Information Technology Reference
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of CD-Roms and other interactive media and platforms. These
included Macromedia Director, Asymetrix Toolbook, and Silicon
Beach's SuperCard among others. This proliferation of authoring
software was a response to the promise that interactivity and CD-
Rom seemed to hold as a commercial product. A certain amount
of hyperbole was generated about the CD-Rom in the early '
s,
as, for example, the 'new papyrus'. 27 This and other such rhetorical
flourishes suggested that such technology represented an advance
in information technology equal to, for example, the printed topic,
that publishers and media companies would be foolish to ignore.
Accordingly in the early '
90
s there was a boom of multimedia
companies and multimedia departments within publishing and TV
production companies. However, despite the hyperbole, the CD-
Rom industry failed to take off as expected.
90
the digital counter-culture and neoliberalism
As the
s progressed some of the more extreme elements of the
Californian counter-culture embraced new technology with enthu-
siasm. In the late '
1980
s, echoing Stewart Brand's earlier comment,
acid guru Timothy Leary started to proclaim that personal comput-
ers were 'the LSD of the '
80
s'; 28 bizarre publications also emerged,
such as High Frontiers , founded in
90
, described by Mark Dery
as a 'heady blend of gadget pornography, guerrilla humour, human
potential pep talk, New Age transcendentalism and libertarian
anarcho-capitalism'. 29 High Frontiers mutated into Reality Hackers
and then Mondo
1984
, in which form it continues as an expensive
and glossy cyberculture magazine. 30 Edited by R. U. Sirius and
Queen Mu, self-styled 'domineditrix', Mondo also has connec-
tions with even more extreme movements such as the LA-based
'Extropians', who, in a combination of Ayn Rand and Friedrich
Nietszche, proclaim the need for leaving the physical body and
downloading the mind onto computers. The increasing importance
2000
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