SOME HISTORY

Cyberpunk escaped from being a literary genre into cultural reality. People started calling themselves cyberpunks, or the media started calling people cyberpunks. The first people to identify themselves as cyberpunks were adolescent computer hackers who related to the street- hardened characters and the worlds created in the books of William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, John Shirley, and others. Cyberpunk hit the front page of the New York Times when some young computer kids were arrested for cracking a government computer file. The Times called kids "cyberpunks". Finally, cyberpunk has come to be seen as a generic name for a much larger trend more or less describing anyone who relates to the cyberpunk vision. This, in turn, has created a purist reaction among the hard-core cyberpunks, who feel they got there first.

R.U.Sirius, Mondo 2000: A Users Guide to the New Edge

DESCRIPTION OF THE CYBERPUNK WORLDVIEW

Gareth Branwyn posted the following description of the cyberpunk worldview to general approval at a MONDO 2000 conference on the WELL:

A) The future has imploded onto the present. There was no nuclear Armageddon. There's too much real estate to lose. The new battlefield is people's minds.

B) The megacorps are the new governments.

C) The U.S. is a big bully with lackluster economic power.

D) The world is splintering into a trillion subcultures and designer cults with their own language, codes, and lifestyles.

E) Computer-generated info-domains are the next frontiers.

F) The is better living through chemistry.

G) Small groups or individual "console cowboys" can wield tremendous power over governments, corporations, etc.

H) The coalescence of a computer "culture" is expressed in self-aware computer music, art, virtual communities, and a hacker/street tech subculture. The computer nerd image is passé, and people are not ashamed anymore about the role the computer has in this subculture. The computer is a cool tool, a friend, important human augmentation.

I) We're becoming cyborgs (1). Our tech is getting smaller, closer to us, and it will soon merge with us.

J) Some attitudes that seem to be related (2):

Information wants to be free.
Access to computers and anything which may teach you something about how the world works should be unlimited and total.
Always yield to the hands-on imperative.
Mistrust authority.
Promote Decentralization.
Do It Yourself.
Fight the Power.
Feed the noise back into the system.
Surf the Edges.

and, most important:

K) CYBERPUNK HAS MORE TO DO WITH A WAY OF THINKING THAN WITH FOLLOWING A PARTICULAR BIBLE!

(1) "Cyborg" is a science-fictional shorting of "cybernetic organism". The idea is that, in the future, we may have more and more artificial body parts - arms, legs, hearts, eyes, and so on. The logical conclusion is that one might become a brain in a wholly artificial body. And the step after that is to replace your meat brain by a computer brain.

(2) Related attitudes: A few of these "attitudes" have time-traveled directly from the 1960s hacker ethics as defined by Stephen Levy in his 1984 book Hackers.