Word: cyberpunk
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
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...