Are you a cyberpunk?

Recently, at the suggestion of a friend, I wandered over to a site called I Power - I am the revolution which gave me a new found respect for media sharing and social networking sites on the internet. This medium is based on three principles of being open minded, active thinking and putting your voice into vision. Currently there are 12, 015 members of IPower hailing from Australia to Latvia to Saudi Arabia and Malaysia all sharing videos, blogs and pictures about their daily lives, what they think of the world, happiness, globalization and humanity as whole. Featured groups that member can join and have forums about include "Questions for the opposite sex," "Is 9-11 still an inside job?," "The philosophers of the new renaissance" and most popular, "Net neutrality watchdog." The general themes I noticed were discussions of conspiracy theories, new philosphies that challenge our capitalist world economy, a general concern the use of technology to beat the system and unite on all front and that someone or something is trying to keep change from happening. All relevent themes in the Cyberpunk manifesto/movement. I speculate that cyberpunk ideals have spread without its followers even recognizing they are part of it.

Cyberpunk is a term crafted by Bruce Bethke and the title for his 1983 science fiction short story "Cyberpunk" about advanced science and informational technology coupled with a radical change in the social order. Bethke's story was followed by William Gibson's 1984 novel Neuromancer where he coined the term "cyberspace" for the artificial digital realms of the Web:
" `Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathe- matical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Un- thinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...' "

The term "cyberpunk" is the welding of the terms cybernetics, which is science studying control and communication, furthermore, the feedback loop that gives a controller information on the result of its actions and punk, which sprang from the youth movement of the 1970s based on counterculture and rebellion. The two combined merge technology and individualism, which often reveals usually dark ideas about the two in the near future. Themes in the genre include a negative ipact of technology on humanity, the fusion of man and machine, corporate control over society, stories that focus on the underground and ubiquitous access to informaiton. The genre has also been a huge part of cinema as well with such cyberpunk films including, A Clockwork Orange, Blade Runner, Twelve Monkeys and Bicentennial Man.

William Gibson has credited Marge Piercy's 1976 novel Woman on the Edge of Time as the birthplace of cyberpunk and it is not a shock to see why. The book deals with two alternate worlds: a potential future one where the main character sees the social and environmental revolutions of her time fulfilled and there exists equality (though war remains), and a contemporary world where the elite homogenize and subdue the population with drugs and try to control society through technology. Piercy's critiques ring loud on what is the appropriate use and ethical limits of technology, what does it mean to be human and what does life mean, but where do these questions come from? How have any cyberpunk authors in any medium, via book, movie or blog formulated their passions around answering these questions?

Marge Piercy has had a pretty troubling early life that may have greatly shaped how she saw the world including the murder of her grandfather, contracting a case of the German measles when she almost died and life on the brink of poverty in Chicago after leaving her first husband. It is possible that life experiences shape the way you see injustice and pain around you, and for cyberpunks, the best way to cope may be to find ways to work within and against the system you are trying to fight. By this, the very use of technology (internet especially) can connect us all to fight a rebellion against a corrupted world order increasingly focused on consumerism and surveillance. Listen here to see how Marge Piercy herself critiques the Patriot Act by posting a reading of her poem on YouTube:



As the Manifesto reads "the soicety which surrounds us is clogged with conservancy pulling everything and everybody to itself, while it sinks slowly in the quicksands of time." Cyberpunks have a rebellious, negative outlook on the state of the world because, the state of the world is negative, rampant with chaos, uncertainty, inequality and injustice. What makes you get to this realization is what I theorize may be biographical and experiential but to the extent you utilize the internet to surf the chaos and cope with these burdens is the degree to which you are in the movement. Are you a cyberpunk?