here is much more going on here than in the well-known love-hate relations of previous ages with their machines. In the computer, human beings confront not only questions about their own changing roles, but what their creations think, whether and what they feel, and whether they deserve rights, compassion, and even love as well as responsibilities.
As We May Think is an essay by Vannevar Bush, first published in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1945, and republished again as an abridged version in September 1945 - therefore, before and after the U.S. nuclear attacks on Japan. Bush expresses his concern for the direction of scientific efforts towards destruction, rather than understanding, and explicates a desire for a sort of collective memory machine with his concept of the memex that would make knowledge more accessible, believing that it would help fix these problems. Through this machine, Bush hoped to transform an information explosion into a knowledge explosion.
"welcome to the unofficial alt.cyberpunk FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions guide). This file should give you some broad idea of what alt.cyberpunk is about, and hopefully some idea of what CyberPunk is about."
W-W-Welcome to the Max Headroom chronicles, a web site intended to be the most complete word on the history, milieu and supporting crew of the '80s icon, cyberpunk legend and advertising avatar.
Lewis Shiner reflects on the demise of cyberpunk (1991)
"I don't see anything dangerous or threatening about cyberpunk in its current incarnation. But its newfound popularity is revealing. It shows our obsession with material goods, and technical, engineered solutions. "
Read this just after you read Cheap Truth.
"Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. And we can do most anything to rats. This is a hard thing to think about, but it's the truth. It won't go away because we cover our eyes.
This is cyberpunk."
In the early 1980's SF author Bruce Sterling, under the pseudonym "Vincent Omniaveritas", edited a series of one-page newsletters titled Cheap Truth. (It's usually referred to as a samizdat, after the mimeographed newsletters dissidents circulated among themselves in Communist Eastern Europe.) In them, Bruce Sterling, Lewis Shiner, Rudy Rucker, and other members of a loose-knit group of SF writers (called by themselves "the Movement") attacked what they considered the stagnant state of the time's popular science fiction and hyped their own works. As such, they document the development of the literary consciousness of many of the writers of works later dubbed "cyberpunk".