A growing number … in the antiques and collectibles trade think the virtual world may be the marketplace for many of their customers in the next century. They envision an electronic bazaar where buyers and sellers in every corner of the globe meet to exchange wares, pick up leads on where to find the hard-to-find, and stay up-to-date on pricing trends.
“Cyberpunk” will be written somewhere on my tombstone. There’s nothing I can do about it. But I can’t wait for the day it goes from being popular culture to being high culture. Because I’ve got my tux ready for my Nobel Prize ceremony.
I see a great deal of dyspepsia about technology along with a willingness to embrace anything that comes along. Cyberpunk seems to be filled with grim predictions about the future coupled with a willingness to hasten its advent by whatever means possible.
In the future it will be everywhere, but it won’t be called cyberculture. It will just be called culture. A few years ago, people used to talk about “the emerging TV culture.” We no longer talk about a “TV culture” today. It’s a given. Someday soon, no one will talk about “emerging cyberculture.” Because it will be a given, too.
I’m just astonished by the terror that can be unleashed by these things. Who’s going to control all this technology? The corporations, of course. And will that mean your brain implant is going to come complete with a corporate logo, and 20 percent of the time you’re going to be hearing commercials?
Cybernautic brokers of the future [will] zoom through landscapes that are the 3D depictions of marketplaces, as reported through global electronic transactions systems, in real time.
The advent of cyberspace will have profound effects on so-called post-industrial culture, and the material and economic rewards for those who first and most properly conceive and implement cyberspace systems will be enormous.
When this stuff gets implemented and gets widespread, as all the trends indicate it will, what people experience as the ordinary material universe will start to crumble away a little bit. At the very least, virtual reality will become just one of many possible places in which to spend time.
Reality as we know it, and our fantasies – or our ersatz realities, these new cyber-realities, or virtual realities – will become so real that they are almost palpable. They satisfy all the cognitive criteria of reality. At that point – and this is the definition of schizophrenia, you know, in the past century, the inability to distinguish between reality and your fantasies – when you reach that point, it’s going to signal a very special change in human consciousness. The full implications of that we can’t even cognize at this moment.
Wearing blackout goggles and a Lycra glove, or perhaps a full-body cybersuit, you might be plugging into your PC and mentally inhabiting space there. You might build yourself a room there. And decorate it. You might entertain good-looking friends there. You might fall in love.