Memories of the Past, Cyberpunk Nostalgia, and AI Slop | by Vektor Memory | Jun, 2026 | MediumSitemapOpen in appSign up<br>Sign in

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Memories of the Past, Cyberpunk Nostalgia, and AI Slop

Vektor Memory

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“A self-indulgent weekend divergence from the usual Vektor memory business content. Consider what happens when you give a developer two days off, unlimited internet archive access, and too many ideas crammed into one article."<br>Writing this article began organically. Which is a funny thing to even have to say in 2026.<br>What does organic even mean now? I don’t care, man; I just want to be free to express myself, man.<br>I did not write this on a mechanical typewriter.<br>I wrote it on a PC with my stubby index fingers running Windows software that, miraculously, does not blue screen every ten minutes anymore. It only took Microsoft thirty years to pull that off.<br>To the left sits an analog record player with some secondhand Yamaha bookshelf speakers I found at a charity shop; to the right of me sits a modern dark wood-paneled Zen PC case, a processor that would have occupied an entire room thirty years ago, and a GPU that can synthesize gargantuan piles of AI slop or brilliant code in roughly ten seconds flat.<br>And yet, for all that raw power, it still comes down to an algorithm. It always has.

The Sharper Image and the Death of Wonder<br>When I was a kid I used to walk into The Sharper Image store at Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston and just stand there. Looking at technology I could not afford while the staff watched me carefully to make sure I did not break anything.<br>I also grabbed some brightly colored rock salt candy; I loved that stuff, some core memories right there.<br>Press enter or click to view image in full size

That feeling of picking up a piece of technology and not quite knowing what it did, like a ten-year-old ape holding something from another civilisation, you cannot replicate that in a sterile Apple store. The technology is better now. Genuinely better. Faster, smaller, more capable than anything those shelves held. But the sense of wonder at the unknowable object is completely gone.<br>Everything is explained before you touch it. Every product has a thirty-second video, a Reddit thread, a YouTube teardown, a comparison article, a spec sheet, and six AI-generated summaries of what other people thought about it. The mystery has been optimised out of the experience.<br>I did not know it at the time, but that shop was one of the last places where a kid could walk in and feel genuinely tactile wonderment about the future. Confused in a good way. The way that makes you want to figure things out via curiosity; they eventually went bankrupt and resurfaced as an online-only store.<br>That feeling is what I keep chasing when I go back into the archive, or when searching for used records, that rush you feel of finding something illusive and rare amongst a pile of James Last Trumpet a gogo records, man that German bandleader sold some records back in the 70's.<br>I once found a rare copy of Philip K. Dick's short story compilation, but it was in French. Absolutely gutted… how did that even end up halfway around the world in a charity shop in the suburbs? What a journey it went through.

Mondo 2000 and the Magazine That Dreamed Too Hard<br>Which leads me to Mondo 2000.<br>Mondo 2000 was a glossy cyberculture magazine published out of Berkeley, California, through the 1980s and 1990s. It covered cyberpunk topics: virtual reality, smart drugs “noots”, the coming digital revolution. It was a more anarchic and subversive prototype for the later-founded Wired.<br>Wired won commercially. Mondo had more cyber soul.<br>It started as High Frontiers in 1984, edited by R.U. Sirius, the pseudonym of Ken Goffman. It became Reality Hackers in 1988, then Mondo 2000 in 1989. It ran 17 issues and folded in 1998. In its tear through the early 1990s, Mondo brought an anarchic, drug-addled sensibility to the geeky world of computers, drawing a wiggly line from gonzo rock journalism to novelty-chasing tech speculation. Wired reads, by comparison, like the operating manual for an IBM mainframe. That is not an insult to Wired. Wired won because it was legible to more people. But Mondo felt like it was made by people who were genuinely strange, genuinely excited, and genuinely unsure how things were going to turn out.<br>That experimental uncertainty was the best part. And they didn't waste 80 billion dollars on a Metaverse attempt. Cyberspace…<br>Press enter or click to view image in full size

When I was a kid I mostly went to the back pages and read all the small ads. Strange devices. Gadgets I could not identify. Things that promised to change the way your brain worked. The joy was not in understanding any of it. The joy was in the sense that there was a whole dimension of reality operating outside the things people talked...