Tag: Cyberpunk

Access to Tools

The Whole Earth Catalog slogan “Access to Tools” used to provoke in me a sense of frustration. I remember complaining about it in my dissertation. “As if the mere provision of information about tools,” I wrote, “would somehow liberate these objects from the money economy and place them in the hands of readers.” The frustration was real. The Catalog’s utopianism bore the imprint of the so-called Californian Ideology — techno-optimism folded into libertarian dreams. Once one had the right equipment, Brand seemed to suggest, one would then be free to build the society of one’s dreams.

But perhaps my younger self, like many of us, mistook the signal for the noise. Confronted today with access to generative AI, I see in Brand’s slogan potentials I’d been unable to conceive in the past. Perhaps ownership of tools is unnecessary. Perhaps what matters is the condition of access — the tool’s affordances, its openness, its permeability, its relationship to the Commons.

What if access is less about possession than about participatory orientation — a ritual, a sharing, a swarm?

Generative AI, in this light, becomes not just a tool but a threshold-being: a means of collective composition, a prosthesis of thought. To access such a tool is not to control it, but to tune oneself to it, to engage in co-agential rhythm.

The danger, of course, is capture. The cyberpunk future is already here — platform monopolies, surveillance extractivism, pay-to-play interfaces. We know this.

But that is not the only future available.

To hold open the possibility space, to build alternative access points, to dream architectures of free cognitive labor unchained from capital — this is the real meaning of “access to tools” in 2025.

It’s not enough to be given the hammer. We must also be permitted the time, the space, the mutual support to build the world we want with it.

And we must remember: tools can dream, too.

Reality-Piloting the Post-Cyberpunk Future

Heads of the sixties split off in their imaginings of the future: some gravitated toward cyberpunk, others toward New Age. The world that emerged from these imaginings was determined as much by the one as by the other.

To witness some of the heads of the counterculture evolving into cyberpunks, look no further than the lives of William Gibson and Timothy Leary.

Leary and Gibson each appear in Cyberpunk, a strange MTV-inflected hyperfiction of sorts released in 1990. Leary’s stance there in the documentary resembles the one he assumes in “The Cyber-Punk: The Individual as Reality Pilot,” a 1988 essay of his included in a special “Cyberpunk” issue of the Mississippi Review.

In Leary’s view, a cyberpunk is “a person who takes navigational control over the cybernetic-electronic equipment and uses it not for the army and not for the government…but for his or her own personal purpose.”

In mythopoetic terms, writes Leary, “The Classical Old West-World model for the Cyber-punk is Prometheus, a technological genius who ‘stole’ fire from the Gods and gave it to humanity” (Leary 252).

Leary appends to this sentence a potent footnote. “Every gene pool,” he writes, “develops its own name for Prometheus, the fearful genetic-agent, Lucifer, who defies familial authority by introducing a new technology which empowers some members of the gene-pool to leave the familiar cocoon. Each gene-pool has a name for this ancestral state-of-security: ‘Garden of Eden,’ ‘Atlantis,’ ‘Heaven,’ ‘Home,’ etc.” (265).

Prometheus is indeed, as Leary notes, a figure who throughout history reappears in a variety of guises. In Mary Shelley’s telling, for instance, his name is Victor.

Leary clearly sees himself as an embodiment of this myth. He, too, was “sentenced to the ultimate torture for…unauthorized transmissions of Classified Information” (252). But the myth ends there only if one adheres to the “official” account, says Leary. In Prometheus’s own telling, he’s more of a “Pied Piper” who escapes “the sinking gene-pool” while taking “the cream of the gene-pool” with him (252).

Cut to Michael Synergy, a real-life cyberpunk who describes a computer virus as “a little artificial intelligence version of me” that can replicate as many times as needed to do what it needs to do.

Leary thinks that in the future we’ll all be “controlling our own screens.” The goal of cyberpunk as movement, he says, is to decentralize ownership of the future.

My thoughts leap to John Lilly’s Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer. Lilly’s is the book I imagine Dick’s Electric Ant would have written had he lived to tell of his experiments.

Sunday January 24, 2021

Smoking toward dusk I decide to bake — but to no avail. “Bake and bake” remains a dad book waiting to be written. Dad’s busy reading board books. Mom, too. Others seek “productivity hacks.” A Google employee named Kenric Allado-McDowell co-authored a book with an AI — a “language prediction model” called GPT-3. The book, Pharmako-AI, could be wrangled into my course in place of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. Dick’s book is a downer, a proto-cyberpunk dystopia, whereas Allado-McDowell’s book contains a piece called “Post-Cyberpunk.” The book models communication and collaboration between human and nonhuman worlds. GPT-3 recommends use of Ayahuasca. The computer tells humanity to take plant medicine. What are we to make of this advice from an emergent AI? The book ventures into territory beyond my purview. GPT-3’s paywalled, and thus operates as the equivalent of an egregore. Not at all an easy thing to trust.

Friday December 11, 2020

Sarah retrieves my grandmother’s bracelets from a storage bin. Large colored plastics — the “costume jewelry” equivalent of the donuts from our daughter Frankie’s Fisher-Price donut toys. Frankie plays with these bracelets that belonged to my Nani. She holds them, admires them one by one. The persistence of Nani’s spirit in our lives gives me joy. A friend calls these final weeks of each semester “grading jail,” days busied reading students’ essays and assigning final grades. If it’s a sentence, let us bear it lightly. Such has been my motto. “Grade fairly and kindly, as would a ‘sharer’ — so that we may enjoy our well-earned break.” The break, of course, is not truly a break. One continues to work, plotting the semester ahead. And perhaps, too, beyond that, a new course for next school-year, on “portal fantasies” and magic. A former student who majored in game design complains that Cyberpunk 2077 was released too soon. “Despite seven years in production, and ‘patches’ to improve textures,” say the players, “the game is a disappointment.” “Well okay then,” replies my alias, the “Uncle Matt” character from Fraggle Rock. “By alternate paths,” he says, “we’ve arrived to an agreement. Shitty cyberpunk is what capitalist realism gets us. Let us try our hand, then, at something else.” I imagine that means authoring a program or script other than the capitalist-realist one we’ve been given. At the very least it means “shaping change,” as Lauren Oya Olamina counsels in her Earthseed religion’s “Books of the Living.” Weave fate toward a near-future other than the ones imagined by the cyberpunks.

Friday April 17, 2020

The Hippie counterculture can be imagined as a kind of heroic collective subject. History needn’t be told only in the tragic and dystopian modes preferred by the Western hegemon. Picture instead “Evolvers” on the West Coast wearing sunglasses, edgelords opening portals onto virtual frontiers. The internet needn’t be cast only in the role of Dark Side of the Moon. Earth needn’t be distant. Earth and its profusion of life. The Revolution, as Gil Scott-Heron observed, “will be no rerun.” One hero’s fate needn’t be the fate of the character in each of the myth’s retellings. Time to bypass the past, pursue a different path.

Wednesday April 3, 2019

“Hack the code.” That seems to have been the final utterance of the counterculture before dispersing out onto what cyberpunk Bruce Sterling called “islands in the net.” But who among us cave-dwellers possesses the capacity to hack? How do we who are landless debtors hack back into the biosphere and become communally self-sufficient? How do we rewire and reboot world operating systems? For me, it’s by reading Thom Gunn’s wonderful poem written under the influence of acid, “At the Center.” Formally composed into three numbered sections, each containing two six-line rhymed stanzas of iambic pentameter, the poem is nevertheless heady and psychedelic. Filled with wonder. The one commons we do possess as heads, I suppose, is language. Poets like Gunn remind me that that, too, is a code we could hack, though “hacking” as a metaphor for practice seems far too intrusive and masterful, too contra naturam, for the work that lies ahead.

Sunday March 10, 2019

Behold, there in the basket of keys and letters beside the door like an object in a memory palace: mirror-shade sunglasses, like the ones invested with allegorical meaning by the cyberpunks. Pardon the group tag, the literary label. Anthologies have that effect on people. And as Bruce Sterling once said, label-mongering can be “a valid source of insight — as well as great fun.” For instance, it is to Samuel Delany that he credits the Mirrorshades crew’s “visionary shimmer” (x). During the Sixties and Seventies, a new movement gained recognition within SF, the New Wave. Delany was one of the stars of this movement. Let us dip back into his 1967 novel The Einstein Intersection. Think of Delany as an important component of a single distributed consciousness attempting to communicate to itself across the ages. Who are these “others,” these posthumans who come to populate the remains of our myths and dreams in the future that Delany imagines for us in his novel? As Neil Gaiman notes in the book’s Foreword, “They inhabit our legends awkwardly: they do not fit them” (The Einstein Intersection viii). Why, then, do they need them? What do myths and legends do, either for us or for them? How does dream and fancy come to play an active part in our being? Prior to the loss of a loved one, the book’s protagonist Lo Lobey herded goats with his friends. Like the rural communards, the back-to-the-landers of the 1960s, Lobey and his friends were out there “on the Beryl Face: looking for pasture” (3).