Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/hold me in your arms/Running Down the Meme

Text File | 1994-07-03 | 48KB | 813 lines

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Running Down the Meme: Cyberpunk, alt.cyberpunk, and the Panic of '93
Shawn P. Wilbur  <[e-mail]>
copyright 1994
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Running Down the Meme: Cyberpunk, alt.cyberpunk, and the Panic of '93

Shawn P. Wilbur

Dodging Cultural Traffic

It's a cliché of traditional history that a certain amount of temporal
distance is necessary between the historian and his or her period.
Otherwise, it is impossible to know what was important, what is worthy
of study. A similar attitude guides much literary criticism, where
contemporary works must "pass the test of time" to prove their worth.
The result is undoubtedly a clearer sense of the grand sweep of History
and Culture—though one which is nonetheless temporally bound. But,
for any cultural critic whose concerns reach beyond an understanding
of what the hegemonic big picture "is" -- —for example, to those occasions
where the dominant discourses break down, or to successful strategies
for resistance--—this kind of cultural study has to be understood as
obscuring and attenuating the intensities and experiences of everyday
life, which is, in the end, where we live our own histories. There is
much to be said for the examination of the local, the contemporary, the
as-it-happens. Academics, like most people, are forced to spend too much
time catching up with the present to plan much for the future.
There are also difficulties with studying contemporary culture which
can't be discounted, particularly as we move our studies closer to the
various cutting edges of our culture(s). Critics of contemporary society
know as well as anyone that feeling of "information sickness" (or
"information anxiety") that came with our current "information
revolution." The effect is a bit like trying to understand traffic patterns
while standing in the middle of a busy street. You might hold that image
in your mind as you venture with me into the Internet, the global
information network, the terrain across which the much-discussed
"information superhighway" will be built.

The Cyberpunk Panic of '93

For several years now, I have been studying various aspects of
"cyberpunk," a science fiction subgenre turned subculture, and a
marketable commodity label. So when I opened my first Internet
account, about a year ago, I naturally gravitated toward  the established
online cyberpunk forums, particularly the alt.cyberpunk hierarchy on
Usenet and the Cyberpunk forum on New York's Mindvox BBS.[1] What I
found there was an odd, fluctuating collection of personalities, opinions
and discussion threads, with more than a few flames thrown in for good
measure. While there was not, perhaps, the cohesion and continuity
that one would expect of a community, the groups still represented more
than just another culture of compatible consumption. For some time, I
simply lurked, reading but seldom contributing to the discussions,
except to answer an occasional question about cyberpunk literature. I
made little attempt to integrate myself into the core group of
alt.cyberpunks. Mostly, I scanned the posts for news of new science
fiction novels or other technocultural products and events.
And then the panic occurred. My entry into cyberspace had been just
one very small part of a larger movement. Within the last year, the
Internet has gained large numbers of new users and an increasingly
large presence in popular media. This has meant an increase in
newbies—people unschooled in the intricacies of net.life—but also the
"invasion" of previously sheltered spaces by reporters and media
personalities. On February 8, 1993, Time ran a cover story about
"Cyberpunk" which included discussions of the Internet. In May, 1993,
Sassy magazine ran a story on Mindvox, called "Girlz in Cyberspace,"
which concentrated on gender issues. About the same time, Adam Curry
appeared on Usenet, stirring things up on rec.music.video, and hosting
video-rating parties on Internet Relay Chat (IRC). And then word came
out that Billy Idol was not only recording an album to be called
"Cyberpunk," but had acquired an account on the Whole Earth
'Lectronic Link (WELL) and was preparing to release a multimedia
computer disk to accompany the album.[2]

The resulting flamefest lasted for months. In fact, the most recent anti-
Idol posts on alt.cyberpunk appeared within the last few weeks. Billy
Idol came in for the most flameage on alt.cyberpunk, but Sassy, Curry,
Time, and even supposed cyber-magazines like Mondo 2000 and Wired
came in for heavy criticism. There were charges of commercialization,
posing, selling out, invading, even of destroying "cyberpunk" in
particular, but also net.culture as a whole. There was more than a bit of
the hysterical in this frenzied abjection of mass culture, capitalism, and
the media—in the spirited (and frequently mean-spirited) defense of a
supposedly threatened, authentic "cyberpunk movement." There was
also very little agreement about exactly was being defended—and this
became more and more clear as the panic went on.

This episode offers us an interesting point of entry into the workings of
the social context within which it took place. It offers an opportunity
for a close reading of online culture, for something like "virtual
ethnography." However, it is important to keep in mind the significant
differences between what we ordinarily think of as communities and
virtual communities, as well as the differences between types of online
social groupings. There is not a great deal of published work to guide
this sort of study, and little in the way of a specialized vocabulary to deal
with the peculiarities of studying online culture. For those reasons, it
seems worthwhile to sketch out a few of the issues involved in online
sociological research and introduce some methods which seem
particularly suited to this kind of study—in part because they are the
methods frequently applied by members of virtual communities to their
own groups.

Virtual Communities and Other Online Forums

Within the online environment, there are many different kids of social
groupings, based on a variety of electronic communications
technologies. Electronic mail, email, is the most common form of online
communication, and works primarily as a means of establishing one-to-
one, private, asynchronous dialogue. The same technologies, however,
can also be used to create electronic mailing lists, or elists. Mailing lists
are usually organized around a single, fairly narrowly defined topic and
the lists themselves exist as semi-separate entities with email addresses
of their own. The software for lists is designed to facilitate
asynchronous, group discussion that is public to the extent that it is
readable by all list subscribers, but is not readily accessible by users
who are not subscribed to the list. Any message sent to the list's own
address is automatically forwarded to all the subscribers, as are any
replies—provided they are posted to the list, rather than through private
email. Errors and administrivia are routed to the address of the list's
maintainer, so that the list is left relatively uncluttered. Lists vary
considerably in their signal to noise ratio—that is, the ratio between
interesting and useful information and flames, disagreements, off-topic
posts, and other distractions. They also vary considerably in volume,
with some lists producing no more than one message every month or
two and some producing hundreds of messages on a busy day. On an
active mailing list, the rate of response may be so rapid that there is
almost the illusion of realtime discussion.

Usenet newsgroups also use a variation of the electronic mail system to
facilitate asynchronous discussion, but they differ from mailing lists in
important ways. One of the most significant differences is the way that
Usenet—understood as a single system—maps the user's sense of place
within the network. Naturally, a sense of place is complicated in a
virtual environment, and the particular form of cognitive map created
by each user will probably be unique. However, we can make some
generalizations about how individual environments seem to structure
virtual space if we observe the behavior and language of other users
and by comparing these virtual environments to more familiar
environments in the so-called real world. (Network users frequently
refer to the world outside of cyberspace as real life or just RL, although
the usage is not without irony in many cases.)
Usenet poses particular spatial problems. It is a network of subscribing
sites—including the majority of Internet providers—all of which carry at
least some of the hundreds of newsgroups serviced by Usenet.
Individual sites store lists of messages which are regularly updated by
bundles of new postings that travel through the network constantly.
Since data flow through the network is at times a hit or miss affair, this
means that the content of any particular site within the network is
likely to be unique. However, the structure of the newsgroups—the
names of the groups, the hierarchy of which they are a part—does not
change from site to site, or from day to day—except as new groups
constantly swell the size of the data mass. And, within a few hours, most
of the same messages will have passed through most of the sites
subscribed to a given newsgroup.

Most of the fluctuations of Usenet go unnoticed by most users, just as a
local rescheduling of a television program is hardly noticeable unless it
is pointed out specifically. Tidbits from Usenet are regularly introduced
into other forums, as a kind of common ground, despite the fact that the
open, free-for-all atmosphere of many newsgroups has earned the
network nicknames like "abUsenet" or "Uselessnet." Particularly outside
its boundaries, people are inclined to talk about Usenet as if it was a
place—a particularly bad neighborhood.

The activity that goes on within a newsgroup has some of the same
neighborhood flavor—that is, it encourages one to think of Usenet as
existing as a separate, unified entity somewhere out there, rather than a
decentralized network with nearly as many discontinuities from site to
site as there are continuities. All of the messy distribution processes are
masked by browsing software which gives the net a distinctive
structure, and also assure that users will not be interrupted by
incoming messages. Usenet is among the least interactive group
communication media online, but it is the most public. All of these
contradictions push the network into some area outside the user's home
site, but not clearly anywhere else—a central/decentralized, non/space.
Usenet is so pervasive that it may be the closest thing to being "on the
net," as opposed to just having access to a host.

Realtime sites combine the solidity of the Usenet structure with the
possibility of immediate response, and replace its vague sense of place
with a specific location and frequently complex topography. The
architecture of these sites varies considerably, however, and this
affects the users' experiences of them. Internet Relay Chat (IRC), which
consists of channels loosely committed to particular topics, resembles
Usenet in that the forums are more-or-less permanent, and discussion is
generally open and public. The main difference is that IRC allows
realtime computer-mediated communication (CMC), the closest thing to
talking directly to another user you can find on the text-based portions
of the net. (Some voice and audio links exist, as well as primitive video
links, but they are uncommon and require more sophisticated
interfaces than most users have access to.) On IRC, as on Usenet, there is
little or no upkeep involved in maintaining one's position in the
discussion. You log in and you chat. Someone else has already shaped—
mostly simplified—the electronic landscape for you, and client software
negotiates all of the rough spots in the road.

In contrast, Multi-User Dimensions (MUDs) attempt to model a complex,
determinate virtual landscape which allows user not only to roam and
interact with other users, but also to shape the virtual landscape.
Sometimes, the purpose of such sites is role-playing games, but MUDs—
particularly the object-oriented MOOs—are also being used as virtual
offices and laboratories. There are MUDs for media researchers,
biologists, astronomers, and researchers in postmodern theory. MUDs
are among the least centralized online environments—frequently
appearing as small networks within the Internet, incorporating email,
IRC-like chat channels, discussion forums in the Usenet style and even
mail and gopher connections to the rest of the Internet. These worlds
have a kind of volatile permanence unlike the other forums mentioned.
They run constantly in random-access memory (RAM) on their host
computers, which means that they are always "there," but also that they
are prone to crashes which can erase the work of builders. (All realtime
environments are prone to this sort of catastrophe. On IRC, net-splits
routinely kick users off the chat network.) However, even the
catastrophes caused by crashes are only relative catastrophes. Most
MUDs checkpoint regularly—save the code for the entire environment—
so that a restart will preserve all but the most recent changes and
additions.

Users' relations to realtime environment are bound to be complex, since
realtime CMC involves a primitive form of telepresence or virtual
reality. On IRC, users have a name and the ability to speak and emote—
act out in language various gestures and movements—while on a MUD,
players actually move around the virtual landscape in simulated bodies
which they describe. MUDing involves a kind of impromptu virtual
theater, as users attempt to communicate through the limitations of
virtual bodies. Some become quite adept at these charades, as evidenced
by the popularity of virtual sex in realtime environments.

Players are also likely to develop stronger identifications with their
"property" on a MUD than they are with their contributions to other
sorts of forums. For one thing, the virtual "body" is left behind when
they logoff, as well as virtual rooms and objects that are often
customized through hours of work. The possibility of a crash—or of any
number of other small virtual invasions, like the "theft" of a virtual
object or its code—can leave a player with the same sort of anxiety you
feel about leaving your home unattended. Has someone broken in? Who
might have entered my space, watched me "sleeping"?  The threat of the
latter did not become clear to me until I began to run a "female"
character on a MOO. On more than one occasion, young male characters
remarked that they had visited my room while I was asleep and admired
my "looks." Considering the high incidence of sexual harassment within
online environments —and even a case of "virtual rape" at LambdaMOO
where fake messages were displayed that suggested two female
characters were engaged in consensual virtual sex acts with the
"rapist," when in fact they had been prevented from speaking. It does
not seem unreasonable to attribute a voyeuristic character to some of
this behavior.

In describing the various types of virtual environments, I have
purposefully steered away from the term virtual community, which is
much used, but perhaps little understood, both on and off the networks.
There are those who would argue that any mailing list or Usenet
newsgroup constituted a virtual community, but I would like to reserve
the term for a more specific use. Howard Rheingold, in his recent book
Virtual Community, suggests the following description:

Virtual communities are social aggregations that emerge from the Net
when enough people carry on those discussions long enough, with
sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in
cyberspace.[3]

The suggestion that community is determined by personal relationships,
rather than some sort of proximity, or sense of locality, is particularly
important on the Internet. Internet users are a transient lot. For an
active user, even the simple task of "checking my mail" might involve
entering several different virtual environments. To use myself as an
example, I maintain five separate accounts with basic services,
including email, and have internal mail on another seven player
account on MUDs. Nearly all of those accounts get some activity during a
week, and many of them have a fairly steady flow of email. And this does
not even begin to count the mail routed through various forums and
mailing lists on these other sites.

Which is only to say that my minimum daily routine takes me through a
variety of sites. But there is also another kinds of transience which is
particularly significant if we wish to talk about online community.
With the Internet, individuals from all over the world can interact in
any of the forums they have access to. I regularly receive mail from
Norway and Australia, spend time MUDing with players from Britain.
Physical proximity is no longer a necessary requirement for the
establishment of community. Neither is it a sufficient condition. The
rate of user turnover on Usenet groups and MUDs is quite high, perhaps
because there are none of the conventional reasons for learning to get
along. One can always escape a group that has strayed from your
interests. If it is a MUD, you may lose some of your work, and builders on
MUDs frequently make greater efforts to create and preserve
community. If, however, the discussion on alt.pets.herp is not to your
taste any longer, it is much simpler to unsubscribe or form another
group than it is to change the group's direction or reach a compromise.
Perhaps, your decision is based merely on a change in interests. Your
time is now better spent reading alt.pets.parakeets. Will there be tearful
farewells when you hit the "U" key to leave the other group? Will you
keep in touch with the other snake-lovers?

Sometimes the answers to these questions are a definite Yes. But
frequently, users will switch groups routinely, without much thought
that they might be leaving behind a particular community. To
understand this, we need a little more sophisticated notion of how
individual users present themselves and sense others within a virtual
environment. At this point, I also want to begin focusing on Usenet,
since that is where the event we are going to examine were most
spectacularly displayed.

In a text-based environment, any user is only represented by the sum of
his or her words, or that portion that any other potentially-transient
user might have encountered. The "personality" of a user is only
available through their screen names, their signature files, the names
of the groups they are members of, and their posts—the letters they
write to various forums or lists. Sometimes these provide a considerable
amount of information from once one might begin to draw a mental
picture of another user. But this is usually only the case for individuals
who post frequently. The majority of Usenet users never post. Can they
become parts of any of the potential communities within Usenet? By
Rheingold's definition we might say No. The role of these lurkers in
virtual communities is frequently debated, and there are persuasive
arguments for both including and excluding them from consideration,
but we can fairly safely say that they do not contribute to the
construction of virtual communities in the same way that active posters
do. They are for the most part invisible, and can not enter into our study
for that simple reason.

The kind of identity that grows out of active posting to a particular
newsgroup is an intertextual one—that is, the subject is only knowable
to others as an intertext. The entire newsgroup is a larger intertext, but
also, to the extent that subjects emerge, it may become an
intersubjective entity. This requires the step that Rheingold points to,
beyond the topic that binds the group together to bindings based on
personal connections between group members. The simplest form of
this emerging intersubjectivity is an association with the subject matter
of the group. Users bond on the basis of a shared interest. In this way,
alt.cyberpunk.movement becomes a description of much more than just
the particular Usenet forum or its subject matter, but refers to the
individuals who post there. In this way, the particular group I want to
look at later are not just cyberpunks, but alt.cyberpunks.
This is a clubhouse mentality, or perhaps the mentality of consumers
bound together by shared brand loyalty. It approaches Rheingold's
"community"—and it is certain that personal relationships are built, or
at least begin, through forums like alt.cyberpunk. However, the
prevalence of flame wars might also suggest other explanations than
the development of some intersubjective entity, where a communion of
many-to-many makes up a greater whole. I would like to suggest that, in
general, Usenet users—particularly alt-hierarchy users, and even more
particularly alt.cyberpunks—are involved in a many-to-one
relationship with whatever concept rules their particular corner of the
network. The alt.cyberpunks are more actively conversing in dialogue
with something called "cyberpunk" than they are with one another.
I base my judgment on months of observation, months of watching ill-
mannered argument go on in place of discussion and of watching
thoughtful posts largely ignored. Others, who have been around longer
than I, seem to have similar things to say about Usenet and
alt.cyberpunk. In fact, Andy Hawks--—original maintainer of the
alt.cyberpunk Frequently Asked Questions list (FAQ), and creator of the
original Future Culture mailing list--—recently made an even harsher
judgment. After laying out a typology of alt.cyberpunk posters, all of
whom seem to be joined by a tendency to repeat the same threads over
and over, he continues:

As an outsider enters the realm of usenet. . . you look at the groups and
say "oh, there's so much discussion going on here, people are talking
and communicating about so many things, it's conceivably infinite,
what a wonderful technology of which to partake".  that's ignorant
bullshit.  the simple truth is. . . people talk to themselves on usenet,
have no real desire to converse with you unless you in some
way/shape/form contribute to, alter, or morph the subjective
environment they bring to the net.  i believe this true for all of
cyberspace, though, not just Usenet or the Internet. [4]

Hawk's critique is attached to a call for increased analysis of motivations
and interactions in online settings (and a back-handed defense of Billy
Idol), but it is presented as a sort of lecture to unruly children—a
situation rendered somewhat humorous by the fact that Hawks, for all
his achievements online, is a college freshman. It is also strangely
undercut by Hawks opening line--—"So I'm sitting here asking myself
why I still care"—which itself suggests both a lack of clarity and a
tendency to repeat. (Hawks' repetitions will play a part later in this
story.)

There was very little response to Hawks' posting. In fact, most of the
follow-ups responded to the fact that it was the young net-god "andy"
who posted, despite the fact that Hawks' post was anti-celebrity. And,
four months later, very little has changed on alt.cyberpunk. It is likely
that Hawks' post was simply taken as another flame, or as the
crankiness of an "old-timer," or as the inviolable words of a local
authority, or the rashness of youth. In any event, rashness in
practically de rigeur on Usenet.

Elsewhere in the same post, Hawks suggests some of the reason this
might be the case. He blames many of the evils of the net on its
tendency to privilege the "subjective" over the "objective." He seems to
mean that network user tend to deal with the network, and everyone
else on it, entirely in their own terms, and according to their own
prejudices. This position seems to be at odds with the familiar claim that
life online takes one beyond the limitations imposed by perceptions of
gender, ethnicity, religious affiliation, personal appearance and age. (A
much-reprinted cartoon, featuring canine computer users, bears the
caption: "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog.") However, this
stress does not reflect some sort of denial of the liberating possibilities
of the network. Instead, Hawks seems to be arguing specifically with the
invocation of "subjective" experience as the key to egalitarian online
living. Others, myself included, have argued for more inclusive
understandings of online subjectivity. After all, the "objective" truths
of our experience online seem online to accentuate the distances
between individuals. My suggestion is that what Hawks is objecting to is
more like a kind of narcissism or object-fixation.

The slide into the language of psychoanalysis is not accidental. Instead
it plainly marks a differend  between the constructionist perspective
from which I am approaching life on the networks, and the ultimately
essentialist position from which Hawks seems to be working. In his
insistence that an "objective" approach to virtual communities would
yield not only greater harmony but greater personal "insight," he
echoes the "better living through chemistry" philosophy of another
fringe culture, along with its suggestion that we only knows ourselves
by escaping our "selves." A constructivist, or Lacanian (or anti-oedipal)
psychoanalyst might call for an attempt to escape the restrictions of our
positions as "subjected," but with the assumption that what we might
find beyond was something other than ourselves—though perhapssomething
as threatening, abject, as anything within us. Hawks seems to see the
problems of alt.cyberpunk—a fixation on an image, both theimage of
"cyberpunk' and a cyberpunk self-image—but his insistenceon objectivity
doesn't lead us out of the confusion.

The problem seems to be that "cyberpunk" is not a thing, not a proper
object. This becomes extremely clear when the alt.cyberpunks begin to
talk about their objections to the "invasion" of their cyberspace by the
likes of Billy Idol. The best most of them can do is to violently denounce
whatever they think cyberpunk is not—a movement of abjection. "Billy
is a wanker" was the title of a long-running thread, but it was only one
among many instances of simple, juvenile name-calling. Hawks.
looking back across his two years of alt.cyberpunk experience, suggests
that process of definition by negation is habitual:

In my personal opinion (admittedly not humble), the *addiction* to
mindless rebellion and negativity that exists on this group which has
done a lot to dissuade the idea of community development here, has done
an incredible amount of more harm than good.5

These are strong words. The use of the word "addiction" suggest both the
way in which certain negative characteristics have become deeply
woven into whatever it means to be an alt.cyberpunk, but also the
strong personal attachments which individuals have to that
designation. Hawks is not trying here to tell why this is, but we might
find a few more clues by exploring more deeply the nature of
cyberpunk.

An important criteria among real life computer hackers, and the
protagonists of cyberpunk novels, are the technical skills which allow
them to "liberate" information from the networks. As in so many
primarily male youth cultures, a way with the machine is a key to
status. Some of the results are amusing. In junior high, when I was
struggling through my typing classes, I certainly never imagined that
my status in any community important to me could depend on my typing
speed and accuracy. Besides, word processing now takes much of that
sort of pressure off most scholars and scientists—unless they want to
succeed in realtime environments online, where speed and accuracy
are necessary to keep up with a conversation on IRC, to hold three
simultaneous conversations on different MUDs, or to maintain the
illusion of virtual sex. During the height of the flame war over Idol, one
poster forwarded a transcript of an article which basically reported that
Idol was a poor typist.[6] Another made a relatively simple UNIX
procedure his yardstick of cyberpunkhood:

Probably doesn't even know what an FTP is.  I hate all those pseudo-
cyberpunks who don't know shit but try to act like they do. I'm not
saying I'm Mr. Cyberpunk, but Billy Idol sure as hell isn't!!!![7]

Of course, all the technical expertise it takes to be an alt.cyberpunk is
the knowledge of a few simple commands, and FTP (file transfer
protocol, used to move files from one site to another) is not exactly
forbidden knowledge. Besides, forbidden knowledge has no place in a
setting as public as Usenet. As one poster said, "For all you know right
now, he could be hacked into the pentagon computer. He probably isn't,
but, he could be, and you'd never know."[8]

 You can detect the cabalistic pretensions of the alt.cyberpunks. One of
the most serious threats to fringe culture is that it might become
mainstream. Erich Schneider's current alt.cyberpunk FAQ list a variety
of movements and roles related to cyberpunk and then ends:

However, one person's "cyberpunk" is another's everyday obnoxious
teenager with some technical skill thrown in, or just someone looking
for the latest trend to identify with. This has led many people to look at
self-designated "cyberpunks" in a negative light. Also, there are those
who claim that "cyberpunk" is undefinable (which in some sense it is,
being concerned with outsiders and rebels), and resent the mass media's
use of the label, seeing it as a cynical marketing ploy.[9]

The message here is that the person who says he or she is a
"cyberpunk" is the one you have to be most suspicious about. The true
cyberpunks are elsewhere. They are "outsiders and rebels." But where
does that leave alt.cyberpunk, and the individuals who have invested so
much in its defense? Clearly, not all of the alt.cyberpunks would agree
with the judgment that cyberpunk is "undefinable." If they did, then
what grounds would they have for excluding Billy Idol? And Schneider
certainly seems to have something more specific in mind, despite his
attempts to be diplomatic.

What the profusion, or lack, of cyberpunk definitions seems to suggest
is that either individual cyberpunks have some fairly clear sense of
why they are a participant in alt.cyberpunk, but cannot reach
consensus, or that they do not have any clear idea, and are just riding a
trend or looking for a prepackaged image. Undoubtedly, there are
alt.cyberpunks of both types. What we have not uncovered, however, is
the reason that cyberpunk is the particular attractor for all these
people—from Erich Schneider to Billy Idol, and from name-callers to
cultural studies scholars. That requires that we leave alt.cyberpunk
once again to trace a short history of the (as one poster put it)
"cyberpunk, well, thingie. . . ."

Running Down the Meme

The problem with a "short history" of cyberpunk is that, once you leave
the relatively safe confines of alt.cyberpunk, the enormity and
enormous confusion of the subject matter becomes inescapably clear. As
Schneider pointed out, there has been a fair amount of
commercialization of cyberpunk. In fact, cyberpunk was
commercialized from the beginning, and has been most remarkable for
its extreme hardiness as a commercial concept, rather than for any
particularly revolutionary ideas that it carried. But it did carry
something--—some particularly fecund bit of cultural matter. Think of it
as a meme, a unit of meaning designated by Richard Dawkins to
correspond to the gene. Or, perhaps, think of cyberpunk as a bundle of
memes—many of them inherited memetically from other cultural
entities—which has been particularly prolific in seeding culture for the
last decade. Neither approach is precisely satisfactory, but both suggest
partial explanations for the continuing success of cyberpunk.
The problem of defining cyberpunk is firther complicated by the large
amount of ink that has been spilled attempting to explain it outside of
cyberspace or the science fiction press. Cyberpunk has become a
favorite research area for academics, with whole issues of the
Mississippi Review and South Atlantic Quarterly (just out) devoted to the
subject. What seems most striking to me, however, is the way that this
academic adoption of a popular genre seems so clearly grounded in a
kind of critical wish-fulfillment. Schneider gives the following
explanation of cyber punk literature:

Cyberpunk literature, in general, deals with marginalized people in
technologically-enhanced cultural "systems". In cyberpunk stories'
settings, there is usually a "system" which dominates the lives of most
"ordinary" people, be it an oppresive government, a group of large,
paternalistic corporations, or a fundamentalist religion. These systems
are enhanced by certain technologies (today advancing at a rate that is
bewildering to most people), particularly "information technology"
(computers, the mass media), making the system better at keeping those
within it inside it. Often this technological system extends into its
human "components" as well, via brain implants, prosthetic limbs,
cloned or genetically engineered organs, etc. Humans themselves
become part of "the Machine". This is the "cyber" aspect of cyberpunk.

However, in any cultural system, there are always those who live on its
margins, on "the Edge": criminals, outcasts, visionaries, or those who
simply want freedom for its own sake. Cyberpunk literature focuses on
these people, and often on how they turn the system's technological
tools to their own ends. This is the "punk" aspect of cyberpunk.[10]

There are problems with this "cyperpunk = cyber + punk" equation, as
Schneider acknowledges elsewhere in his FAQ. However, much of the
later work in the genre treated the equation as a formula. Even Donna
Haraway's socialist feminist cyborg subject mixes technological
entanglement with bad attitude as a strategy of resistance. It seems to be
a useful strategy, and it is easy to see how left academics and
oppositionally-minded science fiction writers might have developed it.
It is not, however, exactly what goes on in the earliest works of
cyberpunk. William Gibson's Neuromancer, the central work of
cyberpunk by almost any criteria, tells a rather different story.
The setting is the one Schneider describes—a near-future world of
hyperized capitalism, where sprawling urban "axes" represent the mass
of once-separate cities grown together at the edges. Gibson presents the
essence of this world in his portrait of Chiba, Night City. Chiba is an
"outlaw zone," full of "black" medical clinics, computer criminals,
biotech smugglers and hustlers of most every variety. It moves to the
rhythm of "biz," its citizens always dancing from deal to deal. We sense
that it represents near-future capitalism without its smiling
holographic mask, but also without certain restraints which the system
must ordinarily impose upon itself.

There were countless theories explaining why Chiba City tolerated the
Ninsei enclave, but Case tended toward the idea that the Yakuza might be
preserving the place as a kind of historical park, a reminder of
humbler origins. But he also saw a certain sense in the notion that
burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn't
there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground
for technology itself.[11]

This last phrase seems particularly striking. It suggests that the relative
freedom of the "outlaw zones" is only an accidental by-product of
processes necessarily beyond human, or even corporate control. The
freedom is here a freedom for "technology itself," which is only
secondarily, or accidentally, a human freedom. Throughout the novel,
the human characters are manipulated by an artificial intelligence that
will eventually gain its freedom from humanity and merge with the
networks--become, in essence, "technology itself." At the novel's end,
the action--in fact, the future--races away from the human characters.
Ours is the freedom to free the machines, or to have them turn us to
their own ends.

Gibson's work, read in this way, fits within the literature of
transhumanism, a form of futurist thinking that owes more than a bit to
F. T. Marinetti's image of "man metallified." Hans Moravec, Director of
the Mobile Robot Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University, is
convinced that our best evolutionary prospects lie with downloading
individual consciousness into electronic memory and mounting the
resulting "mind children" on robotic bodies. Rather than Arthur C.
Clarke's "we have to get off this planet," the call now seems to be"we
have to get out of this meat."

This is scary stuff, difficult even to consider, and it was quickly toned
down or lost entirely in later cyberpunk works. As cyberpunk began to
be marketed to a broader audience, it became increasingly identified
with a few character types and plot devices, or its elements became
incorporated into other sorts of fiction. More importantly, at least for
this discussion, it became linked in the minds of many with various
fringe and New Age technologies, as well as with actual online
communities. Virtual reality researchers borrowed Gibson's
"cyberspace" as a term to describe their goals. Computer hackers were
quickly labeled "cyberpunks."

It is out of this cyberpunk subculture, with its dizzying proliferation of
concerns and emphases, that groups like alt.cyberpunk grew. And we
needn't lament any loss of the "purity" of Gibson's original ideas.
Certainly, there is little possibility for intentional community within
the world of Neuromancer. But we can also see how the isolation of
Gibson's characters might have informed the dealings of the
alt.cyberpunks, just as the wide range of cyberpunk culture has made a
unified community nearly impossible.

To make sense of alt.cyberpunk, and the "panic of '93," we need to have
some sense of where they fit into the story of "cyberpunk." What is
there relation to the widening pool of culture which carries some of
that memetic heritage? Two different interpretations suggest
themselves, and we will need to explore both.

Is It Dead Yet?

One of the most common arguments on alt.cyberpunk revolves around
the "death" of cyberpunk. Some argue that cyberpunk has been killed
by commercialization. Once Billy Idol can sell records with the name, it
is dead as a notion with any cutting edge culturally. This is the familiar
argument about avant gardes--that they should disband before than are
consumed by the world of institutions. It is "I hope I die before I get old"
played out in another arena. Or, using the memetic metaphor, it is an
argument for a kind of mementic eugenics. Keep the meme pure. In any
event, it seems to grow out of contempt for mass culture, and for "the
masses" themselves.

It is not hard to see how this attitude might be more motivated by a
desire to be cool, to keep strangers out of the clubhouse, or to possess
secret knowledge, than by any sort of more enlightened motivation. The
desire to differentiate, even if only by a style of presentation, is deeply
rooted in our culture. The contradictions inherent in trying to "be
different, just like everybody else" are the stuff of cliches. It seems that
alt.cyberpunk has hung itself up on the horns of this particular
dilemma. Unable to define itself as a group, and perhaps unwilling to
acknowledge too much conformity within itself, the quasi-community
falls back on negative definitions or abstractions, like Terry Palfrey's
oft-repeated "cyberpunk is an attitude"--which is rapidly becoming the
"why ask why?" of alt.cyberpunk culture.

However, Palfrey has also been one of the most interesting proponents
of a positive cyberpunk which does not define itself so negatively. In
response to one of the many "let's keep on topic" posts, he responded:

Gee, now someone has come out and said that to be cyber you have to
grow up and limit your horizons. This is not Never Never Land and
growing up does not have to lead to the narrowing of focus.

>Read Wired and not Mondo2K <now lame>.
What CRAP.

Read Mondo, Wired, Spy, Boing Boing, Adbusters, Sassy, dozens of
published and electronic zines, all the forums on Babylon <MindVox -
telnet phantom.com> and the WELL - half a dozen new novels a month
and then most of the alt. groups as well as a couple of daily newspapers,
weekly, neighbourhood and the bloody telephone book and keep up
with new technology as well.

Pick up anything that catches your eye, hell pick up the stuff that
doesn't - you never know the paradigm that some people are living in
right under your nose.[12]

And, responding to an equation of cyberpunk with Gibson's work:

Yo dude, life is not Gibson, only the ankies rotate on that point.
Nice man shared some visions with us that's all.
Real world overtaking plotlines very quickly but as with Orwell's
1984 it isn't exactly one to one... Mac showed up in '84 our reality.

Cyberpunk is an attitude, no more no less.
Cyberpunk is also not dead - it is evolving.[13]

While the style is still aggressive, the philosophy behind it seems more
positive, more open to difference. Palfrey suggests that a good
cyberpunk shouldn't be afraid to find uses for the ordinary--—what's
"right under your nose." If this is cyberpunk, then it suggests that
Gibson's work triggered more than just what he had perhaps intended, a
suggestion that would be quickly verified by a more complete history of
cyberpunk literature.

Palfrey's invocation of evolution is also interesting, particularly if we
return to Dawkins memetic model. But if cyberpunk is (constantly?) in
the process of becoming, then what are we to make of the repetitive
nature of alt.cyberpunk? One explanation might be that alt.cyberpunk
represents only one line of descent from the old memetic stock of
cyberpunk. and perhaps it is one which is well-adapted to introducing
newbies to the basics of cyberpunk culture. We might even think about
the memetic function of a space which inevitably thrusts the curious
out of the nest, to explore other areas for more answers. Palfrey and
Hawks both insist on the need to focus beyond the virtual walls of the
alt.cyberpunk clubhouse. However, it may be that neither of them fully
understands their own role as relatively settled citizens in an
environment full of transients.

Hawks' case is particularly instructive. By the age of eighteen, he was
established as one of the legendary figures on the net. His best-known
achievement was the establishment of the Future Culture elist, an
attempt to move beyond the repetitions of alt.cyberpunk and to broaden
the range of discussion for, primarily young, online citizens. It was also
an attempt to create the kind of community that Hawks still finds
lacking on Usenet. Future Culture may still be the best known list on the
net, but Hawks is no longer running it. About a year ago, he reached a
point of frustration with the list, and with the entire net, and destroyed
the list. Of course, these things have a way of rebuilding themselves.
Certain memes prove hardier than their hosts might wish, and, after
one false start, Future Culture returned. It is currently gowing strong,
despite some confusions over its purpose. In fact, the elist has recently
spawned an amazing variety of other projects, nearly all of them aimed
at establishing communities in or around cyberspace. ThesisNet is a list
for students doing research on CMC. Tribe was a more recent Andy
Hawks experimen--a list without a subject--which was ultimately
unworkable, but which has provoked a great deal of discussion around
the networks. Future Culture has established a compound on MIT's
MediaMOO, and the experiences of a group of players there led to the
establishment of BayMOO on San Francisco's CRL.COM site. Of the seven
wizards (system maintainers) there, five are Future Culture subscribers.
There have been Future Culture fleshmeets, where subscribers get
together "in real life" to broaden their acquaintances beyond the
boundaries of CMC, and this summer will see Leri@Con, a gathering of
folks from Future Culture and several other lists in its virtual
"neighborhood." This attempt to connect online and offline
relationships is also the basis for the NEXUS project, which intends to
establish a global network of local communes or communities grouped
around cooperative Internet service providers. Several nexi are already
in the process of forming, and the group is internetworking with other,
similar projects. With the threat of privatization still looming over the
Internet, this sort of electronic grass roots movement may be needed, if
the networks are to remain open.

These projects can all trace a part of their heritage back to
alt.cyberpunk, in the years when Andy Hawks was maintaining the FAQ.
That is not to say that either Hawks or alt.cyberpunk is responsible for
these developments. In fact, Hawks has distanced himself from many of
them. But they do suggest that whatever it is that boils in the forums of
Usenet may still have some power, particularly as it is "cross-bred" with
other memetic stock. The Future Culture spin-offs seem to be hardy
hybrids, at least for now.

Usenet's alt.cyberpunk is both a warning and a promise. It suggests the
power of ideas to draw people together, even when they aren't quite
sure wha those ideas are. It points out the limitations of a certain, rather
negative, variety of "cyberpunk." And, to the extent that it is connected
to other, more positive, movements, it reminds us that we are living in
an increasing ly networked society—both online and off. Energy--even
meaning--flows, sometimes unpredictably, making the job of cultural
critics that much more difficult, but also more exciting.

NOTES:

1 Mindvox is a commercial Internet provider. To access it through the
Internet, telnet mindvox.phantom.com.

2 The second issue (1.2) of the electronic zine Voices from the Net
contains interviews with Curry and Ingall, dealing with their reactions
to the "panic."

3 Howard Rheingold, Virtual Community (Reading, Massachusetts:
Addison-Wesley, 1993) 5.

4 Andy Hawks, "Face without Eyes: Thoughts on Idol & alt.cp," Usenet:
alt.cyberpunk, August 16, 1993, Message-ID:
<[e-mail]>.

5 Hawks, "Face without eyes".

6 Jeff Harrington, "Billy's New York Times Style Section Cyberpunk
Idyll," Usenet: alt.cyberpunk, August 8, 1993, Message-ID:
<2430qr$[e-mail]>.

7 Quoted in "Re: Billy is a wanker", Usenet: alt.cyberpunk, November 1,
1993, Message-ID: <[e-mail]>.

8  "Re: Billy is a wanker."

9 Erich Schneider, "Frequently Asked Questions on alt.cyberpunk,"
Usenet: alt.cyberpunk, December 3, 1993. Copies are available from
[e-mail].

10 Erich Schneider, "Frequently Asked Questions on alt.cyberpunk."

11 William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984) 11.

12 Terry Palfrey, "Re: Billy Idol? Huh, how 'bout that. :)," Usenet:
alt.cyberpunk, August 25, 1993, Message-ID: <[e-mail]>.

13 Terry Palfrey, "Re: Cyberpunk is dead," Usenet: alt.cyberpunk,
November 3, 1993, Message-ID: <[e-mail]>.