Cyberpunk!

With virtual sex, smart drugs and synthetic rock 'n' roll, a new $ counterculture is surfing on the dark edges of the computer age

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MUCH OF MONDO 2000 STRAINS CREDIBILITY. Does physicist Nick Herbert really believe there might be a way to build TIME MACHINES? Did the CRYONICS experts at TransTime Laboratory really chill a family pet named Miles and then, after its near death experience, turn it back into what its owner describes as a "fully functional dog"? Are we expected to accept on faith that a SMART DRUG called centrophenoxine is an "intelligence booster" that provides "effective anti-aging therapy," or that another compound called hydergine increases mental abilities and prevents damage to brain cells? "All of this has some basis in today's technologies," says Paul Saffo, a research fellow at the Institute for the Future. "But it has a very anticipatory quality. These are people who assume that they will shape the future and the rest of us will live it."

Parents who thumb through Mondo 2000 will find much here to upset them. An article on house music makes popping MDMA (ECSTASY) and thrashing all night to music that clocks 120 beats per minute sound like an experience no red-blooded teenager would want to miss. After describing in detail the erotic effects of massive doses of L-dopa, MDA and deprenyl, the entry on aphrodisiacs adds as an afterthought that in some combinations these drugs can be fatal. Essays praising the beneficial effects of psychedelics and smart drugs on the "information processing" power of the brain sit alongside RANTS that declare, among other things, that "safe sex is boring sex" and that "cheap thrills are fun."

Much of this, of course, is a cyberpunk pose. As Rucker confesses in his preface, he enjoys reading and thinking about psychedelic drugs but doesn't really like to take them. "To me the political point of being pro- psychedelic," he writes, "is that this means being against consensus reality, which I very strongly am." To some extent, says author Rheingold, cyberpunk is driven by young people trying to come up with a movement they can call their own. As he puts it, "They're tired of all these old geezers talking about how great the '60s were."

That sentiment was echoed by a recent posting on the WELL. "I didn't get to pop some 'shrooms and dance naked in a park with several hundred of my peers," wrote a cyberpunk wannabe who calls himself Alien. "To me, and to a lot of other generally disenfranchised members of my generation, surfing the edges is all we've got."

More troubling, from a philosophic standpoint, is the theme of DYSTOPIA that runs like a bad trip through the cyberpunk world view. Gibson's fictional world is filled with glassy-eyed girls strung out on their Walkman-like SIMSTIM DECKS and young men who get their kicks from MICROSOFTS plugged into sockets behind their ears. His brooding, dehumanized vision conveys a strong sense that technology is changing civilization and the course of history in frightening ways. But many of his readers don't seem to care. "History is a funny thing for cyberpunks," says Christopher Meyer, a music-synthesizer designer from Calabasas, California, writing on the WELL. "It's all data. It all takes up the same amount of space on disk, and a lot of it is just plain noise."

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