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TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century
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TIME, Almanac of the 20th Century.ISO
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1990
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93
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jan_mar
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02089941.000
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<text>
<title>
(Feb. 08, 1993) Cyberpunk!
</title>
<history>
TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1993
Feb. 08, 1993 Cyberpunk
</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
COVER STORIES, Page 58
Cyberpunk!
</hdr>
<body>
<p>With virtual sex, smart drugs and synthetic rock 'n' roll, a
new counterculture is surfing on the dark edges of the computer
age
</p>
<p>By PHILIP ELMER-DEWITT - With reporting by David S. Jackson/San
Francisco
</p>
<p> In the 1950s it was the beatniks, staging a coffeehouse
rebellion against the Leave It to Beaver conformity of the
Eisenhower era. In the 1960s the hippies arrived, combining
antiwar activism with the energy of sex, drugs and rock 'n'
roll. Now a new subculture is bubbling up from the underground,
popping out of computer screens like a piece of futuristic
hypertext.
</p>
<p> They call it cyberpunk, a late-20th century term pieced
together from cybernetics (the science of communication and
control theory) and punk (an antisocial rebel or hoodlum).
Within this odd pairing lurks the essence of cyberpunk culture.
It's a way of looking at the world that combines an infatuation
with high-tech tools and a disdain for conventional ways of
using them. Originally applied to a school of hard-boiled
science-fiction writers and then to certain semi-tough computer
hackers, the word cyberpunk now covers a broad range of music,
art, psychedelics, smart drugs and cutting-edge technology. The
cult is new enough that fresh offshoots are sprouting every day,
which infuriates the hard-core cyberpunks, who feel they got
there first.
</p>
<p> Stewart Brand, editor of the hippie-era Whole Earth
Catalog, describes cyberpunk as "technology with attitude."
Science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling calls it "an unholy
alliance of the technical world with the underground of pop
culture and street-level anarchy." Jude Milhon, a cyberpunk
journalist who writes under the byline St. Jude, defines it as
"the place where the worlds of science and art overlap, the
intersection of the future and now." What cyberpunk is about,
says Rudy Rucker, a San Jose State University mathematician who
writes science-fiction books on the side, is nothing less than
"the fusion of humans and machines."
</p>
<p> As in any counterculture movement, some denizens would
deny that they are part of a "movement" at all. Certainly they
are not as visible from a passing car as beatniks or hippies
once were. Ponytails (on men) and tattoos (on women) do not a
cyberpunk make--though dressing all in black and donning
mirrored sunglasses will go a long way. And although the biggest
cyberpunk journal claims a readership approaching 70,000, there
are probably no more than a few thousand computer hackers,
futurists, fringe scientists, computer-savvy artists and
musicians, and assorted science-fiction geeks around the world
who actually call themselves cyberpunks.
</p>
<p> Nevertheless, cyberpunk may be the defining counterculture
of the computer age. It embraces, in spirit at least, not just
the nearest thirtysomething hacker hunched over his terminal but
also nose-ringed twentysomethings gathered at clandestine RAVES,
teenagers who feel about the Macintosh computer the way their
parents felt about Apple Records, and even preadolescent vidkids
fused like Krazy Glue to their Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis
games--the training wheels of cyberpunk. Obsessed with
technology, especially technology that is just beyond their
reach (like brain implants), the cyberpunks are future oriented
to a fault. They already have one foot in the 21st century, and
time is on their side. In the long run, we will all be
cyberpunks.
</p>
<p> The cyberpunk look--a kind of SF (science-fiction)
surrealism tweaked by computer graphics--is already finding
its way into art galleries, music videos and Hollywood movies.
Cyberpunk magazines, many of which are " 'zines" cheaply
published by desktop computer and distributed by electronic
mail, are multiplying like cable-TV channels. The newest, a
glossy, big-budget entry called Wired, premiered last week with
Bruce Sterling on the cover and ads from the likes of Apple
Computer and AT&T. Cyberpunk music, including acid house and
industrial, is popular enough to keep several record companies
and scores of bands cranking out CDs. Cyberpunk-oriented books
are snapped up by eager fans as soon as they hit the stores.
(Sterling's latest, The Hacker Crackdown, quickly sold out its
first hard-cover printing of 30,000.) A piece of cyberpunk
performance art, Tubes, starring Blue Man Group, is a hit
off-Broadway. And cyberpunk films such as Blade Runner,
Videodrome, Robocop, Total Recall, Terminator 2 and The
Lawnmower Man have moved out of the cult market and into the
mall.
</p>
<p> Cyberpunk culture is likely to get a boost from, of all
things, the Clinton-Gore Administration, because of a shared
interest in what the new regime calls America's "data highways"
and what the cyberpunks call cyberspace. Both terms describe the
globe-circling, interconnected telephone network that is the
conduit for billions of voice, fax and computer-to-computer
communications. The incoming Administration is focused on the
wiring, and it has made strengthening the network's high-speed
data links a priority. The cyberpunks look at those wires from
the inside; they talk of the network as if it were an actual
place--a virtual reality that can be entered, explored and
manipulated.
</p>
<p> Cyberspace plays a central role in the cyberpunk world
view. The literature is filled with "console cowboys" who prove
their mettle by donning virtual-reality headgear and performing
heroic feats in the imaginary "matrix" of cyberspace. Many of
the punks' real-life heroes are also computer cowboys of one
sort or another. Cyberpunk, a 1991 book by two New York Times
reporters, John Markoff and Katie Hafner, features profiles of
three canonical cyberpunk hackers, including Robert Morris, the
Cornell graduate student whose computer virus brought the huge
network called the internet to a halt.
</p>
<p> But cyberspace is more than a playground for hacker high
jinks. What cyberpunks have known for some time--and what 17.5
million modem-equipped computer users around the world have
discovered--is that cyberspace is also a new medium. Every
night on Prodigy, CompuServe, GEnie and thousands of smaller
computer bulletin boards, people by the hundreds of thousands
are logging on to a great computer-mediated gabfest, an
interactive debate that allows them to leap over barriers of
time, place, sex and social status. Computer networks make it
easy to reach out and touch strangers who share a particular
obsession or concern. "We're replacing the old drugstore soda
fountain and town square, where community used to happen in the
physical world," says Howard Rheingold, a California-based
author and editor who is writing a book on what he calls virtual
comminities.
</p>
<p> Most computer users are content to visit cyberspace now
and then, to read their electronic mail, check the bulletin
boards and do a bit of electronic shopping. But cyberpunks go
there to live and play--and even die. The well, one of the
hippest virtual communities on the Internet, was shaken 2 1/2
years ago when one of its most active participants ran a
computer program that erased every message he had ever left--thousands of postings, some running for many pages. It was an
act that amounted to virtual suicide. A few weeks later, he
committed suicide for real.
</p>
<p> The well is a magnet for cyberpunk thinkers, and it is
there, appropriately enough, that much of the debate over the
scope and significance of cyberpunk has occurred. The question
"Is there a cyberpunk movement?" launched a freewheeling
on-line flame-fest that ran for months. The debate yielded,
among other things, a fairly concise list of "attitudes" that,
by general agreement, seem to be central to the idea of
cyberpunk. Among them:
</p>
<p>-- Information wants to be free. A good piece of
information-age technology will eventually get into the hands
of those who can make the best use of it, despite the best
efforts of the censors, copyright lawyers and datacops.
</p>
<p>-- Always yield to the hands-on imperative. Cyberpunks
believe they can run the world for the better, if they can only
get their hands on the control box.
</p>
<p>-- Promote decentralization. Society is splintering into
hundreds of subcultures and designer cults, each with its own
language, code and life-style.
</p>
<p>-- Surf the edges. When the world is changing by the
nanosecond, the best way to keep your head above water is to
stay at the front end of the Zeitgeist.
</p>
<p> The roots of cyberpunk, curiously, are as much literary as
they are technological. The term was coined in the late 1980s
to describe a group of science-fiction writers--and in
particular William Gibson, a 44-year-old American now living in
Vancouver. Gibson's Neuromancer, the first novel to win SF's
triple crown--the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick awards--quickly became a cyberpunk classic, attracting an audience
beyond the world of SF. Critics were intrigued by a dense,
technopoetic prose style that invites comparisons to Hammett,
Burroughs and Pynchon. Computer-literate readers were drawn by
Gibson's nightmarish depictions of an imaginary world
disturbingly similar to the one they inhabit.
</p>
<p> In fact, the key to cyberpunk science fiction is that it
is not so much a projection into the future as a metaphorical
evocation of today's technological flux. The hero of
Neuromancer, a burned-out, drug-addicted street hustler named
Case, inhabits a sleazy interzone on the fringes of a
megacorporate global village where all transactions are carried
out in New Yen. There he encounters Molly, a sharp-edged beauty
with reflective lenses grafted to her eye sockets and
retractable razor blades implanted in her fingers. They are
hired by a mysterious employer who offers to fix Case's damaged
nerves so he can once again enter cyberspace--a term Gibson
invented. Soon Case discovers that he is actually working for an
AI (artificial intelligence) named Wintermute, who is trying to
get around the restrictions placed on AIs by the turing police
to keep the computers under control. "What's important to me,"
says Gibson, "is that Neuromancer is about the present."
</p>
<p> The themes and motifs of cyberpunk have been percolating
through the culture for nearly a decade. But they have coalesced
in the past few years, thanks in large part to an upstart
magazine called Mondo 2000. Since 1988, Mondo's editors have
covered cyberpunk as Rolling Stone magazine chronicles rock
music, with celebrity interviews of such cyberheroes as
Negativland and Timothy Leary, alongside features detailing
what's hot and what's on the horizon. Mondo's editors have
packaged their quirky view of the world into a glossy book
titled Mondo 2000: A User's Guide to the New Edge
(HarperCollins; $20). Its cover touts alphabetic entries on
everything from virtual reality and wetware to designer
aphrodisiacs and techno-erotic paganism, promising to make
cyberpunk's rarefied perspective immediately accessible. Inside,
in an innovative hypertext format (which is echoed in this
article), relatively straightforward updates on computer
graphics, multimedia and fiber optics accompany wild screeds on
such recondite subjects as synesthesia and temporary autonomous
zones.
</p>
<p> The book and the magazine that inspired it are the product
of a group of brainy (if eccentric) visionaries holed up in a
rambling Victorian mansion perched on a hillside in Berkeley,
California. The MTV-style graphics are supplied by designer Bart
Nagel, the overcaffeinated prose by Ken Goffman (writing under
the pen name R.U. Sirius) and Alison Kennedy (listed on the
masthead as Queen Mu, "domineditrix"), with help from Rudy
Rucker and a small staff of free-lancers and contributions from
an international cast of cyberpunk enthusiasts. The goal is to
inspire and instruct but not to lead. "We don't want to tell
people what to think," says assistant art director Heide Foley.
"We want to tell them what the possibilities are."
</p>
<p> Largely patched together from back issues of Mondo 2000
magazine (and its precursor, a short-lived 'zine called Reality
Hackers), the Guide is filled with articles on all the
traditional cyberpunk obsessions, from artificial life to
virtual sex. But some of the best entries are those that report
on the activities of real people trying to live the cyberpunk
life. For example, Mark Pauline, a San Francisco performance
artist, specializes in giant machines and vast public
spectacles: sonic booms that pin audiences to their chairs or
the huge, stinking vat of rotting cheese with which he perfumed
the air of Denmark to remind the citizenry of its Viking roots.
When an explosion blew the thumb and three fingers off his right
hand, Pauline simply had his big toe grafted where his thumb had
been. He can pick things up again, but now he's waiting for
medical science and grafting technology to advance to the point
where he can replace his jerry-built hand with one taken from
a cadaver.
</p>
<p> Much of Mondo 2000 strains credibility. Does physicist
Nick Herbert really believe there might be a way to build time
machines? Did the cryonics experts at Trans Time Laboratory
really chill a family pet named Miles and then, after its near
death experience, turn it back into what its owner describes as
a "fully functional dog"? Are we expected to accept on faith
that a smart drug called centrophenoxine is an "intelligence
booster" that provides "effective anti-aging therapy," or that
another compound called hydergine increases mental abilities and
prevents damage to brain cells? "All of this has some basis in
today's technologies," says Paul Saffo, a research fellow at the
Institute for the Future. "But it has a very anticipatory
quality. These are people who assume that they will shape the
future and the rest of us will live it."
</p>
<p> Parents who thumb through Mondo 2000 will find much here
to upset them. An article on house music makes popping MDMA
(ecstasy) and thrashing all night to music that clocks 120 beats
per minute sound like an experience no red-blooded teenager
would want to miss. After describing in detail the erotic
effects of massive doses of L-dopa, MDA and deprenyl, the entry
on aphrodisiacs adds as an afterthought that in some
combinations these drugs can be fatal. Essays praising the
beneficial effects of psychedelics and smart drugs on the
"information processing" power of the brain sit alongside RANTS
that declare, among other things, that "safe sex is boring sex"
and that "cheap thrills are fun."
</p>
<p> Much of this, of course, is a cyberpunk pose. As Rucker
confesses in his preface, he enjoys reading and thinking about
psychedelic drugs but doesn't really like to take them. "To me
the political point of being pro-psychedelic," he writes, "is
that this means being against consensus reality, which I very
strongly am." To some extent, says author Rheingold, cyberpunk
is driven by young people trying to come up with a movement they
can call their own. As he puts it, "They're tired of all these
old geezers talking about how great the '60s were."
</p>
<p> That sentiment was echoed by a recent posting on the WELL.
"I didn't get to pop some 'shrooms and dance naked in a park
with several hundred of my peers," wrote a cyberpunk wannabe
who calls himself Alien. "To me, and to a lot of other
generally disenfranchised members of my generation, surfing the
edges is all we've got."
</p>
<p> More troubling, from a philosophic standpoint, is the
theme of dystopia that runs like a bad trip through the
cyberpunk world view. Gibson's fictional world is filled with
glassy-eyed girls strung out on their Walkman-like simstim decks
and young men who get their kicks from microsofts plugged into
sockets behind their ears. His brooding, dehumanized vision
conveys a strong sense that technology is changing civilization
and the course of history in frightening ways. But many of his
readers don't seem to care. "History is a funny thing for
cyberpunks," says Christopher Meyer, a music-synthesizer
designer from Calabasas, California, writing on the well. "It's
all data. It all takes up the same amount of space on disk, and
a lot of it is just plain noise."
</p>
<p> For cyberpunks, pondering history is not as important as
coming to terms with the future. For all their flaws, they have
found ways to live with technology, to make it theirs--something the back-to-the-land hippies never accomplished.
Cyberpunks use technology to bridge the gulf between art and
science, between the world of literature and the world of
industry. Most of all, they realize that if you don't control
technology, it will control you. It is a lesson that will serve
them--and all of us--well in the next century.
</p>
</body>
</article>
</text>