*Information wants to be free.
*Access to computers and anything which may teach you something about
how the world works should be unlimited and total.
*Always yield to the hands-on imperative.
*mistrust authority.
*promote decentralisation.
*Do it yourself.
*Fight the power.
*Feed the noise back into the system.
*Surf the edges.
[(MONDO 2000)65-66 ]
Cyberpunk Culture
Science fiction deals with issues as diverse as the clash between religious
fundamentalism and the consumer society, abortion and the church, life support
for the terminally ill. or the freedom of the individual in the age of on-line
databases.
William Gibson, whose brave new world is seen as in a state of impermanent
decay compared to “Cyberspace”,The “virtual world” already in embryonic
existence in the Internet global computer network. In Gibson’s latest novel,
Virtual Light, a pair of designer sunglasses holds all the data on plans for
property scam involving the rebuilding of post-quake San Francisco. Gibson’s
“heroes” are a handful of neo-punks and derelicts. His Future world is a grim
approximation of today’s social and technological trends, a graphic debunking
of the progress principle.
In the 20th century, the Net is only accessible via a computer terminal,
using a device called a modem to send and receive information. But in 2013,
the Net can be entered directly using your own brain, neural plugs and complex
interface programs that turn computer data into perceptual events” . In several
places, reference is made to the military origin of the
Cyberspace interfaces: “You’re a console cowboy. The prototypes of the
programs you use to crack industrial banks were developed for [a military
operation]. For the assault on the Kirensk computer nexus. Basic module was a
Nightwing microlight, a pilot, a matrix deck, a jockey. We were running a
virus called Mole. The Mole series was the first generation of real intrusion
programs.” [Neuromancer].
“The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games… early graphics
programs and military experimentation with cranial jack” [Neuromancer].
Gibson also assumes that in addition to being able to “jack in” to the
matrix, you can go through the matrix to jack in to another person using a
“simstim” deck. Using the simstim deck, you experience everything that the
person you are connected to experiences: “Case hit the simstim switch. And
flipped in to the agony of a broken bone. Molly was braced against the blank
grey wall of a long corridor, her breath coming ragged and uneven. Case was
back in the matrix instantly, a white-hot line of pain fading in his left
thigh.” [Neuromancer].
The matrix can be a very dangerous place. As your brain is connected in,
should your interface program be altered, you will suffer. If your program is
deleted, you would die. One of the characters in Neuromancer is called the
Dixie Flatline, so named because he has survived deletion in the matrix. He is
revered as a hero of the cyber jockeys: ‘Well, if we can get the Flatline, we’re
home free. He was the best. You know he died brain death three times.’ She
nodded. ‘Flatlined on his EEG. Showed me the tapes.’” [Neuromancer].
Incidentally, the Flatline doesn’t exist as a person any more: his mind
has been stored in a RAM chip which can be connected to the matrix:
Cyberpunk is fascinated by the media technologies which were hitting the
mass market in the 80s. Desktop publishing, computer music and now desktop video
are technologies taken up with enthusiasm by Cyberpunks..
The rapid evolution from video-games to virtual reality has been helped
along by the hard core of enthusiasts eager to try out each generation of
simulated experience. The multimedia convergence of the publishing industry,
the computer industry, the broadcasting industry and the recording industry has
a spot right at its centre called Cyberpunk, where these new product
experiments find a critical but playful market.
Cyberpunk is a product of the huge batch of technical and scientific
universities created in the US to service the military industrial complex. Your
typical Cyberpunk is white, middle class, and technically skilled. They are a
new generation of white collar worker, resisting the yoke of work and suburban
life for a while. They don’t drop out, they jack in. They are a example of how
each generation, growing up with a given level of media technology, has to
discover the limits and potentials of that technology by experimenting with
everyday life itself.
In the case of Cyberpunk, the networked world of Cyberspace, the
interactive world of multimedia and the new sensoria of virtual reality will all
owe a little to their willingness to be the test pigs for these emergent
technologies.
There is also a tension in Cyberpunk between the military that produces
technology and the sensibility of the technically skilled individual trained
for the high tech machine. Like all subcultures, Cyberpunk expresses a conflict.
On the one side is the libertarian idea that technology can be a way of
wresting a little domain of freedom for people from the necessity to work and
live under the constraints of today. On the other is the fact that the
technologies of virtual reality, multimedia, Cyberspace would never have existed
in the first place had the Pentagon not funded them as tools of war.
On the one hand it is a drop out culture dedicated to pursing the dream of
freedom through appropriate technology. On the other it is a ready market for
new gadgets and a training ground for hip new entrepreneurs with hi-tech toys to
market.
Cyberpunk’s fast crawl to the surface has included not only pop music
(industrial, post industrial, techno pop, etc.), but also television (MTV,
Saturday morning cartoons, the late “Max Headroom” series, etc.) and movies
(”Total Recall,” “Lawnmower Man,” the Japanese “Tetsuo” series, etc.). A bi-
monthly magazine called Wired, aimed in part at the Cyberpunk set and financed
in part by MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte. And the principals of
Mondo 2000 .
“The micro technology that, in Cyberpunk, connects the streets to the
multinational structures of information in Cyberspace
also connects the middle-class structures of information in
Cyberspace also connects the middle-class country to the middle-class city”.
[S.R Delany (Flame Wars) 198]
Cyberpunk tends to fill some of us with uneasiness and even fear.The X
Generation is made up of Slackers, Hackers (a.k.a. Phreakers, Cyberpunks, and
Neuronauts). They are Ravers and techno- heads. According to most demographers,
we are more street smart and pop-culture literate, and less versed in the
classics, ethics, and formal education (especially in areas like geography,
civics, and history: areas where we appear to be, in short, an academic
disgrace.) We are said to have less ambition, less idealism, less morals,
smaller attention spans, and less discipline than any previous generation of
this century. We are the most aborted, most incarcerated, most suicidal, and
most uncontrollable, unwanted, and unpredictable generation in history. (Or so
claim the authors of 13th Generation. ).
“The work of cyberpunks is paralleled throughout eighties pop culture :
in rock video ; in the hacker underground; in the
jarring street tech of hip-hop and scratch music….”
[Bruce Sterling (MONDO 2000) 68]
Cyberpunk and Technology
In Gibson’s world, Cyberspace is a con sensual hallucination created within
the dense matrix of computer networks. Gibson imagines a world where people can
directly jack their nervous systems into the net, vastly increasing the intimacy
of the connection between mind and matrix. Cyberspace is the world created by
the intersection of every jacked-in consciousness, every database and
installation, every form of interconnected information circuit, in short, human
or in-human.
Cyberspace is no longer merely an interesting item in an inventory of ideas
in Gibson’s fiction. In Cyberspace: First Steps, a collection of papers from
The First Conference on Cyberspace, held at the University of Texas, Austin, in
May, 1990, Michael Benedikt defines Cyberspace as “a globally networked,
computer-sustained, computer-accessed, and computer-generated, multidimensional,
artificial, or ‘virtual’ reality.” He admits “this fully developed kind of
Cyberspace does not exist outside of science fiction and the imagination of a
few thousand people;” however he points out that “with the multiple efforts the
computer industry is making toward developing and accessing three-
dimensionalized data, effecting real-time animation, implementing ISDN and
enhancing other electronic information networks, providing scientific
visualisations of dynamic systems, developing multimedia software, devising
virtual reality interface systems, and linking to digital interactive television
. . . from all of these efforts one might cogently argue that Cyberspace is ‘now
under construction.’”
Cyberpunk in TV and Cinema
One Film “WAR GAMES” was based on a college student who hacked into the Us
defence computer and started a simulation program of a nuclear attack on Russia,
which looked like the real thing to the Russians. In the near future a British
film call “Hackers” is to be released, directed by Iain Softley (BackBeat). Also
soon to be released is “The Net” starring Sandra Bullock (Speed) and a Gibson
Cyberpunk thriller called “Johnny Mnemonic” a $26 million science fiction movie
based on his short story, and starring Keanu Reeves as the main character.
Directed by Robert Longo. The film also stars Ice-T, Dolph Lundgren, Takeshi
Kitano (of the cult “Sonatine”), Udo Kier, Henry Rollins and Dina Meyer.
William Gibson also wrote the screenplay of his original story which was
published in the anthology “Burning Chrome”. “Johnny Mnemonic” goes into wide
release in Dec 1995.
The film Blade Runner, loosely based on Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream Of
Electric Sheep, is set in early 21st century Los Angeles. Among the enormous
human cultural diversity evident, five , synthetically designed organic robots -
replicants – have escaped their slave status on an off-world colony. These
replicants are the property of the Tyrell Corporation, and have extremely high
levels of physically and mental development. The Tyrell Corporation, ensuring
that the replicants do not develop the emotional capacity of their human masters
genetically engineer a four- year life span. Tyrell Corporation, on the basis of
this slavery, uses the market slogan ‘More Human Than Human’. And like those who
settled earth’s New World in the seventeenth century, they expect slave labour.”
Whilst this commentary is certainly true, a further elaboration can be made on
the technological nature of the replicants; they were, for all intents and
purposes, a new life-form.
“Max Headroom was the most amazingly Cyberpunk thing that’s ever been on
network TV. Max started out as an animated VJ for a British
music-video channel. In order to introduce him, a
short film was made…..Entertainment with all the corners filled in . I think
that’s what a lot of Cyberpunk writing is …….Television is
the greatest Cyberpunk invention of all time” . [Steve Roberts
(MONDO 2000) 76]
Theories
One man who has his own theory about the net is Kevin Kelly (exective
editor of Wired), he combines ideas from chaos theory, cybernetics, current
thinking on evolution and research into computerised artificial life with his
own experience of on-line culture. His main argument is that we’re ‘the Neo-
Biological Era’. The line between the made and the born is being blurred;
machines are becoming biological and the biological is being engineered.
The reason is that we have reached the limits of industrial thinking.
Linear cause and effect logic is no good for figuring out the hugely complex
systems (phone networks, global economies, the Internet) that we have created,
so we’ve begun to look instead at natural systems. After years of tapping mother
nature for food and raw materials, we’re now mining her for ideas.
One scenario of the Internet he is playing with is that the net might
die. “You can imagine a situation in which there’s 200 million people on the
Internet trying to send E-mail messages and the whole thing just grinds to a
halt. Its own success just kills it. In the meantime, a telephone companies
steps in and offers E-mail for $5 a month, no traffic jams and its reliable. i
hope it doesn’t happen but it’s a scenario one has to consider”. eorge Gilder of
the Hudson institute stated “there is about to be a revolution, born of nothing
less than sand, glass and air, and yet it was one which would have an incalcuble
effect upon us all.
From sand will come microchips offering super computing power on slices
of silicon smaller than a thumbnail and cheaper than a book.
From glass will be fashioned fibre-optic cables that will flash
information of any size at lighting speed.
In the air, frequency bandwidths of practically limitless size and
available at virtually no cost will permit the wireless transmission of any kind
of digital data from anywhere to anywhere, instantly.
Timothy leary the man who coined the phrase “turn on, tune in and drop
out” in the 60’s thinks that the future of the 20th and 21st century, will be
the net.”Its awesome. But on the net. you still have someone on the other side .
The poor nerd who sits in front of the computer just talking to themselves -
that’s kind of sad. It’s the contact that’s important, interpersonal,
interactive communication. We’re hard wiring global consciousness, we’re moving
towards a global mind. a global village. Soon we’ll develop a global language.
People will communicate with pictures not words”.
Jean Baudrillard described the emergence of a new postmodern society
organsied around simulation, in which models, codes, communication, information,
and the media were the demiruges of a radical break with modern societies.
Baudrillard’s postmodern universe was also one of hyperreality, in which models
and codes determined thought and behavior, and in which media of entertainment,
information, and communication provided experience more intense and involving
han the scenes of banal everything life. In this postmodern world, individuals
abondoned the ‘desert of the real’ for the ecstasies of hyperreality and a new
realm of computer, media, and technological experience.
Visions of the Future
Gibson’s vision is of a multi-dimensional space inhabited by vast “data
structures”, where glowing and pulsing representations of data flow within the
ubiquitous computer/ telecommunications networks of military and corporate
memory banks.(see Johnny Mnemonic)
During the 80’s, the Cyberspace vision was being fleshed out in the work
shops and laboratories of silicon space , of seeing it, being in it, touching
and feeling it, flying through it and hearing it were being developed. The
inter-relationship between the vision and the practical, working “virtual
reality” machines (such as W industries ‘ Virtuality and VPL’s Reality built for
two) were on sale in both the us and Britain by 1990. By 1994 cheap headsets and
programmes were available to mostly anyone.
The Cyberpunk future includes the likes of a computer-generated artificial
environment known as virtual reality. (Not so futuristic, perhaps: VR arcade
games are already here.) It includes dreams of virtual sex. (Not so futuristic,
either: text based “sex” already exists on computer networks. Call it Phone
Sex: The Next Generation.) It includes further developments in robotics,
artificial intelligence, even artificial life. More to the point of punk, it
includes “smart drugs,” legal substances that allegedly increase mental
capacity.
“someday be possible for mental functions to be surgically extracted from
the human brain and transferred to computer software in a process he
calls “transmigration”. the useless body with its brain tissue would then
be discarded, while consciousness would remain stored in computer
terminals, or for the occasional outing, in mobile robots”.
[Hans Moravec, mind children : the future of robot and human
intelligence(Cambridge, MA, 1988),108]
Cyberpunk fiction characters are hard wired (see JohnnyMnemonic), jack into
Cyberspace, plug