CY8ERPUNKS

Prior art · TECH

Technology

Era 0 · 1948–1974

Ground

cybernetics meets the counterculture

  1. 1968

    Engelbart's "Mother of All Demos"

    (Dec 9, 1968). Mouse, windows, hypertext, real-time collaborative editing, video conferencing — five years before the personal computer existed.

  2. 1969

    ARPANET first packet

    (Oct 29, 1969, UCLA → SRI). The network is born already as a military-funded project that immediately leaks into civilian and countercultural use.

Era 1 · 1975–1982

Proto-cyberpunk

the term exists before the label

  1. 1977

    The 1977 trinity

    Apple II, Commodore PET, TRS-80. Computing enters the home.

  2. 1980

    Usenet

    Established (Truscott & Ellis, 1980).

Era 2 · 1983–1986

The term & the wave

  1. 1983

    ARPANET switches to TCP/IP

    (Jan 1, 1983). The internet, properly speaking, begins here.

  2. 1984

    Apple Macintosh launch

    (Jan 24, 1984). MacPaint, bitmap fonts, the "1984" ad. Desktop publishing → zines get cheap and pretty.

  3. 1985

    The WELL founded

    (April 1985, Stewart Brand & Larry Brilliant, Sausalito). Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link. — literate, argumentative, countercultural, community-owned-adjacent. Its whole culture descends from the Whole Earth Catalog.

  4. 1986

    Omni e-magazine on CompuServe

    (1986) — an early magazine-goes-online move worth citing for CY8ERPUNKS' own channel strategy.

Era 3 · 1987–1991

Cyberculture & cryptography

  1. 1988

    IRC

    (1988, Jarkko Oikarinen). Real-time group text.

  2. 1989

    Tim Berners-Lee proposes the World Wide Web

    (March 1989, CERN).

  3. 1991

    PGP released

    (Phil Zimmermann, June 1991). Strong crypto to the masses; the cypherpunk thesis becomes a shipping product.

  4. 1991

    Linux

    (Linus Torvalds, Aug 1991); . Free software / hacker gift culture becomes infrastructure.

Era 4 · 1992–1996

Cypherpunks, Wired, the Declaration

  1. 1993

    NCSA Mosaic

    ** (Dec 1993). The web becomes graphical; gaming becomes network-native.

  2. 1994

    HotWired

    (1994) — the magazine becomes a website; its sub-zine ** (1995) is one of the first great web-native voices.

  3. 1995

    Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital

    (1995); (1995); Netscape IPO, the dot-com era opens.

Era 5 · 1997–2004

Network culture & the critique

  1. 2004

    O'Reilly Web 2.0; the platform era begins. This is where the Barlow thesis actually dies

    The network becomes the product.

Era 6 · 2005–2015

The cypherpunk payoff

  1. 2008

    Bitcoin whitepaper

    (Oct 2008, "Satoshi Nakamoto"); The cypherpunk program actually ships — 16 years after Hughes's manifesto. Note the genesis block contains the Times headline about bank bailouts. Political statement in code.

  2. c. 2014

    Ethereum (2013 whitepaper, 2015 launch)

    "Code is law" taken literally, with all the failure modes that implies (The DAO, 2016).