[extropy-chat] 'Beyond Cyperpunk' on the web !

[Amara Graps]

I still have my Beyond Cyperpunk stack. Now it is on the Web!

http://www.streettech.com/bcp/


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Introduction

Frontiers are always fraught with danger, romance, utopian flights
of fancy and no small amount of madness. When Peter Sugarman and I
first began talking about creating the Beyond Cyberpunk! HyperCard
stack in 1990, the frontier towns of cyberspace were tiny outposts
and the populace was a rough and tumble crowd of hackers, research
scientists, libertarians, academics, military types and various
stripes of bohemians. It was a time of great excitement and
hyperactivity. Cyberpunk science fiction was still a major
inspiration to the advance teams building cyberspace, Mondo 2000 was
the hip new magazine and the hacker community was still stinging
from Operation Sundevil/The Hacker Crackdown. Academia had
discovered in the burgeoning cyberculture a full-blown example of
postmodernism, with its decentralized, anarchic structure, its
virtualizing of the human body, and its use of multimedia and
hypertexts to socially construct stories and knowledge. Social
scientists like Donna Haraway began using the idea of the cyborg as
a perfect metaphor to describe the human/machine hybrids we're
becoming in the twilight hours of the 20th century.

When we began Beyond Cyberpunk! (BCP), there was no such thing as
the World Wide Web. Hypermedia programs like Apple's HyperCard were
the only way to inexpensively deliver hypertext, sounds, images and
animations. We saw in HyperCard the opportunity to create a
compendium of all this cybercultural output. We wanted to map the
territory, but to do so in a way that allowed the user to explore
her own links and interests. We tried to cram in as much material as
we could, covering everthing from high-brow theory to sci-fi lit and
films to the wired worlds of hackers/crackers and the zine
publishing scene which was starting to move into cyberspace. The
result was a 5.5 megabyte "connect-the-dots" cyber-manifesto. In
1993, we followed up the first BCP stack with a one-disk update.

Since doing the BCP project, the online world and the cyberculture
has reinvented itself several times over. What you're reading here
is an artifact from a future past. Some of the material holds up,
some of it is down-right prescient. Other parts make us cringe, and
it's all we can do not edit out the embarassingly dated parts. After
continuing to get so many requests for copies of BCP or the
directions to an Internet version of it, we decided to create this
site. Right now it only contains a sampling of the original stack.
We'll be adding more of the original material, and even some brand
new material, in the months to come.

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Amara