Cyberpunk

Trying to define Cyberpunk is a difficult task. In short, however, Cyberpunk refers to both a culture and a genre.

What is Cyberpunk

Cyberpunk is a sub-genre of science fiction that features advanced science and technology in an urban, dystopian future. On one side you have powerful mega-corporations and private security forces, and on the other you have the dark and gritty underworld of illegal trade, gangs, drugs, and vice. In between all of this is politics, corruption, and social upheaval.

A cyberpunk has attitude. This attitude is culturally and socially aware, just like the fiction from which they take their name. They question everything and anyone and decide for themselves what they believe is true. This path to understanding yields different world views and opinions, but diversity is key to a successful population. A cyberpunk knows that the system isn’t in your favor, and the deck is stacked against you. A cyberpunk knows how to hack the system so that doesn’t matter. Don’t fuck with a cyberpunk.

Christian Kirtchev tells it better:

1. The System, centuries-old, exists on principles that no longer stand up to scrutiny, a System that has changed little since its conception.
2. The System is wrong.
3. The System must impose its truth upon us so that it can rule. The government needs us to follow it blindly. For this reason, we live in an informational eclipse. When people can only acquire information from the government, they cannot distinguish right from the wrong. So the lie becomes a truth – truth, fundamental to everything else. Thus, leaders control with lies and ordinary people have no notion of what is true and follow the government blindly, trusting it.
4. We fight for freedom of information. We fight for freedom of speech and press. We fight for the freedom to express our thoughts freely, without being persecuted by the System.
5. Even in the most developed and ‘democratic’ countries, the System imposes misinformation. Even in the countries that pretend to be the cradle of free speech, misinformation is the System’s primary weapon. A weapon they use very well.
6. It is the Net that helps us spread information freely. The Net, with no boundaries or information limit.
7. What is ours is yours, what is yours is ours. Christian A. Kirtchev, A Cyberpunk Manifesto

Resources

Websites

You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe. Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

• CyberPunkReviews
• Cyberpunk Forums
• N-O-D-E
• 2600
• CYBR
• Lainzine
• CyberLife
• Wired Sound for Wired People
• The alt.cyberpunk FAQ
• Sapiens Anonym
• BLOOD KNIFE
• Alexander Chislenko
• _vbstract.interfæce/
• The Cyberdeck Cafe
• CaptainBlackbeard
  • This is CaptainBlackbeard Radio ♫
  • Close Encounters of the CaptainBlackbeard Kind ♫
  • CaptainBlackbeard Saves America: The Italian Stallion Of The Dark Seas ♫
  • CaptainBlackbeard Is Cooming
  • CaptainBlackbeard & The Quest For The Holy Grail ♫
  • CaptainBlackbeard Is Mad As Hell ♫
  • CaptainBlackbeard Fights For The Gold ♫
  • The Good, The Bad & The CaptainBlackbeard ♫
  • CaptainBlackbeard Radio: On A Mission From God ♫
• Exolymph
• You are listening to Los Angeles
• The Cyberpunk Project
• Beyond Cyberpunk

Movies

There are no normal people — just look at your relatives, the people that you are in a position to know best. They’re all weird at some level below the surface. Yet conventional fiction very commonly shows us normal people in a normal world. As long as you labor under the feeling that you are the only weirdo, then you feel weak and apologetic. You’re eager to go along with the establishment, and a bit frightened to make waves — lest you be found out. Actual people are weird and unpredictable, this is why it is so important to use them as characters instead of the impossibly good and bad paperdolls of mass-culture. Rudy Rucker, A Transrealist Manifesto

Games

The future is unwritten. there are best case scenarios. There are worst-case scenarios. both of them are great fun to write about if you’ re a science fiction novelist, but neither of them ever happens in the real world. What happens in the real world is always a sideways-case scenario. World-changing marvels to us, are only wallpaper to our children. Bruce Sterling

Books

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding… William Gibson, Neuromancer