CY8ERPUNKS

Prior art · THEORY

Theory

Era 0 · 1948–1974

Ground

cybernetics meets the counterculture

  1. 1948

    Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

    Origin of "cyber." Wiener later grew anti-militarist and warned about automation in The Human Use of Human Beings (1950).

  2. c. 1962

    Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy / Understanding Media

    "Global village," "the medium is the message," technology as "extensions of man." McLuhan is the intellectual bridge from media theory to cyberculture and gets name-checked by everyone later (Wired 1.01 literally featured him).

  3. 1965

    Ted Nelson coins "hypertext."

    Also "hypermedia," "transclusion" — the non-linear document model.

  4. 1967

    Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

    Situationism; the critique of mediated life. Feeds directly into zine/punk culture.

  5. 1968

    Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog

    (first issue fall 1968; ran to 1972; National Book Award 1972). "Access to tools." The hippie DIY catalog that is the direct ancestor of the WELL, CoEvolution Quarterly, Whole Earth Review, and eventually Wired.

  6. 1970

    Alvin Toffler, Future Shock

    "Information overload," accelerated change, the psychological cost of technological velocity.

  7. 1974

    Ted Nelson, Computer Lib / Dream Machines

    Self-published, designed as a flipped two-sided book. — collage, hand-lettering, psychedelic diagrams. "You can and must understand computers NOW." Direct model for a magazine that is both theory and object.

  8. 1974

    Semiotext(e) founded

    (Sylvère Lotringer, Columbia). Imports French theory (Baudrillard, Deleuze, Foucault) into the American avant-garde. Later publishes Semiotext(e) SF (1989).

Era 1 · 1975–1982

Proto-cyberpunk

the term exists before the label

  1. 1976

    Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

    Coins Necessary for any later discussion of viral culture and information propagation.

  2. 1977

    Foucault, Discipline and Punish

    (English). The as the model of modern power. All surveillance discourse descends from it.

  3. 1981

    Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

    Simulacra, hyperreality. Later famously on-screen in The Matrix.

Era 2 · 1983–1986

The term & the wave

  1. 1984

    Stewart Brand at the first Hackers Conference (Nov 1984): "Information wants to be free."

    The full line: information wants to be free and wants to be expensive. The exact phrasing was reported in the Washington Post, Nov 18, 1984; Brand had just published Whole Earth Software Catalog. (Sources: Quote Investigator, Wikipedia, Wired retrospective.) - Important nuance for our editorial stance: Brand's line is usually half-quoted. He said both halves. A magazine that claims this lineage should hold both: distribution is free, value is not. That tension is the interesting territory.

  2. 1984

    Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review

    The academic frame for the genre's cultural politics.

  3. 1984

    Gardner Dozois popularizes "cyberpunk"

    In his Washington Post piece "SF in the Eighties," applying it to the new cluster of authors. Term goes from story title to movement label.

  4. 1985

    Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto," Socialist Review

    (as "A Manifesto for Cyborgs"). Cyborg as boundary-breaking figure; rejects rigid categories. and a cornerstone of cyberfeminism.

  5. 1985

    Howard Rheingold, Tools for Thought

    The people behind the personal-computer revolution, written by a WELL regular.

Era 3 · 1987–1991

Cyberculture & cryptography

  1. 1987

    Stewart Brand, The Media Lab

    (1987). MIT Media Lab as the future. Negroponte enters the picture.

  2. 1987

    James Gleick, Chaos

    (1987). Chaos theory popularized; the intellectual fashion of the late 80s.

  3. 1988

    Tim May writes "The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto"

    (mid-1988; distributed at and that year's Hackers Conference; read aloud at the September 1992 Cypherpunk founding meeting; published Nov 22, 1992). The founding document of crypto-anarchy: strong cryptography as a tool to make the state's control of information impossible. This is the political spine of CY8ERPUNKS' cypherpunk half. (Source: activism.net archive, Wikipedia.)

  4. 1988

    Extropy: The Journal of Transhumanist Thought

    First published (Max More, Tom Morrow). — dynamic optimism, self-transformation, uploaded minds, indefinite lifespans. The right-libertarian transhumanist line that later feeds LessWrong/rationalism and much of the current AI-accelerationist scene. CY8ERPUNKS needs a position on this.

  5. 1989

    Semiotext(e) SF

    Anthology (eds. Rudy Rucker, Peter Lamborn Wilson, Robert Anton Wilson). Post-cyberpunk SF plus theory, including Burroughs and Ballard. Bridges the SF scene and the theory scene.

  6. 1990

    Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on the Societies of Control."

    From discipline (enclosures) to control (continuous modulation). The best short theory text for describing platform-era power.

  7. 1991

    Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.

    Published (Autonomedia).

Era 4 · 1992–1996

Cypherpunks, Wired, the Declaration

  1. 1992

    The Cypherpunk mailing list launched

    (Sept 1992), organized by out of Bay Area gatherings. The list is where the cryptography-as-liberation argument is hammered out. This is CY8ERPUNKS' true home mailing list, spiritually.

  2. 1992

    Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown

    The Sundevil raids from the inside; also famously released free online.

  3. 1993

    Eric Hughes, "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto"

    (March 9, 1993). "Cypherpunks write code." Privacy as a defensive necessity; cryptography as the only tool that doesn't require asking permission.

  4. 1993

    CTheory

    Begins (1993, Arthur & Marilouise Kroker, online journal). Theory goes online-native.

  5. 1995

    Richard Barbrook & Andy Cameron, "The Californian Ideology"

    (1995). the "bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley" into a faith that the free market + technology = liberation. CY8ERPUNKS must read this as self-criticism, not as an enemy text. It also correctly predicted that Wired's libertarianism would paper over welfare cutbacks and deregulation. (Sources: Wikipedia, monoskop PDF, Sterling's Medium repost.)

  6. 1995

    Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital

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

  7. 1996

    John Perry Barlow, "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace"

    (Feb 8, 1996, Davos). Commissioned for 24 Hours in Cyberspace. "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel... I ask you of the past to leave us alone." — and, importantly, an argument about self-governance, not just about markets. (Sources: EFF, Wikipedia.) - Note: this is also the text most often dismissed as naive. The honest editorial position is that it was right about the possibility and wrong about the durability — and asking why is CY8ERPUNKS' founding essay.

Era 5 · 1997–2004

Network culture & the critique

  1. 1997

    Sadie Plant, Zeros and Ones

    (1997). Cyberfeminism proper; the woman-machine relation.

  2. 1999

    Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace

    (1999). Architecture as regulation. Essential.

  3. 2001

    Creative Commons founded

    (2001, Lessig et al.); ** (2001). Wikipedia launches (Jan 2001) — the free-information thesis as a working institution.

  4. 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. 2005

    Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near

    (2005). Vinge's idea becomes a mass movement with a timeline attached.

  2. c. 2005

    Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

    (2019, but describing this period). The definitive account of what happened to the WELL's promise.

Era 7 · 2016–2026

AI

  1. 2019

    Zuboff's Surveillance Capitalism published

    Zuboff's Surveillance Capitalism published