R.U. Sirius: inside the mind of a cyberdelic shaman

Most will know R.U. from his time as co-publisher and editor-in-chief of the 1990s cyberpunk magazine MONDO 2000. MONDO covered topics like transhumanism, virtual reality and smart drugs at a time when these things offered hope for a better or at least more interesting world, though the editorial tone always subversively poked at the soft white underbelly of technoculture and its champions. If Wired has become Kenny G, MONDO was Sun Ra, through and through.

R.U. is the author or coauthor of several books, including Counterculture Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House, Everybody Must Get Stoned: Rock Stars on Drugs, How to Mutate and Take Over the World, and nearly a dozen others.

We covered a lot of ground, including, but not limited to, online subcultures, cryptocurrency, the societal repercussions of digital technologies, AI, conspiracy theory, politics, the shortcomings of transhumanism, deregulation, post-scarcity philosophy, the uses and limitations of irony and ambiguity, and a ton more. I could talk to him for hours.

Music is a big part of the R.U. experience, as you will hear in our talk. He’s been a lyricist and composer for projects including Phriendz, Party Dogs and Mondo Vanilli.

R.U.’s various works have served as a guidepost for me since I was a much younger man. It was a special treat to connect with him now, in this time of reckoning with what the digital and internet revolution has wrought, to talk about the state of life and affairs.

I would like to dedicate this episode to Eve Berni, Ken’s partner of 26 years who passed away shortly after we recorded this episode. I did not know Eve, but I know she was deeply loved by our guest today. I wish Eve, Ken, and all who knew them peace and solace.

(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)

LP: I have to tell you, I'm sure you get this a lot, but I'm so excited to talk with you. I feel as though you're a voice that's been ringing in my head for thirty some odd years.

R.U. Sirius: And I'm so sorry.

LP: And this is my attempt to purge it once and for all.

R.U. Sirius: Poor, poor fella. (laughter)

LP: I have my list of diagrams and questions and notes.

R.U. Sirius: Excellent.

LP: Is music your primary endeavor these days? When we were communicating, you said that was the one link you cared about, and I wonder, is that because that's where your energy is?

R.U. Sirius: Yeah, I pretty much try to put most of my efforts into recording. Well, I wrote a memoir, History of Mondo 2000, that took a lot of the word energy. It remains unpublished, which is a strange and in itself interesting story.

But what I found, particularly since I had a stroke about two years ago, is I'm much happier working with lyrics. I can do them really well. They come into my head really well. Trying to write essays is a struggle. I do it okay. Not to get too much of a pity party going, but I also had a triple bypass surgery at the end of 2023.

Before that, I was writing for an AI-oriented website. I was writing fairly substantial, ambiguous to cynical columns for this website, the wonderful Ben Goertzel, who is very much for free speech and sense of humor and all that kind of stuff. So, I was doing these long essays, but since emerging from the hospital, I'm pretty much just entirely doing music.

I've had some marvelous opportunities, including the opportunity to write a theme song for a film that's being made called Degens, or Down and Out in the Crypto Casino. So I was able to write a song called "Degens and Phriendz" because I work with a band called Phriendz. .

I collaborated on a live performance in which I appeared virtually, and we tried our best to fake it. It was part of the fun. We weren't fooling anybody, but with AI being what it is, people have been talking about a robot R.U. since 1993. So maybe I will get one, and it can tour. Warhol had a robot Warhol back in 1969 or something, but I don't think anybody was tricked by that either.

LP: In light of your health challenges, and in thinking about some of those limitations, opportunities, or just new ways of interfacing with the world that confronts you, I wanted to talk to you about transhumanism. I don't think we'd get too far into a conversation without talking about it. What the hell happened?

R.U. Sirius: Yeah, what the hell happened? It's interesting. You could be sort of techno-optimistic, I think, right up to the collapse of the Arab Spring. That was the last nail in the coffin, where Facebook could even seem noble, in that it allowed people rebelling against authoritarian states to communicate.

At some point, the idea that this could be more liberating than dystopian flipped. And when it flipped, it flipped entirely, at least in the view of most people. In writing the book about Mondo 2000, a lot of what I wrote, and this was written maybe five or six years ago, was comparing then to now, and remembering how cyber utopianism, or at least a celebration of virtual reality, even though there wasn't really much actual virtual reality, these wild celebrations conquered San Francisco.

It was the kind of guys who owned Google and the kind of people who were throwing rocks at the Google bus all at the same party in the 1990s because the future was unmade and unknown. There was a sense that nothing new under the sun existed and no sense of hope during the Reagan 1980s.

Suddenly, this thing came forward that seemed like fun and seemed like something that could get people out and partying. It created a vibe. Greed and authoritarianism and bad memes - it's not just the capitalists or the state, it's the people, too. People were just not ready to reframe the past and move it into a future that would be desirable.

I mean, most people were not in a position, globally, to be super happy about the new world that was being imagined by white men in the United States. Although they may be happier with it than we are here now in the U.S. People in Africa are paying for stuff with their cell phones using cryptocurrency.

LP: That's right.

R.U. Sirius: It's called leapfrogging. So it works in some ways and doesn't work in some ways. I think El Salvador's adoption of cryptocurrency has been kind of a disaster for them, but then I think it's working somewhere else.

These things are so unpredictable. Certainly, the people who are pushing the technologies are not considerate of who will be hurt, but I think are considerate of who will be helped. They like that part of it. This goes all the way back to Steve Jobs. But I think it was in Kara Swisher's new book. The first line in it about digital culture was, "It was capitalism after all."

And all those idealistic projections from Steve Jobs - computers are wheels for the mind, and 1984 won't be 1984, or all those things. I mean, I think he felt and believed those things, but he believed in his own stash of money even more. And so we end up in this situation.

I don't go all the way to the dystopian view of tech. I sort of go all the way to the dystopian view of the entire situation, including climate change and all that. But with tech, I like to remain ambiguous about it. I like to use AI. I like to use GPT. For me, I'm going to try to do something interesting with this.

To me, ChatGPT is not the theft of material from writers and artists. It's remix culture, just like we always did - the sampling and the taking of stuff from culture and turning it into something else. I believe in the writers' and artists' objections to it in terms of the big companies that are making money from it and people who are doing crap work with it. But for me, when artists and creative people get in there and start messing around with it, it's still a legitimate thing.

LP: I heard Douglas Rushkoff's quote where he said, "It turns out that AI is just another interface to capitalism."

R.U. Sirius: That's true.

LP: If you're worried about copyright infringement, it's because you're under that mindset of "I have to protect and hoard." It's not quite that simple because I tend to lean more sympathetically towards the artist's point of view, and the artist should have some say in what happens to their work if they want to.

R.U. Sirius: Well, there's that book by Cory Doctorow and somebody else. It's like how capitalists squeeze through this interface and take all the wealth from between the creative institutions and the consumer. People should look it up. It's a very important book. Cory Doctorow is the co-author. To me, it's a perfect explanation of what's going on.

I always look to Cory for explanations of what's going on these days. He and Bruce Sterling are my go-to people for what the fuck is going on out there.

LP: You mentioned Kara Swisher, and I feel like she's using her platform in a very public way to go through what I think a lot of people of my and her generation are going through. I'm in my fifties. I always tell people I feel like I grew up in the first generation of people who had computers in their homes, very early computing devices.

I studied computer science for a little bit, but I never practiced as an engineer. There's a whole uninteresting story behind that. But you grew up in that world of being influenced by you and by Mondo and the lore of it all. The sort of the California story of how the freak culture met the tech culture. Very versed in that world and grew up excited by it.

Now there's this reckoning of like, what I come down to - I don't know if this is the conclusion in Kara's book, I've been listening to interviews with her, I haven't read the book yet - is that I just think these people don't like-

R.U. Sirius: And this takes us back to transhumanism.

LP: Yeah. But the thing is, in preparation for this conversation, I've tried to develop some thesis on this. And to me, it's like, they're just really like Western Judeo-Christian thinkers. Like, man's flawed. We live in the fall from paradise, and we're either gonna dig our way to the center of the earth or fly our way to Saturn, but we're getting the hell out of here, and that to me is the worst part of it, is that they're willing to leave everybody behind.

R.U. Sirius: Have you read the TESCREAL stuff? People have been writing about transhumanism and extropianism. Yeah, the sort of extreme right-wing shift and the people who want to leave the planet behind.

Well, Allen Ginsberg accused Timothy Leary of wanting to leave the planet and the humans behind as a broken eggshell. I think that's how he expressed it way back during the space migration advocacy days. There's the whole thing through cyberpunk and through transhumanism of describing the body as the meat, a sort of separation from what intelligence can do, what humans can experience with the mind and consciousness and the expanded mind, and the limitations of the body.

Transhumanism has always been a mix of those who have emphasized humanism and just wanted to have the "trans" to the humanism; this will exceed the sorry specimens. And those things coexist within the same person often.

Many of the people I know from the transhumanist world have both those things going on within - perhaps in conflict or perhaps in "well, let's bring this gift to the masses if we can, but if not, we're the hell out of here." That kind of thing.

And getting the hell out of here, it's just so unrealistic. We're so far from reaching escape velocity and getting out of here on a starship. I don't really see people piling into the spacecraft and getting to someplace where they could actually live.

There's been some exploration of Lagrange points again. You might remember the L5 Society in the 1970s with Gerard O'Neill and Timothy Leary, even Jerry Brown, talking about how we could live in a certain part of the galaxy called Lagrange points, and we could set up colonies there with Earth-like conditions. But we're still very far from anything like that. So I don't think the billionaire preppy preppies - that's a good slip - I don't think they have anywhere to go, really. You know, they don't really have anywhere to go other than underground.

LP: Yeah. In New Zealand.

R.U. Sirius: In New Zealand, yeah. Actually, I wrote a piece of fiction in which there was an apocalypse way back in the 1980s, unfinished. I had a group called Zealots for New Zealand because I decided that New Zealand was probably the best place to survive whatever was coming up. I don't know if I was aware of global climate change in the 80s or why I particularly picked New Zealand.

LP: What were you doing before High Frontiers? There's this sort of gap in your biography that I've never been able to close fully. You went from being a kid to a teenager, and then it's the mid-80s.

R.U. Sirius: Yeah, let's see. In the mid-80s, I was just moving out to California and starting High Frontiers. But before that, I was born in 1952. I was kind of a turn-on, tune-in, drop-out, radical, and then depressed person in the early, mid, and late 70s.

Then I went to college late. In my late 20s, I went to college at a state university in New York, and that's where I first had my sort of successful band, the Party Dogs. So I was pretty engaged with music then, and I was also majoring in English and then creative writing. I wasn't a science guy, I wasn't a technology guy, I was a creative writing guy.

But I was writing futurist stuff, somewhere on the edge of surrealism. After I took too much acid at the beginning of the 1980s, it sort of became vaguely Tom Robbins-ish playfulness. But I was writing stuff that was somewhere between that kind of thing and with a little bit of a technoid edge because I had the influence of Leary and Robert Anton Wilson.

I started to get some influence from them, so I was slowly taking in that kind of optimism, but I always had a punk edge, and I was always ready for a downward spiral, even during the Mondo 2000 days. I always kept a little bit of that Roger Waters, "I'm gonna end up in the hole somewhere."

LP: Yeah.

R.U. Sirius: And when it's all done. Yeah.

LP: How aware were you of that before you really got immersed in what I'll use the shorthand and call it the cyberpunk culture? How aware were you in even the seventies of the strands of hippie head freak culture meeting the techno-utopians? Like, was Stewart Brand in your psyche at all? Were you aware of this?

R.U. Sirius: Absolutely, absolutely. Whole Earth and then CoEvolution Quarterly was just a wonderful magazine. So much intelligence running through there from so many sources. CoEvolution was a place where you learn to appreciate the counterculture voices but also appreciate the straight people who had intelligences to add.

Brand brought them all into the same place. So even going back to the late 1960s, I was a post-scarcity guy rather than "let's take off and become farmers." I was "let the machines do it," which came from Dadaists to the Yippies and Diggers. So there was always a rap. Abbie Hoffman had the rap. A lot of people had the rap about post-scarcity.

LP: Could you articulate that for people? Post-scarcity is basically the idea that-

R.U. Sirius: The idea that boring labor and want were obsolete in the 1960s.

LP: Because of technology.

R.U. Sirius: Because of technology. According to Diggers, who were giving up free food and the anarchist group in San Francisco and New York; according to the Yippies; and according to many countercultural and/or radical groups, technology should eliminate scarcity, but the capitalists wanted planned adolescence and wage slaves and all that.

It was probably very premature. It might even still be premature, but that was the idea that was going around. And that was prominent, probably, with people who had a full - I don't necessarily want to say ideological, but a full idea map of what the counterculture is. Well-formed, that was probably more popular than just turning your back on technology.

LP: I was reading an interview with you from, I think, just after your Mondo 2000 experience, or maybe it was still in the midst of doing whatever it was doing. It was really mind-blowing. I would love to have taken it out of context, given it to somebody, and said, "When do you think these words were said?"

But you were talking about the idea of downsizing and how basically late-stage capitalism not only doesn't need workers, but it doesn't need consumers.

R.U. Sirius: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

LP: You basically said, "And that's the whole thrust of the Republican revolution." And so when you say those words about what I'll call that utopian ideal around machines of loving grace, that's really around the same point in time, maybe just a little bit afterward.

Geneses are very similar to the Barry Goldwater days and this sort of 50, 60-year right-wing - what looks in retrospect like a plan or an initiative to react against civil liberties and to really, lack of a better way to say it, to marry the government and the corporations. And this didn't just happen overnight. It's interesting to view it through the lens of it being reactionary to what was happening in society. It's not conservative. It's actually quite radical.

R.U. Sirius: They wanted the wage slaves not to get too far out to be available for whatever this thing was. I think capitalism, particularly that started in the 70s, and it actually happened to Jimmy Carter, that capitalism wanted to unleash entrepreneurial energy, or the creation of what we then called high technology.

So even under the Carter administration, that kind of removed some of the stops on what companies, entrepreneurs, and capitalists could do.

LP: Oh, deregulation. Yeah.

R.U. Sirius: Deregulation. Even Carter got sucked into that to a degree. And then Reagan came stomping right in. Absolutely. It is the Reagan administration and its push for deregulation that created the digital revolution.

Then, it was the freaks and hippies, many of whom tended to be liberal or even left-wing, who were excited to create computers for the people. But those two forces came together, and that became what happened in the 1990s.

The group Jobs and Wozniak emerged from, the computer club Homebrew, was largely organized by Lee Felsenstein, who, according to St. Jude, used to run guns for the Black Panther Party. I'm not accusing anybody of anything here, but lets at least say he was very involved in the Berkeley Barb and the sort of ultra-leftism, the "revolution has come any minute" vibe of the early 1970s.

These were the people who were making the computers, but the Reagan administration was opening up the space for businesses to flourish. And everybody, including most of the left-leaning radicals, wanted these businesses to flourish. They wanted to get computers to the people. They wanted to get people online because it appeared like a good way of giving regular people a lot of power, even if it was brought in under the conditions of the Reagan revolution, I suppose, and then Bush, George H. W. Bush, and then Clinton really not changing anything other than the vibe.

LP: That really is all he did was change the vibe. You look back now at some of them, whether it's the drug policies or the incarceration rates or the decrease in social benefits-

R.U. Sirius: They knew better, too. That's the weird thing. There's actually a funny thing in my unpublished book about how Clinton was asked what he had just been doing on a weekend radio program. I think it was over Labor Day. And he said, "I've been reading Mondo 2000."

LP: (laughter) At that time, I had a little bookstore in New Haven, Connecticut, and I carried Mondo. Man, that melted my mind. I love that stuff. That and 2600 - just again, the generation of young people that was just all those strands coming together, the music, the Discordianism. Wilson loomed large over all of that stuff.

Such a rich history, and I talked to a lot of guests here, just this rich history of how that stretched back into the 60s and 70s of all those people, whether they were academics and intellectuals and New Agers and the California freaks - they all traveled in these orbiting circles. They bounced in and off of each other, either physically or in their writings, and influenced each other. And to really create that, I guess, that world that, again, for lack of a better way to say it, became cyberpunk.

It's always been a question to me as to why didn't the liberals and the libertarians have more simpatico? Was it really simply just over the role of government?

R.U. Sirius: In the 90s, the liberals and libertarians got along, and the leftists, because they were at the Mondo House, and we had underlying, the main people involved in the publication, all had left-wing backgrounds.

But we kept it under the radar somewhat because, as I like to say in a provocative way, I say this in the book, being political was gauche back then. It was just, it wasn't hip, it wasn't fashionable. One of the things I realized later on reading Mondo, actually, was that our libertarian people, Gracie and Tsarkov, and some other people were being very direct in the columns that they wrote about their attachment to classical liberalism and libertarianism.

And we were under the radar, which allowed at least one person who wrote about us for Artforum and a very famous article to decide that we were like anarcho-capitalists or something like that. But certainly, in my circle, everybody was getting along in the 1990s; there's just a sense that we're going for something that was as of yet unformed. And we could work out our differences later.

When WIRED came along, I think it provoked some hostility. That was when people started to say, "No, we don't really like those leanings."

LP: Yeah, I always think of it as like, if Mondo 2000 were the Beatles, then WIRED was like the, I won't say the Monkees, because they've had such a great critical reassessment, but certainly the vapid bubblegum pop. (laughter)

R.U. Sirius: Although that's what we used to say, we actually compared them to the Monkees. Although I was just being reminded of the WIRED first issue party that I went to and as I was walking into the party, the performance artist, George Coates, said to me that Mondo is the Rolling Stones and WIRED was the Beatles because you wouldn't want your daughter to marry a Mondo. (laughter)

LP: You've referred to it a few times now. I was actually going to go to the conversation without bringing up Mondo 2000 at all because I figured you've been there and done that so many times. But do you want to talk about why the book was not published? It would seem to me like there are at least two generations of people waiting for that book.

R.U. Sirius: Yeah, there's a need for this book. I mean, it's just a bizarre occurrence, basically. It was going to be published by Zero Books, and their acting publisher was Doug Lane. He loved the idea of me doing a book and then liked what I gave him. We got all the way to the point where the galleys were about to be printed when there was a palace revolution at Zero Books.

So Trotsky got the ice pick. And he was gone. Some new leftists, actually old leftists who had previously owned the book company, took it back, and they didn't like the people who Doug Lane had brought in. They had an obligation to work with all the people. Still, they did their best to make it impossible for any of us to want to work with them and started giving weird editorial comments and stuff like that, like asking me to prove a negative comment I made about Donald Trump. I mean, it's just weird stuff.

So that's what happened, and it's been lying fallow since then. There have been a number of attempts to sell it, and there are attempts ongoing even right now to either sell it as it is or to rework it. That's where it stands right now.

LP: It needs to be out there. Plus, then you can stop having to answer questions about stuff that happened 35 years ago. You just say it once. (laughter)

R.U. Sirius: Well, I have this funny relationship with the titles of institutions that are supposed to help me with my career because before this book was put to bed by Zero Books, the Mondo Vanilli album was going to come out on Nothing Records, and nothing was released by Nothing Records. So next time I have an offer from a book company or a record company, I'm going to make sure that their name is not-

LP: Zero Zilch Nil. (laughter)

R.U. Sirius: Zero, yeah.

LP: He needs to go for Bountiful Press.

R.U. Sirius: Yeah, something along those lines, or Something Anything Press, or yeah,

LP: To go back to Wilson for a minute, I read a quote from you where you said, "Any ism makes me sarcastic," and of course, that just rings of Bob Wilson or a Discordian sort of flavor. I wonder, what do you think about irony and sarcasm?

To one extent, when I read some of your writings over the years or your comments over the years, I can see you trying to maintain the ambiguity of the flexibility of thought, so you don't have to be pinned down. And I know that irony and sarcasm can play a role in that. It's also used in other ways. And I just wonder, are you ultimately an ironic, sarcastic person, or are those tools in your toolbox?

R.U. Sirius: It's hard to say. I'm probably more ironic now, in a way, because things seem pretty hopeless, so why not? It's a distancing mechanism. I don't think it's righteous at all. It's cool, in a way.

It's righteous in the sense that no matter how necessary it's not some kind of revolutionary reform might be. It's also really important to tweak people a little bit when they're taking themselves too seriously. So it has a little tinge of righteousness to it.

But ultimately, I mean, God, I read there was some history of the Rolling Stones. I read the phrase "ironic distancing," and I thought, "Yeah, yeah, I get that too." I was really attracted to Andy Warhol at the time, too. He was just a master. You couldn't get more distance than what Warhol was able to achieve.

It's a reflex. I don't think it's politically noble, particularly, although there is that aspect, again, of challenging people who are taking themselves too seriously. I just started watching the TV show "3 Body Problem." Have you heard of that science fiction book that a lot of people started talking about a few years ago, written by a Chinese author who lives in China?

The American TV version has just started, and I just watched the first few minutes of it. It starts with the Red Guard denouncing some intellectuals and professors and throwing stuff at them. And it really - I'm going to get in trouble for saying this - but it really did remind me of some young people today on the left.

So it's important to tweak people who are being too self-righteous.

LP: So then what about nihilism? Are we so far gone that that's- Are you a nihilist or are you-

R.U. Sirius: You know, I, again, I don't- I avoid isms including nihilism, I don't want to commit to it, although I have a lyric in which I declare myself ready to take on some variation of N-I-H-I-L-I- I have that in a lyric.

To me, intellectual content and words and language and particularly lyrics all come from a state of play. One of the things I like about writing lyrics as opposed to writing essays is that it's easier not to get pinned down. Bob Dylan created this space to say, "Yeah, nope, I have no commitment to doing anything about these lyrics I've written." You know, he sort of gave us permission, whether rightly or wrongly, to just say, "Yeah, just use them any way you want, but don't ask me for anything."

LP: Thank you for that because that unlocks something for me that I was struggling to articulate, which was in listening to some of the music where you've sort of led me or where that gets me to realize is that a lot of the lyrics, it's almost like a safe space just to explore these extreme ideas.

When you sing about the end of the world or the different catastrophes and potential outcomes, you're not necessarily singing songs of celebration or anything else. It's just artistic expression. It's not your job; it doesn't exist to tell us how much you mean and how much is just you working through these things.

R.U. Sirius: I mean, a lot of dark rhymes that I came up with maybe five or ten years ago seemed to come up while I was wandering around the Safeway. I would just start a chorus in my head, and I would stop. I would get out my iPad and type words, and that became the commitment to write a song about something that might be really dark.

Like, "Hey, hey, we're the punkies, people say we're not the Ramones, we're just trying to be friendly, come and watch us tweet all day, we're the young generation, you better watch what you say." Ha! (laughter)

LP: What did you think of Anonymous, if you had any opinion at all?

R.U. Sirius: Oh, I loved Anonymous. It's ironic that it was the first outcropping of 4chan, which later pretty much single-handedly gave birth to the alt-right. So bizarre. Yeah. The original was Anonymous. They were mostly left-leaning anarchists.

And they started off by going after Scientology. They took Scientology down many pegs, those crazy people online, and supporting WikiLeaks and all kinds of dirty things. Good, interesting stuff. I thought Anonymous was great, and in one of my interviews back in the '90s, I said that a contemporary radical cyber-revolutionary group would have to have irony as thick as David Letterman. They did that in their little video vignettes that they put out. They did these terribly hip, playful pieces that accompanied genuinely radical hacks. I thought that was great.

LP: When you were out talking about "How to Mutate and Take Over the World," one of the things you said at the time was that you thought that the internet was a great place for guerrilla warfare. And I guess in a way they would represent that. But I wonder, how does a statement like that sit with you now? Like, I guess there's always TOR and the dark web, but how do you think about all that?

R.U. Sirius: I think it's a great place for guerrilla warfare by right-wingers, mafias, and people trying to rip off things for themselves and their friends. It's also for the kind of people that I was talking about, but those tricks have been taken up by Putin's brain trust and, no doubt, NSA-type people, mafias, and gangsters of all sorts.

It seemed like we were the ones who were ahead of the curve, and we could just jump in and take over. My co-author, St. Jude, for "How to Mutate and Take Over the World" really believed that in totality much more than I did. To me, it was a riff, and maybe it'll work, and maybe it won't.

LP: It goes back to before the first dot-com crash - '96 to 2000 or so, it all moved so fast, and it became everywhere all of a sudden. And I read a lot of the histories now, and people talk about the web wasn't really that prevalent in 2000 or before 9/11. That's not my memory. Like I- it was already firmly here in my mind. Now, maybe I was an early adopter, I don't know, but I'm sorry, it was here. You were banking; you were paying your bills. It was like it was already happening, and it happened so fast. It was just too fast for people to respond to in any organized way, I think.

R.U. Sirius: Yeah. I've called it a social singularity - the idea that a billion people could suddenly find themselves in this shared space, just in a place where nobody understands what's happening, how it's affecting them, and what will happen next.

I mean, it really crossed the threshold, I think, in the 21st century, but it was certainly happening at the end of the 1990s. I remember walking in a subway in the BART system in San Francisco, and there was an advertisement that said, "Join the cyberpunks at AT&T." That was around 1994 or '95.

LP: I'm blaming you for that one. (laughter)

R.U. Sirius: It went fast.

LP: Went fast.

R.U. Sirius: Yeah. The pandemic was the point at which everybody was forced online. In order to do anything, you have to be online.

LP: Yeah. So then, is QAnon a PSYOP?

R.U. Sirius: It should be. There are so many things that should be PSYOPs that either are or aren't. I think that maybe the system just tends to help people who benefit from confusion and political ignorance.

I was watching something on Netflix, a fairly legitimate exploration of some of the things that went on during Iran-Contra and about a guy who may have been killed or may have committed suicide. And I was thinking about how crazy conspiracy theories have really delegitimized investigative journalism and what investigative journalists can say or get into without kind of getting lumped into the conspiracy theory camp.

So it could be that kind of thing. Naomi Klein's book "Doppelganger" - goes into a little bit about how the other Naomi, Naomi Wolf's embrace of conspiracy theory had made her shy away from very real things that she felt needed to be expressed because she would be sounding too much like the conspiracy nuts if she started to express it.

LP: I mean, that's Bob Wilson, if nothing else is, right?

R.U. Sirius: Yeah.

LP: You know, about a week or so ago, it was in the news for all of a day the whistleblower at Boeing, who was supposed to testify the following morning, was found in his house dead. And the journalist that was closest to him was interviewed on NPR or something.

And he said, "I talked to him earlier in the day or the day before, and he wasn't upset. He wasn't nervous. He was looking forward to just going and doing this and putting it behind him and moving on to the next stage of his life." Yeah, here we are, what, a week or ten days later, and it's a conspiracy theory to suggest that-

R.U. Sirius: Yeah, nobody wants to talk about it. I remember back during Iran-Contra, one of the CIA guys was about to testify, and he had a brain aneurysm or something like that. So much goes back to Iran-Contra, if you want, in terms of legitimate conspiracy stuff—legitimate investigative material that should have been explored further.

Basically, Oliver North intimidated everybody from going any further by blustering patriotism, and it came to a close.

LP: I think a lot of our geopolitics was so close to the edge of being fully exposed during those investigations that-

R.U. Sirius: Yeah,

LP: Who knows if people would have just shrugged or not, but it strikes me that what was at stake was like- I just- how much money and geopolitics were intertwined. That today probably seems quaint, but back then, it would have been shocking.

R.U. Sirius: We gave arms to the revolutionary guards in Iran, but nobody hates Iran more than we do. It's like the contradictions of the right wing. I know the contradictions; the political center is bad enough, but the contradictions of the supposedly mainstream Republican right have just become bizarre.

It gets even more extreme to the point where liberals are convinced that anybody who hates Donald Trump is great. MSNBC is happy to do interviews with the kind of people who lied to us about the National Security Agency spying on everybody. It's become one vast mishmash in which Trump is a devil and anybody who's against Trump is good and God, Ronald Reagan would have hated Trump, and wasn't he great.

He just did this horrible, awful, weird stuff. Now, the Reagan administration even gave weaponry to Pol Pot. It can't get more evil than that.

LP: Again, to try to avoid isms, but for lacking more precise language, as a left-leaning person of a certain age, isn't it amazing to see the gift that Trump gave the, what we'll call, "the deep state?"

Like the fact that people are rooting for the FBI, CIA, and NSA. I never thought- I never thought I'd see legal dope and gay marriage in my lifetime. And I'm so grateful I do, but I never thought I'd see people saying we need to protect the FBI.

R.U. Sirius: Yeah, yeah, it's so bizarre, and I mean in some sense it's legitimate, you have to do both things at the same time, but you have to stay- When crazies come at mainstream political people and say, "I'm going to kill your whole family"-

LP: Yeah.

R.U. Sirius: Yeah. You have to protect those people or poll workers or whatever. And then at the same time, you have to remember these institutions aren't particularly our friends either. We're just juggling such a rich and poor kind of mess.

LP: In anticipation of speaking with you, it got me thinking about all kinds of different disparate strands. I was trying to think about some of the other, what I'll call in an air quote, "thinkers" or prominent voices around digital culture from the mid-late eighties into the nineties.

Of course, somebody I hadn't thought of in years and years popped into my head, and it was Nicholas Negroponte. I was like, "Oh, is he still alive?" And I Googled him. I went down the internet rabbit hole as one does. I was reading about how one of his last sort of public controversies was the Media Lab. The MIT Media Lab, when he was running it, took a donation from Jeffrey Epstein years after Epstein was convicted on his pedophile charges.

R.U. Sirius: Yeah, our Mondo pal Joi Ito has also gotten in trouble over that. He ran the Media Lab after Negroponte.

LP: Well, Negroponte's reaction was, "If I could go back in time, I'd do it again."

R.U. Sirius: Oh, really? Yeah, I don't think Joi would say that. Yeah.

LP: I promise I'm leading to a point, which was I kept going further and further down the rabbit hole. I came across this 2019 article in the New York Times about Epstein. He had just been arrested only a couple of months prior - the big arrest, the one that led to his demise.

They referred to him as a "serial illusionist." It wasn't "convicted pedophile." It wasn't- It was a "serial illusionist." And I thought that makes it sound like he's Doug Henning or something. (laughter)

R.U. Sirius: Yeah.

LP: Serial illusionist.

R.U. Sirius: Oh my goodness. His association with transhumanism is another wild thing. You know, I edited a magazine for Humanity Plus, and I think they got some money from Epstein as well. And I think if you're trying to do a big project that's expensive, and a billionaire comes along and says, "I'm going to help you do the project." You just do it because otherwise, you're not going to do your big project. It all turns out to be part of the problem. Breeding farms and oh my god. We had some big plans.

LP: I've been thinking a lot about how the interplay of our technology and sort of our futurism speak intersects with metaphor.

I'm not a media theorist. I'll fumble through what I'm about to say. I'm sure it's not original. I'm like the dorm room stoner looking at it. "There's a universe in my thumbnail." But we have the multiverse because you and I, right now, exist in multiple places. Like, I'm here with you, my Instagram account is alive, my LinkedIn account is alive, my website's alive, the music you and I have published to our Bandcamp pages has a whole other potential living thing going on right now, and people interacting with it.

Like there's no multiverse to be created. It already exists. And there's time travel already because we've uploaded all these memories and experiences. And I heard this thing that apparently, three or four years ago, Amazon had a demo of Alexa. It was like a produced corporate video of a little girl saying to her mother, "Mommy, I wish Nana could read me a bedtime story." And the mother says, "Well, she can, honey." And she says, "Alexa, play Nana reading."

What's that if not time travel? It's all here. What else are you waiting for?

R.U. Sirius: I mean, in the first issue of Mondo 2000, we have a quote from "The Philosophy of Andy Warhol From A to B and Back Again" in which he says that humans are the only things that can be in many places at once because "I'm here and then I'm with you on the telephone and I'm on TV" and he had a way of expressing it that was interesting.

The telephone was more intimate, TV was more abstract, so even back then all that stuff started bouncing off satellites in space and it just gets larger, just looms larger, until the whole Baudrillard concept, that hyperspace - all these variations of ourselves - pretty much replaced the actual space that we are situated in right now.

People's reactions to that include trying to find their bodies again and using slogans like "touch grass", and that's a nice idea. However, the situation is certainly that we have so many multiple selves now.

One of our Mondo 2000 writers, Sarah Drew, came up with the idea of the "infinite personality complex," which we discussed in an issue. This idea is that we can extend out as many possible copies of ourselves, and those copies can all have their own personalities.

LP: Yeah, I wonder, what would the R. U. Sirius of today say to the R. U. Sirius of 1990, 1992, 1994? Would you disabuse that version?

R.U. Sirius: Buy Apple stock. (laughter)

LP: "You don't know what I'm talking about yet, but there's going to be this thing called Facebook. Stay away from it, but buy their stock."

R.U. Sirius: Yeah, yeah. Even in the 70s, I would say, buy Apple stock, but no, that's not the Beatles company. That's something else.

Other than that, I would- Oh, boy. I would say hang on to Mondo 2000. I mean, there is nothing particularly futuristic about it, but I quit so quickly with Mondo 2000 because it could still be a successful media institution. So, it's nothing really about foresight that I would tell myself other than, "Oh God, I don't know, put more dark-skinned people on the cover of Mondo 2000," although we had a lot already.

God, I'm trying to think of the Mexican guys who do cyberpunk stuff. I can't think of their name, but I met them right after Mondo had folded and always regretted not putting them on the cover and making people aware of them. Folks, look up Mexican cyberpunk performer Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Yeah, look him up. Amazing cyberpunk performance artist who lived in both Mexico City and, as last I knew, also lived in San Francisco. So those guys should have been on the cover.

LP: My son goes to art school in San Francisco. He spent the first ten years or so of his life in Brooklyn, and then we moved out here—I'm in Seattle—and he's in school now in San Francisco, and it's so amazing to watch him experience San Francisco.

There's, like New York, everybody has their San Francisco, and he's there at a really interesting point in time, and to actually be on the ground there versus reading about it from- the hysteria around the world. It's just really fun to watch it through his eyes and to see even now that city has so much potential, has so much potential. There's no inevitability around the worst-case scenario.

R.U. Sirius: Takeover by wealthy techies and then-

LP: And they're all killing each other.

R.U. Sirius: Yeah, right, right.

LP: Yeah. Thank you so much for making time.

R.U. Sirius: No, it's been great. It's been a lot of fun. Let's keep in touch.