Cyberpunk in the Nineties (1998)

[criddell]

My introduction to cyberpunk culture came from Mondo 2000. Aside from reading about William Gibson, they also had articles on music and movies and smart drugs!

The 90's are 30 years ago(??). I've often wondered if the people taking piracetam or whatever it was back then have had any long term effects, good or bad. It felt like dialing up your IQ and awareness was possible. You just had to figure out the right combination of substances to take.

I just spent 20 minutes looking over google results for nootropics and seems like little has changed.

Edit: Thought archive.org might have this magazine and, of course, they do!

It's a lot harder to read than I remember and the ads are better than I remember. There's also more nudity than I recall... so maybe don't open this at work.

https://archive.org/details/Mondo.2000.Issue.14.1995

[pmarreck]

Circling back to this story after 11 days, your Mondo link stirred up all sorts of stuff from my life in that era, I was 23 in 1995... I had no idea there was even a "Macintosh NY Music Festival" (from one of the awesome ads) lol wow. I was in California at the time and in the USAF, so I wouldn't have been able to make it, anyway, but was always a huge Apple fan, didn't realize they ran a music festival... RIP CBGB

[generalizations]

Just finished flipping through Issue 14 you linked. Wow, that's a time I wish I'd been old enough to appreciate. I wonder if anything like Mondo 2000 exists these days. Or maybe it's a time that's just passed us by.

[aidenn0]

The easiest way to describe how gonzo cyberpunk had gotten at this point is that people debate whether or not Snow Crash is a parody of it or not.

[jhbadger]

I don't see how anyone could consider it not a parody. I mean the main character himself is named Hiro Protagonist (a pun on the literary term "Hero Protagonist") and Hong Kong exists as a chain franchise nation.

[nathias]

it's both a parody and one of the foundational works of the genre

[anthk]

I still play Shadowrun in Mednafen, but a hacked ROM (enhanced one), Shadowrun 2058.

It has all the vibe of cyberpunk except for the magick, but if you mentally replace magick with "quantum futuristic alien tech masked as godly one" it still fits with the lore.

[tyrells]

I recently watched a documentary series about cyberpunk on YouTube by Indigo Gaming:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sttm8Q9rOdQ

There are currently 3 parts to the series, and it is an interesting overview of the genre.

[r9550684]

cyberpunk in the 90s was a lived experience, particularly so in Eastern Europe. I read Neuromancer, watched johnny mnemonic and blade runner on pirated VHS tapes, and armitage and bubble gum crysis on pirate tv[0]. there were old grandmas selling cd releases from RAZOR 1911 and PARADOX all over the place. "ooh, little munchkin, you're into 3d modeling? here's a new cd I got lightwave 3d, 3d studio max and Maya, cracked[1], $3". there were dozens if not hundreds of BBSes, and your local friendly FIDO point administrator. there were several large markets where you would buy computer parts grand bazaar style[2], so you buy an AMD K6 (in a box? dude, it's back of the truck OEM in an anti-static bag, better pray it works when you bring it home) that runs at 166 mhz or whatever and overclock it to a whopping 300 mhz, which necessarily implies that your desktop box was in a constant state of messing around with. no amount of LEDs and glass covers of a modern gaming rig will give you the same feeling as a boring 90s beige box did, because inside the beige box you had a 3dfx voodoo 6 months after it got released, and it's the first time consumer grade 3 acceleration is within your personal reach. of course some Finn in the demoscene has already made a back of a napkin C program, that you can compile in your pirated copy of Visual Studio, that shows you how to draw a shaded rectangle using your voodoo. everybody was on the same page: scene releases, demos, themes, background pictures, music, bbs styles, nicknames and scene group names were all incorporating cyberpunk aesthetic and contributing the aesthetic at the same time. reality was providing cyberpunk, and cyberpunk authors were providing the way for us to see the reality.

[0]you had to buy a descrambler to watch it [1]she would never explicitly say it was cracked, because of course everything was cracked [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjDHhdx_tGY

[Sirioso]

I post lazily and at random on https://www.mondo2000.com/ trying to remember why I stopped taking memory drugs R.U. Sirius

[ArtWomb]

>>> Now imagine a cyberpunk version of Frankenstein

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrochicken

[Animats]

...the Monster would likely be the well-funded R&D team-project of some global corporation.

Resident Evil, the Umbrella Corporation.

Or, further back, Bubblegum Crisis, Genom Corporation.

[stevenwoo]

Almost every significant character in the recent limited series Cyberpunk: Edgerunners was a Frankenstein's monster and there were multiple doctor Frankensteins, some corporate and some freelance, competing against each other.

[hotnfresh]

I’m not really sure how you’d put the parts of Frankenstein that really matter into cyberpunk and come out with anything but a farce, unless you ditch all the awful-but-sympathetic-creature bits somehow. Motherhood (and an intertwined nigh-irresistible drive toward and revulsion of pregnancy and giving birth), responsibility for one’s works in the world, the nature of man, abandonment, revenge, sympathetic villains… it’s great stuff, but I think if you try to do that in cyberpunk and keep anything like the Creature you’re gonna be drawn into parody or some other unfortunate hole.

[mutant]

https://chat.openai.com/share/3d5d3fd1-57d3-4d17-b367-acbd17... Ok. I imagined it.

[bobvanluijt]

Ah - Sterling, always great. He didn't do his iconic closing speech at SXSW this year. Does anybody know why?

[bpiche]

A reminder that DNA is doing their regular Cyberdelia party again on Sept 9.

[Calamitous]

I want the dystopia I was promised in my youth, not the one I got.

[suoduandao3]

Move to LA? Everyone says they have squats and ineffectual policing. Not much work for shadowrunners yet that I've heard of, but then, I would would I?

[yankput]

You CAN move to China I guess?

[emikulic]

I want flying cars and moving sidewalks like I was promised by The Jetsons. :(

[Animats]

The real world caught up, and passed cyberpunk.

The whole concept of a counterculture is gone. The closest thing we have to a counterculture in the US today is the MAGA/militia/Q-Anon movement.

[kdazzle]

> The whole concept of a counterculture is gone. The closest thing we have to a counterculture in the US today is the MAGA/militia/Q-Anon movement.

You're probably just getting old

[suoduandao3]

the idea of counterculture being gone was a feature of cyberpunk too though. I've heard the core theme of cyberpunk expressed as 'whither bohemia in a hyperconnected world?'.

There's not really a mainstream culture now. Even the biggest consent-manufactories like the 'mainstream media' are actually a minority in an overall fragmented and dissenting pseudoculture that's becoming more like an ecosystem than an expanding monoculture. What would have been 'the dominant culture' in the civil rights era, the domain of the Cronkites of that era, is now just another minority, perhaps the largest single minority but still distrusted or ignored by the majority.

[prepend]

Honey Boo Boo and rednecks with purple hair is over 10 years old [0].

What the counterculture movement of the 70s and 80s presented, at least externally through hair, clothes, tattoos, piercing, etc is now post mainstream.

It’s like this huge portion of society “rebelling” against a Nixon that no longer exists, or is a much smaller portion of the population than it was when it was an oppressive majority.

I remember in middle school I was paddled by the headmaster because my hair was too long. It touched my shirt collar in the back.

[0] premiered in 2012, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Comes_Honey_Boo_Boo

[bpiche]

Cyberpunk didn't die, it just stopped being fiction

[falqun]

I disagree.

Take absurdism, or the deconstruction of gender for example. Or people using mastodon just to show the 12-ish friends that they repaired a their dirt cheap bike. I think also you could also argue that Meta-Irony is some form of counterculture.

Just think things that are not commodified yet.

[unethical_ban]

I'd argue the trans and gnederfluid movement is counterculture in that it is a major shift in social norms, language and self-presentation and isn't yet sufficiently mainstream to be noncontroversial.

Aside from identity, is there no counterculture, or is everything so interconnected and observable via Internet and social media that nothing is in a "dark corner" anymore? I can see that argument.

[puchatek]

That's a very amicable framing of what basically amounts to an inability to judge sources and adequately process information, coupled with a taste for consequence-free, amoral behavior and an authoritarian mindset.

[porkbeer]

Not true and a bit trite. You don't get out much and are online alot?

[IggleSniggle]

Wow. I can't believe I'm on this side of the fence.

[rchaud]

MAGA/militia/Qanon are conspiracist grifts that simply extend pre-existing societal wedge issues (god, guns, government). What cultural artifacts or innovations has this counterculture created? They appear to be entirely dependent on mainstream media and social platforms to carry their message.

[dfxm12]

Maybe militia, if you're talking about people who've more or less removed themselves from regular society to live in a compound, likely off the grid, similar to the group who took over the national wildlife preserve in OR several years back.

MAGA is way too mainstream to be a counter culture. QAnon is more like a belief in certain conspiracies than an ethos you live by, no?

[michael1999]

I dunno. The Juggalos strike me as vibrant.

[probelm]

Counter culture is there it’s just abstract now:

wfh

automating away exploitative labor

intentionally not having kids/imploding nuclear family as the norm

<50% in US are convinced god exists

local AI/ML threatening copyright rent seekers

steam/proton

online retail impact on brick and mortar

[anthk]

Those are just reactionary wackos. They want their old abusive status back. They'd love to lynch back the blacks, put women 'back' in the kitchen, beat up homosexuals, exclude Atheists...

Counterculture existes in libre gaming, distros, hackers, underground games such as Nethack, IF games from IF archive, niche electronica/rock/metal/blues from Jamendo (Revolution Void, Proleter, Helfervescent, Nanowar (ok, now is half-mainstream, but still...) and now saved back in archive.org thanks to James Scott...

[photochemsyn]

Petition to rename cyberpunk to cybernoir.

[jhbadger]

That (also called "future noir") actually is a separate genre, related to cyberpunk, but not exactly it. A lot of works loosely called cyberpunk have noir tendencies with detectives, femme fatales, and an overall 1940s feel, but other works really do have the 1970s punk feel.