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The 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 out CDs. Cyberpunk-oriented books are snapped up by eager fans as soon as they hit the stores. (Sterling's latest, The Hacker Crackdown, quickly sold out its first hard-cover printing of 30,000.) A piece of cyberpunk performance art, Tubes, starring Blue Man Group, is a hit off-Broadway. And cyberpunk films such as Blade Runner, Videodrome, Robocop, Total Recall, Terminator 2 and The Lawnmower Man have moved out of the cult market and into the mall.
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 an actual place -- a VIRTUAL REALITY that can be entered, explored and manipulated.
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.
BUT CYBERSPACE IS MORE THAN A PLAYGROUND for hacker high jinks. What cyberpunks have known for some time -- and what 17.5 million modem-equipped computer users around the world have discovered -- is that cyberspace is also a new medium. Every night on Prodigy, CompuServe, GEnie and thousands of smaller computer bulletin boards, people by the hundreds of thousands are logging on to a great computer-mediated gabfest, an interactive debate that allows them to leap over barriers of time, place, sex and social status. Computer networks make it easy to reach out and touch strangers who share a particular obsession or concern. "We're replacing the old drugstore soda fountain and town square, where community used to happen in the physical world," says Howard Rheingold, a California-based author and editor who is writing a book on what he calls VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES.