A Cyberpunk Manifesto
by Christian As. Kirtchev
We are the ELECTRONIC MINDS, a group of free-minded rebels. Cyberpunks.
We live in Cyberspace, we are everywhere, we know no boundaries.
This is our manifest. The Cyberpunks' manifest.
I. Cyberpunk
1/ We are those, the Different. Technological rats, swimming in the ocean of
information.
2/ We are the retiring, little kid at school, sitting at the last desk, in
the corner of the class room. 3/ We are the teenager everybody considers
strange 4/ We are the student hacking computer systems, exploring the depth
of his reach. 5/ We are the grown-up in the park, sitting on a bench, laptop
on his knees, programming the last virtual reality. 6/ Ours is the garage,
stuffed with electronics. The soldering iron in the corner of the desk and
the nearby disassembled radio- they are also ours. Ours is the cellar with
computers, buzzing printers and beeping modems. 7/ We are those that see
reality in a different way. Our point of view shows more than ordinary
people can see. They see only what is outside, but we see what is inside.
That's what we are - realists with the glasses of dreamers. 8/ We are those
strange people, almost unknown to the neighborhood. People, indulged in
their own thoughts, sitting day after day before the computer, ransacking
the net for something. We are not often out of home, just from time to time,
only to go to the nearby radio shack, or to the usual bar to meet some of
the few friends we have, or to meet a client, or to the backstreet
druggist... or just for a little walk. 9/ We do not have many friends, only
a few with whom we go to parties. Everybody else we know we know on the net.
Our real friends are there, on the other side of the line. We know them from
our favorite IRC channel, from the News-Groups, from the systems we
hang-around: 10/ We are those who don't give a shit about what people think
about us, we don't care what we look like or what people talk about us in
our absence. 11/ The majority of us likes to live in hiding, being unknown
to everybody except those few we must inevitably contact with. 12/ Others
love publicity, they love fame. They are all known in the underground world.
Their names are often heard there.
But we are all united by one thing - we are Cyberpunks.
13/ Society does not understand us, we are "weird" and "crazy" people in the
eyes of the ordinary people who live far from information and free ideas.
Society denies our way of thinking - a society, living, thinking and
breathing in one and only one way - a clichc. 14/ They deny us for we think
like free people, and free thinking is forbidden. 15/ The Cyberpunk has
outer appearance, he is no motion. Cyberpunks are people, starting from the
ordinary and known to nobody person, to the artist-technomaniac, to the
musician, playing electronic music, to the superficial scholar. 16/ The
Cyberpunk is no literature genre anymore, not even an ordinary subculture.
The Cyberpunk is a stand-alone new culture, offspring of the new age. A
culture that unites our common interests and views. We are a unit. We are
Cyberpunks.
II. Society
1/ The Society which surrounds us is clogged with concervacy pulling
everything and everybody to itself, while it sinks slowly in the quicksands
of time. 2/ However doggedly some refuse to believe it, it is obvious that
we live in a sick society. The so called reforms which our governments so
adeptly use to boast, are nothing else but a little step forward, when a
whole jump can be done. 3/ People fear the new and unknown. They prefer the
old, the known and checked truths. They are afraid of what the new can bring
to them. They are afraid that they can lose what they have. 4/ Their fear is
so strong that it has proclaimed the revolutional a foe and a the free idea
- its weapon. That's their fault. 5/ People must leave this fear behind and
go ahead. What's the sense to stick to the little you have now when you can
have more tomorrow. Everything they must do is stretch their hands and feel
for the new; give freedom to thoughts, ideas, to words: 6/ For centuries
each generation has been brought up is a same pattern. Ideals is what
everybody follows. Individuality is forgotten. People think in a same way,
following the clichc drilled in them in childhood, the clichc-education for
all children: And, when someone dares defy authority, he is punished and
given as a bad example. "Here is what happens to you when you express your
own opinion and deny your teacher's one". 7/ Our society is sick and need to
be healed. The cure is a change in the system...
III. The System
1/ The System. Centuries-old, existing on principles that hang no more
today. A System that has not changed much since the day of its birth. 2/ The
System is wrong. 3/ The System must impose its truth upon us so that it can
rule. The government needs us follow it blindly. For this reason we live in
an informational eclipse. When people acquire information other that that
from the government, they cannot distinguish the right from the wrong. So
the lie becomes a truth - a truth, fundamental to everything else. Thus the
leaders control with lies and the ordinary people have no notion of what is
true and follow the government blindly, trusting it. 4/ We fight for freedom
of information. We fight for freedom of speech and press. For the freedom to
express our thoughts freely, without being persecuted by the system. 5/ Even
in the most-developed and 'democratic' countries, the system imposes
misinformation. Even in the countries that pretend to be the cradle of free
speech. Misinformation is one of the system's main weapon. A weapon, they
use very well. 6/ It is the Net that helps us spread the information freely.
The Net, with no boundaries and information limit 7/ Ours is yours, yours is
ours. 8/ Everyone can share information, no restrictions. 9/ Encrypting of
informattion is our weapon. Thus the words of revolution can spread
uninterrupted, and the government can only guess. 10/ The Net is our realm,
in the Net we are Kings.11/ Laws. The world is changing, but the laws remain
the same. The System is not changing, only a few details get redressed for
the new time, but everything in the concept remains the same. 12/ We need
new laws. Laws, fitting the times we live in, with the world that surrounds
us. Not laws build on the basis of the past. Laws, build for today, laws,
that will fit tomorrow. 13/ The laws that only refrain us. Laws that badly
need revision.
IV. The vision
1/ Some people do not care much about what happens globally. They care about
what happens around them, in their micro-universe. 2/ These people can only
see a dark future, for they can only see the life they live now. 3/ Others
show some concern about the global affairs. They are interested in
everything,in the future in perspective, in what is going to happen
globally. 4/ They have a more optimistic view. To them the future is cleaner
and more beautiful, for they can see into it and they see a more mature man,
a wiser world. 5/ We are in the middle. We are interested in what happens
now, but what in what's gonna happen tomorow as well. 6/ We look in the net,
and the net is growing wide and wider. 7/ Soon everything in this world will
be swallowed by the net: from the military systems to the PC at home. 8/ But
the net is a house of anarchy. 9/ It cannot be controlled and in this is its
power. 10/ Every man will be dependent on the net. 11/ The whole information
will be there, locked in the abysses of zeros and ones. 12/ Who controls the
net, controls the information. 13/ We will live in a mixture of past and
present. 14/ The bad come from the man, and the good comes from technology.
15/ The net will control the little man, and we will control the net. 16/
For is you do not control, you will be controlled. 17/ The Information is
POWER!
V. Where are we?
1/ Where are we? 2/ We all live in a sick world, where hatred is a weapon,
and freedom - a dream. 3/ The world grows so slowly. It is hard for a
Cyberpunk to live in an underdeveloped world, looking the people around him,
seeing how wrongly they develop. 4/ We go ahead, they pull us back again.
Society suppressses us. Yes, it suppresses the freedom of thought. With its
cruel education programs in schools and universities. They drill in the
children their view of things and every attempt to express a different
opinion is denied and punished. 5/ Our kids grow educated in this old and
still unchanged system. A system that tolerates no freedom of thought and
demands a strict obeyance to the reules... 6/ In what a worlds, how
different from this, could we live now, if people were making jumps and not
creeps. 7/ It is so hard to live in this world, Cyberpunk. 8/ It is as if
time has stopped. 9/ We live on the right spot, but not in the right time.
10/ Everything is so ordinary, people are all the same, their deeds toos. As
if society feels an urgent need to live back in time. 11/ Some, trying to
find their own world, the world of a Cyberpunk, and finding it, build their
own world. Build in their thoughts, it changes reality, lays over it and
thus they live in a virtual world. The thought-up, build upon reality: 12/
Others simply get accustomed to the world as it is. They continue to live in
it, although they dislike it. They have no other choice but the bare hope
that the world will go out of its hollow and will go ahead.13/ What we are
trying to do is change the situation. We are trying to adjust the present
world to our needs and views. To use maximally what is fit and to ignore the
trash. Where we can't, we just live in this world, like Cyberpunks, no
matter how hard, when society fights us we fight back.14/ We build our
worlds in Cyberspace. 15/ Among the zeros and ones, among the bits of
information. 16/ We build our community. The community of Cyberpunks.
Unite!
Fight for your rights!
We are the ELECTRONIC MINDS, a group of free-minded rebels. Cyberpunks.
We live in Cyberspace, we are everywhere, we know no boundaries.
This is our manifest. The Cyberpunks' Manifest.
February 14, 1997
https://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/computer_culture/a.cyberpunk.manifesto.txt
Topic: A Cyberpunk Manifesto (Read 1776 times)
