Abstract
This paper explores the rise and fall of Cyberpunk influences in California’s Silicon Valley and San Francisco Bay area circa 1988–93, in prevalent technologies, industry, by artists and in enthusiastic magazines thriving there. Attentive to the Cyberpunk novelists, an animating spirituality of the time also looks to Timothy Leary and Marshall McLuhan.
Highlights
To some of us in a certain time and place, twenty-five or thirty years ago in Silicon Valley, northern California, it is most recalled as a moment as full of characteristic constellations of sights and sounds and tropes and topics and toys and tools and conversations, sometimes consciously looking to Cyberpunk fiction for its validation
In his sixth INTERZONE column “Cyberpunk in the 1990s”, Bruce Sterling recalled “Cyberpunk”, before it acquired its handy label and its sinister rep, was a generous, open-handed effort, very street-level and anarchic, with a do-it-yourself attitude, an ethos it shared with garage- band 70s punk music” (Sterling 1998)
After a period of purposeful urban Punk grimness in the 1970s and into the 1980s, the end of the decade saw a technocratic sunniness in the Cyberpunk constellation of cultural phenomena out of Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay area
Summary
To some of us in a certain time and place, twenty-five or thirty years ago in Silicon Valley, northern California, it is most recalled as a moment as full of characteristic constellations of sights and sounds and tropes and topics and toys and tools and conversations, sometimes consciously looking to Cyberpunk fiction for its validation. To pull in a metaphor from media design, a popular late-1980s style of magazine illustration and videos called Blendo made use of video, still photography, animation and hand drawing, for digital compositing tools allowed their coordination; this might serve to represent the eclectic style and content of the lifestyle Cyberpunk moment, its contradictory polished clarity and evocative ambiguities
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
