Cyberpunk, cyberspace and reality

Abstract

The term cyberspace, cybernetic space, is a term that was originally disclosed in the novel Neuromancer, in 1984, by the American-American writer William Gibson. Cyberpunk, as a movement, is linked in its origin, and strongly influenced, by a group of gringo writers and poets, the poets of the beat generation, the so-called beatniks, who were part of a social trend of counterculture, of sexual revolution and of anti-racist struggles in the 1950s. These beats, critics of the materialist, capitalist and authoritarian society, intellectuals, adventurers, drunks and promiscuous, were the ones who, from marginality, injected into cyberpunk and a host of later generations, that so characteristic feeling of cultural unsatisfaction, nomadism and of experimentation. Cyberpunk is linked to the punks of the seventies, such a connection is made in paradoxical terms: for such punks, the new technologies were totally alienating.