Cyberpunk Wants To See The Mind As Mechanistic & Duplicable, Challenging Basic Assumptions About The Nature Of Individuality & Self.

Cyberpunk Wants To See The Mind As Mechanistic & Duplicable, Challenging Basic Assumptions About The Nature Of Individuality & Self.

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...cyberpunk wants to see the mind as mechanistic & duplicable,
challenging basic assumptions about the nature of individuality & self.
That seems all the better reason to assume that cyberpunk art & music is
essentially mindless garbagio. Willy certainly addressed this idea in
Count Zero, with Katatonenkunst, the automatic box-maker and the girl's
observation that the real art was the building of the machine itself,
rather than its output.
-- Eliot Handelman

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As for the basic assumptions about individuality and self, this is the core of what I like about cyberpunk.
And it's the core of what I like about certain pre-gibson neophile techie SF writers that certain folks here like to put down....
bug n. An unwanted and unintended property of a program or piece of hardware, esp.
one that causes it to malfunction. Antonym of feature....
So we get to my point. Surely people around here read things that aren't on the *Officially Sanctioned Cyberpunk Reading List*.
Surely we don't (any of us) really believe that there is some big, deep political and philosophical message in all this, do we?...
COBOL /koh'bol/ n. [COmmon Business-Oriented Language] (Synonymous with evil.
) A weak, verbose, and flabby language used by card wallopers to do boring mindless things on dinosaur mainframes....
HAKMEM /hak'mem/ n. MIT AI Memo 239 (February 1972).
A legendary collection of neat mathematical and programming hacks contributed by many people at MIT and elsewhere....
All art is but immitation of nature. Seneca
vaxocentrism /vak`soh-sen'trizm/ n. [analogy with `ethnocentrism'] A notional disease said to afflict C programmers who persist in coding according to certain assumptions that are valid (esp.
under Unix) on VAXen but false elsewhere. Among these are...
finn v. [IRC] To pull rank on somebody based on the amount of time one has spent on IRC.
The term derives from the fact that IRC was originally written in Finland in 1987....
cyberpunk /si:'ber-puhnk/ n.,adj. [orig. by SF writer Bruce Bethke and/or editor Gardner Dozois] A subgenre of SF launched in 1982 by William Gibson's epoch-making novel "Neuromancer" (though its roots go back through Vernor Vinge's "True Names" (see the Bibliography in Appendix C) to John Brunner's 1975 novel "The Shockwave Rider").
Gibson's near-total ignorance of computers and the present-day hacker culture enabled him to speculate about the role of computers and hackers in the future in ways hackers have since found both irritatingly naï...