genre of Cyberpunk. Cyberpunk is a subcategory of science fiction that focuses on the role
of technology in a future setting. In this literary and cinematic genre, lower-class citizens
are depicted, who have access to, and a great understanding of, advanced technology.
Cyberpunk often explores the role of technology during the breakdown of social order, in
which there is an oppressive government restricting and damaging the lives of the general
population. Furthermore, artificial intelligence (such as robots or intelligent computers)
also plays a significant part in Cyberpunk stories, and the Earth is depicted in the near
future in a post-industrial dystopia (the opposite of utopia, and therefore a bleak world
characterized by oppression and often social unrest.)
The impact of Cyberpunk in the present-day understanding of hacking is considerable.
Science fiction is particularly effective when we can recognize our own world within the
fictional representation, and with Cyberpunk we can recognize many of the concerns of
the contemporary technological age. Lawrence Person (editor of the science fiction
magazine Nova Express) describes the typical characters in Cyberpunk:
“Classic cyberpunk characters were marginalized, alienated loners who lived on the edge
of society in generally dystropic futures where daily life was impacted by rapid
technological change, an ubiquitous data sphere of computerized information, andinvasive modification of the human body.”
To a contemporary reader, this description of Cyberpunk characters is reminiscent of how
hackers are thought of in the popular imagination, and depicted in books and in films.
Therefore, the interplay between Cyberpunk characters and how we view real-life hackers
is considerable: in many ways our understanding of what a hacker is like is based on how
Cyberpunk characters are depicted in fiction. One example of this is how in Cyberpunk
the characters often live in filthy conditions, work at night and sleep all day, and do not
have any social life beyond chat rooms.
In the present-day imagination when we think of hackers we will often think of a lonely
adolescent boy sitting in a darkened room behind a computer screen. In fact, Michael
Bruce Sterling, who was one of the first science-fiction writers who dealt with Cyberpunk,
has also shown the most interest in understanding the development of hacking.
Sterling has traced the emergence of hacking, and the associated underground computer
network, to the Yippies, a counterculture group who were active in the 1960s and
published Technological Assistance Program, a newsletter that taught its readership
techniques for unauthorized access to telephones, known as phreaking.
Many of the individuals who were involved in the phreaking community are also an active
part of the underground hacking community, suggesting that the relationship between the
two groups.
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