The New Edge : Magazines: The New Age meets the PC Age in Mondo 2000. The quarterly’s topics range from latest in high-tech products, jewelry and culture.

In an age of personal computers and fax machines, CNN and MTV, some people are threatened by what’s become an epidemic of information. With so many channels and choices, it’s difficult to know what to believe.

Then there are people like R.U. Sirius, who shiver in giddy anticipation of the new order that rampant technology might create.

“The culture is just emerging,” says Sirius, considered a cult leader among those who have front-row seats to the microchip future. “There is a great opportunity for changing what it means to be a human being.”

Sirius and his cohort of equally dubious moniker, Queen Mu, are publishers of Mondo 2000, a quarterly magazine that is trying to do for high-techies what Rolling Stone did for rockers.

“We’re covering the cultural manifestations of the PC revolution,” Sirius says. Or as Mu, the magazine’s “Domineditrix,” puts it, Mondo is diving head-first into “the media soup at the end of the 20th Century.”

Working out of a Berkeley mansion--amid ghosts of the hippie movement--they are disseminating reports on the newest technology and far-flung predictions about where computers will take us next.

Mondo’s chaotic editorial blend ranges from stories on computer-chip jewelry to reports on computerized break-ins at automated-teller machines and “wireheading”--the implantation of electrodes in the brain.

Such is the terrain of the “cyberpunks,” a subculture that takes its cues from science and science fiction. These computer-literates foresee a time when everyone will be plugged into the circuitry and multinational corporations control the world by controlling the databases. Future rebels will be wizard-hackers strung out on IQ-enhancing hormones; they’ll link their brains directly to the computers, cracking codes and wreaking havoc.

Mondo both celebrates and frets over such prospects. But there’s more here than computer magazine nerd-speak.

Frank Zappa, Timothy Leary and William S. Burroughs show up, amid articles on fashion and music and essays about the kinks that technology is bending in traditional morals. Sirius and Mu are peddling a new brand of expanded consciousness. Someday, they say, millions of brains will join as one in “cyberspace,” inside the computer.

After two years and five issues, Mondo sells 50,000 copies at $5.95. The editors say most readers are in their late 20s and work in the communications and information fields.

The Village Voice has chastised Mondo for feeding its readership large words and even larger concepts “like so much pricey salad.” Consider an interview between Mondo’s John Perry Barlow and computer scientist Ted Nelson.

Barlow: “You bring up an interesting point about spatiality which I’ve tried to wrap my mind around. The WELL (the Whole Earth BBS), or a voice-mail system, has a spatiality which is non-physical. There’s a sense of social dimension. If you’re on a conference call, you’ve got another sort of cyberspacean experience.”

Nelson: “It’s a virtuality.”

At the same time, there is often a self-effacing humor to the writing that the Toronto Globe and Mail called “compulsively readable.”

Much of this devilishness emanates from Sirius, 39, born Ken Goffman and previously a punk rock singer. This is a man who, as a performance art piece, plans to alter himself with bodybuilding, plastic surgery and “smart” drugs--a group of psychoactive compounds that cyberpunks claim, without much medical support, enhance brain power.

Even his serious side is tinctured with insolence. In Mondo’s fourth issue, he warned about the emerging global community: “To resist the New World Order, spread chaos and confusion, first amongst yourselves. Don’t come together. Come apart. Don’t identify with the nation state, the tribe, your race, gender, bulletin board or dance club. That’s how you get suckered. Be mercilessly politically incorrect. . . Abortion. Drugs. Freedom of speech. You could wake up tomorrow and find out that if it ain’t whitebread, it ain’t allowed.”

Mu is his equal in satire. In the fifth issue, she critiqued Michael Jackson’s new “Black or White” music video, his first effort for the Sony label: “He has not only been cosmeticized for Japanese consumption, but--as in the Daijosai enthronement ceremony--has become a ritual female,” she wrote.

Mu--who declines to give her age because of concerns about our ageist society--is actually Allison Kennedy, a former anthropology student at UC Berkeley who has published papers on toad and tarantula venoms. “I used to be an astrologer. Did more than a thousand charts,” she says. “But who has time for that anymore?”

In describing Mondo, she careens through a 40-minute monologue on Walt Whitman, sexual surrogates and Japanese nationalism. This pastiche is representative of her magazine’s “New Edge” philosophy, its Silicon Valley-meets-New Age tone. “We call it the techno-pagan revolution,” she says.

The cyberpunk culture became popular with William Gibson’s 1982 novel, “Neuromancer,” which told of a rebel-hacker pitted against the corporations. This pure fantasy was quickly embraced by many techno-groupies. More recently, the film “Total Recall” portrayed another cyberpunk favorite--”virtual reality,” a technology that hopes to give humans any experience, including sex, via brain implants and machinery.

Mondo loves to expound on virtual reality and “smart” drugs. Such escapist components of the cyberpunk movement are bound to be popular when the environment and economy are deteriorating.

“This is dangerous stuff, the stuff that (snuff) dreams are made of,” wrote Vivian Sobchack, director of the arts at UC Santa Cruz, in a recent Artforum magazine.

Sirius agrees, at least in part.

“Everything we’re interested in is profoundly disturbing,” he says. “If you look at the human record, there is a great possibility that these (technological) changes will be used for exploitation and greed.”

All the more reason, Sirius and Mu say, for people to become sophisticated about the future and its possibilities. Upcoming issues will deal with conspiracy theories and a reassessment of Americana.

“Nothing is good and bad, or black and white anymore,” Mu says. “It’s a time when the new generation has to write its own rules.”