Must-read: R.U.Sirius and Justin Hall talk about
new-edge "cyberculture"
and what happened to it:
The great thing about the early-'90s cyberculture was that we got to make it
all up. As far as anybody reading Mondo knew, hackers were probably as busy
working on implants that would install encyclopedic knowledge in users' brains
as they were working on encryption for a digital shopping mall. Instead of
preparing to go public and rake in bucks, we were preparing for a singularity
after which human life would be beyond current comprehension. It was bullshit,
or at least massively premature, but it was hella more fun than our current
relatively grim reality.
Reading the news, it seems as though being a "cyberpioneer," in the early-'90s
sense of things, may soon be a crime. A young man was arrested for developing
software code to watch DVDs on his Linux machine. Soon they'll be throwing
people in jail for having MP3 servers, for sharing music with their friends.
That's the basic early-1990s technotopian mistake, believing that the nature
of the technology will ultimately overthrow corporate tyranny as well as state
tyranny.
...right libertarianism didn't bother me that much until 1994, when Cyber-Newt
Gingrich took over the country. Seeing some of my own rhetoric about
techno-based boundary dissolution appropriated in order to decentralize the
social welfare state while deregulating the corporations came as a bit of a
shock.