Hyper-punk: Cyberpunk and Information Technology

Jones, Steve. "Hyper-punk: Cyberpunk and Information Technology." JPC 28.2 (Fall 1994): 81-92.

On "cyberpunk ideology" (81) as seen in rock music, a beer commercial, and, pre-eminently, the fiction of William Gibson—and postmodern Theory. "Meaning must shift because there is no room for it in cyberspace; there is room only for information. With meaning, representation and ideology involved, information count not be quantified—in cyberspace there is room only for a one or a zero, a yes or a no, binary code. / But cyberpunk is not meaningless. Cyberpunks control the screen and thereby control the creation of meaning from information . . ." (87). "Yet the irony and power of cyberpunk is in its rhetoric of decentralization, of freedom. Cyberpunk relies on the abstract codification of signs, on the separation of meaning from information, to create an environment saturated with possible meanings, ones that can be chosen at random. Cyberpunk's possibilities remain open primarily because signifiers that appear on the screen (cyberspace) constitute a hypertext. What is more important is that the representation of the future not only 'forecloses options and possibilities' but also inserts a way of knowing, an ideology, based on information consumption via computer networks and mass media. The parallels we draw between machines and living things strongly color our understanding of the world" (89). (RDE, 04/08/95)