wonder what they were hiding.
What they were hiding, of course, is the kind of not-too-bright , middle class, well-off Californian attitude that assumes the future is not-too-bright , middle class, well-off and Californian. A kind of Ren-Faire future, filled with shiny things and flashing lights that only serve to distract you from the lurching figure, with the glitter of incipient guru-hood in his eyes, who has his hand in your wallet.
Badly written, badly designed wish-fulfillment produced by shallow middle-aged hippies for wannabe middle-aged hippies."
posted by thatwhichfalls at 8:16 PM on May 7, 2022 [12 favorites]

Ehh, I think you discount too much the intrinsic “I am from New York and thus am much cooler than thou” angle underlying the well-off Californian angle.

Most well-off Californians came from somewhere else, and where that is/was affects their angular momentum, so to speak.

Especially so in this case.
posted by aramaic at 8:25 PM on May 7, 2022 [3 favorites]

"you either die a hero, or live long enough to become the villain"

The interview subject is such an un-serious thinker, with so little to offer, I feel like quoting a second-rate Hollywood summer film is the most appropriate rebuttal I can offer. This doggerel doesn't rate any better.

Like many other self-important men, I, myself, grow older with every passing day. I hope I notice when I am sucked through my own butthole's event horizon, and I can no longer express an idea with a coherent meaning outside the Schwarzschild radius of my own navel.

(Yes, I realize the physics suggest that no one of such massive self-importance could see events from outside that raidus -- but maybe I will be the first, and then journalists circling my bottomless pit of ego will spray radiation as I consume them!)
posted by your postings may, in fact, be signed at 8:43 PM on May 7, 2022 [6 favorites]

R.U. a Cyberpunk? Well? R.U? … Punk - Mondo 2000.

Every few months the net goes gaga for someone publishing the off-the-cuff “R.U. A Cyberpunk” parody from a 1993 edition of MONDO 2000.

-- R.U. Sirius (2017)

Ken is little more than a joke I feel sorry for him that you two know each other so well.
posted by zengargoyle at 8:56 PM on May 7, 2022

Metafilter: sucked through my own butthole's event horizon
posted by lalochezia at 9:29 PM on May 7, 2022 [6 favorites]

Oh you are all so harsh about RU Sirius. I enjoyed reading Mondo back in the day. I was an undergrad at the time, and was scouring Montreal to find issues of Mondo, and then Omni as well. These two periodicals opened my eyes to new possibilities, I followed some new-to-me writers, and I quite enjoyed most of the readings.

I was surprised to read that RU Sirius is now 70 years old. Did the interview make sense? Nope, not much - it didn't go anywhere or land anywhere - but I am glad that he is still out there, thinking, writing and being irreverent.
posted by seawallrunner at 9:52 PM on May 7, 2022 [5 favorites]

that lettering style is a mistake
posted by glonous keming at 9:59 PM on May 7, 2022 [12 favorites]

that lettering style is a mistake
posted by glonous keming

Eponythauritative
posted by a box and a stick and a string and a bear at 10:25 PM on May 7, 2022 [19 favorites]

Omni was always interesting in a way that an (old) Scientific American sold as a tabloid at the checkout stand could be. I've only ever heard of Mondo 2000 on Metafilter -slashdot- and my impression is it was a Weekly World News for the after-college STEM set. Lest this seems disparaging, it is. But I'm happy everyone has a voice.
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 12:22 AM on May 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

...for the after-college STEM set

More like for post-humanities STEM fanboys with a poor understanding of both the humanities and tech.

I did find some of Mondo2000 diverting back then but it was striking just how culturally clueless it was. They claimed to be interested in the electronic music of the time, but could only rarely find anyone interesting to write about.

Like much else in that section of the groovy bookshop or record store, it promoted a notion of the avant-garde as a sort of uncritical mulch of certain, recurrent names. It would be unkind to name those names, many of whom were more interesting than claimed, but they sure came around in predictable orbits.
posted by GeorgeBickham at 12:53 AM on May 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

I have sour impressions myself but I came into this thread thinking, “Just gonna audit, don’t wanna yuck anyone’s yum.” What I saw here truly surprised me but I generally agree with most of it. I don’t have anything further to add.
posted by sjswitzer at 1:21 AM on May 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

I imagine that Ken is still attired exactly as he was for the R.U. A Cyberpunk photoshoot, in long black trenchcoat and a bunch of PDAs and barcode scanners and stuff hanging from his utility belt, only now he's not so much a 1337 hax0r d00d as the crazy guy who lives in the junkyard.
posted by acb at 3:17 AM on May 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

Remember when R. U. Sirius responded to Metafilter on Twitter?
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 3:45 AM on May 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

Wow. You folks must really hate Wired, too.
posted by valkane at 5:23 AM on May 8, 2022 [7 favorites]

Omni was always interesting in a way that an (old) Scientific American sold as a tabloid at the checkout stand could be.

Omni had way better cover art.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 6:22 AM on May 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

My copy of A User's Guide to the New Edge is still shelved in the living room. (Autographed, $7.50 from Powells whenever I bought it.)

nettime still exists. barely.

The recent breathless reporting on microdosing and ketamine therapy and etc. somehow manages to completely miss Mondo 2000, Rushkoff's Cyberia and of course the Shulgins and earlier psychedelia. Which is a strange disconnect given the straight through line via Burning Man and Valley-affiliated new age stuff that never went away. Like Essalen. Despite techno-libertarianism diverging in a sadly ancap direction. Before mostly shedding the an-.
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:33 AM on May 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

From the interview: "I have to consider the possibility that, at some point after 1968, “theory” became a PsyOp to get the (affluent) left to de-emphasize class and war." I'm going to think about this for a bit.

Ken is little more than a joke, hence his alias.

I guess I never expected R.U. Sirius and company to change the world or myself. Pranksters are going to prank. He spoke at a conference for academic writing teachers who used computers, back in 1999 in South Dakota. That was an entertaining, jarring juxtaposition. Try to imagine a room of English professors who felt edgy because they used web pages and MOOs. He seems to be pretty up front in every interview about the fact that that he's been making it up as he goes. Is he a dada-surrealist? I don't know.
posted by mecran01 at 6:52 AM on May 8, 2022

Another quote: "It was sort of funny to me as the Mondo 2000 thing got going that some people really thought that I should feel ashamed because I'm not an authentic hacker. Really, who gives a f***? I'm not an auto mechanic either. I just feel compelled to do various forms of communication and make art about the things that intrigue me."
posted by mecran01 at 6:57 AM on May 8, 2022

I stand by what I wrote back in 2004

This is the same criticism that has been made from within since 1995; as is appropriate for a consciously postmodern aesthetic.

Geert Lovink on nettime in 2015: 20 years Californian Ideology!
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:58 AM on May 8, 2022

Sincere question: What's up with Omni? When I was a pre-teen, a relative gifted me a subscription, but I wasn't quite at the right age to actually read it. The cover art was cool, but I don't think I kept any of the issues long enough to go back and read them with any sort of critical eye. I always figured it was the early-90s equivalent of Astounding or something -- sounds like it has a weird/negative reputation?
posted by Alterscape at 7:04 AM on May 8, 2022

I kind of dug on the aesthetic and vibe of the M2000 thing, to an extent, but it was definitely the result of a bunch of arts and humanities people three quarters of a generation older throwing a cyberpunk cosplay party where they forgot to actually invite hackers, phreakers, sceners, cyberpunks, or anyone who couldn't drop $3,500 on a Mac.
posted by majick at 7:23 AM on May 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

The important question is how many Dr Tingle books can we make from this thread?
posted by Jacen at 7:24 AM on May 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

What's up with Omni?

It was Scientific American as filtered through the mind of Bob Guccioni, who created Penthouse. It could sometimes be interesting, and had some good SF, but then you got the completely weird stuff in there.
posted by mephron at 7:51 AM on May 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

The completely weird stuff was what was great about Omni!

My main problem with Mondo is that it ended up feeding all of that terrible neo-hippy Burning Man culture and tech libertarianism and so-called anarcho-capitalism. They always came across to me as basically well-intentioned though, if deluded and blind to their overprivileged position.
posted by remembrancer at 8:05 AM on May 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

for post-humanities STEM fanboys with a poor understanding of both the humanities and tech

In my case, it was for a STEM nerd with a yearning for coolness a willingness to overlook a certain amount of imprecision. I was in my early 20s, the Cold War was over, all of this new technology seemed to be flying under the radar of the establishment -- of course people were just making it up; there was no map for the future. We were creating it!

In hindsight the magazine and its content may indeed have been shit, but I sure do miss the feeling of possibility and optimism that I associate with it. (Or maybe just with being young.)
posted by Slothrup at 8:12 AM on May 8, 2022 [10 favorites]

I stand by what I wrote back in 2004:

and I'll go with 2013

it wasn't really a revelation as I'd already heard of and/or read most of the people and themes they were raving about. But [...] just to find it all this hyper cool and strange and hopeful stuff in one place, all glossy and euphoric and yeah, positively dripping with various feel good chemicals and additives. [...] I liked that there was now this magazine that I could point some of my younger friends and acquaintances at, in hopes of aiding and abetting in the broadening of their minds etc ... because this was still the dregs of the coke and greed fueled Reagan era (George Bush Sr in the White House, the aftermath of the first Gulf War still pumping foul vapors and visions our way). There wasn't much light anywhere in the culture, certainly not penetrating to my corner of the crumbling civilization.

But yeah, [...] Things quickly got annoying in (as has already been noted here) much the same way that the whole Burning Man thing has become annoying. Something about individual moments of breakthrough and epiphany -- they just don't translate that well beyond the subjective sphere. Indeed, like a cherished photo from Burning Man. Yeah, man, I heard you the first time. That's you at a peak moment in your life, but the fact remains, you're not wearing any pants, you've got mud or something on your knees and that face paint just makes you look the wrong kind of clown.

Mondo 2000 is/was just like that. Which doesn't mean I'm not glad it happened.
posted by philip-random at 9:08 AM on May 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

I worked at Ballantine Books back in the early 90s when they published “How to Mutate and Take Over the World.” The editor who first received the manuscript took one look and wisely passed on it, as it was nothing but quasi-epistolary dithering — basically “Up the Down Staircase” if “Up the Down Staircase” had been written by a self-important wanker who used email instead of paper memos and fancied himself a cybervisionary.

That would have been the end of it if one of the assistant editors, who was around 24 or 25 and a Goffman acolyte, wrote an impassioned memo to the senior editors swearing up and down that the manuscript was a masterpiece that the original editor had been too old to understand, and that Ballantine would be making a huge mistake in passing on it because it actually was a vision of the future. For some insane reason, the higher ups bought it, probably because they were afraid of becoming that infamous editor who passed on the next Harry Potter or what have you. Needless to say, the book was just as bad in final form as it had been in manuscript form, got terrible reviews (even Publisher's Weekly hated it), sold a few hundred copies, and sank into well-deserved oblivion. Amazing what you can accomplish if you have delusions of grandeur and no capacity to be embarrassed.
posted by holborne at 10:45 AM on May 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

I'm an older millennial who heard of, but never actually got my hands on, Mondo 2000 and "How to Mutate and Take Over the World". The best I managed was getting The Real Cyberpunk Fake Book at a used book store, repeated viewings of the 1995 Hackers movie, and occasionally having enough pocket money to buy an issue of 2600 magazine from Barnes and Noble.

Cyberpunk was a cool dream that I was just a bit too young to be able to fully engage with, mainly because I and my family lacked the disposable income to buy gadgets. We had a family PC, but not one powerful enough to play Quake and I had no clue how to find phone numbers for BBSes (that war dialer program I got from a warez site only turned up fax machines and, now that I think about it, irritated many people with spam calls.)

I became an adult with an actual job in tech and mostly forgot that whole romantic cyberpunk blur where one could say things like "hack the planet!" and "information longs to be free" without embarrassment. And reading the comments in this thread provides a dim closure on all that; yeah, in retrospect, it was all just a subculture fashion for people who had more money than I did.

It's like that anime Serial Experiments Lain. Remember that? I never actually watched it, but earlier this year I resolved to go through the fourteen or so episodes and... it's not that good. Very pretentious plot, slowly paced, and reminds me that there was a time when laser pointers were considered the coolest thing rather than a cheap cat toy.

But it felt cool, and it reminds me of a time when I was young and before 9/11 happened so I naturally have a small affinity for it. Especially since the real cyberpunk dystopia we all live in now is no where near as fun or cool as the 90s thought it'd be. Nonetheless, I'm glad to read these comments to deflate the tired notions I had. Nostalgia is a disease.

It's comment threads like these that I really appreciate the Metafilter community for.
posted by AlSweigart at 11:04 AM on May 8, 2022 [7 favorites]

Here is Patrick Farley's memoir of infatuation and disillusionment with 90s cyberculture: The Guy I Almost Was.
posted by JonJacky at 11:39 AM on May 8, 2022 [19 favorites]

Memorably caricatured in Patrick Farley’s “The Guy I Almost Was” which I feel like I’ve seen on MeFi a bunch of times.

At risk of unfair stereotyping I feel like for a few people around these parts the urge to tee off on R.U. Sirius might cast him as a stand-in for the guy they used to be, though.
posted by atoxyl at 11:41 AM on May 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

Harvey Kilobit: The pronoun joke in his Twitter bio tells me everything I need to know about the kind of person R. U. Sirius is.
posted by SansPoint at 12:03 PM on May 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

Milkshake Cyberduck
posted by acb at 12:21 PM on May 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

METAFILTER: what you can accomplish if you have delusions of grandeur and no capacity to be embarrassed.

[alternately]

METAFILTER: a cool dream that I was just a bit too young to be able to fully engage with, mainly because I and my family lacked the disposable income to buy gadgets.
posted by philip-random at 12:37 PM on May 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

So, my techie career is best summarized as "didn't take the opportunity to move to Silicon Valley when wages were high and housing was cheap(er), stuck in Boston for good." Not that I'm complaining. I like being where everything about the techie scene was in a lower key, and where we did not serve as the birthplace of all the neoreactionary shit.

Thing is, Ken fits that key perfectly. His R. U. Serious persona just radiated a call not to take cyberculture seriously or profoundly. So while I understand the meh, I do not understand the hate. It's not like he's to blame for Mencious Goldbug.
posted by ocschwar at 1:08 PM on May 8, 2022 [7 favorites]

Sure he was all mouth and no trousers, but given the choice between an R. U. Serious internet and a Zuckerberg/Bezos one, I know which one I'd choose.
posted by kersplunk at 2:16 PM on May 8, 2022 [8 favorites]

Metafilter: All mouth; no trousers
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 2:29 PM on May 8, 2022

Whatever you think, surely Mondo and etc. aged better than all the officially anointed Nicholas Negropontification, of which the Metaverse and Web3 is highly redolent.
posted by snuffleupagus at 2:40 PM on May 8, 2022 [8 favorites]

It took me a surprising number of comments to realize this wasn’t about Yahoo Serious.
posted by mubba at 2:42 PM on May 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

My two cybercents, a reminiscence I wrote sometime in the early aughts, originally, IIRC:

"In January '92, I went to a publication party for the 'zine Mondo 2000 (which came out irregularly, hence the occasion being worthy of a party), a kind of forerunner of Wired magazine, and the brainchild of one R.U. Sirius (a.k.a. Ken Goffman), in their beautiful Maybeck mansion in the Berkeley hills. There was a suitably hip & artsy crowd, state of the art Macintosh-based desktop publishing gear, and, more interesting to me, a large number of fascinating books in their library, including one I later ordered from a rare book site: "Music, Mind, and Brain".

Later on in the evening, there was a crowd cramming into one of their downstairs offices where someone was conducting (and recording) an interview with several strikingly-dressed people. What was striking was that they were wearing uniforms that were near-replicas of Nazi ones, except that the swastika was replaced by a similar angular symbol. (Severe hairstyles, too.)

They droned on laconically about how they weren't endorsing the Nazi ideology, but felt that the aesthetic of the Nazis' "look" was admirable, and enough so to revive and emulate.

What a load of bullshit, I thought to myself: after all the horrific history of the mid-20th century, you can't separate out those symbols from their referents."
posted by Philofacts at 6:54 PM on May 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

There was a suitably hip & artsy crowd, state of the art Macintosh-based desktop publishing gear,

Aldus TasteMaker
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:57 PM on May 8, 2022 [10 favorites]

They droned on laconically

Sounds kinda like TOPY?
posted by aramaic at 7:37 PM on May 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

Wow, tough crowd here. I thought the interview with him was okay and not-stupid, even if the whole Mondo 2K ethos isn't your cuppa tea, I glanced at it on the news-stand but didn't buy in. The best thing about Wired is BigHead being on the cover in 'Silicon Valley'. Omni... is best thing in the world to find a big stack of in a rented cottage on a stoner week rental out in the country.

It took me a surprising number of comments to realize this wasn’t about Yahoo Serious.

Young Einstein was a pretty entertaining movie.
posted by ovvl at 7:57 PM on May 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

and I'll go with 2013

Metafilter: remembers being so excited about the world that never was.
posted by gtrwolf at 9:47 PM on May 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

You know what magazine I hate? Time. It got skinnier and skinnier, and then I couldn't figure out whether it was Newsweek. But hey, all you folks that are smarter than the guy who pushed out all those issues on super-glossy paper, I say hey. Hey.
posted by valkane at 10:59 PM on May 8, 2022

You know, Newsweek turned into a hardcore sex magazine so gradually I didn't even notice.
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 11:08 PM on May 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

Here is Patrick Farley's memoir of infatuation and disillusionment with 90s cyberculture: The Guy I Almost Was.

hahahaha I didn't realize this ended up linked directly above my mention of the same
posted by atoxyl at 10:29 AM on May 9, 2022 [3 favorites]