In 1990, my friends Gareth Branwyn and Peter Sugarman conceived of of a hypercard stack exploring near future developments in art, entertainment, media, science, literature, technology, music, etc. I drew a bunch of illustrations and drew a promotional comic book for the stack, and Jim Leftwich designed many of the interface elements. It was called Beyond Cyberpunk! and was a critical success.
The stack was ported to the Web, and Gareth unveiled it today. From his introdcutory essay, written in 1991:
"CYBERPUNK." Is it a literary genre? Is it marketing hype? Is it the latest style in the culture industry? Is it the apotheosis of post-modernism? As Dieter, the German nihilo-art snob on Saturday Night Live would say: "Your questions have become tiresome." Regardless of what it is or isn't, Cyberpunk (also called "Techno-culture" or "New Edge" culture) has become a cultural phenomenon which bears looking into.
For a multiplicity of reasons, it has, in hardy memetic fashion, taken on a life of its own. This stack is an attempt at holding up, for further examination, some of the more interesting strains of this curious cultural mutation.
As we move deeper into the 1990's, Techno-culture has become "important." In the tunnels of the underground, in the halls of academe, and in pop culture, people are talking about C-punk, taking it seriously. What these people are talking about has little to do with Cyberpunk as a literary movement. Those SF-ers who proclaim that "Cyberpunk is dead," are probably right. As far as literature goes. To the current generation of users, Cyberpunk is synonymous with the hacker underground, non-Luddite forms of anarchy, and the strategy (borrowed from C-punk lit) of extrapolating "20 minutes into the future." Cyberpunk has come to mean simply the grafting of high-technology onto underground, street, and avant pop culture.
Here's a review of the print version of Boing Boing from Beyond Cyberpunk.
