5 Cyberpunk Summaries

1. Cyberpunk cybernetics - killed by facebook?

http://blogs.birminghammail.net/technobabble/2009/02/cyberpunk-cybernetics---killed.html


Ben Hurst says that maybe cyberpunk is dead as there is no need for us to do surgery or jack any sockets into our brains with the ease of social networking nowadays

With facebook, twitter, ever more hi-tech mobile phones, and so on all providing a mass of easily accessible, user friendly and instant communications technologies, he finds it hard to imagine surgery ever playing a part in everyday networking and conversation.

2. What is Cyberpunk?

http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/what-is-cyberpunk/

Definition: Cyberpunk is about expressing (often dark) ideas about human nature, technology and their respective combination in the near future.

SFAM, begs to differ about the so-called "death of cyberpunk" as he sees cyberpunk to be alive and well, he breaks cyberpunk-ness into themes to prove that it exists (at least in movies):

Negative impact of technology on humanity: he talks about dystopian near futures where sacred societal boundaries are often crossed with regularity.

Fusion of man and machine: sentient programs take over roles traditionally occupied by humanity, thus, marginalizing humans on the fringes of society.

Corporate control over society: Cyberpunk almost always has an ever powerful controlling entity that directs society. Most often this is represented as a corporation. It involves futuristic dystopia, where the last traces of high civilization exist only in an enclosed and protected city, where civil liberties are removed under the guise of protecting humanity.

Ubiquitous Access to information: Hacker themes and ever-connecting internets are common. Additionally, the connection of humans to this omnipresent information stream leads to the blurring of the virtual with the real.

Cyberpunk visuals and style: Cyberpunk visuals, ideally, are dirty, hyper-realistic “lived in” looks at the near future.

3. Cyberpunk in games

http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/2072/cybgames.htm

This Website talks about the under-representation cyberpunk is in the world of computer games. They seem a natural combination, but only a few major cyberpunk games have ever been produced.
The writer asserts that "Cyberpunk" is hard to define, and there are probably different ideas about exactly what the word means. However, he acknowledges that it's probably the most popular sub-genre of science-fiction right now, due to the changing nature of the field of science

The writer goes on to describe an archetypal Cyberpunk character: computer-using characters are also usually hackers; They don't just use the computers, they crack them. Theres also usually a worldwide computer network, which people usually access through direct connection with neural implants in their brain, rather than keyboards and monitors as they do in today's real world.

4. A Cyberpunk Manifesto
by Christian As. Kirtchev

http://isole.ecn.org/settorecyb/txt/cybermanifest.html

It is a manifesto possibly modelled after that of the communist manifesto where the writer asserts the various characteristics of how a cyberpunk should be like eg

1/ We are those, the Different. Technological rats, swimming in the ocean of information.

He further breaks it down to "society" and "the system" as the other where society is sick and need to be healed. The cure is a change in the system and that the system has not changed much since the day of its birth, existing on principles that hang no more today.

He talks about the need to have new laws to fit the new times they live in, not the ones built on the basis of the past, thus needing revision.

5.
Cyberpunk!
By Philip Elmer-DeWitt;David S. Jackson/San Francisco

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,977654,00.html


The writer talks about a way of looking at the world that combines an infatuation with high-tech tools and a disdain for conventional ways of using them. Originally applied to a school of hard-boiled science-fiction writers and then to certain semi-tough computer hackers, the word cyberpunk now covers a broad range of music, art, psychedelics, smart drugs and cutting-edge technology.