CY8ERPUNKS

Timeline

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. 1987

    RoboCop

    (1987); ** series.

  4. 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.)

  5. 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.

  6. 1988

    IRC

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

  7. 1988

    Akira

    (Otomo film, 1988). Japan's contribution to the visual canon and the source of much that is now cliché.

  8. 1988

    They Live

    (Carpenter, 1988). Conspiracy, subliminal control, and the best fistfight in cinema.

  9. 1988

    Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive

    (1988) — closes the Sprawl trilogy.

  10. 1988

    Rudy Rucker, Wetware

    (novel); industrial/EBM peak.

  11. 1989

    Mondo 2000

    Name adopted (from Reality Hackers; ran 1989–1998, Berkeley). Editors R.U. Sirius and (Alison Bailey Kennedy); Jude Milhon (St. Jude) as editor; art director Bart Nagel — a pioneer of Photoshop collage, gave the magazine its surrealist look. The definitive cyberculture magazine and the direct predecessor of Wired. Covered VR, smart drugs, cyberpunk, body modification, nanotech — anarchic, satirical, utopian and paranoid at once. (Sources: Wired retrospective, Wikipedia, anarchivism.org, rip.so.)

  12. 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.

  13. 1989

    Tim Berners-Lee proposes the World Wide Web

    (March 1989, CERN).

  14. 1989

    Nine Inch Nails, Pretty Hate Machine; Underground Resistance founded (Detroit, 1989)

    Techno as explicit political resistance.

  15. 1990

    EFF founded (July 10, 1990)

    By (with Steve Wozniak involved early). Response to the Secret Service raid on Steve Jackson Games and Operation Sundevil (May 1990). Barlow is the project's named political north star. His essay "Crime and Puzzlement" (1990) is the founding text of digital civil liberties.

  16. 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.

  17. 1991

    PGP released

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

  18. 1991

    Linux

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

  19. 1991

    Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.

    Published (Autonomedia).

  20. 1991

    VNS Matrix, "A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century"

    (Australia, 1991). The feminist rebuttal from inside the movement.