textfiles/news/time-art

By Philip Elmer-Dewitt 
Time, February 8, 1993
 
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 (see indentation).
 
		Hypertext - In this article, words printed in color [not 
here] are defined or expanded upon in marginal entries coded to 
the same color.  In a computer hypertext article, electronic 
footnotes like these actually pop up on the screen whenever you 
point your cursor at a "hot" word and click the button of your 
mouse.
 
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). [Well I guess 
we can stop the debatre on alt.cyberpunk now =) ] 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-teck 
tools and a disdain for conventional ways of  using them.  
Originally applied tooa school of hard-boiled science-fiction 
writiers and then to certain semitough 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 infutiated the 
hardcore cyberpunks, who feel they got there first.
	
		Cybernetics -- Norbert Wiener of MIT was designing 
systems for World War II antiaircraft guns when he realized that hte 
critical component in a control system, whether animal or 
mechanical, is a feedback loop that gives a controller information 
on the results of its actions.  He called the study of these control 
systems cybernetics (from Kybernetes, the Greek word for 
Helmsman [Anybody want to deconstruct this one]) and helped 
pave the way for electronic brains that we call computers.
 
		Punk -- Cyberculture borrows heavily from the 
rebellious attitude of punk music, sharing with such groups as the 
Sex Pistols a defiance of mainstream culture and an urge to turn 
modern technology against itself.
 
Stewart Brand, editor of the hippe-era 'Whole Earth Catalog,' 
describes cyberpunk as "technology with attitude."  Science-fiction 
writier 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 of St. Jude, defines it as "the place where the worlds of 
science and art overlap, the intersection of the futureand 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."
 
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 sun-
glasses will go a long way.  ANd although the biggest cyberpunk 
journal claims a readersh 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 [hmmm where do I fit in] around the world 
who actually call themselves cyberpunk.
 
Nevertheless, cyberpunk may be the defining counterculture of the 
compute age.  It embraces, inspirit at least, not just the nearest 
thirtysomething hacker hunched over his [sic] terminal but also 
nose-ringed twentysomethings [wait - was that an insult???] 
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 -- they training 
wheels of cyberpunk [Look Ma! no hands.].  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.  [ugh - 
Goddess Save Us All ]
 
		RAVES -- organized on the fly (sometimes by 
electronic mail) and often held in warehouses, raves are huge, 
nomadic dance parties that tend to last all night, or until the police 
show up.  Psychedelic mood enhancers and funny accessories 
(white cotton gloves, face masks) are optionals. [what, no 
ubiquitous Cat-in-the-Hat has?]
 
		BRAIN IMPLANTS -- Slip a microchip into snug 
contact with your gray matter (a.k.a. wetware) and suddenly gain 
instant fluency in a foreign language or arcane subject.
 
The cyberpunk look -- a kind of SF surrealism tweaked by coputer 
graphics -- is already finding its way into galleries, music videos 
and Hollywood movies.  Cyberpunk magazines, many of which 
are "zines," cheaply published by desktop computer and 
distributed by electronis mail, are multiplying like cable-TV 
channels.  The newest, a glossy, big-budget [where'd all the 
money go to?] entry called "WIRED," premiered last week with 
Bruce Sterling on the cover and ads from the likes of Applie 
Computer and AT&T [Boo... Hisss...].  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," 
Videodromve, Robocop, Total REcall, Terminator 2, and The 
Lawnmower Man have moved out of the cult market and into the 
mall.  
 
		Acid House -- White-hot danced music that falls 
somewhere between disco and hip-hop.
 
		INDUSTRIAL -- Mixing rhythmic machine clanks, 
electornic feedback and random radio noise, industrial music is 
"the sounds our culture makes as it comes unglued," says 
cyberpunk writer Gareth Branwyn.
 
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 
commmunications.  The incoming Administration is focused on the 
wiring, and it has made strenghtening the networks high-speed 
data liks 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 
manipluated.
 
			CYBERSPACE -- SF writier William Gibson 
called it "a consensual hallucination ... a graphic representation of 
data abstracted from the banks of every cojputer in the human 
system."  You can get there simply by picking up the phone.
 
		VIRTUAL REALITY -- An interactive technology that 
creates an illusion, still crude rather than convincing, of being 
immersed in an artificial world.  The user generally dons a 
computerized glove and a head-mounted display equipped with a 
TV screen for each eye.  Now available as an arcade game.
 
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.