Portada by Nathan Roy Doughty

Cyberpunks and the Digital Frontier

The word "cyberpunk" was born some 20 years ago, in science fiction literature. William Gibson, the classic representative (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive) , imagines the world of the future as decadent and violent, where the individual fights against corporate and political control through technology. For todays cyberpunks, the fight has begun: in march of this year, Nathan represented Rice University in an exhibition match against Deep Blue.

As geographic frontiers were crucial in the progress of western civilization, nowadays the new frontier is technological. Young people of this generation fight to maintain an individual identity, using the same technology which pretends to control us. The rising of this new frontier can be seen in digital art, and in the literary and cinematographic genre called cyberpunk. The cyberpunk or hacker is the modern cowboy, the lone ranger of the digital era.

The role of the cyberpunk is to retain its humanism in the presence of any type of control. Cyberpunks maintain alive information and resist the tendency to erase collective memory. Cyberpunks fight against laws written by former society, because these are arbitrary. Cyberpunks know that human nature is chaotic, and that chaos is not within any law.

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July, 1997