Some Aspects of California Cyberpunk

Abstract

This paper explores the rise and fall of Cyberpunk influences in California’s Silicon Valley and San Francisco Bay area circa 1988–93, in prevalent technologies, industry, by artists and in enthusiastic magazines thriving there. Attentive to the Cyberpunk novelists, an animating spirituality of the time also looks to Timothy Leary and Marshall McLuhan.

Keywords

• cyberpunk
• YLEM artists using science and technology
• SCAN
• virtual reality
• HyperCard
• MONDO 2000
• Timothy Leary
• bOING bOING
• Marshall McLuhan