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MCLUHAN: Such a synthesis is entirely possible, and could create a creative blend of the two cultures – if the educational establishment was aware that there is an electric culture. In the absence of such elementary awareness, I’m afraid that the television child has no future in our schools. You must remember that the TV child has been relentlessly exposed to all the “adult” news of the modern world –war, racial discrimination, rioting, crime, inflation, sexual revolution. The war in Vietnam has written its bloody message on his skin; he has witnessed the assassinations and funerals of the nation’s leaders; he’s been orbited through the TV screen into the astronaut’s dance in space, been inundated by information transmitted via radio, telephone, films, recordings and other people. His parents plopped him down in front of a TV set at the age of two to tranquilize him, and by the time he enters kindergarten, he’s clocked as much as 4000 hours of television. As an IBM executive told me,“My children had lived several lifetimes compared to their grandparents when they began grade one.”

Playboy: If you had children young enough to belong to the TV generation, how would you educate them?

MCLUHAN: Certainly not in our current schools, which are intellectual penal institutions. In today’s world, to paraphrase Jefferson, the least education is the best education, since very few young minds can survive the intellectual tortures of our educational system. The mosaic image of the TV screen generates a depth-involving nowness and simultaneity in the lives of children that makes them scorn the distant visualized goals of traditional education as unreal, irrelevant and puerile. Another basic problem is that in our schools there is simply too much to learn by the traditional analytic methods; this is an age of information overload. The only way to make the schools other than prisons without bars is to start fresh with new techniques and values.

user@terminal ~ % less 1335299715.txt

The “Social Organization” of the Computer Underground?

Gordon Meyer wrote a paper a few years ago by this very name. Basically, he chose to look at the computer underground as a loose confederation of criminal organizations. This is generally how the Secret Service views the matter, although cyberpunk partisans protest there is an important social and political importance to their actions; so say their manifestoes, anyway. However, if cyberpunk really were some sort of countercultural movement, one might expect to see some sort of solidarity or cooperation. Cyberpunk apparently fails in this regard, because their seem to be no united “goals” for the movement. There are people hacking over here, hacking over there, but no common coordination, goals, or structures to be found. Cyberpunks are notorious for ratting on each other and turning each other in. And they are famous for backstabbing each other in every way possible. Hacker paranoia is legendary - they don’t trust anybody, and since most of them use “social engineering” to trick people, they expect others to try and trick them. 

There is no wrath like that of a cyberpunk scorned. They find extravagant ways of wreaking revenge on others who claim to be better hackers than they are. This is where cyberpunk fails as a true counterculture. Despite the slogans and manifestoes, there does not seem to be a unifying ethos. There are attempts to “hack” out a Hacker Ethic - you should redistribute pirate software, not sell it yourself for profit, etc. - but no attempts to enforce it or make it a true standard. Most computer undergrounders really don’t have any sense of a grand social mission for their activities. It’s just a way for them to get things they want for free and to go places where nasty grownups force them to get expensive accounts for before visiting. 

CyberPolitics: is there any?

While few cyberpunks are explicitly politically active in the classical sense (most do not vote), in their discussions with each other, an implicit politics does emerge. The underlying value system of most cyberpunks is libertarianism. The government just has no bloody business telling you what you can and cannot do with your modem, or what information you can acquire or send, or what you put into your body, or what you do with your money. For most of them, privacy is an important issue - they’re tired of the government reading their mail and maintaining data on them (who watches the Watchman, after all?), so they use cryptographic methods to protect their communications and transactions.

Since data encryption theory and technology is supposed to (in theory) be under the sole control of the National Security Agency (ciphers are classed as ‘munitions’ vis-a-vis foreign export), providing people with public-key cryptography is also a rebellious act. The CUers who do so are called “cypherpunks,” and they feel that people should use encryption to protect themselves from the State, and decryption to access the classified information that it so jealously guards from them. Some “cypherpunks” believe encryption can ultimately destroy the State - if one enciphers their monetary transaction, taxation will become impossible. It’s not for no reason that many of them are called “cryptoanarchists.”

Cyberpolitics is basically informed by a lot of what’s going on in the general culture. Chaos theory, postmodernism, Dadaism, and Situationism (especially the latter’s use of elaborate pranks and cultural detournement to savage ‘the spectacle’) attitude influence the pessimism of much of cyberpunk politics. The cyberpunk relies on the detritus society casts away - shredded phone system documents, junked electronics equipment, and dumped password printouts - for much of his trade. In many ways, his politics is just one of parasitism. Society is not going to improve very much, but the cleverest “console cowboys” will be best prepared to exploit the situation and turn it to their advantage.

Cyberpunks: the new Lumpenproletarians of the Information Age? Or something more serious?

So we’ve looked at some ways in which cyberpunk may be a new counterculture, and some ways in which it may not be. As with any movement, the question always remains: will they sell out? Will they be co-opted? Capitalism has, as usual, found various ways to cash in on the trend, with cyberpunk novels, clothes, video games, gadgets, and so on, completing the process that Herbert Marcuse describes so well. The fact that many ex-hackers are now going to work for computer security firms suggests (not unsurprisingly) that, like the hippies of the 60s, these folks are willing to cash it all in for a cushy job and a corporate jet. 

Are the cyberpunks a more serious challenge to the System than their predecessors? As suggested above, they definitely have the potential to be a greater challenge. Imagine the dismay of the Hagen Daz corporate exec when he finds out that 20,000 cases have been accidentally routed to the north pole. Imagine the frustration of the government bureaucrat who finds out that all his files on ‘troublemakers’ have been scrambled. Imagine the anger of the Pentagon general who finds that his drone-piloted planes are actually bombing the Atlantic Ocean instead of Saddam Hussein. Or the media monopoly executive who finds that his satellite network now seems to be only carrying “Ren N Stimpy.” But for these same reasons, cyberpunks may be a greater danger to society as a whole, not just to “the Powers That Be.” 

Instead of just “dropping out” of society, or just parasitically feeding off of its information monopolies, cyberpunks have the potential to change it. But to do so they’ll have to learn those weary lessons of Movement history. You know what they are. Study up. Think globally, act locally. And most importantly, don’t mourn, organize . Just think what cyberpunks could accomplish if they actually learned to cooperate with, talk to, and trust each other. If instead of pulling pranks on the Man, they actually started to try and take away some of his power. If instead of sabotaging grassroots bulletin-board systems, they jammed the signal of propaganda engines like Voice of America. Then we could say that maybe, at long last, the New Counterculture has come of age… 

Steve Mizrach (aka Seeker1) 

Excerpts from an old essay. (source)

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909 (Jan.-Fall 1888)

The typical forms of self-formation. Or: the eight principal questions.

1. Whether one wants to be more multifarious or simpler?
2. Whether one wants to become happier or more indifferent to happiness and unhappiness?
3. Whether one wants to become more contented with oneself or more exacting and inexorable?
4. Whether one wants to become softer, more yielding, more human, or more “inhuman”?
5. Whether one wants to become more prudent or more ruthless?
6. Whether one wants to reach a goal or to avoid all goals (as, e.g., the philosopher does who smells a boundary, a nook, a prison, a stupidity in every goal)?
7. Whether one wants to become more respected or more feared? Or more despised?
8. Whether one wants to become tyrant or seducer or shepherd or herd animal?

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THE PRESENT AGE (1846)

By Søren Kierkegaard / Translated by Alexander Dru

The present age is one of understanding, of reflection, devoid of passion, an age which flies into enthusiasm for a moment only to decline back into indolence.

Not even a suicide does away with himself out of desperation, he considers the act so long and so deliberately, that he kills himself with thinking — one could barely call it suicide since it is thinking which takes his life. He does not kill himself with deliberation but rather kills himself because of deliberation. Therefore, one cannot really prosecute this generation, for its art, its understanding, its virtuosity and good sense lies in reaching a judgment or a decision, not in taking action.

Just as one might say about Revolutionary Ages that they run out of control, one can say about the Present Age that it doesn’t run at all. The individual and the generation come between and stop each other; and therefore the prosecuting attorney would find it impossible to admit any fact at all, because nothing happens in this generation. From a flood of indications one might think that either something extraordinary happened or something extraordinary was just about to happen. But one will have thought wrong, for indications are the only thing the present age achieves, and its skill and virtuosity entirely consist in building magical illusions; its momentary enthusiasms which use some projected change in the forms of things as an escape for actually changing the forms of things, are the highest in the scale of cleverness and the negative use of that strength which is the passionate and creating energy during Revolutionary Ages. Eventually, this present age tires of its chimerical attempts until it declines back into indolence. Its condition is like one who has just fallen asleep in the morning: first, great dreams, then laziness, and then a witty or clever reason for staying in bed.

The individual (no matter how well-meaning he might be, no matter how much strength he might have, if only he would use it) does not have the passion to rip himself away from either the coils of Reflection or the seductive ambiguities of Reflection; nor do the surroundings and times have any events or passions, but rather provide a negative setting of a habit of reflection, which plays with some illusory project only to betray him in the end with a way out: it shows him that the most clever thing to do is nothing at all. Vis inertiae is the foundation of the tergiversation of the times, and every passionless person congratulates himself for being the first to discover it — and becomes, therefore, more clever. Weapons were freely given out during Revolutionary Ages… but in the present age everyone is given clever rules and calculators in order to aid one’s thinking. If any generation had the diplomatic task of postponing action so that it might appear that something were about to happen, even though it would never happen, then one would have to say that our age has achieved as mightily as Revolutionary Ages. Someone should try an experiment with himself: he should forget everything he knows about the times and its relativity amplified by its familiarity, and then come into this age as if he were from another planet, and read some book, or some article in the newspaper: he will have this impression: “Something is going to happen tonight, or else something happened last night!”

A Revolutionary Age is an age of action; the present age is an age of advertisement, or an age of publicity: nothing ever happens, but there is immediate publicity everywhere. A revolt in the present age is the most unthinkable act of all; such a display of strength would confuse the calculating cleverness of the times. Nevertheless, some political virtuoso might achieve something nearly as great. He would write some manifesto or other which calls for a General Assembly in order to decide on a revolution, and he would write it so carefully that even the Censor himself would pass on it; and at the General Assembly he would manage to bring it about that the audience believed that it had actually rebelled, and then everyone would placidly go home — after they had spent a very nice evening out. An enormous grounding in scholarship is alien to the youth of today, in fact, they would find it laughable. Nevertheless, some scientific virtuoso might achieve something even greater. He would draw up some prospectus outlining systematically some all-embracing, all-explaining system that he was about to write, and he would manage to achieve the feat of convincing the reader (of the prospectus) that he had in fact read the entire system. The Age of Encyclopedists is gone, when with great pains men wrote large Folios; now we have an age of intellectual tourists, small little encyclopedists, who, here and there, deal with all sciences and all existence. And a genuine religious rejection of the world, followed with constant self-denial, is equally unthinkable among the youth of our time: nevertheless, some bible college student has the virtuosity to achieve something even greater. He could design some projected group or Society which aims to save those who are lost. The age of great achievers is gone, the present age is an age of anticipators… Like a youth who plans to diligently study from September 1 for an exam, and in order to solidify his resolve takes a holiday for the entire month of August, such is our generation which has decided resolutely that the next generation will work very hard, and in order not to interfere with or delay the next generation, this generation diligently — goes to parties. However, there is one difference in this comparison: the youth understands that he is light-hearted, the present age is on the contrary very serious — even at their parties.

Action and passion is as absent in the present age as peril is absent from swimming in shallow waters…

If a precious jewel, which all desired, lay out on a frozen lake, where the ice was perilously thin, where death threatened one who went out too far while the ice near the shore was safe, in a passionate age the crowds would cheer the courage of the man who went out on the ice; they would fear for him and with him in his resolute action; they would sorrow over him if he went under; they would consider him divine if he returned with the jewel. In this passionless, reflective age, things would be different. People would think themselves very intelligent in figuring out the foolishness and worthlessness of going out on the ice, indeed, that it would be incomprehensible and laughable; and thereby they would transform passionate daring into a display of skill… The people would go and watch from safety and the connoisseurs with their discerning tastes would carefully judge the skilled skater, who would go almost to the edge (that is, as far as the ice was safe, and would not go beyond this point) and then swing back. The most skilled skaters would go out the furthest and venture most dangerously, in order to make the crowds gasp and say: “Gods! He is insane, he will kill himself!” But you will see that his skill is so perfected that he will at the right moment swing around while the ice is still safe and his life is not endangered…

Men, then, only desire money, and money is an abstraction, a form of reflection… Men do not envy the gifts of others, their skill, or the love of their women; they only envy each others’ money… These men would die with nothing to repent of, believing that if only they had the money, they might have truly lived and truly achieved something.

The established order continues, but our reflection and passionlessness finds its satisfaction in ambiguity. No person wishes to destroy the power of the king, but if little by little it can be reduced to nothing but a fiction, then everyone would cheer the king. No person wishes to pull down the pre-eminent, but if at the same time pre-eminence could be demonstrated to be a fiction, then everyone would be happy. No person wishes to abandon Christian terminology, but they can secretly change it so that it doesn’t require decision or action. And so they are unrepentant, since they have not pulled down anything. People do not desire any more to have a strong king than they do a hero-liberator than they do religious authority, for they innocently wish the established order to continue, but in a reflective way they more or less know that the established order no longer continues…

The reflective tension this creates constitutes itself into a new principle, and just as in an age of passion enthusiasm is the unifying principle, so in a passionless age of reflection envy is the negative-unifying principle. This must not be understood as a moral term, but rather, the idea of reflection, as it were, is envy, and envy is therefore twofold: it is selfish in the individual and in the society around him. The envy of reflection in the individual hinders any passionate decision he might make; and if he wishes to free himself from reflection, the reflection of society around him re-captures him…

Envy constitutes the principle of characterlessness, which from its misery sneaks up until it arrives at some position, and it protects itself with the concession that it is nothing. The envy of characterlessness never understands that distinction is really a distinction, nor does it understand itself in recognizing distinction negatively, but rather reduces it so that it is no longer distinction; and envy defends itself not only from distinction, but against that distinction which is to come.

Envy which is establishing itself is a leveling, and while a passionate age pushes forward, establishing new things and destroying others, raising and tearing down, a reflective, passionless age does the opposite, it stifles and hinders, it levels. This leveling is a silent, mathematical, abstract process which avoids upheavals… Leveling at its maximum is like the stillness of death, where one can hear one’s own heartbeat, a stillness like death, into which nothing can penetrate, in which everything sinks, powerless.

One person can head a rebellion, but one person cannot head this leveling process, for that would make him a leader and he would avoid being leveled. Each individual can in his little circle participate in this leveling, but it is an abstract process, and leveling is abstraction conquering individuality. The leveling in modern times is the reflective equivalent of fate in the ancient times. The dialectic of ancient times tended towards leadership (the great man over the masses and the free man over the slave); the dialectic of Christianity tends, at least until now, towards representation (the majority views itself in the representative, and is liberated in the knowledge that it is represented in that representative, in a kind of self-knowledge); the dialectic of the present age tends towards equality, and its most consequent but false result is leveling, as the negative unity of the negative relationship between individuals.

Everyone should see now that leveling has a fundamental meaning: the category of “generation” supersedes the category of the “individual.” During ancient times the mass of individuals had this value: that it made valuable the outstanding individual… In ancient times, the single individual in the masses signified nothing; the outstanding individual signified them all. In the present age, the tendency is towards a mathematical equality…

In order for leveling really to occur, first it is necessary to bring a phantom into existence, a spirit of leveling, a huge abstraction, an all-embracing something that is nothing, an illusion — the phantom of the public… The public is the real Leveling-Master, rather than the leveler itself, for leveling is done by something, and the public is a huge nothing.

The public is an idea, which would never have occurred to people in ancient times, for the people themselves en masse in corpora took steps in any active situation, and bore responsibility for each individual among them, and each individual had to personally, without fail, present himself and submit his decision immediately to approval or disapproval. When first a clever society makes concrete reality into nothing, then the Media creates that abstraction, “the public,” which is filled with unreal individuals, who are never united nor can they ever unite simultaneously in a single situation or organization, yet still stick together as a whole. The public is a body, more numerous than the people which compose it, but this body can never be shown, indeed it can never have only a single representation, because it is an abstraction. Yet this public becomes larger, the more the times become passionless and reflective and destroy concrete reality; this whole, the public, soon embraces everything…

The public is not a people, it is not a generation, it is not a simultaneity, it is not a community, it is not a society, it is not an association, it is not those particular men over there, because all these exist because they are concrete and real; however, no single individual who belongs to the public has any real commitment; some times during the day he belongs to the public, namely, in those times in which he is nothing; in those times that he is a particular person, he does not belong to the public. Consisting of such individuals, who as individuals are nothing, the public becomes a huge something, a nothing, an abstract desert and emptiness, which is everything and nothing…

The Media is an abstraction (because a newspaper is not concrete and only in an abstract sense can be considered an individual), which in association with the passionlessness and reflection of the times creates that abstract phantom, the public, which is the actual leveler… More and more individuals will, because of their indolent bloodlessness, aspire to become nothing, in order to become the public, this abstract whole, which forms in this ridiculous manner: the public comes into existence because all its participants become third parties. This lazy mass, which understands nothing and does nothing, this public gallery seeks some distraction, and soon gives itself over to the idea that everything which someone does, or achieves, has been done to provide the public something to gossip about… The public has a dog for its amusement. That dog is the Media. If there is someone better than the public, someone who distinguishes himself, the public sets the dog on him and all the amusement begins. This biting dog tears up his coat-tails, and takes all sort of vulgar liberties with his leg — until the public bores of it all and calls the dog off. That is how the public levels.

[Excerpt from Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age and of the Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle, trans. Alexander Dru (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962).]

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From: mwark@peg.pegasus.oz.au
Newsgroups: alt.cyberpunk
Date: 01 Dec 92 20:37 EST
Subject: Cyberpunk as subculture
Message-ID: <225000041@peg.pegasus.oz.au>
Lines: 206

Cyberpunk From subculture to mainstream

McKenzie Wark

A hip new lingo has infiltrated the mass media. 'Cyberspace',
'hypermedia' and 'virtual reality' have become the techno buzz
words of the '90s. After years of indifference and suspicion, the
idea that technology can be fun, exciting, and sexy has surfaced
again.

Two ideas in particular are now doing the rounds. One is that
computers are not just for pencil-head types in lab coats and grey
suited accountants. Technology can be a tool for the imagination,
opening up new terrains of images, sounds, experiences and
concepts. The second idea has less to do with computers than with
communications. By linking up all of the computer power
languishing on desks and in basements, whole new forms of
interaction are possible Q a communications revolution to take
beyond the television age.

The first of these two ideas orbits somewhere around the term
virtual reality. The second is a vague nebula of possibilities
sighted off the cyberspace cluster. Both have been around a long
time, but have just recrystalised in the public's imagination.
'Hypermedia' is the next phase in marketing this dream to the
public. The movie Lawnmower Man has cashed in on the trend,
pulping the whole lot together with some silly old Stephen King
haunted house clichs. The really interesting stuff on both these
current trends can be found a little off the main stream. Take a
hyperspace bypass back through the cyberpunk subculture of the
80s, and you will find the creative source and force behind the
present multimedia marketing push.

Cyberpunk is a cute name for a rather motley collection of people
who thought and wrote and made art about technology over the last
decade. Some of them were harmless. Some of them were mad, bad and
dangerous to know. Like many other prophetic art avant gardes in
the past, they saw the future both more clearly and more crazily
than their contemporaries. Like the romantic poets and the
decadent artists of the 19th century; like the surrealists and
futurists and constructivists of the early 20th century, they
wanted to change life. So they imagined how it could be different,
not only from the present, but from how the future was officially
imagined to be.

Cyberpunk gathered momentum in 1984 with the publication of the
first of William Gibson's novels, called Neuromancer. Gibson has
since published four novels and a collection of stories. There are
half a dozen readers of cyberpunk fiction on the market, and now
other writers like Bruce Sterling and Pat Cadigan have emerged.
There is even a remarkable 'overground' cyberpunk magazine called
Mondo 2000, as well as a host of tiny desktop published fanzines.
Cyberpunk has gone beyond a subculture and is now a full blown
marketing category.

Gibson was an odd sort of person to launch an avant garde cultural
movement. He wrote pretty pulpy science fiction novels. He was a
small town, white suburban kind of guy. Yet he was able to
crystalise something that was in the air. He bleak, 'no future'
landscape of punk rock and post-apocalyptic movies like
Bladerunner and Mad Max, and imagined a way to escape from the
street-level violence these films referred to. The way out was
cyberspace.

In Gibson's world, cyberspace is a consensual 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.

This mythology of cyberspace is interesting for two reasons.
Firstly, it provides an alternative to the boredom of suburbia
without having to deal with the danger of inner-city living. Every
subculture needs a fantasy place to run away from suburban life
to, be it the rural fantasy of the hippies or the urban fantasy of
punk. Cyberspace is a fantasy destination for white, middle class
suburbanites who realise that rural life is even more boring than
the suburbs and the cities are becoming far too dangerous.

The other interesting thing about cyberspace is the way it
recreates the idea of community. Every subculture needs an image
of an outsider's community to cling to, to run to. For the
cyberpunk, this community doesn't actually have a place. Its not a
nightclub in New York. It is not a street in London. It can be
accessed everywhere Q by modem. Of course, the bulletin boards and
e-mail systems are a poor imitation of the fully wired-up world of
cyberspace, but its the nearest thing on earth. Cyberpunk
subculture is the first subculture which doesn't have a particular
place of congregation Q its a suburban phenomenon made possible by
the networks. There are now hundreds of bulletin boards around the
world which have a cyberpunk style, where young cyberpunks discuss
the lastest hardware and software.

In a sense, subcultures are always a product of the media
technology of the age. The classic subcultures of the 60s and 70s,
from the mods to the punks, where a combination of the electric
world of rock and roll with a style and a place and an ethos and a
certain amount of drug abuse. The mods grew out of 50s austerity
in Britain. They were the first generation of young people to
enter mass white collar employment and aquire a disposable income
at a young age. So they spent it Q on clothes and music and motor
scooters and weekend trips to the seaside. They were a mobile
community, growing up on television and rock and roll. The first
great pop music TV show, Ready, Steady Go!, spread mod style from
one end of Britain to the other instantly, a fashion
transformation that without television would take months or
years.

The punk movements of the late 70s were where the youth
subcultures launched by the mods finally crash-landed. Punk was a
subculture based on the boredom of unemployment, not the tedium of
white collar work. It lacked the excitement and innocence of the
mods Q who were absolute beginners in the art of living in a
consumerist, media saturated world. Punk was a subculture created
by young people in the late 70s who grew up on the media and its
promises of the good life, and were bored with all that. It had
let them down: 'career opportunities, the ones that never knock'
as a song from the time put it. The punks took the media
technology of the time, the music, the fashion, the radio and
video, and trashed it.

Cyberpunk grew out of this negative subcultural style, but turned
it back towards a positive celebration. Where the mods had been
fascinated by consumerism and the mass media, 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
cyberpunk in the place of rock and roll. Computer networking is
its alternative to the mods' pop TV or the punks' pirate radio.

Just as subcultures from mod to punk were the testing ground for
new styles of music and fashion, the cyberpunk crowd are the
testing ground for new fashions in desk-top technology. 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.

Where punk was a product of unemployment and the english art
school, cyberpunk is a product of the huge array of technical and
scientific universities created in the US to service the military
industrial complex. Your typical cyberpunk is white, suburban,
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
fabulous 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.

Subcultures are an art form. They can have their delinquent edge,
its true. Mods took too many amphetamines. Punks were a little
prone to rioting. Cyberpunks sometimes have a romantic fascination
with hacking into other peoples' computers. All this is a testing
of limits, a pushing to the limit of the social norm. The enduring
product of any subculture is a rapid innovation in popular style.
Subcultures pioneer styles of life for the mainstream. 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
industrial monster 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. The pilots who
bombed Baghdad flew in virtual reality.

Even the peaceful applications of these technologies can be
subordinated to commercial imperatives abhorrent to the free
thinking cyberpunk. There is a contradiction between the spirit of
free enquiry and experiment and the need to keep corporate secrets
and make a buck. Cyberpunk is a reflection of this contradiction Q
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 may be
over a subculture. It was reabsorbed into the mainstream like
every other subculture before it. Yet it signals a fundamental
change in the way subcultures can form and oppose themselves to
the mainstream. In effect, cyberpunk was the realisation that the
new generation of media tools are also excellent resources for
changing life, if only on the margins, and if only for a short
while. Like all of the other avant gardes and subcultures before
it, it has added something special to the repertoire of postmodern
life.

McKenzie Wark lectures in communications at Macquarie University
This story originally appeared in 21*C

(c) McKenzie Wark may be reproduced with permission mwark@pegasus
mwark@laural.ocs.mq.oz.au

(.txt)

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989 (Spring-Fall 1887)

“Les philosophes ne sont pas faits pour s’aimer. Les aigles ne volent point en compagnie. Il faut laisser cela aux perdrix, aux étourneaux… . Planer au-dessus et avoir des griffes, voilà le lot des grands génies.” 64

GALIANI.

     64 Philosophers are not made to love one another. Eagles do not fly in company. One must leave that to partridges and starlings … Soaring on high and having talons, that is the lot of great geniuses.