William Gibson And The Cyberpunks example essay topic

William Gibson and The Internet Introduction The words "Internet" and "world wide web" are becoming everyday use these days, it has exploded into the mass market of information and advertising. There are bad points about the "net" as well as good points, this relatively new medium is growing at such a rate that the media have to take it seriously. This new form of communication was mainly populated by small groups of communities, but now that it is getting much easier to access the web these groups are growing. The word Cyberpunk is nothing new in the world of the "net" and to science fiction readers, and it is this term which names most of the online communities. Within the Cyberpunk cultures there are sub cultures such as hackers, phreaks, ravers etc... all have a connection with new technologies.

The term Cyberpunk was originated in Science Fiction Literature, writers such as William Gibson tell stories of future worlds, cultures and the Internet. it is William Gibson and the cyberpunks who have carried out some of the most important mappings of our present moment and its future trends during the past decade. The present, in these mappings, is thus viewed from the perceptive of a future that is visible from within the experiences and trends of the current moment, from this perpscetive, cyberpunk can be read as a sort of social theory. Chapter 1 Internet history The Internet is a network of computer networks, the most important of which was called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency NETwork), a wide area experimental network connecting hosts and terminal servers together. Rules were set up to supervise the allocation of addresses and to create voluntary standards for the network. The ARPANET wa built between October and December 1969 by a US company called Bolt, Ber anak and Newman (BBN), which is still big in the Internet world. It had won a contract from the US Government's Department of Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, to build a network that would survive a nuclear attack.

Only four government mainframe computers were originally linked up, Unfortunately, ARPANET was also dependent on the involvement of hundreds of US computer scientists. Because the ARPANET was a military project, it was managed in true military style - the project manager appointed by ARPA gave the orders and they were carried out. It was therefore easy to tell who "ran" the network. By 1972 it had grown to 37 mainframe computers. At the same time, the way in which the network was being used was changing.

As well as using the system to exchange important, but boring, military information, ARPANET users started sending e-mail - to each other by means of private mail boxes. By 1983 ARPANET had grown to such an extent that it was felt that the military research component should be moved to a separate network, called MILNE T. In 1987 the system was opened up to any educational facility, academic researcher or international research organisation who wanted to use it. As local area networks became more pervasive, many hosts became gateways to local networks. A network layer, to allow the inter operation of these networks was developed and called IPA (Internet Protocol). Over time other groups created long haul IP based networks (NASA, NSF, states... ).

These nets too, inter- operate because of IP. The collection of all of these inter operating networks is the Internet. Up until 1990 the Internet was only a complicated and uninteresting text format of communication and most of the people using the net were either Computer programmers, students, Hackers, Societies, Governments officials and a few artists interested the digital media. Everything changed in 92 when a British programmer came up with "Mosaic", a text and graphic based window (web browser) into the net, this programme was simple to use.

The basic structure was in simple page form, Just click on a button, word or picture and you could cross half the world in seconds, it was also simple to construct a page. Over the last couple of years, anyone who had a computer and Internet account has created their own "Web page". The growth of the Internet, those machines connected to the NSFNET backbone has been extraordinary. In 1989, the number of networks attached to the NSFNET / Internet increased from 346 to 997, data traffic increased five-fold. The latest estimate, is that 200,000 to 400,000 main computers are directly connected to NSFNET, with perhaps a total of eleven million individuals able to exchange information freely. The Internet is still growing and companies are developing new tools and programmes to speed up the communications so that immense amounts of data can be transferred in seconds.

"The future of the 20th century, of the 21st century, will be the net. Its awesome. But on the net, you still have to have someone on the other side. The poor nerd who sits in front of the computer just talking to themselves - that's kind of sad. It's the contact that's important, interpersonal, interactive communication". [T. Leery (observer 29/5/94) p 16] Internet Cultures Over the years since the Internet first began, many clubs, organisations, cultures and societies have grown and congregated on the net. This is probably because to many users it is a cheap form (even free) of world wide communication, the new technology has link with their ideas and also because of the freedom of expression the Internet gives.

No single government body or organisation owns the net and because of its size, no one can fully govern and censor the Internet. So called "hackers" also part of the "Cyberpunk" group, were one of the first groups of individuals known on the Internet, these were mostly male students studying computer science, trying to break into government computers or anywhere they were not supposed to be. Most hackers live by this set of rules, First, access to computers should be unlimited and total: "Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!" . Second, all information should be free.

Third, mistrust authority and promote decentralisation. Fourth, hackers should be judged by their prowess as hackers rather than by formal organisational or other irrelevant criteria. Fifth, one can create art and beauty on a computer. Finally, computers can change lives for the better.

One group i came across in an article call themselves the "Extropians", they want to be immortal and travel through space and time. They are also libertarians who want to privets the oceans and air. One member Jay Prime Positive wants to upload his consciousness to a computer "I'd probably want to spend most of my time in data space... i imagine having multiple bodies and multiple copies of myself. I have problems with gender identification, so I'd definitely have a female body in there somewhere". The group have many idea's of the future. You perhaps never considered the idea of setting loose molecule-sized robots in your body to clean out your arteries. (see nanotechnology).

A floating free state banged together out of old oil tankers (similar to the sprawl described in Gibson's "Mona Lisa overdrive", a place where freedom and unrestrained intellect could reign and you could finally get the government and tax man off your back. the Extropians want to go beyond the limits of nature and biology and move on up to the stars, they believe that computers have kick started the human evolution. Chapter 2 Cyberspace The term "Cyberspace" was first coined by the sci-fi writer William Gibson in his 1984 novel "Neuromancer". Gibson first identified the emergence of Cyberspace as the most recent moment in the development of electromechanical communications, telematics and virtual reality. Cyberspace, as Gibson saw it, is the simultaneous experience of time, space, and the flow of multi-dimensional, pan-sensory data: All the data in the world stacked up like one big neon city, so you could cruise around and have a kind of grip on it, visually anyway, because if you didn't, it was too complicated, trying to find your way to the particular piece of data you needed. Cyberspace. "A con sensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation...

A graphical representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding... ". - William Gibson, Neuromancer.

At the core of Cyberspace is the Internet. The psychologist / guru Timothy Leery interviewed by David Gale in 1991, is very clear about Cyberspace: "What were talking about is electronic real estate, a whole electronic reality. The problem we have is to organise the great continents of data that will soon become available. All the movies, all the TV, all the libraries, all recordable knowledge... These are the vast natural crude oil reserves waiting to be tapped, In the 15th century we explored the planet, now we must prepare once more to chart, colonize and open up a whole new world of data. Software becomes the maps and guides into that terrain".

The interesting thing about Cyberspace is the way it creates the idea of a community. Every subculture needs an image of an outsider's community to cling to, to run to. For the Cyberpunk, this community doesn't actually have a place. It can be accessed everywhere by modem, but its the nearest thing on earth. Cyberpunk subculture is the first subculture which doesn't have a particular place of congregation. There are now hundreds of bulletin boards around the world which have a Cyberpunk style, where young cyberpunks discuss the latest hardware and software.

It is familiar to most people as the "place" in which a long-distance telephone conversation takes place. But it is also the treasure trove for all digital or electronically transferred information, and, as such, it is the place for most of what is now commerce, industry, and human interaction Cyberpunk History Cyberpunk literature, in general, deals with unimportant people in technologically-enhanced cultural "systems". In Cyberpunk stories's et tings, there is usually a "system" which dominates the lives of most "ordinary" people, be it an oppressive government, a group of large, corporations, or a fundamentalist religion. These systems are enhanced by certain technologies, particularly "information technology" (computers, the mass media), making the system better at keeping those within it inside it. Often this technological system extends into its human "components" as well, via brain implants, prosthetic limbs, cloned or genetically engineered organs, etc.

Humans themselves become part of "the Machine". This is the "cyber" aspect of Cyberpunk. "Cyberpunk hit the front page of the New York Times when some young computer kids were arrested for cracking a government computer file. The Times called the kids "cyberpunks" From there, the performers involved in the high-tech-oriented radical art movement generally known as "Industrial" [ R. U Sirius (Mondo 2000) 64 ] In the mid-'80's Cyberpunk emerged as a new way of doing science fiction in both literature and film. The first book "Neuromancer"; the most important film, "Blade Runner."what's most important to me is that Neuromancer is about the present. its not really about an imagined future... ".

[William Gibson (MONDO 2000) 68] William Gibson is widely considered to be the father of "Cyberpunk", dark novels about hi-tech computer bohemians and underground renegades. His first novel, "Neuromancer", bears the distinction of winning the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick awards. The first to win all three. William Gibson parlayed off the success of his first SF 'Cyberpunk' blockbuster Neuromancer to write a more complex, engaging novel in which these two worlds are rapidly colliding. In his novel Count Zero, we encounter teenage hacker Bobby Newmark, who goes by the handle "Count Zero". Bobby on one of his treks into Cyberspace runs into something unlike any other AI (artificial intelligence) he's ever encountered - a strange woman, surrounded by wind and stars, who saves him from 'flat lining.

' He does not know what it was he encountered on the net, or why it saved him from certain death. Later we meet Angie Mitchell, the mysterious girl whose head has been 'rewired' with a neural network which enables her to 'channel' entities from Cyberspace without a 'deck' - in essence, to be 'possessed'. Bobby eventually meets Beauvoir, a member of a Voudoun / cyber sect, who tells him that in Cyberspace the entity he actually met was Erzulie, and that he is now a favourite of Le gba, the lord of communication... Beauvoir explains that Voudoun is the perfect religion for this era, because it is pragmatic - "It isn't about salvation or transcendence. What it's about is getting things done".

Eventually, we come to realise that after the fracturing of the AI Winter mute, who tried to unite the Matrix, the unified being split into several entities which took on the character of the various Haitian loa, for reasons that are never made clear. Now other writers like Bruce Sterling and Pat Cardigan have emerged. There is even a 'overground' Cyberpunk magazine called Mondo 2000, as well as a host of tiny desktop published fanzines. A fundamental theme running through most Cyberpunk literature is that (in the near future Earth) commodities are unimportant. Since anything can be manufactured, very cheaply, manufactured goods (and the commodities that are needed to create them) are no longer central to economic life. The only real commodity is information.

The bleak, 'no future' landscape of punk rock and post-apocalyptic movies like Blade runner and Mad Max, and imagined a way to escape from the street-level violence these films referred to. Along with Neuromancer, Blade Runner together set the boundary conditions for emerging Cyberpunk: a hard-boiled combination of high tech and low life. As the William Gibson phrase puts it, "The street has its own uses for technology". So compelling were these two narratives that many people then and now refuse to regard as Cyberpunk anything stylistically and thematically different from them.

Literary Cyberpunk had become more than Gibson, and Cyberpunk itself had become more than literature and film. In fact, the label has been applied variously, promiscuously, often cheaply or stupidly. Kids with modems and the urge to commit computer crime became known as "cyberpunks or Hackers", however, so did urban hipsters who wore black, read Mondo 2000, listened to "industrial" pop, and generally subscribed to techno-fetishism. Gibson had become more han just another sf writer; he was a cultural icon of sorts.

[Gareth Bronwyn] posted the following description of the Cyberpunk world view to the MONDO 2000 conference of the WELL (see glossary): A) The future has imploded onto the present. there was no nuclear Armageddon. There's too much real estate to lose. The new battle field is people's mind's. B) The megacorp's are the new governments. C) The U. S is a big bully with lackluster economic power. D) The world is splintering into a trillion subcultures and designer cults with their own languages, codes, and lifestyles.

E) Computer-generated info-domains are the next frontiers. F) there is better living through chemistry. G) Small groups or individual "console cowboys" can wield tremendous power over governments. corporations, etc. H) The coalescence of a computer "culture" is expressed in self-aware computer music, art, virtual communities, and a hacker / street tech subculture. The computer nerd image is passe', and people are not ashamed anymore about the role the computer has in this subculture.

The computer is a cool tool, a friend, important, human augmentation. I) We " re becoming cyborg's. Our tech is getting smaller, closer to us and it will soon merge with us. J) [Some attitudes that seem to be related] Information wants to be free.

Access to computers and anything which may teach you something about how the world works should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the hands-on imperative. mistrust authority. promote decentralisation. Do it yourself. Fight the power. Feed the noise back into the system. Surf the edges.

[ (MONDO 2000) 65-66 ] Cyberpunk Culture Science fiction deals with issues as diverse as the clash between religious fundamentalism and the consumer society, abortion and the church, life support for the terminally ill. or the freedom of the individual in the age of on-line databases. William Gibson, whose brave new world is seen as in a state of impermanent decay compared to "Cyberspace", The "virtual world" already in embryonic existence in the Internet global computer network. In Gibson's latest novel, Virtual Light, a pair of designer sunglasses holds all the data on plans for property scam involving the rebuilding of post-quake San Francisco. Gibson's "heroes" are a handful of neo-punks and derelicts. His Future world is a grim approximation of today's social and technological trends, a graphic debunking of the progress principle. In the 20th century, the Net is only accessible via a computer terminal, using a device called a modem to send and receive information.

But in 2013, the Net can be entered directly using your own brain, neural plugs and complex interface programs that turn computer data into perceptual events". In several places, reference is made to the military origin of the Cyberspace interfaces: "You " re a console cowboy. The prototypes of the programs you use to crack industrial banks were developed for [a military operation]. For the assault on the Kirinsk computer nexus. Basic module was a Nightwing microlight, a pilot, a matrix deck, a jockey. We were running a virus called Mole.

The Mole series was the first generation of real intrusion programs". [Neuromancer]. "The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games... early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jack" [Neuromancer]. Gibson also assumes that in addition to being able to "jack in" to the matrix, you can go through the matrix to jack in to another person using a "simstim" deck. Using the simstim deck, you experience everything that the person you are connected to experiences: "Case hit the simstim switch. And flipped in to the agony of a broken bone.

Molly was braced against the blank grey wall of a long corridor, her breath coming ragged and uneven. Case was back in the matrix instantly, a white-hot line of pain fading in his left thigh". [Neuromancer]. The matrix can be a very dangerous place. As your brain is connected in, should your interface program be altered, you will suffer. If your program is deleted, you would die.

One of the characters in Neuromancer is called the Dixie Flatline, so named because he has survived deletion in the matrix. He is revered as a hero of the cyber jockeys: 'Well, if we can get the Flatline, we " re home free. He was the best. You know he died brain death three times. ' She nodded. 'Flatline on his EEG.

Showed me the tapes. ' " [Neuromancer]. Incidentally, the Flatline doesn't exist as a person any more: his mind has been stored in a RAM chip which can be connected to the matrix: Cyberpunk is fascinated by the media technologies which were hitting the mass market in the 80's. Desktop publishing, computer music and now desktop video are technologies taken up with enthusiasm by Cyberpunks...

The rapid evolution from video-games to virtual reality has been helped along by the hard core of enthusiasts eager to try out each generation of simulated experience. The multimedia convergence of the publishing industry, the computer industry, the broadcasting industry and the recording industry has a spot right at its centre called Cyberpunk, where these new product experiments find a critical but playful market. Cyberpunk is a product of the huge batch of technical and scientific universities created in the US to service the military industrial complex. Your typical Cyberpunk is white, middle class, and technically skilled. They are a new generation of white collar worker, resisting the yoke of work and suburban life for a while. They don't drop out, they jack in.

They are a example of how each generation, growing up with a given level of media technology, has to discover the limits and potentials of that technology by experimenting with everyday life itself. In the case of Cyberpunk, the networked world of Cyberspace, the interactive world of multimedia and the new sensoria of virtual reality will all owe a little to their willingness to be the test pigs for these emergent technologies. There is also a tension in Cyberpunk between the military that produces technology and the sensibility of the technically skilled individual trained for the high tech machine. Like all subcultures, Cyberpunk expresses a conflict.

On the one side is the libertarian idea that technology can be a way of wresting a little domain of freedom for people from the necessity to work and live under the constraints of today. On the other is the fact that the technologies of virtual reality, multimedia, Cyberspace would never have existed in the first place had the Pentagon not funded them as tools of war. On the one hand it is a drop out culture dedicated to pursing the dream of freedom through appropriate technology. On the other it is a ready market for new gadgets and a training ground for hip new entrepreneurs with hi-tech toys to market. Cyberpunk's fast crawl to the surface has included not only pop music (industrial, post industrial, techno pop, etc. ), but also television (MTV, Saturday morning cartoons, the late "Max Headroom" series, etc.) and movies ("Total Recall,"Lawnmower Man", the Japanese "Tetsuo" series, etc. ).

A bi- monthly magazine called Wired, aimed in part at the Cyberpunk set and financed in part by MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte. And the principals of Mondo 2000. "The micro technology that, in Cyberpunk, connects the streets to the multinational structures of information in Cyberspace also connects the middle-class structures of information in Cyberspace also connects the middle-class country to the middle-class city". [S. R Delany (Flame Wars) 198] Cyberpunk tends to fill some of us with uneasiness and even fear. The X Generation is made up of Slackers, Hackers (a. k. a. Phreakers, Cyberpunks, and Neuronauts). They are Ravers and techno- heads.

According to most demographers, we are more street smart and pop-culture literate, and less versed in the classics, ethics, and formal education (especially in areas like geography, civics, and history: areas where we appear to be, in short, an academic disgrace.) We are said to have less ambition, less idealism, less morals, smaller attention spans, and less discipline than any previous generation of this century. We are the most aborted, most incarcerated, most suicidal, and most uncontrollable, unwanted, and unpredictable generation in history. (Or so claim the authors of 13th Generation. ). "The work of cyberpunks is paralleled throughout eighties pop culture: in rock video; in the hacker underground; in the jarring street tech of hip-hop and scratch music... ".

[Bruce Sterling (MONDO 2000) 68] Cyberpunk and Technology In Gibson's world, Cyberspace is a con sensual hallucination created within the dense matrix of computer networks. Gibson imagines a world where people can directly jack their nervous systems into the net, vastly increasing the intimacy of the connection between mind and matrix. Cyberspace is the world created by the intersection of every jacked-in consciousness, every database and installation, every form of interconnected information circuit, in short, human or in-human. Cyberspace is no longer merely an interesting item in an inventory of ideas in Gibson's fiction. In Cyberspace: First Steps, a collection of papers from The First Conference on Cyberspace, held at the University of Texas, Austin, in May, 1990, Michael Benedikt defines Cyberspace as "a globally networked, computer-sustained, computer-accessed, and computer-generated, multidimensional, artificial, or 'virtual' reality". He admits "this fully developed kind of Cyberspace does not exist outside of science fiction and the imagination of a few thousand people"; however he points out that "with the multiple efforts the computer industry is making toward developing and accessing three- dimensional ized data, effecting real-time animation, implementing ISDN and enhancing other electronic information networks, providing scientific visualizations of dynamic systems, developing multimedia software, devising virtual reality interface systems, and linking to digital interactive television... from all of these efforts one might cogently argue that Cyberspace is 'now under construction.

' " Cyberpunk in TV and Cinema One Film "WAR GAMES" was based on a college student who hacked into the Us defence computer and started a simulation program of a nuclear attack on Russia, which looked like the real thing to the Russians. In the near future a British film call "Hackers" is to be released, directed by Iain Softly (BackBeat). Also soon to be released is "The Net" starring Sandra Bullock (Speed) and a Gibson Cyberpunk thriller called "Johnny Mnemonic" a $26 million science fiction movie based on his short story, and starring Keanu Reeves as the main character. Directed by Robert Longo. The film also stars Ice-T, Dolph Lundgren, Takeshi Kitano (of the cult "Sonatina"), Udo Kier, Henry Rollins and Dina Meyer.

William Gibson also wrote the screenplay of his original story which was published in the anthology "Burning Chrome."Johnny Mnemonic" goes into wide release in Dec 1995. The film Blade Runner, loosely based on Dick's novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep, is set in early 21st century Los Angeles. Among the enormous human cultural diversity evident, five, synthetically designed organic robots - replicants - have escaped their slave status on an off-world colony. These replicants are the property of the Tyrell Corporation, and have extremely high levels of physically and mental development.

The Tyrell Corporation, ensuring that the replicants do not develop the emotional capacity of their human masters genetically engineer a four- year life span. Tyrell Corporation, on the basis of this slavery, uses the market slogan 'More Human Than Human'. And like those who settled earth's New World in the seventeenth century, they expect slave labour". Whilst this commentary is certainly true, a further elaboration can be made on the technological nature of the replicants; they were, for all intents and purposes, a new life-form.

"Max Headroom was the most amazingly Cyberpunk thing that's ever been on network TV. Max started out as an animated VJ for a British music-video channel. In order to introduce him, a short film was made... Entertainment with all the corners filled in. I think that's what a lot of Cyberpunk writing is... Television is the greatest Cyberpunk invention of all time".

[Steve Roberts (MONDO 2000) 76] Theories One man who has his own theory about the net is Kevin Kelly (executive editor of Wired), he combines ideas from chaos theory, cybernetics, current thinking on evolution and research into computerised artificial life with his own experience of on-line culture. His main argument is that we " re 'the Neo- Biological Era'. The line between the made and the born is being blurred; machines are becoming biological and the biological is being engineered. The reason is that we have reached the limits of industrial thinking. Linear cause and effect logic is no good for figuring out the hugely complex systems (phone networks, global economies, the Internet) that we have created, so we " ve begun to look instead at natural systems. After years of tapping mother nature for food and raw materials, we " re now mining her for ideas.

One scenario of the Internet he is playing with is that the net might die. "You can imagine a situation in which there's 200 million people on the Internet trying to send E-mail messages and the whole thing just grinds to a halt. Its own success just kills it. In the meantime, a telephone companies steps in and offers E-mail for $5 a month, no traffic jams and its reliable. i hope it doesn't happen but it's a scenario one has to consider". eor ge Gilder of the Hudson institute stated "there is about to be a revolution, born of nothing less than sand, glass and air, and yet it was one which would have an incalcuble effect upon us all. From sand will come microchips offering super computing power on slices of silicon smaller than a thumbnail and cheaper than a book. From glass will be fashioned fibre-optic cables that will flash information of any size at lighting speed.

In the air, frequency bandwidths of practically limitless size and available at virtually no cost will permit the wireless transmission of any kind of digital data from anywhere to anywhere, instantly. Timothy leary the man who coined the phrase "turn on, tune in and drop out" in the 60's thinks that the future of the 20th and 21st century, will be the net". Its awesome. But on the net. you still have someone on the other side. It's the contact that's important, interpersonal, interactive communication. We " re hard wiring global consciousness, we " re moving towards a global mind. a global village.

Soon we " ll develop a global language. People will communicate with pictures not words". Jean Baudrillard described the emergence of a new postmodern society organs ied around simulation, in which models, codes, communication, information, and the media were the demiruges of a radical break with modern societies. Baudrillard's postmodern universe was also one of hyperreality, in which models and codes determined thought and behavior, and in which media of entertainment, information, and communication provided experience more intense and involving han the scenes of banal everything life. In this postmodern world, individuals abandoned the 'desert of the real' for the ecstasies of hyperreality and a new realm of computer, media, and technological experience. Visions of the Future Gibson's vision is of a multi-dimensional space inhabited by vast "data structures", where glowing and pulsing representations of data flow within the ubiquitous computer / telecommunications networks of military and corporate memory banks. (see Johnny Mnemonic) During the 80's, the Cyberspace vision was being fleshed out in the work shops and laboratories of silicon space, of seeing it, being in it, touching and feeling it, flying through it and hearing it were being developed.

The inter-relationship between the vision and the practical, working "virtual reality" machines (such as W industries ' Virtuality and VPL's Reality built for two) were on sale in both the us and Britain by 1990. By 1994 cheap headsets and programmes were available to mostly anyone. The Cyberpunk future includes the likes of a computer-generated artificial environment known as virtual reality. (Not so futuristic, perhaps: VR arcade games are already here.) It includes dreams of virtual sex.

(Not so futuristic, either: text based "sex" already exists on computer networks. Call it Phone Sex: The Next Generation.) It includes further developments in robotics, artificial intelligence, even artificial life. More to the point of punk, it includes "smart drugs", legal substances that allegedly increase mental capacity. "someday be possible for mental functions to be surgically extracted from the human brain and transferred to computer software in a process he calls "transmigration". the useless body with its brain tissue would then be discarded, while consciousness would remain stored in computer terminals, or for the occasional outing, in mobile robots". [Hans Mor avec, mind children: the future of robot and human intelligence (Cambridge, MA, 1988), 108] Cyberpunk fiction characters are hard wired (see Johnny Mnemonic), jack into Cyberspace, plug.