CY8ERPUNKS

Timeline

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. 1950

    Alan Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence."

    The Turing Test. The founding document of the AI question.

  3. 1962

    La Jetée (Marker)

    Time-loop, memory, the still-image aesthetic.

  4. 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).

  5. 1964

    Stanisław Lem, The Cyberiad

    Philosophical robot fables. Also Lem's Summa Technologiae (1964) — speculative futurology of machine minds.

  6. 1965

    Godard, Alphaville

    Technocracy, machine intelligence controlling language, noir-dystopia with almost no special effects.

  7. 1965

    Ted Nelson coins "hypertext."

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

  8. 1967

    Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

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

  9. c. 1967

    The Prisoner

    (McGoohan). Surveillance, identity, "I am not a number." A core visual/political ancestor, exact run dates (1967–68).

  10. 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.

  11. 1968

    Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

    Precursor to Blade Runner.

  12. 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.

  13. 1968

    2001: A Space Odyssey

    HAL 9000: the first great AI character, and a cautionary one.

  14. 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.

  15. 1970

    Alvin Toffler, Future Shock

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

  16. 1970

    Colossus: The Forbin Project

    The AI that seizes control for its own good. Underrated; essential for the "who governs the machine" thread.

  17. 1971

    Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book

    Yippie information freedom, "free" as in spread it and don't pay. Crude but a genuine ancestor of the piracy/copyleft line.

  18. 1971

    THX 1138

    (Lucas). Control-society aesthetics.

  19. 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.

  20. 1974

    Semiotext(e) founded

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

  21. c. 1974

    Métal Hurlant

    Launched (Dec 1974 per Wikipedia; Jan 1975 as a Les Humanoïdes Associés title). The visual imagination of the genre is French, not American. US edition: Heavy Metal (1977).

  22. 1974

    Kraftwerk, Autobahn

    Begins the machine-music line (see §5).