Apotheosis

At the end of Neuromancer, the Wintermute artificial intelligence (with the help of Henry Case and Molly Millions) broke down the firewall preventing Wintermute from reaching the other artificial intelligence—the namesake of the book... Neuromancer.

Some of you might be wondering where the original Codepunk podcast is. There was a lot of talk about building a Codepunk space in virtual reality (using Facebook Horizon... or Meta Horizon... or whatever it's called now)...

I'm going to do something a little different with this Apotheosis entry. Recently, I picked up a few books on cyberpunk, and once again Max Headroom found his way into the conversation, so I thought it would be fun to do a readout of the Max Headroom essay I wrote a while back.

I'm happy to see this entry for Apotheosis—not just because it's the 10th entry, but because it wraps up the Mondo 2000 3-parter, which followed on the heels of the Boing Boing 3-parter. Revisiting both publications/communities just reminds me too much about how the edgier (experimental would be a more appropriate term) aspects of cyberculture quickly fell to commercialism, leaving those in the community stranded.

If you're first exposure to Mondo 2000's narrative of the Internet was with The Cyberpunk Handbook you might have looked no further—sending it to the trash heap—not even fit for recycling. But those who grew up and explored the Internet during Mondo's days didn't live in reverse like we're doing with this look back at cyber history. The handbook was the final push of California cyberpunk satire, but Mondo did lived on the edge for a few years, much like the earlier zine version of Boing Boing.

In the last Apotheosis post, we had some fun reliving a little early 2000's Internet culture, but what we're doing here on Codepunk with Apotheosis is digging deeper into the roots of cyberspace. That brief interlude was me reminiscing of a time when I was highly involved in an underground culture, while also checking in on an old friend and his work...

Many my age still remember the years of personal bulletin board systems (BBS) when the Internet was young (and more explicitly tied to the telecoms). Eventually, cyberspace emerged as a collective of protocols with BBS, IRC chat channels, and UseNet newsgroups filling out additional communication channels. I remember following newly created UseNet newsgroups dedicated to the very first SciFi Channel original programming (long before it became whatever SyFy is supposed to stand for).

I'm sure you're tired of hearing my opinion on Boing Boing at this point, so you'll be happy to know that this is the last Codepunk post and Apotheosis episode on the subject.

Although the history of Boing Boing paints a picture of geek chic with a thriving community and an almost playful cyber-indulgence, the blog (and those running the blog) is not without the occasional head-turning controversy...

Boing Boing was a zine before it became a web site, and although zines were not exclusive to the counterculture and cyberculture eras, the proliferation of zines reached its apex in the late 80's/early 90's.