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