strange but interesting -- - A tekkie counterculture is born By Paul Saffo

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

Cyberpunk R.I.P.


   - A tekkie counterculture is born
        By Paul Saffo






   Like a sun-grazing comet on a deep-space trajectory, the cyberpunk
   movement is disappearing as quickly as it arrived just a few years
   ago. Moreover, the movement was hardly more substantial than a comet's
   fuzzy tail when it came to numbers - there were never more than 100
   hard-core cyberpunks at any time before the term hit the mainstream
   press.


   But don't sell cyberpunks's social impact short, for insubstantial
   comets have long served as messengers. I suspect that cyberpunks are
   to the 1990s what the beatniks were to the '60s - harbingers of a mass
   movement waiting in the wings. Just as the beatniks anticipated the
   hippies, cyberpunks are setting the stage for a coming digital
   counterculture that will turn the '90s zeitgeist utterly on its head.
   This movement in the making has yet to be described, much less named,
   but eerie parallels between the beatnik and cyberpunk movements offer
   strong hints of what is to come.


   For starters, both movements were given focus by literary fiction. The
   beatniks took their cue from a handful of "beat writers" (Jack
   Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and William S. Burroughs),
   while cyberpunks found their identity in the cyberpunk science ction
   genre dened by writers such as William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, Bruce
   Sterling, and John Shirley. Moreover, the lead works in both
   traditions orbited emerging infrastructures: Kerouac's On the Road
   played off the concrete mobility enabled by the Interstate Highway
   Act, while Gibson's Neuromancer portrayed a future world wrapped
   around vast information highways. Eager readers never realized that
   neither writer was really one of them: Kerouac disliked driving;
   Gibson banged out Neuromancer on a 1927 Hermes typewriter.


   Like the cyberpunks, there were never more than a handful of true
   beatniks - less than 120 in all before the movement hit the media in
   the late 1950s, according to essayist George Leonard. Leonard's
   descriptions of the North Beach beatnik milieu parallel today's
   cyberpunk culture. Word got out on the grapevine of parties at
   people's "pads," and, like raves, these happenings quickly evolved
   into underground quasi-commercial events. Just as cyberpunks carry
   their network identities into the physical world, the beatniks were
   fond of pseudonyms. "Everyone had a name, like in a Damon Runyon
   novel," observes Leonard. Ironically, neither group named its own
   movement, for just as the cyberpunks were so dubbed by a literary
   interloper, the term "beatnik" was coined by San Francisco Chronicle
   columnist Herb Caen.


   Once labeled, both movements quickly surrendered their visual
   archetypes to the cultural mainstream. In 1960, youths the world over
   were aping the goateed, cool-shades beatnik look, while today, PDBs
   (people dressed in black) affecting electronic lifestyles are more
   numerous than network nodes. This surrender would send both movements
   into the black hole of history, but not before they inspired larger
   movements to come. Just ve years after the beatniks's demise in 1960,
   the hippies emerged from the Haight-Ashbury to change our cultural
   landscape forever.


   Like cyberpunks, the beatniks were for the most part low-key, slightly
   mournful loners. Beatnik individualism was a sullen and stubborn
   reaction to the optimistic company-man materialism of the Eisenhower
   era, just as the cyberpunks stand in stark contrast to the antiseptic
   military- industrial orderliness of the Reagan-Bush years.


   But Kerouac later concluded that beat also meant beatific - imbued
   with joy or blessedness - and it was this aspect of the beatniks that
   became the germ of the hippie movement, according to Leonard. "It was
   a time of grace," he told me, referring to the early days of the
   Haight-Ashbury, when it seemed that a new age of cultural
   consciousness truly was dawning.


   Optimism and a sense of community distinguished the hippies from the
   beatniks, and will also distinguish the cyberpunks from the coming
   digital counterculture. The cyberpunk world is starkly non-utopian,
   serving up the same sort of intimate but uneasy accommodation with
   technology portrayed in the movie Blade Runner. I will bet that the
   digital counterculture will reject this bleak vision of a future in
   which technology enlarges the human spirit as a new tool for
   consciousness in much the same way that the hippies appropriated the
   psychoactive chemical spinoffs of the military- industrial complex.
   This new movement will be cyberpunk imbued with human warmth,
   substituting a deep sense of interdependence in place of lone-wolf
   isolationism. Cyberpunks envision humans as electronic cyber-rats
   lurking in the interstices of the information mega-machine; the gospel
   of the post- cyberpunk movement will be one of machines in the service
   of enlarging our humanity.


   It is too early to tell what the digital counterculture will call
   itself, but the history of the hippies offers a clue. "Hippie" traces
   its origins to "hipster," slang for a cruel and cynical 1950s
   subculture that predated the beats. The digital counterculture thus is
   likely to appropriate an older term for its own, in the same way that
   the hippies appropriated and turned "hipster" into something entirely
   new. I'll bet that they call themselves something like "tekkies,"
   consciously adopting the scornful '80s slang for nerds, stripping the
   word of its industrial coldness and making it synonymous with the
   human control of technology.


   Hippies appeared in 1965, several years after the beatnik movement had
   gone public. Given this chronology, the tekkies will arrive sometime
   in the mid- 1990s, if not sooner. Watch the skies for a new comet - it
   will be digital, and its tail is likely to glow in Technicolor swirls.
   Its arrival will change our lives forever.


        Paul Saffo (psaffo () MCImail com) is a research fellow at the I
        nstitute for the Future in Menlo Park, California.


Life On the Net, 2015


   Speaking truth to power
        By Bruce Sterling






   Earlier this year, Bruce Sterling testied before the House
   Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance in Washington, DC. This
   is the transcript of his remarks.


   _*Hello everyone and thanks for inviting me here. My name is Bruce
   Sterling and I'm a science-fiction writer and sometime science
   journalist. Since writing my nonction book Hacker Crackdown: Law and
   Disorder on the Electronic Frontier, I have returned to writing
   science ction. And I've returned to that with some relief, frankly,
   since the world of science ction is in most ways rather less strange
   and less bizarre than the contemporary world of telecommunications
   policy.


   I hope therefore that you will forgive me if I testify today as a
   science- fiction writer. It's one of the perks of my profession to
   write about the future, or attempt to, and I thought you might like to
   meet someone from the telecommunications future that you are so busy
   creating.


   With your kind indulgence for my novelist's whimsy then, the rest of
   my brief presentation today will be given by a Mr. Bob Smith, who is
   an NREN network administrator from the year 2015. I present Mr.
   Smith.*_


   Thank you, Mr. Sterling. It's a remarkable privilege to talk to the
   legislators who historically created my working environment. As a
   laborer in the elds of 21st-century cyberspace, I of course would have
   no job without NREN. My wife and small son and I are all properly
   grateful for your foresight in establishing the information
   superhighway.


   Your actions in this regard have affected American society every bit
   as strongly as did the telegraph, the railroads, the telephone, the
   highway system, and television. In fact, it's impossible for me to
   imagine contemporary life in 2015 without the global Net; living
   without the Net would be like trying to live without electricity.


   However, it's a truism in technological development that no silver
   lining comes without its cloud. Today, I'd like to mention two or
   three trifling problems that were not entirely obvious from the
   perspective of the early 1990s.


   First, a word about this "research and education" issue. Because
   communications is power in an information society, giving
   fantastically advanced communications to the research and education
   communities did in fact empower those communities quite drastically by
   comparison with interest groups lacking that advantage. Today, one of
   the most feared political organizations in the world is the
   multi-national anarchist libertarian group called the Students for an
   Utterly Free Society.


   Of course, there have always been campus radicals, but thanks to their
   relative lack of nancial clout, and lack of even a steady home
   address, these young fanatics once found it very difcult to organize
   politically. Therefore, they were easy for the powers-that-be to
   ignore, except during occasional spasms of violent campus unrest.


   Thanks to NREN, however, spasms of student unrest can now spread like
   lightning across entire continents. Advanced Articial Intelligence
   (AI) translation programs installed on the Net only made matters
   worse, because in 2015 the global leaders of the student movements are
   not only extremely radical, but French.


   Attempts by campus authorities to control this unrest have failed
   miserably. In 2015, NREN sites are always the rst buildings occupied
   during a campus strike. Campus chancellors and faculty are themselves
   so utterly dependent on NREN that they become quite helpless offline.


   A second major problem has been the growth of unlicensed encryption,
   which has proven quite unstoppable. Today, some 75 percent of NREN
   archives is material that no one in authority can read. Countries that
   attempted to control and monitor network trafc have lost market share
   and service revenue as data processing simply moves offshore.


   The United States has profited by this phenomenon to a great extent as
   people worldwide have flocked to the relative liberty of our networks.
   Unfortunately, many of these electronic virtual immigrants are not
   simply dissidents looking for free expression, but in fact are
   organized criminals.


   Take for instance a recent FBI raid on an enormous archive of
   encrypted Iranian files, illicitly stored in an obscure NREN node in
   North Dakota. Luckily, the FBI was able to decrypt these les thanks to
   an informant. Deciphering these archives revealed the following
   contraband:
    * 80 percent graphic image files of attractive young women without
      veils or, in fact, much clothing of any kind.
    * 15 percent digitally stored pirated copies of Western pop music and
      Western videos, still illegal to possess in Tehran.
    * And, 5 percent text files in the Farsi language describing how to
      build, deliver, and park truck-bombs in major urban areas.






   I can't conclude my brief remarks today without a mention of a
   particularly odd development related to wireless computer
   telecommunications. Because it is now possible to carry out
   transactions entirely in cyberspace (including nancial transactions),
   many information entrepreneurs in 2015 have simply given up any
   physical home. Basically, they have become stateless people,
   21st-century gypsies.


   A recent tragic example of this occurred in the small town of North
   Zulch, Texas. There, some rural law enforcement ofcers apprehended a
   scruffy vagabond on a motorcycle after a high-speed chase.
   Unfortunately he was killed. A search of his backpack revealed a
   device the size of a cigarette pack. The police ofcers, who were not
   computer literate, accidentally broke the device. This tiny device was
   actually a privately owned computer bulletin board system with some
   15,000 registered users.


   Many of the users were wealthy celebrities, and the apparent outlaw
   biker was actually an extremely popular and nationally known system
   operator. These 15,000 users were enraged by what they considered the
   wanton destruction of their electronic community. They pooled their
   resources and took a terrible vengeance on the small town of North
   Zulch, which, by contrast, had only 2,000 residents, none of them
   wealthy or technologically sophisticated. Through a combination of
   harassing lawsuits and sharp real- estate deals, the vengeful board
   users bankrupted the town. Eventually the entire township was
   bulldozed flat and purchased for park land by the Nature Conservancy.


   Thanks in part to the advances that you yourselves set in motion,
   violent conflicts between virtual and actual communities have become a
   permanent feature of the cultural landscape in 2015.


        Bruce Sterling is author of four science ction novels, and co
        -author, with William Gibson, of The Difference Engine. Sterl
        ing edited Mirrorshades, the denitive document of the cyberpu
        nk movement.




















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