wow that's awesome, at first I was thinking "oh kind of like Wired in the early days".... But this sounds closer to Mondo 2000, which was the sort of "underground" prototype to Wired.
Of course, like a Giant Robot Mailman, Internet Archive delivers;
Discussion
You're right! :) It was a direct reaction to Mondo 2000 (with Ray Gun graphics), a mixup of the best form and content of the 90s
When Živel was created in 1995, I was still very young - I wouldn't discover it for a few more years. But I often find myself imagining what those early '90s must have felt like for adults.
People were discovering new freedoms after the fall of communism, beginning to explore the world beyond what they'd known. Somehow, all that energy found its way into Živel. It became a gathering point, concentrating everyone in our small country who was hungry for this kind of discovery.
I suspect we're around the same age, and similarly I wasn't really old enough to participate "culturally" in the 90s, but... It was clearly a very important time, for a number of reasons.
So much of the values we're still fighting over today, the cypherpunk ideals, both "cypher" and "punk" parts, were sort of crystallized in that time period. There was just something in the air.
I'm starting to think the rough period around ~2012-2015 was sort of similar. The Ron Paul rLOVEution, Cody Wilson, the slow atrophy of neoconservatism all contributed to a resurgence of a kind of cypherpunk ethos, albeit more culturally centered on the Right than the 90s wave was.