Jakub Macek, Ph.D.

Defining Cyberculture (v. 2)[1]

(Translated by Monika Metyková and Jakub Macek)

This article offers a new concept of cyberculture based on an analysis of structures of cybercultural narrations.The author sums up previous concepts of cyberculture and offers an account of the distinction between early andcurrent cyberculture. Thereafter he focuses solely on early cyberculture and offers its definition and historicalperiodization. The thesis deals with early cyberculture as a wide social and cultural movement closely linked toadvanced information and communication technologies (ICT), their emergence and development and theircultural colonization. This is the fixed version of the text (July 2005). The original Czech version is available in Média a realita (ed.by Binková, P. – Volek, J., Masaryk University Press, 2004, pp 35-65). In need of further information, pleasecontact the author.

IntroductionIn much of reflection on ICTs[i], the term cyberculture can clearly be identified one of the frequently andflexibly used terms lacking an explicit meaning. Generally, it refers to (as the prefix indicates) cultural issuesrelated to “cyber-topics”, e.g. cybernetics, computerization, digital revolution, cyborgization of the humanbody, etc., and always incorporates at least an implicit link to an anticipation of the future, to a kind ofLunenfeldian “not yet”. However, any more explicit understanding of the referent of cyberculture varies fromauthor to author and is actually often absent.A wide range of miscellaneous phenomena are referred to as cyberculture – the term can be used as a label forhistorical and contemporary hackers’ subcultures and for the movement connected to the literary genre of

cyberpunk,[ii] as an expression describing groups of computer network users, even as a futuristic metaphorfor various prospective or (as some claim) actually emerging forms of society transformed by ICTs. At thesame time the term refers to cultural practices of ICTs (or solely Internet) users or to past or current newmedia research and theory.Thus cyberculture is an ambiguous, confusing, unclear term describing a set of issues. It can be used in adescriptive, analytical or ideological sense. It has a multiplicity of meanings and thus everyone willingly usesat least one of them. You can hardly make a mistake when you use it as the word cyberculture is one of themost significant paratextual characteristics of ICTs theory that will let the reader know that he is right in therealm of chip-mythology.However, thanks to this polysemous nature of the term I can “borrow” it and doubtless make it more precise,provide it with a clear meaning at least in the context of this essay. The goal of this essay is to develop the concept of what I call early cyberculture, a concept to be employed ina critical rendering of the cultural and ideological aspects of ICTs. I understand early cyberculture as a past

socio-cultural formation,[iii] which was at the birth of current computer technologies (e.g. of the currentlydominant segment of ICTs) and of the discourses and narratives which framed them. For early cybercultureICTs were a futuristic myth of a “new hope” and a “new menace” and stood behind one of the most significantnarratives of the 1980s and 1990s, the story of the power of a new technology, which dramatically and

fundamentally changes the world of humans and humans themselves, a story that was grasped and adopted bythe cultural mainstream, by western societies and their political representations.With regard to the multiplicity of previous concepts of cyberculture, this essay opens with a brief criticalsummary of the most important and known approaches to this issue. Following the summary I outline the fieldof cyberculture and make a distinction between early cyberculture (on which I focus in this text) andcontemporary cyberculture (which, however, lies outside the scope of this essay). In the following I defineearly cyberculture at the levels of social groups, discourses/practices and narratives, I periodicize it anddescribe its origins, historical development and disappearance through its fusion with the mainstream. In thefinal part of the essay I focus on cybercultural narratives which I view as the key defining characteristics andthe most important symbolic inheritance of the mainstream from cyberculture.

Current Concepts of CybercultureCloser and more systematical approach to mentioned ways of thinking of what can be understood ascyberculture enables me to develop a helpful typology of existing concepts. This typology – based on simpleanalysis of the basic point of views of concepts of cyberculture – spans utopian, information, anthropologicaland epistemological concepts of cyberculture.

Utopian conceptsof cyberculture

Informationconcepts of c.

Anthropologicalconcepts of c.

Epistemologicalconcepts of c.

Briefcharacter.

of theconcept

- c. as a form ofutopian societychanged throughICT

- anticipating(„futurologism“)

- c. as cultural(symbolical)codesod the informationsociety

- analytical, partlyanticipating

- c. as culturalpractices and lifestyles related toICT

- analytical, orientedto the present stateand to history

- c. as term forsocial andanthropologicalreflection of newmedia

Examples ofauthors and

books

Andy Hawk – FutureCulture Manifesto(1993) Pierre Lévy –Kyberkultura(1997, česky 2000)

Margaret Morse –Virtualities: Television,Media Art andCyberculture (1998) Lev Manovich – TheLanguage of a NewMedia. (2001)

Arturo Escobar –Welcome to Cyberia:Notes on theAtrhopology ofCyberculture(1994, zde 1996) David Hakken –Cyborgs@Cyberspace(1999)

Lev Manovich – NewMedia from Borges toHTML (2003) Lister a spol. – NewMedia: A CriticalIntroduction (2003)

Cyberculture as utopian project – Utopian concepts of cyberculture

Probably the oldest and narrowest concept of cyberculture refers to the initial discussions on new media anddenotes the cyberpunk movement, hackers’ subculture and (more generally) the first computer and networkusers and, for example, members of the early virtual communities developing via computer networks in the1980s and early 1990s. Douglas Rushkoff, author of Cyberia (1994, in Czech 2000) and Mark Dery, who inhis Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (1996) identifies cyberculture with “computer-agesubcultures,” are two representatives of this understanding of cyberculture. Members of these “computer-agesubcultures” perceived cyberculture as an initiation of some kind of a futuristic regeneration of society, as

Andy Hawk (one of The Cyberpunk Project creators)[iv] demonstrates in his article Future Culture Manifesto.[v] For him, the cyberculture of the “here and now” is in its infancy, nevertheless it is an already existingfoundation of a “new future”. Actually, in the case of Hawk’s manifesto the hackers’ cyberculture, whichdeveloped from cyberpunk and a rich variety of older subcultures, was to be the culture of the information

society. This orientation toward the future and the focus on technologically catalyzed social change is typicalof discourses appropriating cyberpunk (see below) and it ushers in futurological and utopian visions emergingfrom the academic world, but inspired by subcultural narratives. Pierre Lévy’s extremely optimistic vision represents one of the most powerful and most famous explorationsof cyberculture. Lévy, a French humanistic philosopher widely known as the author of the sophisticatedconcept of the virtual and an apologist of new media (in the European context he played a similar role as the

digerati in the U.S.)[vi], offers his conceptual framework in his Cyberculture (Lévy 2000).

Lévy employs the term cyberculture to refer to the Internet as to a Barlowian cyberspace.[vii] Lévy arguesthat with the spread of the Internet new forms of knowledge and new forms of its distribution emerge, thesenew forms transform not only the ways we manipulate information, but the society itself. Cyberculture issynonymous with this change, it refers to the “set of techniques (material and intellectual), practical habits,attitudes, ways of thinking and values that develop mutually with cyberspace” (Lévy 2000: 15) and embodies“a new form of universality: universality without totality” (ibid: 105). For Lévy this new universalitysymbolizes the peak of the Enlightenment project of humanity – the humanity of free, empowered subjectsoppressed neither by the power of the unity of language and meaning nor by unified and binding forms ofsocial being. For Lévy cyberculture proves the fact that we are close to this humanistic paradise, it points tothe possibility of “creating a virtual participation on your own self (universality) in a way that is differentfrom the identity of meaning (totality)” (ibid: 107).Lévy’s cyberculture cannot be termed a realistically conceived exploration, rather a conservative and utopianvision closely related to the eager technotopism of the turn of the 1980s and the 1990s. There is nocyberculture in the sense of a formally unified and at the level of content diffused cultural modus, that is as arelatively homogenous cultural formation. Lévy advances his vision of the future and he links it directly to theactual spread of digital technologies, for him the massive spread of the Internet clearly indicates theforthcoming changes. However, he does not distinguish between his visions regarding the nature of thesechanges and the current situation, he conflates a project of the future with a reflection of the present.The weakness of Lévy’s vision is in its dimness and roughness, his transformation of the society into the “newsociety” characterized by “universality without totality” lacks clear contours. Lévy simply knows that newtechnologies bring about social and cultural change and thus he tries to detect and capture the character of thischange. In relation to his argumentation, which is influenced by the fact that his “The Second Flood: Reporton Cyberculture” was written within the framework of a Council of Europe project, Kevin Robins and FrankWebster write the following:

What, in fact, is significant about Lévy’s discourse is the co-existence of a radical techno-rhetoric with a socialand communitarian political vision that is actually quite conventional and even conservative. And we would say,moreover, that it is this combination of radical and what we might call pragmatic aspirations that particularlymarks Cyberculture as a representative text of the late 1990s. (Robins and Webster 1999: 223)

Cyberculture as cultural interface of information society – Information concepts of cyberculture

In her book Virtualities: Television, Media Art and Cyberculture (1998) the American theoretician of mediaMargaret Morse defines cyberculture in a way that partly corresponds with Lévy’s and Hawk’s understanding.She approaches cyberculture as an emerging, juvenile and thus a predicated rather than a retrospectivelyreflected phenomenon. Similarly to Lévy, she defines cyberculture as a set of cultural practices enabling us todeal with new forms of information. Her understanding is, however, far from Lévy’s technotopist teleology.

The vision of cyberculture as a cultural level of the information society links her to Hawk’s approach but incontrast to Hawk’s manifesto, her text does not share any characteristics with the language of cyberpunk.Starting from Raymond Williams’s thesis on mobile privatization (Williams 1974) Morse moves on to arguethat computer networks not only strengthen the tendency to separate and mobilize private worlds but at thesame time, as they question the whole centralized model of information distribution, they change the nature ofinformation itself. While television offers a connection to a nationwide, centrally distributed communicationchannel and thus participation in the wider social and cultural context, computer networks supplement thiswith an intimate, interpersonal level of communication. However, in this case communication is realized viadigital information within computer networks, such information is depersonalized, de-contextualized and toosterile to form a basis for human relationships. According to Morse (1998: 5), “information is impersonal andimperceptible, knowledge stripped of its context in order to be transformed into digital data,” which is a priceto be paid for making information a “freely convertible currency” (ibid). However, the information societycannot be experienced at the level of abstract digital information thus an individual, unique, subjective level ofcultural uses of technology and digital information is created, an interface between culture and technology,which creates space for uniqueness and imagination. And it is precisely this cultural level that Morse termscyberculture.Morse, like Lev Manovich, a visual culture theorist, emphasizes the role of visual representations in thetelevision and “post-television” society. Due to the similarity of their approaches it is not surprising thatMorse’s concept of cyberculture partly matches Manovich’s concept of information culture (but importantlynot his concept of cyberculture, see below).

“[Information culture] includes the ways in which different cultural sites and objects present information. [...]Extending the parallels with visual culture, information culture also includes historical methods for organizingand retrieving information (analogs of iconography) as well as patterns of user interaction with informationobjects and displays” (Manovich 2001: 39).

Morse’s cyberculture and Manovich’s information culture can be understood as more down-to-earth,language-oriented variants of Lévy’s approach. Similarly to Lévy, they explore the cultural processing ofcomputer-mediated information (CMI), i.e. information carried, created and distributed by computers as meta-media. But, in contrast to Lévy, their approaches lack the ideological visionary component and thecorresponding aspirations as they were not intended to promote or advocate technologies, but rather to providea theoretical analysis of the impact of technologies on the field of cultural information codes.

Cyberculture as cultural practices and lifestyles – Anthropological concepts of cyberculture

Compared to Morse, the social anthropologists Arturo Escobar and David Hakken offer a somewhat widerconcept of cyberculture. In his essay “Welcome to Cyberia: Notes on the Anthropology of Cyberculture”(1996) Escobar understands research on cyberculture, i.e. research on “cultural constructions andreconstructions on which new technologies are based and which they, conversely, contribute to shaping”(Escobar 1996: 11), as a new domain of anthropological practice and a challenge to anthropology. “The pointof departure of this inquiry is the belief that any technology represents a cultural invention, in the sense thattechnologies bring forth a world; they emerge out of particular cultural conditions and in turn help to createnew social and cultural situations.” Nonetheless, Escobar’s concept of cyberculture is actually not explicit, ingeneral it remains contextual. Cyberculture, he claims, is defined by its relation to computer and informationtechnologies, which “are bringing about a regime of technosociality” (Escobar 1996: 112), and by its relationto biotechnologies, which “are giving rise to biosociality” (ibid). These cultural regimes, a kind of discursive

and narrative framework, “form the basis for … the regime of cyberculture”. Escobar conceives cybercultureas a cultural mode that involves

“...the realisation that we increasingly live and make ourselves in techno-biocultural environments structuredindelibly by novel forms of science and technology. [...] Despite this novelty, however, cyberculture originates ina well-known social matrix, that of modernity, even if it orients itself towards the constitution of a new order –which we cannot yet fully conceptualise but must try to understand...” (Escobar 1996: 112).

Escobar’s language, similarly to Lévy’s, is obviously shaped by the sense of upcoming change and an urge toname this change and capture it in a textual form. This atmosphere of excitement was typical of earlycybercultural reflection at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s and it could be illustrated by Z. Sardar’s andJ. R. Ravetz’s “Introduction” in Cyberfutures: Culture and Politics on the Information Superhighway, thevolume in which Escobar’s essay is published. When describing their “era,” e.g. the mid 1990s, Sardar andRavetz write that

“we are now getting a first taste of ‘Cyberia’ – the new civilisation emerging through our human–computerinterface and mediation” (Sardar and Ravetz 1996: 1).

The ethnographer David Hakken, one of the pioneers of the ethnography of cyberspace adopts a more realisticand rather sceptical approach to the already noted excitement that uplifted as well as disheartened thedefenders of the barricades of the “computer revolution”. Hakken’s scepticism, comparable to Kevin Robins’,is the scepticism of critical deconstruction and pre-empirical mistrust; it evolves from the necessity toempirically and critically explore the roots of this excitement and to question its taken-for-granted nature.Hakken (1999) does not use the term cyberculture, rather he talks about cyberspace. However, his concept ofcyberspace is defined by features that connect it to Escobar’s and Morse’s concepts of cyberculture, moreover,Hakken’s criticism perfectly complements Escobar’s and Morse’s approaches.Exploring Barlow’s post-Gibsonian vision, Hakken describes cyberspace as a technologically mediated socialarena entered by everyone using ICTs (i.e. Advanced Information Technologies, AIT – in Hakken’sterminology) in social interaction. This approach, Hakken claims, refers to all potential lifeways linked tocultural being and (re)produced via ICTs.

“Lifeways based on AIT are not only real and distinctly different; they are transformative. The transformativepotential of AITs lies in the new ways they manipulate information. The new computer-based ways ofprocessing information seem to come with a new social formation; or, in traditional anthropological parlance,cyberspace is a distinct type of culture” (Hakken 1999: 1-2).

Hakken is fully aware of the speculative nature of this claim, it is thus not surprising that he labels himself “acyberspace agnostic” and emphasizes the need to empirically verify the proclaimed “distinctiveness” of thecultural formation emerging around cyberspace and ICTs. Indeed he presents his formulations in the form ofhypotheses and at the same time pays due attention to the unpredictability of the continuous and yetunfinished development of ICTs. Hakken coins the term proto-cyberspace in order to distinguish the currentlevel of the development of ICTs and their current cultural context from a hypothetical “resultant” situation.

Cyberculture as theory of new media – Epistemological concepts of cyberculture

Last but not least, the term cyberculture is in the above mentioned senses used metonymically to label the

theorizing on cyberculture or on ICTs.[viii] The term is in this respect used, for example, by Lev Manovich(Language of a New Media, 2001) and Lister et al. (New Media Reader, 2003). Manovich distinguishesbetween cyberculture and new media as two distinct areas of research. Manovich understands new mediatheory as an exploration of the information culture (see above), while for him cyberculture involves:

“...the study of various social phenomena associated with Internet and other new forms of networkcommunication. Examples of what falls under cyberculture studies are online communities, online multi-playergaming, the issue of online identity, the sociology and the ethnography of email usage, cell phone usage invarious communities; the issues of gender and ethnicity in Internet usage; and so on. [...] To summarize:cyberculture is focused on the social and on networking; new media is focused on the cultural and computing”(Manovich 2003: 16).

Lister et al. use the term cyberculture “in two related, but distinct, ways” (Lister et al. 2003: 385) – the first, incontradiction to Manovich’s differentiation between new media and cyberculture, broadly corresponds toEscobar’s and Morse’s approach to cyberculture as a set of cultural and social practices, codes and narratives.However, the first way smoothly flows into the second one. Lister et al. conceive cyberculture as a culturalcontext of ICTs, a context characterized by its themes (communication networks, programming, software,artificial intelligence and artificial life, virtual reality, etc.). Works of fiction and film such as Gibson’sNeuromancer (1984), Cadigan’s Synners (1991) or Scott’s movie Blade Runner that map the rise of thetechnological world and provide it with a language, meanings, stories and values, played (or still play) a keyrole in this respect.

“Secondly, cyberculture is used to refer to the theoretical study of cyberculture as already defined; that is, itdenotes a particular approach to the study of the “culture + technology” complex. This loose sense ofcyberculture as a discursive category groups together a wide range of (on many levels contradictory) approaches,from theoretical analyses of the implications of digital culture to the popular discourses of science andtechnology journalism” (Lister et al. 2003: 385).

Cyberculture can thus be seen as a meeting point of works of fiction with discourses, concepts and theories ofthe social and natural sciences as well as engineering – which permeate, shape and transform each other.Cyberculture is deeply self-reflexive because the theories are part of its (cybercultural) narratives and thesenarratives then inspire emerging theories. Therefore, the categorization of cyberculture into a socio-culturalformation and an assemblage of theories is a seeming and probably misguided one.

Early and contemporary cyberculture The definitions of cyberculture are, as we could see, miscellaneous. They refer to the (already gone)subcultures, current cultural practices, and potential forms of future society, social groups, cultural discoursesand institutions even theoretical visions figure as referents of cyberculture. However, these understandings arenot necessarily contradictory – they, like pieces of a mosaic, complement and influence each other. With aslight exaggeration, which can seem to be quite premature at this moment, I will claim that all the abovementioned definitions of cyberculture are part of the “same story” and the search leading to this story. Everyunderstanding of cyberculture refers to particular themes arising from cybernetics, robotics and informaticsand to the relation between culture/society and new technologies. The story of cyberculture is always the storyof the cultural colonization of the world of ICTs, of the accommodation and signification of this world bycultural practices. And each of the already explored definitions concentrates on one particular segment, onepart of this story.When approaching cyberculture it is misleading to reduce it to some of those segments and ignore others,which cyberculture connotes as well. It may seem that a widely conceived concept of cyberculture, whichwould include previous definitions, is too wide and imprecise, yet importantly, such a concept enables aunified approach to the constitutive colonization of the world of ICTs understood as a gradual process with itsown history and whose constitutive elements include social groups, discourses (subcultural, literary andtheoretical), cultural practices and, not least, narratives.

Within this wide framework, cyberculture is characteristically categorized into two different phenomena andthis categorization is, as opposed to the categorization mentioned in connection with Lister et al., reallysignificant for understanding cyberculture. The imaginary axis of the categorization is, as I will argue, therelationship between cyberculture and the majority society (namely cyberculture and the social/culturalmainstream). From its formation in the 1960s until the beginning of the 1990s, cyberculture was by itsmembers manifestly articulated in contradiction to the mainstream. Then, after a transitional period in the firsthalf of the 1990s, cyberculture definitely became one of the defining parts of the mainstream. In this context,i.e. at the level of the relationship between cyberculture and the mainstream, I make a distinction betweenearly cyberculture and contemporary cyberculture. The “story of cyberculture”, an illustration of the process of institutionalization as elaborated by Berger andLuckmann (1967), begins with the inventors of the technology and their original vision and intentions. Itstrengthens with the oncoming users-innovators who played the role of a spearhead of the technology. Theseusers-innovators further developed the inventors’ visions, they subjected them to the first literary andtheoretical reflection (in which they set a discursive framework and characteristic themes and topics), theyextended the original visions by new, wider contexts and spread the “word” and the technology itself. Inresponse to this part of the story (whose techno-optimistic and novelty-eager protagonists consciouslyidentified with the innovators), Mark Dery (1996) approaches cyberculture as the “computer-age subcultures”and Pierre Lévy sees in their future-oriented members a foundation of a forthcoming new cultural order. It isexactly this part of the story which Douglas Rushkoff talks about in his Cyberia (1994) and to which JozefKelemen refers in Kybergolem (2001) when he claims that his thoughts were formed “under the intellectualpressure exerted by groups of young people linked to the cybercultural circles,” and adds that he will notdefine cyberculture because his “book is aimed particularly at those who have already adequately‘experienced’ the meaning of the term” (Kelemen 2001: 13). Cyberculture of this part of the story, i.e. earlycyberculture, is the project of the insiders; its story is the tale of their “guild”.As long as the computer remained only a specialized work tool or a sophisticated plaything (e.g. until the endof the 1980s), the innovators could define themselves in contrast to the mainstream, they could hold a mirrorto it and look forward to the future. But as the new technology spread, as it became a widely acceptedtechnological standard and as the computer transformed into a relatively cheap and affordable medium, theinnovators left centre stage. The majority society adopted the technology including their visions and the “storyof cyberculture” acquired a novel dimension. Cyberculture, whatever we mean by the term, is no longer thecyberculture of a relatively closed group of people. Technology, which cyberculture is bound up with, becameomnipresent and spread through the entire society.Did cyberculture spread simultaneously with technology? A conviction that it did makes Morse and Escobaruse an old term in a new way, appropriate to the new situation. Cyberculture of the second part of the story isnot an actual project of a virtual future, neither the “guild of the insiders” and technological avant-garde,rather cyberculture is now an assemblage of cultural practices, discourses and narratives, an assemblageaccompanying a new technology and originating in the previous part of our story.It is obvious that there is a significant difference between the first and the second part of the story, we talkabout two different phenomena separated by a vague historical dividing line. The first one contributed to therise of the second yet the two cannot be conflated and they require distinct methods of exploration. Earlycyberculture, which played the role of a cultural lab, is a closed chapter, a past cultural text. Contemporarycyberculture, the living and changing cultural matrix, is (and Morse, for example, is right in this respect) in itsinfancy. Although the exploration of contemporary cyberculture is one the greatest challenges facing the

socio-cultural exploration of ICTs, it is impossible to embark upon this task without an adequate explorationof early cyberculture and an understanding of its “message”.As mentioned in the introduction, the focus of this essay is solely cyberculture, a no longer existing socio-cultural formation originating in the U.S. And it is early cyberculture that I refer to hereafter when talkingabout cyberculture without an adjective.

Periodization of early cyberculture Early cyberculture was a heterogeneous social formation constituted around ICTs at the time of theiremergence and initial development. I outline early cyberculture at the level of cybercultural groups,cybercultural discourses and practices and cybercultural narratives.Evidently, it is impossible to precisely delimitate early cyberculture at the levels of groups and discourses –

these levels overlap with a range of other social groups and worlds, most markedly with SF Fandom[ix] andthe academia. For a variety of reasons the delimitation of early cyberculture in time is only partly precise. It ispossible to claim that the very first foundations of cyberculture originate at the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology (M.I.T.) at the turn of the 1950s and the 1960s. Early cyberculture reached its peak in the late1970s and in the 1980s. Its decline can be detected on the silver screen, on pages of popularizing magazinesand bestsellers, in ads on electronics and in FBI offices in the first half of the 1990s that is at a time whencyberculture definitely abandoned its marginal position in relation to the mainstream and became itsirrevocable part and was subjected to normative power. Nonetheless, an exact definition of the two limitingtime points is quite problematic and speculative.The key to the understanding of early cyberculture is provided in the typical thematic structure ofcybercultural narratives. Nevertheless, before dealing with them in more depth, I outline the historicaldevelopment of cybercultural groups and discourses. Every attempt at periodization can be somewhatmisleading because it sets artificial dividing lines in a continuous flow of events, but in this case, with regardto clarity, it is necessary. The periods necessarily overlap with each other and their delimitation is, again,speculative. However, every turning point marks a qualitative change of cyberculture (in the sense of a“Kuhnian revolution”) which differentiates each period from the previous one. In terms of cybercultural groups cyberculture can be described as a heterogeneous, continuously growing setof more or less cohesive subcultures, communities and individuals sharing (in the role of inventors or firstusers) access to ICTs and an interest in their development and impact on society and culture. This interest, orthe theme of technologies, their use and their transformative potential, forms the core of cyberculturaldiscourses and cybercultural narratives and determines their character. Cybercultural discourses conflatetechnological jargon with the language of literary science fiction and with the language of social theory,cybercultural narratives generally focus on the issue of technologically determined social and cultural change(see below).

The First Period Early cyberculture originates in the American hackers’ subcultures. At the beginning, until at least the 1970s,it involved only young students, mainframes programmers, researchers and academics from the fields ofcybernetics, computer science and informatics.

The beginning of this period of cyberculture is marked by a set of crucial events in the field of computing,among others they include the formation of the first community of hackers at M.I.T. in 1959, M. E. Clynes’and S. Kline’s concept of cybernetic organism (cyborg) in 1960, T. H. Nelson’s concept of hypertext at thebeginning of the 1960s and the Arpanet project, ancestor of all subsequent computer networks, launched in1963 and terminated in 1968. A community of a few programmers, called the Tech Railroad Model Club, was formed at the turn of the years1959 and 1960 at M.I.T.. The TX-0 computer formed the centre of its universe, which Steven Levy describesin his book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984). In relation to this community it is probablypossible to talk about the roots of a continuous academic hacker subculture. This community coined the first

jargon,[x] including the key terms hacker and hacking,[xi] and formulated the “silently agreed” bedrocks ofhacker ethics, which influenced the whole cyberculture (Levy 1984). Similar communities came into being atthe Stanford AI lab, Carnegie-Mellon University or Worcester Polytechnic Institute in the following years.Later they were in connection via the Arpanet, designed by Larry Roberts upon a commission from the U.S.government.The concept of cyborg presented an inspiring symbolic break of the barriers between machine and human(organic) body and it became one of the strongest cybernetic contributions to cybercultural discourses andnarratives. However, cyberculture adopted the cyborg later, after the rise of cyberpunk in the mid 1980s andturned it into the basis of its politics of embodiment.The notion of hypertext became one of the most fundamental cybercultural themes thanks to Nelson andEngelbart and is linked to the work of V. Bush and to the structural and critical concept of writeable text asdeveloped by R. Barthes. The hypertext was attributed significant emancipatory potential, stemming from thepossibility of challenging the totality of written text and from the opportunity to newly, creatively anddynamically structure not only the text itself, but also the knowledge carried by it.Moreover, a wide range of texts, which later influenced cyberculture, was published during this decade, the1960s. In the field of the social sciences, it was the work of the technological determinist Marshall McLuhan,for instance; and in the field of fiction, the writings of the so-called New Wave of Science Fiction.Nevertheless, these texts, as well as the already mentioned concept of the cyborg, were taken up bycyberculture only in its third period.

The Second Period The second period of cyberculture can be broadly set to the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, whencyberculture moved beyond the realm of institutes and universities. The most crucial features of this era werethe increasing accessibility of technology, the invention of microcomputers and their massive development,which spawned an entire new industry. In addition to “classic” academic hackers, cyberculture also comprisedthe so called phone phreaks (hacking the phone systems), computer clubs hackers (interested in developingand programming the first homemade as well as mass-produced computers) and later the first de facto regularcomputer users. The invention of the microprocessor by Intel in 1971 enabled the miniaturization and cheapening of computertechnology. Basically from the moment its distribution started the first digital microcomputers were made,these involved professional projects (developed by Xerox, for instance) as well as home-assembled computerkits attractive especially for the second generation of hackers, computer hobbyists. The first widely known of

these kits were Jonathan Titus’ Mark-8 (1974) and Ed Roberts’ Altair 8800 (1974).Mainly Roberts’ Altair 8800, in fact only a useless toy, similarly to Mark-8, attracted considerable attentionfollowing its introduction at the beginning of 1975. With the benefit of hindsight it is not surprising. Forhardware hackers, it was a symbolic event. “Hell, what did it matter?” asked Steven Levy ten years later. Hisown answer was simple: “It was a start. It was a computer” (Levy 1984: 189).On March 25, 1975, in Gordon French’s garage in Menlo Park, California, the Homebrew Computer Club (thenow legendary group of engineers and technology hobbyists, interested in home assembly and programmingof microcomputers) met for the first time. The meeting revolved around Altair. Within a year the HomebrewComputer Club developed into a forum with more than seven hundred members, including many of the laterleading figures of the computer industry of the Silicon Valley. It is thus not surprising that the Club isconsidered to be an important impulse for the development of this industry.Among the members of the Homebrew Computer Club we find Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, who,following experiments with an older version of the computer, completed Apple II in the autumn of 1976.Production started in 1977 and Apple II revolutionized the field of the microcomputer industry and relatedcommerce. Apple II – the first machine called Personal Computer, PC – set the benchmark of quality andWozniak’s and Job’s company became one of the fastest growing companies in the Silicon Valley. The AppleComputer was quickly followed by other companies (well established as well as newly founded) and within afew years tens of thousands of various types and brands of microcomputers were produced.Naturally, the Homebrew Computer Club was not the only cybercultural group of the period. At the beginningof the 1970s technology hobbyists found a new interest, the detection of “bugs” in the phone system and inthe security system of long distance calls, an involvement which extended the meaning of hacking. We findalso many hackers interested in computers among phone phreaks – as phone hobbyists called themselves, asubculture that for the first time extended some cybercultural practices to the limits of the law. It wasconstituted around a newsletter YIPL (founded in 1972, later renamed TAP) and could be understood as thecomputer clubs’ forerunner. Although the security level of the phone system was constantly improving, thetechnology of phone systems remained the focus of the interest of the hackers’ subcultures until the 1980s. The invention of the microprocessor understandably increased interest in computers. As mentioned earlier,computer hacking, i.e. expert interest in computer performance and programming, spread from the secludedacademic contexts and significantly influenced the development of computer technology. The historical roleof hackers and the contemporary atmosphere are manifest in the “cyber-hyped” parlance of the authors of TheHistory of Computing Project (2002):

“For the very first computer hobbyists suddenly a vacuum is filled. The “legion” of amateur programmers justjump “en masse” on the micro. With the first micro computer coming to the market it seemed that everythingjust, as a kind of puzzle, clicked together. Lack of knowledge was suppleted in a hurricane kind of speed bycomputer clubs that grew like mushrooms. These clubs published newsletters that spread the word.No software was in sight for these machines by far. But the micro will conquer the world by storm and changethe way we live and deal with our work totally within two decades. A new world has opened up and withoutthem life is unthinkable as it is.”

This storm conquering the world was initiated by Apple II, the “spread of the word” and the success of themicrocomputer widened the rank of non-expert users of the new technology. By the end of this period thepersonal computer represented not only a technological challenge, it suddenly changed into a tool ofentertainment (the first computer games, programmed originally for consoles and mainframes, spreadprobably faster than any other type of software), of work (at the end of the 1970s the first commercial officesoftware appeared) and of education. It was exactly these users, who viewed the computer as a tool rather than

a goal, that took over the initiative in the next period.

The Third Period The beginning of the third period was characterized by a significant transformation at all the levels of earlycyberculture (i.e. at the level of groups, discourse and practices and narratives), a shift that was related to theaccelerated spread of microcomputers (in North America and Western Europe gradually becoming an officetool and a resource of home-entertainment) and to the development of public computer networks. This periodwitnessed the formation of the cyberpunk literary movement which became the first powerful loudspeaker ofearly cyberculture leading to its increasing popularity.At the end of the previous period, cyberculture started to evolve from a narrow set of expert communities to awide, diversified subculture of computer users. Besides the next generation of gradually vilified and later evencriminalized hackers in the third period we find subcultures of computer game players, the first virtualcommunities, and in connection with cyberpunk the so called digital avant-garde that articulated theaspirations and goals of cyberculture. All these groups were metaphorically as well as literally connected bythe computer. The computer as a technological novelty at first penetrated universities, where the culturalfoundations of cyberculture were enriched by many influences.The most significant of these inspirations were literary and film science fiction (cyberculture overlapped, asmentioned above, with American fandom), some fragments of the past hippie counterculture and thesubsequent punk counterculture, and theoretical influences from the field of social theory of the 1960s and the

1970s.[xii] These inspirations and influences were creatively melted into the language of cyberpunk, into itsview of the social reality and its powerful anticipatory vision. Cyberpunk, a literary movement named afterBruce Bethke’s short story, invigorated by William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and brought to life byBruce Sterling, developed themes of the New Wave of SF and can be characterized by a critical, dystopianfuturism, on the one hand and by an adoration of technology and its use for individual subversive purposes, onthe other. A discursive bricollage and a re-writing of symbolic inputs at the literary level resulted incyberpunk’s peculiar cybercultural ethics, esthetics and political orientation. Thus, cyberpunk stressed theindependence of cybercultural discourses and narratives and implied that their specific character is above alldetermined by the structure of cybercultural themes. Cyberpunk writers and even their epigons can be seen ascultural spokesmen of cyberculture, who, in their fiction, formulated the foundations of an exploration of the

rapidly technologizing world.[xiii] The colorful language of cyberpunk fiction formed the background for thesocial theory of the new media and of popcultural and media representations of cyberculture.Hackers, who formed the core of cyberculture until the invention of the microcomputer, gradually becameseparate from a “users’ cyberculture.” Hackers’ subculters became increasingly younger (hacking becamemore attractive for teenagers due to cyberpunk and the influence of very popular movies, WarGames from1983, for instance), also the focus of their activities changed as a consequence of the industrialization ofcomputer production, enforcement of copyright regulations and creation of public computer networks and alsounder the influence of cyberpunk. The hacker, not only as inspired by Neuromancer, became a “data cowboy”and cyberspace (in a Barlow’s words embodied by contemporaneous networks) became his field of self-realization. The hackers’ challenge was, of course, also transformed, some new forms of hacking appeared,including software cracking or unauthorized entry into computer systems and networks. This changecontributed significantly to a shift in the “myth” of the hacker. The word gained its current, negativelyconnoted meaning and the hacker’s identity became an identity of resistance. Even in the eyes of the

preceding generations of hackers these new hackers were synonymous with “‘computer criminals,’ ‘vandals,’‘crackers,’ ‘miscreants’ or in a purely generational swipe, ‘juvenile delinquents’,” as Steve Mizrach (href 1)claims. They explicitly follow the same ethics as the ‘old hackers’, but they were labelled and the time ofostracization and stigmatization arrived. The change of context transformed the evaluation of similarlymotivated action – what was an act of a “programmer’s heroism” in the 1960s, seemed to be almost (ordefinitely) a crime in the 1980s.

The Fourth Period The final, and for a variety of reasons key, fourth period of early cyberculture, is the period of definitivefading of cyberculture into the majority society. It is the period when cyberculture is subjected tonormalization, is tamed by the language of social sciences and politicized and its culturally provocative edgesare taken off. This period begins at the end of the 1980s and ends in about the middle of the 1990s. However,there is no point in defining the exact “end” of this period, because it could be defined by any of the keyevents or processes that signalized the massive and final shift of cyberculture to the social and culturalmainstream.The first of them was the continuing spread of computer technology and networks. The growing acceptabilityof the technology and the metamorphosis of the computer to a new and specific type of a widely usedmedium were enabled by a unification of hardware and software standards, by (a relative) reduction in prices

and increase in the capacity of the technology, and by making the language of new media[xiv] moreaccessible. With transition to the Graphical User Interface (GUI) – “windows,” the computer-user interfacesbecame easier to understand. The same happened to networks when the World Wide Web, currently the mostknown Internet service based on HTML, was introduced. The digital media overcame the image of anexpensive toy and a specific office tool and at last became commonly accepted and easy to use in everydaylife. A stigma of exclusivity and curiosity that surrounded the computer user disappeared without a trace.The “Nietzschean” claim of some cyberpunk writers and critics, that “cyberpunk is dead,” was another

indication of the transformation of early cyberculture. This bon mot (currently still discussed)[xv] appearedseemingly paradoxically at the beginning of the 1990s when cyberpunk (cybercultural) topics conquered themainstream, cyberpunk writers became celebrities and computer technology “got to the streets”. However, thefact that the raw literary matter of cyberpunk and the originality of its style and visions were lost andtranslated into the schematizing language of the cultural industry (see Shiner 2001, Maddox 1992) combinedwith the fact that cyberpunk prophecies regarding a computerized world were getting fulfilled, questioned theviability of the genre. Punk could define itself in contradiction to the mainstream and die at the moment ofmelting into it, and it is exactly what happened.The above mentioned digital avant-garde that elaborated the themes established by cyberpunk and wascharacteristically techno-optimistic, adopted the role of a cybercultural platform. Self-appointed prophets,artists and writers, academics and technologists conceived of themselves as a spear of cyberculture. Thestrongest voice of the avant-garde was (in G. Freyermuth’s words “stylistically most influential”) Mondo 2000magazine, published from 1989 by R. U. Sirius linked to the older hackers’ zin High Frontiers (in 1987renamed Reality Hackers). Although Mondo 2000 can be seen as one of the “culprits” of the death ofcyberpunk, cyberpunk writers, like Gibson and Sterling, contributed to it, just like to the later Wired. Mondo2000 was:

“...a cyberpunk upbeat underground paper from San Francisco. The full color magazine was filled withtechnofashion, drug phantasies, a parade of the latest gadgets, DIY video tips, science fiction, with an occasional

theory essay. In retrospect we can say that _Mondo_ paved the way for Wired (starting in 1993), which wasmore successful in packaging and neutralizing the early, pre-WWW, cybercultures of the US West Coast”(Lovink 1999).

The release of Wired (the above quoted Geert Lovink does not think of it highly) could be seen as the next ofthe neuralgic points of the upcoming end of early cyberculture. Wired, with its high circulation rate,transformed the lifestyle of hackers’ subculture into an object of popcultural adoration and marketcommodification. At the same time Wired became the most known narrator of cybercultural “stories” and aplatform for justifying cybercultural ideas and new technology.Famous representatives of the digital avant-garde, computer industry, technological journalism and academicresearch (the already mentioned digerati) were among those who published in Wired. Their publishingactivities (mostly balancing on the edge of academic exploration and popularization) significantly influencedthe acceptability of cybercultural issues. These writings, which focused on cyberculture, but aspired to reacha wider circle, represent another turning point in the transformation of early cyberculture and they include, forexample, Rushkoff’s Cyberia (1994, in Czech 2000), Negroponte’s Being Digital (1995, in Czech 2001),Leary’s Chaos and Cyberculture (1994, in Czech 1997), Rheingold’s Virtual Community (1993) and Sterling’sHackers Crackdown (1992).The academic exploration and reflection of cybercultural phenomena gradually developed from the mid 1980sand was one of the defining elements of cybercultural discourses and an important determinant shapingcentral cybercultural themes and narratives (regardless of whether the academic influence came from“outside” and was adopted, or whether the authors of these theoretical writings identified themselves with anycybercultural groups). In this sense, cyberculture had a strongly self-reflexive nature. One of the very first,pioneering, non-fiction writings that helped to establish cyberculture as a phenomenon worthy of the attentionof the social sciences was Donna Harraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, published in The Socialist Review in 1985.[xvi] For a number of writers and theorists[xvii] within various paradigms concerned with a wide range ofthemes, Harraway’s work, dealing with embodiment and gender, formed a starting point. This early reflectionhad a distinctly anticipatory and, as Kevin Robins points out, mythologizing character. It turned largely to thefuture, with a more or less manifest reference to cyberpunk, and formulated a vision of possible variations ontechnologically moderated social change. In contrast to cyberpunk, it mostly lacked the dystopian elements

and offered more of an optimistic or utopian view of future events.[xviii] This reflection gradually becamecritical, probably in reaction to the increasing politicization of cybercultural topics and the progressive, yetinevitable, normalization of cyberspace (connected with outlawing some hackers’ groups, see below). Typicalrepresentatives of this early critical camp are Arthur Kroker and Michael Weinstein with their often quotedData Trash – The Theory of the Virtual Class (1993). They do not give up an anticipative attitude, but at thesame time critically explore the trends of capitalization and power structuration of cyberspace, they warnagainst the possibilities of ideological misuse of the seductively optimistic cybercultural rhetoric.Kroker and Weinstein react to the fact that at the beginning of the 1990s in the U.S. new technologies becamepart of the public and political agenda. Vice-president Al Gore introduced the project of the nationalinformation infrastructure, known as the Information Highway project (computer network technologies shouldbecome a powerful tool in the global spread of democracy, see Gore 1994). The narrative of the positiverelation between new technology and democracy forms, since the 1980s, one of the most significant streams

of cybercultural narratives (see the next section) and made the cybercultural vision politically attractive.[xix]

Gore explored older cybercultural arguments and narrative figures when proclaiming the support oftechnological literacy a national interest. The issue of electronic democracy (or teledemocracy) still resonated

in the late 1990s in Clinton’s project of a “presidential town hall meeting” (Dahlberg 2001: 159). Probably inrelation to the growing power of the computer industry and the increasing role of the economic-informationflows the novel theme of a “new economy” emerged. The concept of new economy was stronger than that ofnew democracy, if only for the presumption that the computer industry expanding over one or two decadescould ignite a new economic boom and a new economic order as such.Nevertheless, the politicalization of the narratives of early cyberculture (which was the next significant proofof the terminal shift of early cyberculture) was preceded by the legal normalization of the cultural and socialfield of the cyberculture. It was symbolized by the growing ostracization (see Meyer 1989: 17-20) andfollowing massive criminalization of groups of American hackers groups between the years 1989 and 1991when certain hackers’ activities were definitely subjected to normative power, evaluated as dangerous and

manifestly punished.[xx] This important conflict between the law and some cybercultural activities, describedin detail, for example by Bruce Sterling (Hackers Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier,1992) and John P. Barlow (Crime and Puzzlement, 1990), was already implicit at the moment of theemergence of phone phreaking. It gained clear contours in the mid 1980s when some hackers carried outnetwork attacks on the servers of important national institutions or influential corporations, such activitiesattracted the attention of the United States Secret Service and led to the establishment of the Computer Fraudand Abuse Task Force. After two years of monitoring suspect hackers tens of them were raided all over theU.S. and a series of trials followed.

Cybercultural Narratives The narratives of early cyberculture, emerging from cybercultural discourse and created and developed bymembers of cybercultural groups, equipped the arising world of new technology with meaning. They createdand embedded the cultural identity of the technology, articulated its attributes and thus created expectationsrelated to the technology. The narratives blended original cybercultural topics with a wide range of influencesand inspirations (which I have mentioned already or which I will mention below) which they adaptedaccording to the narratives’ own internal logic. Cybercultural narratives are found in a rather substantialassemblage of texts ranging from fiction and popular journalism to scholarly writings. The foundations ofcybercultural narratives originate in the first period of early cyberculture and are closely related to the ethos ofacademic hackers of the 1960s. However, the narratives began to crystallize fully in the third period, after theemergence of syncretizing cyberpunk, and they matured at its very end with the digerati’s activities and theshift of early academic reflection to criticism.The significance of cybercultural narratives is closely related to their mythologizing nature. They establish theworld of the new technology, they name the forces and principles that form this world and the narrativesthemselves become its archetypal patterns. They are more than a simple explanation, they constitute, support,

and stabilize.[xxi]

An image of the world of the new technology evident in the narratives marks implicit as well as explicitreferences to the “natural” attributes of ICTs – these attributes are taken for granted, they play the role ofnarrative axioms. However, they are a cultural (symbolic) construct as it is cyberculture itself that createsthem and attributes them to technology. Thus rather than a relevant account of technology cyberculturalnarratives are an account of cyberculture and cybercultural notions of the cultural, social and politicalpotential of this technology. This fact, however, does not decrease their value, rather the opposite.Moreover, the fact that the narratives, due to their mythological nature, tend to naturalize the mentioned

attributes provides them with significant ideological power. Their ideological potential made them attractiveenough as well as acceptable for the wider society and they became part of the topography of power.Cybercultural narratives are interesting not only because with their help we can detect the image of thetechnology at the time of its emergence and development, but also due to the obvious assumption that theyform a part of what we can call ICTs ideology – an ideology that shaped the information policies of westernstates as well as the marketing and persuasive strategies of the computer industry.Cybercultural narratives appear to be a bundle of mutually overlapping themes and streams that are difficult tosystematize. However, a closer look reveals the fact that cybercultural texts share a detectable structure ofbasic themes which involve what we can term the narrative logic of cyberculture. For this reason, I distinguishthe core of cybercultural narratives (i.e. the shared core narrative structure) and themes of cyberculturalnarratives derived from the core (turning to particular levels of social and cultural reality and linking thenarratives to various paradigms and topics such as embodiment, community, public sphere and democracy,textuality, etc.). While the themes of cybercultural narratives that explore the potential of the narrative coreresist a simple and straightforward systematization, the relatively consistent core that in my approach playsthe role of the key to cyberculture can be subjected to, and indeed almost offers itself for, a critical analysis. The Core of Cybercultural Narratives Understandably, it is technologies, advanced information and communication technologies, based on digitalcoding of information that stand at the centre of cybercultural narratives. Cyberculture links thesetechnologies to a number of fundamental themes within which technologies are attributed characteristics thatshape cybercultural narratives. Individual topics within the themes are mutually interrelated and together theyconstitute the core of cybercultural narratives. I identify the themes as follows:

· Technology as agent of change· Technology and freedom/power/empowerment· Technology and the formation of the new frontier· Technology and authenticity

I begin with the first two themes – technology as agent of change and the relation of technology and freedom,power and empowerment. Cybercultural narratives are characterized by technological determinism related to an assumption thatinformation and communication technologies are agents of change – of a paradigmatic as well as “factual”change, of change in every context covered by cybercultural narratives, of social, cultural, economic evenpolitical change, of change occurring at the levels of textuality, the individual, group and even themacrosystem. The anticipation of the form or nature of this change directs the narratives towards the future,cybercultural narratives do not reflect the change, they announce it.The early academic reflection of cyberculture had its exploratory foundations in relation to this theme inMarshall McLuhan’s argument that technology is the cultural extension of the human body and that thecharacter of technology determines the character of the social and cultural contexts and each technologicalinnovation necessarily leads to their change. The relationship of technology, power and the subject, developed within the second theme (technology and

freedom, power and empowerment), is understood in two contradictory ways thus dividing the authorsaccording to their evaluation of the benefits of technology into techno-optimists (technotopists or techno-utopists) and techno-pessimists (techno-dystopists).The optimistic attitude regarding this theme is based on the presumption that advanced information andcommunication technologies will be agents of empowerment, of strengthening individual freedom andweakening of centralized forms of power. The emancipatory potential of technology is determined by itsdecentralized/decentralizing character that weakens hierarchical and centralized power structures and also byits ability to strengthen and support the creative, communicative and cognitive abilities of the individual.The pessimistic attitude, on the contrary, stresses the presumption that advanced information andcommunication technologies strengthen the mechanisms of control and power and will thus lead to thecreation of a new order. The oppressive potential of technology lies in its ability to create new tools of controland to develop the already existing ones thus strengthening the position of power elites.These contradictory versions of the narrative of technology, the subject and power exist next to each other in adialectical relationship in cybercultural narratives and they do not necessarily rule each other out. This isclearly demonstrated, for example, in cyberpunk prose in which the two variants co-exist and in which theircontradictory character, their clash, plays the role of one of the symbolic driving forces of the genre. After all,critical theory, characterized by a similar contradiction between “utopian vision” and “pessimistic reflection,”served cyberculture as an inspiration in terms of arguments.The origin of the first two themes, as already mentioned in the introduction to this section, is closely related tothe ethos of the university hackers of the 1960s which formed the basis of the hackers’ code whose variousvariants (these often differ from each other only in slight detail) are still to be found on the Internet. Beforeturning to the other two themes, let me devote some space to the legacy of these first hackers at which I haveso far only hinted despite its fundamental position within cyberculture.Steven Levy formulated the hacker ethos in his retrospective Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution(1984, Chapter 2), summarizing the beginnings of hacker culture in the following points:

· Access to computers – and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works –should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the hands-on imperative!

· All information should be free.· Mistrust authority – promote decentralization.· Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.· You can create art and beauty on a computer.· Computer can change your life for the better.· Like Aladdin’s lamp, you could get it to do your bidding.

This ethos was born at the end of the 1950s and early 1960s in the relatively authoritative environment of thetechnological institute within a community of young programmers who were discovering the charm ofmainframes, the intellectual attraction of computer technology so far basically hidden from the public’s view.At the time, access to computers was significantly limited and subjected to educational and research purposes,the majority of programmes were literally made on paper and personal contact with a computer and personalexperience of programming were worth a fortune. This is where cybercultural distrust of authority, longing foremancipation and craving for unlimited contact with technology is born.

In the 1980s it was the by then inevitable, more sharply formulated cyberpunk elements[xxii] that enrichedthis code and shifted its meaning in a similar way as they changed the myth of the hacker itself. Already thepre-cyberpunk ethos (as described by Levy) stressed those characteristic themes and values that permeated allof cyberculture, namely personal autonomy and personal development, belief in the transformative potentialof the new technology (computers) and a clear stance against the social and ethical mainstream. This ethos

also brought with itself an appeal for the quality of change brought about by new technology.Cyberculture further enriched the message of this code by the issues of cultural colonization and therelativization of the authenticity of experience and insights, these issues were reflected in two key themes(technology and the formation of the new frontier and technology and authenticity).Cybercultural narratives understand technology as a tool for the creation of a new cultural space, ahyperreal, symbolic space emerging as a consequence of the technological implosion of the human world, aspace that is free from the power of formal organizations, a space that lies outside normalization, a pioneeringspace, in a word cyberspace.In relation to cyberspace cybercultural narratives talk about the new frontier, a new boundary, referring to thelogic of the American tradition of “conquering the West”. In the words of Gundolf Freyermuth (1997) thephysical frontier disappeared the moment America reached the Pacific and it was cyberspace that was,according to the digital underground of the 1980s, to become one of the new forms of the cultural frontiers, a

challenge of non-colonized space and creative chaos.[xxiii] The mythology of the frontier incorporates thechallenge of new cultural expansion and colonization that provides space for the fulfilment of the optimisticproject of the subject’s empowerment and the reaching of “true” freedom, at the same time, it is marked by the

awareness of the temporary nature of such a space, the limits of its seclusion from the “real world”.[xxiv]

Thus the “twofold nature of expectation” regarding power, characteristic for the previous theme, includingutopia as well as dystopia is demonstrated in it.The fourth theme introduces the topic of technology as a source of relativization of the authenticity of livedexperience. The most important concern of this dichotomically structured theme is the crisis of authenticity,uncertainty that concerns the “truthfulness” or “genuineness” of technologically mediated interaction andexperience and the possible consequences of inauthenticity brought about by technology.On the one hand, these cybercultural narratives develop Jean Baudrillard’s thesis on simulacra and thesimulated, hyperreal nature of mediated reality and the disappearing distinction between authentic andinauthentic and on the other, the message of the New Wave of SF writer Philip K. Dick who describes theschizophrenic world of uncertain reality, discipline and manipulation of memories, induced by technology,

drugs and mental illness.[xxv] These two sources of inspiration introduce a pessimistic overtone to thediscussion, technologically mediated experience and insight is inauthentic, technology distances us from theauthenticity of experience and deprives us of our ability to distinguish and experience authenticity. The worldof inauthentic experience, the world of simulation, can, moreover, lead to manipulation. It is within thiscontext that the negative connotations of virtual as false, artificial and unreal emerge.Cybercultural narratives, however, supplement this attitude by an “optimistic twist”. The distance form realityat the same time, in line with the message of the previous theme, means a distance from the “real world”, fromits norms and structures. A space created by technology does not necessarily have to be a space open only tosimulation and manipulation, it can equally be open to creative interface which enables self-fulfilment in a“really achievable” mode. Nostalgia for authenticity is unacceptable as it is nothing more than a nostalgia forcommitments of the “world of flesh” that is the “physical,” non-virtual world.

Themes of cybercultural narratives From the core of cybercultural narratives a wide range of discursive events evolve, within which all the fourkey themes are applied to a variety of concrete topics which were reflected upon in early cyberculture. As itwas already stated in the vast body of texts we can detect more or less clear themes which overlap and which

enrich the language and concepts of cyberculture by those of the arts and social sciences. There is doubtlessno significant value in a precise systematization of these themes, yet leaving aside purely technological ones,it is possible to at least draw attention to the most important ones, which mark the most intense discussions,most of which survived till today. These are themes originating from the discourses of literary studies, arts,aesthetics and social sciences.

The subject of hypertext, a new form of textuality that is enabled by digital technology,[xxvi] stems from thetraditions of critical theory, literary studies and linguistics, above all from their structuralist and post-structuralist branches.The themes dealing with new technologies as a tool of artistic creation and performance, the relationshipbetween new media and art – as a change of visual culture enhanced by digitalization, visual aesthetics andthe language of the new media, virtual reality and simulation (not as understood by Baudrillard in this case) –

are to some extent linked to the topic of hypertext.[xxvii]

Other themes are connected with the discourses of the social sciences, they include cybercultural narratives onthe symbolic and physical changes of the body, gender and personal identity as enhanced by technology (thestory of the cyborg, one of the most influential cybercultural myths, resonates strongly in this respect), on theinvigoration of community (symbolized by the birth of the virtual community, virtual agora), on cyberspace asa space of subversion, on the possibility of creating a strong Habermasian public sphere and on technology asa tool for the strengthening and spread of democracy, on future or developing forms of community (whichtake the shape of dark cyberpunk visions as well as considerably more optimistic ones on information ornetwork society and promises of entering the information age), on the new global economic order and the neweconomy (promising the lasting solution of the deepening economic recession that affects the West alreadysince the 1970s).The texts that carry the themes of cybercultural narratives can be understood as the basis of the ideology ofnew media, i.e. the rhetoric of information policy, as well as the theory of new media, i.e. the reflection ofadvanced information and communication technologies. The early, cybercultural, shape of the reflection thatgrew out of the ideological, mythological cybercultural narrative core marks the birth of ideology as well as ofcritical reflection. It did not distinguish the project from the reflection, the vision from its actual state, as Ihave demonstrated in Pierre Lévy’s case, rather, in many aspects it became a self-fulfilling prophecy and animportant constitutive force for the world of new technologies. Thus Geertz’s words on ideology areunquestionably valid in the case of early cybercultural narratives:

“Whatever else ideologies may be – projections of unacknowledged fears, disguises for ulterior motives, phaticexpressions of group solidarity – they are, most distinctively, maps of problematic social reality and matrices forthe creation of collective conscience” (Geertz 1993: 220).

The narratives of early cyberculture played a significant role in the shaping of the generally accepted identityof new technologies, the formation of their social dimensions and the articulation of their political value. Acritical reflection of advanced information and communication technologies must, nonetheless, distinguishideological or ideologizing (mythological or mythologizing) mechanisms that stand at the centre ofcybercultural knowledge and must distinguish and name the ways in which these mechanisms are imprintedinto political discourses and projects but certainly also into texts that result from critical reflection.

Conclusion I understand cyberculture, within the conceptual framework that I have outlined in this essay, as a wide social

and cultural movement that is closely linked to advanced information and communication technologies, theiremergence and development and their cultural colonization. Previous concepts of cyberculture concentratedonly on certain aspects of what I consider constitutive elements of cybercultural phenomena and they do notcover these in sufficient detail. Moreover, they glossed over one of the most remarkable aspects ofcyberculture, namely its contribution to the emergence of the mythology or ideology of advanced informationand communication technologies. I make a distinction between early and contemporary cyberculture. Earlycyberculture, dating from the beginning of the 1960s to the first half of the 1990s, developed outside thecultural and social mainstream (or it developed in a kind of dialectical relationship with them) and it is exactlythis early cyberculture that initiated the signification of the world of advanced information andcommunication technologies.Although I do not deal with contemporary cyberculture in more detail due to its marked difference from earlycyberculture, I understand it as the further developed inheritance of marginal subcultures’ symbolic andcultural practices linked to new media. In this text I only refer to contemporary cyberculture as a furtherpossible and certainly inspiring subject of research that cannot be satisfactorily handled without an explorationof early cyberculture.Early cyberculture, which I understand as a diversified cluster of social groups and their discourses andcultural practices, can best be characterized in my opinion with the help of cybercultural narratives, i.e.accounts of the nature of advanced information and communication technologies that emerge within itsframework. Although these narratives cover a wide range of topics they have an identifiable core that ascribescertain typical characteristics to technology. They describe it as an agent of social and cultural change, as ameans of empowerment but also as the tool of new forms of power, they link it with the emergence of a newcultural space of temporary freedom and a catalyst of change in relation to the authenticity of livedexperience.This essay leads to two important conclusions that can be generalized. However, due to the speculative natureof my approach I consider it appropriate to formulate the conclusions as hypotheses which should besubjected to further research. The hypotheses can be formulated as follows:

· Themes that I describe as the core of cybercultural narratives are common for all narratives originatingfrom early cyberculture and they were reflected in expectations connected with the supposedcharacteristics of advanced information and communication technologies.

· Values and expectations connected with cyberculture and advanced information and communicationtechnologies were adopted by the majority society and became part and parcel of everyday politicaland economic ideology of “information technologies” and currently they play an important role in thehierarchization of the world of new technologies.

A confirmation of these hypotheses could, I believe, be considered a final “settling of accounts” with thesubcultural roots of the narrative of new technologies and a significant step towards their critical reflection.

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Sterling, Bruce. 1992-a. The Hackers Crackdown: Law and Order on the Electronic Frontier. Bantam.WWW: http://www.well.com:70/1/Publications/authors/Sterling/hcSerling, Bruce. 1991. “Cyberpunk in the Nineties.” Interzone, June 1991. WWW:http://lib.ru/STERLINGB/interzone.txtSobchack, Vivian. 1996. „Democratic Franchise and the Electronic Frontier.“ Pp. 77-89 in Cyberfutures:Culture and Politics on the Information Superhihgway. Ed. by Sardar, Ziauddin; Ravetz, Jerome R. London:Pluto Press.THOCP – The History of Computing Project. 2002. WWW: http://www.thocp.orgWilliams, Raymond. 1974. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London: Fontana Press.Zbiejczuk, Adam. 2003. Net Art. (Thesis.) Brno: FSS MU. Non-dated Internet Resources:Href 1: Mizrach, Steve. „Old Hackers, New Hackers: What's the Difference?“ The Cyberpunk Project.WWW: http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/old_and_new_hackers.html [xxviii] This essay is a part of author’s MA thesis (Department of Media Studies and Journalism, Faculty ofSocial Studies, Masaryk University, the Czech Republic). © 2003-2004, Jakub Macek

[i] ICTs – Information and Communication Technologies;also new technologies, digital technologies, informationtechnologies or advanced technologies.

[ii] See below.

[iii] The term social formation (respectively socio-cultural formation) originally refers to Marx’s concept ofsocio-economic formation, but its meaning is different.Hakken (1999: 45) defines social formation as the“abstraction of preference in contemporary socialthought with which we refer to social entities. This termdoes not give unwarranted priority to any one level, asis the case, for example, in standard uses of the term‘society’, which privilege the national level. From a‘social formation’ perspective, the basic questions arehow social entities are reproduced from one period tothe next, whether more or less the same, modifiedsomewhat, or fundamentally different.”[iv] WWW portal on hackers, cyberpunk and relatedissues. See http://project.cyberpunk.ru/.

[v] Future Culture Manifesto – MANIPHEST DESTIN-E: WHAT *IS* FUTURECULTURE? – A Manifesto onthe Here-and-Now Technocultural [R]evolution. Seehttp://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/future_culture_manifesto.html.

[vi] Digerati – abbreviation for Digital Literati, in the mid 1990s describing the digital elite, the group offamous and powerful academics, writers and IT businessmen, who promoted and advocated new

technologies.

[vii] The term cyberspace was coined by the Americanwriter William Gibson at the beginning of the 1980s.Gibson described it as a shared data hallucinationvisualized as an imaginary space made up of computerprocessed data, accessible to the users' mind only.Gibson's metaphorical vision became a powerfulinspiration for contemporary OS interface developers aswell as for other cyberpunk writers. The term becameestablished in the 1980s as an integral part of cybercultural discourses and wasconsequently adopted by the language ofnew media theory. In relation to existing computernetworks the term was first used probably by J. P.Barlow, therefore a specific subterm 'Barlowiancyberspace' - in contrast with the original Gibsoniannotion - was coined. Barlow basically understands theconcept as any deteritorialized symbolic stage oftechnologically mediated communication where thecomplexity of the experience depends solely on thecomplexity of the technology.[viii] There are many different terms for ICTs social andcultural research and theory such as c-theory or cyber-theory, new media studies/theory/research,cyberculture studies/theory/research, cyberspacestudies/theory/research, AI research etc.

[ix] Science Fiction Fandom is an organized subculture of fans of science fiction, fantasy and horrorliterature, movies, media and games.

[x] A unique source that allows entry into hackers’ jargon and discourses is the document Jargon File4.2.0 administered by Arjan de Mes, University of Amsterdam. This database of argots was created in1975 and covers over 30 years of development of hackers’ subcultures. See WWW:http://www.science.uva.nl/~mes/jargon

[xi] These terms lacked the negative connotation ofyouth’s data vandalism in this period, of course. A hackwas the act of creative rendering of a problem; a hackerwas a talented person interested in understanding andsolving these (mostly) technical problems. For a moredetailed explanation of the origins of the terms see Levy1984 (Chapter 1).[xii] Namely Foucault’s approach to the relation ofembodiment and power; McLuhan’s understanding oftechnology as a transformative cultural extension;Baudrillard’s simulative nature of modern society; Bell’svision of the information society; Toffler’s futurology;Tourain’s thesis on new movements and on the relatedparticularization of postmodern society; Deleuze’s andGuattari’s notes on the topography of new culturalspaces striated by power etc.

[xiii] Jolana Navrátilová gives a detailed exploration of cyberpunk as a specific form of social theory inher thesis (1998).

[xiv] The language of the new media is Manovich’s “umbrella term to refer to a number of variousconventions used by designers of new media objects to organize data and structure user’s experience”

(Manovich 2001: 34).

[xv] For more on this discussion, arguments and deathof cyberpunk see Shiner 2001, Maddox 1992, Sterling1991.[xvi] Harraway adopted the cybernetic concept of thecyborg, developed it (in quite an ironic manner) andoutlined it as a form of personal policy of technologicallytransformed embodiment.

[xvii] As examples of the most famous ones we can name Hakim Bey, Michael Heim, David Holmes,Mike Featherstone, Douglas Kellner, Peter Lunenfeld, Lev Manovich, Mark Poster, Howard Rheingold etc.

[xviii] “...[A]nalytical texts from our era are fully aware of the significance of computer’s takeover ofculture yet, by and large, mostly contain speculations about the future rather than a record and theoryof the present,” Lev Manovich (2001: 33) writes in relation to the nature of the cybercultural reflection.

[xix] The major frameworks within the discussion ondemocracy and new technologies can be found inLincoln Dahlberg‘s Democracy via cyberspace: Mappingthe rhetorics and practices of three prominent camps(2001).[xx] The clash of hackers with state authorities waspreceded by the passing of the Computer Fraud andAbuse Act and Electronic Communications Privacy Act in1986. (See Sterling 1992-a.)

[xxi] Based on Dalibor Papoušek’s lecture on the comparative study of religion (as recorded by JanaPetřicová).

[xxii] As is shown, for example by Gareth Branwyn, contributor to the magazine Mondo 2000, whoenlarges Steven Levy’s code by new rules: Do It Yourself, Fight the power, Feed noise back to thesystem and Surf on the edge. (As quoted in Sobchak 1996: 84-85.)

[xxiii] In this context Hakim Bey (1991) developed theconcept of temporary autonomous zones, emerging anddisappearing physical and symbolic alternative spaces of“guerilla culture” that position themselves in oppositionto the State. Bey identifies the modern roots of thesetemporary autonomous zones with the beginning ofsettlement of the U.S.[xxiv] The cybercultural story of the frontier ischaracterized by a sharp, extreme relationship to “RealLife” or “Real World”. The roots of this relationship can bedetected already with the first generation of hackers whoclaimed that “in conversation talking of someone who hasentered the Real World is not unlike speaking of adeceased person.” (Jargon File 4.2.0, WWW:http://www.science.uva.nl/~mes/jargon/r/realworld.html).The cyberculture of the 1980s and the 1990sdistinguished between the “Virtual Life” with positiveconnotations that described social relationships formed incyberspace and the “Real Life” with negative connotationsthat described the social interactions in the world of theflesh, in physical space.

[xxv] Some of Dick’s books and especially their film adaptations (in particular Blade Runner directed byRidley Scott, 1982, 1993 and Total Recall directed by Paul Verhoeven, 1990) became a key componentof the cybercultural canon and icons of discussion on the relationship of authenticity, realness andtechnology. The already mentioned Alison Landsberg (1996) is the author of an interesting essay“Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner” that deals with prosthetic (i.e. mediated with thehelp of media or technology) memory based on the film adaptation of Dick’s texts and confronting themwith J. Baudrillard’s and other postmodern theoreticians’ theses (published in the edited volumeCyberspace/Cyberpbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment).[xxvi] Technology enabled the change of literary, physically stored texts into a virtual textual mediumthat is made up of lexis (blocks of texts and symbolic objects) that can be (and is by the reader)mutually interconnected and which erase the difference between the reader and the writer. In the Czechcontext it is Z. Kobíková (2003-b) who provides a detailed account of hypertext, its theory and currentuse by internet media in “Hypertext a jeho podoby v online médiích”. For more on hypertext see alsoBolter (2001), Bolter and Grusin (1997), Koskimaa (2000), Landow (1997, 1998), Lister et al. (2003).

[xxvii] In the Czech context the topic of new media andart is dealt with, for example, by F. Kůst (2003-b) in hisstudy “Estetické strategie nových médií,” SvětlanaHejsková in her MA thesis “Internet jako umělecképrostředí (nejen) pro ženy: net art a ženy-tvůrkyně,ženy-objekty” and A. Zbiejczuk (2003) “NetArt”. Formore on this topic see also Koskimaa (2000), Lister etal. (2003), Lunenfeld (1999), Manovich (1999, 2001,2002).