Cyberpunk. The term was first used to describe a new genre in science fiction literature.
Cyberpunk. It was inaugurated with the publication of William Gibson's New Romanza, winner of
the Hugo, Nebula, Locus and Philip K. Dick awards. Gibson's books Burning Chrome, New
Romanza, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive have been translated into every language conceivable
and thousands of copies are sold daily around the world. The success of these books has
generated spin-offs such as a graphic novel and a computer role-playing game. New Romanza's
protagonist, Case, is a streetwise young man living at the periphery of a not unfamiliar
high-tech society and its laws. Familiar? Yet a society with imploded cities, mutant
subcultures and artificial realities. The sky above the port was the color of television
tuned to a dead channel. Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism
designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.
You could say that cyberpunk is postmodern science fiction. It's a lot more postmodern
than the old science fiction was. But science fiction is a very, I'm speaking of the American
science fiction industry and it's been traditionally a fairly reactionary literary form, a form
in which you weren't encouraged to develop as a stylist or to investigate any of the
things that were happening in the world of literature. And one of the things that the
so-called cyberpunk writers have done either consciously or unconsciously is to look around
the world outside, look at the fine arts as well and import whatever they could use into
the sort of literary ghetto of science fiction. In New York Publishing they call science fiction
the golden ghetto because it's this sort of schlock area that makes the most money.
Nowhere in his books do we find traditional government. Real power is in the hands of
the Zybatsus, the multinationals. The Zybatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course
of human history had transcended old barriers, hives with cybernetic memories, vast single
organisms, their DNA coated in silicon. Kingpins in a given industry would be both more and
less than people, a gradual and willing accommodation of the machine, the system, the power organism.
I think we're moving toward a world where all the consumers under a certain age would
probably tend to identify more with their consumer status or with the products they
consume than they would with a sort of antiquated notion of nationality. People are increasingly
sort of interchangeable. When William Gibson's visions were published
they struck sparks in the real world. Scientists and hackers had found a future they couldn't
wait to build, couldn't wait to live in, couldn't wait to sell. William Gibson, godfather of
cyberpunk found himself in a situation where he was actually programming the future. Never
before had science fiction literature determined the way people thought and spoke about new
technology. This synthesis of fiction and fact proved to be of value to each. And now
cyberpunk is a movement looking set to blast toward the millennium.
At a certain point I saw cyberpunk jump from being a literary description to being a description
of something in the real world. I think the New York Times used it in a headline last
year, cyberpunks do something. And I thought they were referring to this group of writers
I'm associated with, but in fact they were referring to outlaw hackers who had broken
into someone's data bank. And I believe Time magazine used it as well in that sense, which
is an interesting thing to see. I was happy to see it take on this new life in the world
outside because then I felt I wouldn't be quite so saddled with it.
Man's image of computer cowboys hacking a perilous post-humanist lifestyle on a new
technological frontier gave hackers and technophiles an identity and a set of ennobling myths.
After reading Neuromancer, hackers started to realize that they were in fact and probably
had always been cyberpunks.
So cyberpunk is a person who takes navigational control over the cybernetic electronic equipment
and uses it not for the army, not for the government, not for the Lufthansa airline
before his or her own personal purpose.
Cyberpunks are many things. One thing they all have in common is the delight taken in
the use of advanced technology against those who would try to restrict, direct, or control
that technology. Perhaps this is why cyberpunks have been known to operate on the fringe of
legality. In some cases, the laws to restrict their activities have not yet been written.
In others, the laws exist and cyberpunks are squarely outside them. The identities of such
individuals must naturally be conceived.
I'm poking around in people's databases. I deal in software. I trade. I don't crack.
I'm not that good. But I deal with it, trade with people, and poke around in databases,
trade with phones. I make free phone calls everywhere. You name it. Europe, Asia, the
United States, Cuba. I called Russia once. They didn't like that very much. I first started
doing it just to call, but now I'll do that so I can reach somebody's database or so I
can trade software. It adds on an extra dimension. I don't have to pay for the phone call. I'm
not paying for the software. I'm not paying to get into their database. It makes it easier
for me so I can do it more.
You just do it for the challenge of getting in because it's like the big game because
the people who own the system, they hire so-called professionals to set up security to keep people
like us out. It's a game. You want to see how smart they are. If you can beat them at
their own game, you get in, you look around. If it's boring, you leave. Generally, most
people leave. You have some malicious types who like to go in and screw things up. I just
do it for the challenge. It's fun.
These kids in the Catskills, they were like 14 or 15 years old. They were into trading
software and they had a computer bulletin board system. They would put up codes for
freaking to make free phone calls. People would put up numbers of databases. Somebody
put up an AT&T database number. One kid who was good with hacking into systems got on
and he got into a menu that he didn't know what it was and he just started poking around
with it. The next thing he knew, people came to his house and he didn't know what happened.
They told him that he had moved a satellite. He moved a telecommunications satellite out
of orbit and they all freaked out. They came to his house going, you moved a satellite?
He was like 14 years old. His parents were passing out because there were federal agents
in his house and he was shitting bricks. The federal agents came in, confiscated all his
computer equipment and scared the living daylights out of him and he thought he was going away
to jail for the rest of his life and he just turned everybody in.
So by definition, in a bureaucracy, any individual who thinks for herself is considered a hooligan
or a smart ass or a know-it-all or a troublemaker. The creative child is the troublemaker. So
by definition, an innovative person, particularly in technology with computers, anyone who gets
in there and uses a computer for his or her own purpose is by definition a hooligan, a
punk.
Cyberpunk is made up of kids, freaks or obsessive technophiles and like any other movement it
has its stars. Michael Synergy, a legitimate cyber hero.
I think I'm one of the most outspoken of what we're calling the quote cyberpunk unquote
genre. One of the things that I'm always very important, I always consider very important
when I'm talking politically is, in terms of an interview, is I won't pull any punches.
A lot of people are going to go there and they're going to try not to incriminate themselves,
they're going to try and be sly about stuff. I've never done that. Every time someone wants
to know something I'm just very free about it. I'm the first person who's starting to
talk very honestly about viruses and terrorist acts and what this really means in terms of
the big picture, which isn't very popular with the mainstream population. But the underground
see me as a hero for that because I'm being honest and that's the one thing that they
really want to see. I guess my fame then is coming from the fact that I have certain opinions
and certain technical skills and I'm perfectly willing to share them with whoever wants to
know.
I have what I call my 3D policy. If I show up dead I disappear or if I'm disabled, meaning
someone messes up an attempt on me, I'm in a coma or something like that, there's a trigger
which has to be reset on a weekly basis. If I'm not paying attention to that and I don't
attend to that, then things get a little uncomfortable for everybody else. There are some safety
provisions in there where if it seems natural, someone else can stop it. I'm not about to
say how and I'm not about to say who and what the mechanism is because that puts me at greater
risk. But one of the things that I feel perfectly comfortable is they stick me in a cell. Things
are going to start to happen very, very slowly and it's going to build up like an avalanche
and when that happens I don't think I'll be in prison very much longer after that. Many,
many years ago we didn't have computers and computers have been slowly phasing in as they've
been going by. Certain individuals because of computers are becoming very heavily empowered.
This is all about personal empowerment. Right now because of the way computers are networked,
I'm as powerful as a government agency. I'd say I've got about as much power as say a
group in the Department of Defense here, you know, maybe not the gross national product
or per capita as they do, but just as powerful. Soon in a couple of years I'm going to be
much more powerful than they are because they're still stuck in local mode. Things about computer
viruses I can go beyond boundaries. Things about networks I can go beyond. One of the
things I learned a long time ago is the old rule of thumb. You know, distance means nothing
to a computer hacker, phone freak, whatever. Anyone using a computer, the phone line, the
computer, fax, who knows? It's distance doesn't mean anything anymore. I can be anywhere I
want and one of the other things I find about computer viruses is it's a beautiful lever.
You know, give me a lever and I shall move the earth. For me a computer virus is a way
of building a little AI of me, an artificial intelligence that can go out and copy itself
millions of times and do whatever it has to. One of the things I was asked recently is,
you know, sure you can sit down and write a virus which would take down the banking
system, but would you really? And you know, I've told people before and I'll tell people
again, if I think it's necessary I will. One of the reasons I said that was someone asked
me about what happens if we get a fascist government here in the states? Would you be
willing to take it down? And the more they get computerized, the more powerful I get,
the more willing I will be to do that. One of the fascinating things about this new cybernetic
or electronic universe that we are creating is that many of the ethical rules and the
moral postures and even the legal limitations of the material world don't work anymore.
Ever heard the expression, information wants to be free? That's the slogan of the computer
underground.
Access to computers and anything which might teach you something about the way the world
works should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the hands on imperative. All information
should be free. Misrust authority. Promote decentralization.
Information wants to be free.
And I have the thumbnail chip that in ten years they tell us we'll have a billion transistors
costing a few dollars. What that means is that the inner city kid can walk around with
more information processing and transmittability than ABC, CBS right now for less money than
a pair of Nikes which they're killing for in the inner city right now. So this is going
to be decentralization. It's going to mean ultimate democracy. Who controls the press,
controls the people, who controls the tube, controls the people. In the future we'll all
be controlling our own screens and zapping our messages around.
Cyber punks as William Gibson defined them are often political to the extent that information
is power and power must be decentralized for collective security. The console cowboys of
Gibson's fiction are clearly criminal. Possessed of a Robin Hood romance, their electronic
breaking and entering is purely for profit, though not always monetary. However, the real
life cyberpunk breaks into secure systems without hope of reward, merely to acquire
information and occasionally wreak havoc.
I mean, literally it's coming to the point where whoever holds information has
power. It's interesting though. It is interesting because you find yourself in those books
rooting for the outlaws, you know, the hustlers, you know, I mean, all the patrons of The Gentleman
Loser.
Both Gibson's rom-ranglers and real cyber punks may sometimes seem nothing more than
hackers with shiny new toys, yet they are crashing the political party with a utopian
agenda seriously poses the question of who owns and controls the future. Making records
public, keeping the keepers of corporate secrets somewhat honest, watching the watchers, waging
guerrilla warfare against the multinationals with personal computers takes more than style
and politically correct attitudes. It takes hardware. The average cyberpunk hasn't the
funds to purchase elaborate and advanced equipment. How is this problem solved?
This is Vincent, whose friends thought he could pass as conventional. He put what little
money he had into a suit and haircut. A cyberpunk in businessman's clothing, he approached the
big companies for support.
Basically what we have here are the extremes of contemporary computing. We have an Apple
Macintosh. On the other hand, we have an AT&T Pixel Machine, which is a massive parallel
processing super computer. The intermediary at this point is a Sun Microsystems 3260,
which currently does the interpreting of the data and feeds it to the Pixel Machine. We
also have a couple of really nice monitors that came along with it. You know, 19 inch
color, 19 inch high res for text. This was a gift from AT&T. This is faster than all
the computing power that launched an Apollo spaceship. I mean, we're on the fast track.
Let's extend the definition of property holders. Let's try and believe that we do own something.
I mean, maybe that's what we can share with what's going on over, you know, the miracles
that are happening, you know, that we read about in the papers in the East, is let's
extend the definition of property holders.
Armed with their free super computer Pixel Machine from AT&T, the group Process Animation
produced their bizarre punk graphics.
Watch Saya's books for no?
We're building the cutting edge of technology.
Cyberpunk also influences culture and spawns trends in art, music and fashion.
The musical component of cyberpunk is the so-called industrial movement.
Since few cyberpunks have the requisite equipment to do real cyber music, instead they make
more conventional music to live cyberpunk to.
Since cyberpunk became a way of life, something like 100 bands are playing their versions
of cyberpunk themed songs.
I had already been experimenting with the electronic sound before I had read anything
by William Gibson.
This effect, however, brought to mind a lot more about the ability of the human mind to
create a world created only by the human mind, which is the world inside the computer matrix.
And that came forward more the more I got into the programming of the computers.
And with the computers being used to create the music, I started to realize that not only
was I exploring different sonic explorations, but also setting up new scenarios using the
music, using the computers, new pathways, new ways of introducing data to which was
already what I considered to be a musically stagnant situation where things were just
becoming retro, where they were falling back on previous influences.
It opened up a whole new avenue and I think his writing did have some effect on that because
it was essentially a whole new world opened up simply through the imagination, simply
through the computer.
Cyberpunks have their own glossy magazines.
In galleries around the country, more shows are promoting cyberpunk art.
再见
Come here, it's not worth it, buddy
Not worth it, buddy
Not worth it, buddy
Going to make some money
Going out on a truss
That's the only way to get
All the money you need
Baby, you know what's good
And I know
I want to say it
And back to verse
Cyberpunks like to express their state of mind wherever and however possible, for instance in their dress.
Designers already have lines of jewelry for cyberpunks.
Where high tech meets high society, female cyberpunks may be able to afford these dresses, which are made of computer chips and are quite costly.
Witness the tech tarts in their chip couture, seemingly at every important high tech function.
Mind machines are another phenomenon which evolved from cyberpunk culture.
These machines directly manipulate the brain's EEG signature by the imposition of brain-friendly wavelengths.
Repeated use is alleged to make the user permanently smarter, calmer, and more alert.
Some say this is nothing so much as electronic drugs, but if so, then a drug suitable for the recreational tripper and stressed out corporate manager alike.
Simple versions of these mind machines have become a popular cyberpunk party favor.
Learn to make friends, influence people, pick up girls.
You slip them on, close your eyes, and then we'll raise the intensity here and see.
If I recall, you were, I would say your sensitivity was about an eight.
So, if you can describe any sensation that you're perceiving.
Are you getting anything? I know it's really light in here, it's hard.
But I'm bringing up the intensity and we're operating now at about 12 hertz.
So what we're doing is electronically stimulating the phosphenes in the retina of the eye by using electronic currents to affect a neural message originating at some point in the retina.
We're not really sure where exactly at this time, whether it's in the rods or the cones, the bipolar cells, the glia, or in specific neural fibers themselves.
Holistically minded cyberpunks have developed designer foods and vitamins to promote learning, psychic flexibility, and increase the mind's bandwidth.
When penetrating a secure system, or making a run, a cyberpunk needs to be highly alert.
The slightest entry error could mean disaster.
These uncontrolled substances descend from the psychotropic experimentation of the 60s, legal drugs that make one smarter.
Can anyone afford to just say no?
Is this the face of the future?
Will mind machines and vitamins replace heroin and crack?
The illicit drugs of the future will probably reflect in some way what the future society is about.
So what if someone came up with a drug that made you a little bit smarter?
Didn't do anything, just made you, you know, raised your IQ 50 points.
Could you afford not to take it?
Having taken it, you know, would you like to go back, you know, and be 50 points stupider?
I mean, it's something, and that could be maybe, you know, that's a possibility in a way, something that would, you know, speed up the synaptic flow and just make you really, really sharp.
It's a, yeah, that would be, that would be an interesting one.
You know, it's sort of like, it would be like steroids for stockbrokers.
The cyberpunk movement labors ceaselessly to bring the promise of Gibson's visions to fruition.
Almost as soon as they were published, cyberpunks concretized these concepts, rendering them in stark, shuddering hues.
Still, there are a few things which technology cannot yet provide for.
For instance, Gibson's concept of microsurgical implants or biosorts.
In the novel, some characters had small plugs behind their ears which read a microfiche code and could endow them with skills or abilities they would not otherwise possess.
The thing of Microsoft technology where a person, say, wants to fix a car, doesn't know anything about a car, but you can have a slot engineered in the side of your neck and you can take a biosoft program, stick it in, plug it in, and you'll know everything about fixing a car.
I mean, that sort of thing is amazing. That's got to be great.
Yeah, I'd have the whole set for languages. I'd get the, you know, all the burlitz chips.
Almost all of Gibson's major characters are surgically altered.
For example, Molly, the more traditionally heroic counterpart to Case and his romantic interest.
She sees the world through permanently bonded mirror shades with integral readouts.
Her nervous system has been altered to make her reactions to that world quicker as to how she deals with that world.
She held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers slightly spread, and with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, four-centimeter scalpel blades slid from their housing beneath the burgundy nails.
She smiled. The nails slowly withdrew.
Gibson's radicals have the most bizarre surgery possible to guarantee their uniqueness.
His face was a simple graft grown on collagen and shark cartilage polysaccharides, smooth and hideous.
It was one of the nastiest pieces of elective surgery Case had ever seen.
When Angela smiled, revealing the razor-sharp canines of some large animal, Case was actually relieved.
Tooth-butt transplants. It's seen that before.
The only way cyber punks can satisfy their curiosity about interfacing more totally with machine, in this case becoming a cyborg, is by following the scientific research conducted to aid the handicapped.
Immense interest has grown concerning the latest developments in prosthesis.
We're analyzing the energy now and it's absolutely marvelous.
Physically, she's no longer progressing dangerously.
Don't you think that's being normal?
There's a lot of work being, research being done in the United States to enable very, very handicapped people to interface with computers.
And that's another area where that brain plug stuff is eventually going to come from.
I talked to a man two days ago who's working in Eastern Canada on a project that will allow totally blind people, people whose optic nerves have actually been severely damaged, to watch television.
And what they're doing is they're going directly into the site center of the brain and stimulating it electronically.
So a totally blind person can watch television and a totally blind person can then walk around with a mini cam and not be a totally blind person.
Following in expanding upon the work of the semi-mythical Utah group, Dr. Joseph Rosen's work with the disabled at the Palo Alto VA Hospital and his classes at Stanford have made him a cyberpunk hero.
He may be the first to actually put chips in people.
Presently when we reconstruct somebody, we're repairing some injury in plastic surgery, the surgical field I'm in.
We repair some injury. We replace a part that's missing.
We take a congenital deformity when a patient is born with a cleft lip and bring that lip and join it.
If a patient has formed a tumor, we remove that.
We essentially repair defects of nature or acquired defects.
In cosmetic or aesthetic surgery, a patient often comes in who's normal and we change the way they look.
We change their appearance.
In the future, we can imagine a patient coming in who wants to do something he can't do with his limb.
His limb is normal, but he can't jump as high as he'd like to jump.
We can imagine altering the function.
If you look at a kangaroo, they've over the years altered their function in their leg by taking a certain muscle and just forming it into a band, almost like a rubber band.
What they do is they lean down, they stretch out that band, and they use that band as it releases to allow them to jump.
You can imagine doing the same thing on a patient, someone who wants to jump higher than the next person, taking a muscle and altering it in the leg.
So it changes allowing them to jump more.
Or you can imagine not just doing it with your own parts, but adding parts, making a hybrid person where we add in some kind of mechanical part into their arm
to allow them to do some function they couldn't do before, a mix between a robotic limb and a real limb.
There are certain advantages of a robotic limb over a normal limb.
A robotic limb can be designed so that it sensed danger before it reached it.
If it was near a fire, for instance, it could sense a fire from several feet away and then move away from it,
whereas in a human hand, you get close enough that you may get burned before you can move it fast enough.
Especially true since the industrial age where devices and machines move faster and faster.
So a punch press may come down on a hand before the hand can move out of the way.
A robotic hand may be able to sense the punch press moving and move faster than your normal hand would be to protect it.
The other advantage of a robotic hand is it's much easier to replace than a damaged human hand would be.
If a patient came in and wanted wings built on their back, how would we do it?
And although we never see a patient that comes in asking for wings to fly,
we're trained in techniques that allow us to build a wing out of parts in the body by shifting muscles from the leg
and changing the structure of your chest. You could actually build a patient with wings.
Although physically he couldn't fly because he doesn't match the rules in terms of the amount of weight
compared to the amount of wing surface.
Although if you brought in hybrid materials, you could potentially actually build wings
that could allow you to glide, maybe like a flying squirrel or that kind of creature that would glide,
although you don't have the force to develop to actually take off.
Going further in this area, in our lab we're working on devices to allow us to interface with the peripheral nervous system
as a rehabilitation tool to take a patient who's had a nerve injury and repair that injury
or to take a patient who lost a limb like an arm.
You have a robotic arm that's very advanced, but there's no way to splice or interface that robotic arm to your nervous system.
So we're developing some devices like silicon chips that can be implanted in the peripheral nerves
and allow us to make a communication channel between your nervous system and such a device like a robotic arm.
Although even those devices are 10 or 20 years in the future and are presently funded by the Veterans Affairs,
who gives us money to study these devices because they could help disabled veterans with either loss of limb
or even a paralyzed spinal cord by transferring information from the upper extremity that works to the lower extremity that doesn't work.
All of this may make some think of 21st century Frankenstein, yet ethics change as fashions change,
and in as little as 20 years no one may remark on the mechanical and electronic alteration of human beings.
To think about putting devices in man, electronic devices seems very foreign,
but for 20 years we've been putting in pacemakers, which is a very complicated device placed into the heart,
and more recently we've placed in a large number of devices for hearing that are linking up not directly to the nerve,
but to the hair cells that are used in hearing in your cochlea.
And there is a lot of research being done on devices for vision,
so these devices are devices that are either being used clinically now or being actively researched.
To go the next step and to implant these devices in normal people so that they can improve their skills
is something that I don't think we do right now, but I wouldn't rule something out like that for the future.
It's going to be very commercial, and I think we could wind up with something that felt like having a very,
very expensive American television commercial injected directly into your cortex.
I don't find that an appealing idea.
While cyber punks feverishly plan and build their future,
many average people fear we're ruled by machines controlling our lives, or worse yet, having no use for us at all.
This technophobia is widespread, and what is one man's dearest fantasy is another's most horrific nightmare.
I'm always a little amazed when I run into people who feel that technology is something that's outside of the individual,
that one can either accept or reject.
That's true in a sense, but at this stage of the game, we are technology.
We've become something, I think in some very real sense, part of the world's population is already post-human.
Consider the health options available to a millionaire in Beverly Hills as opposed to a man starving in the streets in Bangladesh.
The man in Beverly Hills can, in effect, buy himself a new set of organs.
When you look at that sort of gap, the man in Bangladesh is still human.
He's a human being from an agricultural planet.
The man in Beverly Hills is something else.
He may still be human, but in some way, I think he's also post-human.
I think the future has already happened.
I think there are deeper fears.
People are afraid that technology will make them less free, make them less powerful in a personal way.
That's entirely possible.
In fact, there are lots of good examples of how that's happened, the defense industry being a major one.
But technology can also empower.
You could take that argument all the way back and say the first ape-like human who used a tool was the guy who put the nail in our coffin.
Because our tools, oh my God, it's not my arm, it's a hammer.
Does that mean I've lost power to the hammer, or does that mean I can build a cathedral?
Is it half full or is it half empty?
The question is whether or not the medium is intrinsically evil or scary.
The question is whether or not we have a culture and a society and a group of artists who can rise to the occasion of using it in a way that enhances us.
You're doing it. That's what cyberpunk means.
Individual power to change your own body, to operate your own brain, as long as you don't hurt anybody else.
So certainly in the future, you'll have plastic surgery, you can change the way you look, you can read rejuvenating drugs.
There will be brain shifts undoubtedly.
Hey, it is scary, and there's no utopia here.
Human nature has its dark sides. There will always be power hungry, evil people trying to screw it up.
It's going to be more demanding, but we're getting smarter and we're getting nicer.
We're learning how to get along with each other.
And yeah, there are always going to be people who go too far.
There'll be people who'll be having artificial limbs winning arm wrestling contests.
Human competition will lead to all strange things.
The man who may be said to have started it all, William Gibson.
The same William Gibson whose fanciful musings are today exerting a profound influence, not only on a single subculture, but on society at large.
This same William Gibson is one of the least technical people imaginable.
He has a cozy, modest home in Vancouver and wrote his novels on a manual typewriter.
Some of my readers assume that I do my writing on something that looks like a stealth bomber with the serial numbers filed off.
But in fact I use a very primitive, obsolete computer which I only got about two years ago.
And before that I wrote on a manual typewriter.
When I started writing this stuff I had never touched a computer.
And I think it gave me a certain strange edge in terms of imagination in that I wasn't really hindered by what was possible.
But when I finally went out and bought my little Apple computer and I got it home and set it up and turned it on it,
it made this weird noise, this kind of grinding sound.
And I called the man up very angrily and said, look when I try to do this it goes, whirr, whirr.
And he said, sir that's the disk drive.
And I said, what's that?
And he explained it to me and as he explained it to me I sort of lost something that I had.
I somehow thought that they were these silent crystalline engines.
I hadn't really thought about how they worked and then I realized it was this piece of clumsy Victorian technology spinning a little plastic record around.
And I sort of went, oh, you know, and at that point I sort of lost something.
I was signing books in San Francisco at a bookstore downtown last year and two guys came roaring up on motorcycles tightly in black leather,
very short hair.
And they kind of came marching into the store and as they got closer and closer to the table I could see the disappointment growing on their faces as they realized that yes, in fact, that's him.
And they sort of looked at me very sadly and one of them got out his beat up copy of the book and said, well, you can sign it anyway.
Gibson is no computer expert, certainly not a cyberpunk.
He is a novice, a visionary, an expert only in ideas themselves.
What is unusual, what is astonishing is that he has come to influence scientific research itself.
At last count, there were eight different companies and academic institutions engaged in realizing Gibson's central concept, the social time bomb called cyberspace.
Jack into the matrix. In Gibson's novels, console cowboys are directly linked to their computers.
Jacked in through electrodes to the central nervous system, cyberspace becomes perceptible.
Cyberspace is defined as a consensual hallucination. The abstraction of databases become visible in the matrix, as it is also called, as geometric architectural shapes, images that have reality only in the brain of the cognitory.
The computer jockey can use programs to move his disembodied consciousness around in cyberspace.
For the legitimate user, this is a way of doing their daily work. Millions of employees moving about in cyberspace, laboring in vast fields of information.
These databases are guarded by dangerous protective fields known by the acronym ICE.
The console cowboys goal is to penetrate this ICE with viruses and attack programs to gain access to the information the base contains.
This is the real cyberspace as it is today, better known as virtual reality.
These people seemingly playing an elaborate game of blind man's bluff are in fact spending time in another universe, a cybernetic universe where anything is possible.
In cyberspace, the individual sensorium becomes part of the computer. The illusion created is that of actually inhabiting a computer generated world.
The concept of cyberspace.
Jack into the matrix.
It's around you, you're in it, it's almost this embryonic kind of information, gel.
California's NASA Ames Research Center was one of the first labs to experiment with virtual reality.
This technology is part of what we call a virtual environment workstation.
The idea at Ames over the past five years has been to develop a very human matched interface, a way to literally get inside images, to interact with them, to walk around inside them,
to give very natural commands to the host computer and for a number of different applications.
The foundation of the virtual workstation is this helmet mounted display.
In the front package here are two small TV screens, one for each eye.
The effect is that you get a very strong stereoscopic image.
You view that image through two very wide angle optics.
Our idea was to try to match human field of view as much as possible.
This gives us about a 120 degree angle of view.
On top of the stock is a magnetic sensor device that tells you the system where you are within the virtual space.
The rest of the things in the headset are a microphone so you can basically give verbal commands,
connected speech commands to the host computer as you would as if you were talking to another person.
And the headphones give auditory feedback.
We use a couple different kinds of sound queuing.
One is just straight from a synthesizer so that, for example, as you touch a virtual object you get a contact cue
or proximity cues as you get nearer and farther.
Or the second level is 3D sound queuing with a piece of technology that we built called the Convolvatron.
You can actually hear the sounds coming from outside your head at a discrete distance and location.
And because of the tracker we can also make the sounds stay there.
If you move your head the sound actually stays where it's supposed to be.
So virtual objects can act as real sound sources as they would in the real world, for example.
Another piece of the virtual workstation is what we call a data glove.
And the glove is instrumented with fiber optic sensors so that as you bend your fingers
a computer-generated model of your hand that's in the virtual environment is controlled by it.
You don't see your real hand because you're completely enclosed.
So when you reach out, move your fingers, your virtual hand will mimic that and you can pick up objects.
And we've made software so that you can make different kinds of gestures, kind of like American Sign Language.
For example, if I make a gesture like this, it will fly my viewpoint through that virtual space.
NASA may use virtual reality to allow a technician to work on a space station without leaving Earth.
In virtual reality, a person has the illusion that they are doing the work themselves, even when they are a million miles away.
Flying enabled.
Starting from his office, the technician may fly through space to the station where he might activate other space instruments or repair them.
One may wonder how Gibson, a self-admitted computer illiterate, foresaw this technology.
What he's described is really, I think it's a really good thing to shoot for.
The kind of cyberspace that he describes is really something that will be very helpful for all of us to be involved in.
This is a virtual world created by VPL Research.
They are working on making virtual reality a new and dynamic means of communication.
It is possible to call a friend on the other end of the world by computer, much as a common modem device is used today.
The two agree on a virtual meeting place and are able to see and interact with each other in some alternate universe or perhaps a simulacrum of a real place.
There, they may explore this new world, work together, play golf, or do virtually anything the two might enjoy together.
Not surprisingly, a doctorate was just granted for a thesis on the potential of virtual sex.
The most difficult part of this process might be to agree on a meeting place or decide how to appear when there.
Entering virtual reality means controlling one's appearance as well.
Today a beautiful woman, tomorrow a tough punk, the next day a lobster.
This little girl chose to be a teapot.
When you tip me over, tea comes out, so tip me over and pour me out.
I'm a little teapot, short and stout, here is my handle, here is my spout.
When you tip me over, tea comes out, so tip me over and pour me out.
If one wishes to appear as more than just one's hand or a program generated figure, one must wear the data suit.
The data suit also allows for real time animation, the dream of the cartoonist restricted to individual cell animation.
Let's suppose ten years from now you have a special pair of goggles and a special glove in your house.
You put them on and suddenly you experience yourself to be in a different room.
You're not in your living room anymore, you're in a different room.
This different room has similar dimensions but it's altered.
It has, for one thing, a set of shelves along one wall and on all those shelves are little sort of fish bowls.
But if you look in the fish bowls, there aren't fish.
Instead there's little miniature people walking around and they're all having different adventures.
Some of them are clustered around a model of a bridge and are working on it.
Another group of them are all playing baseball, just like little people running around.
And another group of them are working in a large field that looks like a statistical field with many points and they're running around on it.
And so what you can do is you can simply place your hand or your head into any one of those fish bowls and suddenly you are in that scene with those people.
And one of them might turn out to be for work, another might be for play, and another one might be for education.
Within 10 or 15 years when you wake up in the morning you will get dressed for work, you won't go to work.
You put on a computer suit and you flip down your eye, your television, your eye goggles, and you can be in Tokyo.
You can be in Paris, you can talk to your friend in Tokyo and agree to meet on the beach in Hawaii.
What kind of Hawaii have you got? You'll be dialing and you'll be looking at your file of Hawaii.
Oh, she's got a better one. Okay.
We will not leave home with our bodies to work.
Our brains were moving around.
The idea that you would strap your body in a car and drive five miles to work, polluting the atmosphere, you'll be doing it at home.
The idea that you'll strap your body in a horrible, noxious airplane, spewing out toxic waste,
and for 12 hours go to Tokyo to have a meeting, which you could have much more comfortably sitting in your home with the person over there.
However virtual reality will influence our future, be it to liberate and provide us with pleasure,
or to produce a generation even more enslaved to a machine that allows them to completely escape from reality.
The new cyberpunk generation couldn't be more eager to acquire this technology.
The Gibson stuff, they're working in a 3D, you know, it's data the way I always thought data would be, you know.
The way I think of data in my mind is not ones and zeros, but you know, if I could go into something like that, that would be great.
I'd like never leave my house.
I'd love to have a little sunlight dip and black kids in the matrix.
Already some are considering the philosophical implications of this medium.
Never in the history of mankind has there been an alternate universe one could actually inhabit.
Now that anyone can experience them, alternate universes are no longer the province of physicists, theologians, and supernaturalists.
It is a matter of the creator and the creation.
It's an interaction between those two things that generates a third thing.
It's the other. It's the other that has been talked about in psychoanalysis and psychology.
The other is that other, the omnipresent thing.
The matrix is like an alternate dimension. The matrix is a metaphor for God.
I mean, it becomes, in a way it becomes, you know, it's the way, as it becomes conscious of itself, which is a very powerful thing.
The technology of virtual reality and these other radical technologies will certainly change our future in ways unforeseen.
Freed from being an engine of labor, will the body again become the temple of the soul?
Though frightening to some, for the cyberpunk generation, technology no longer represents a force of alienation, but rather a transcendental electronic reality.
Kingdom of the unreal, but also a higher state of being, ultimately free of the limitations of the material world through the agency of science, technology, and imagination.
Mind screw would be to be able to have sex through our minds.
Chris Sand, David Severio.
I must be drinking.
You