The Making of Beyond Cyberpunk! A Do-It-Yourself Guide to the Future #cyberpunk

What follows is a piece that I originally wrote for my 2014 “lazy person’s memoir” and best-of collection, Borg Like Me. It details the Beyond Cyberpunk! interactive electronic book that I created in 1991 with Peter Sugarman, Mark Frauenfelder, and Jim Leftwich. Beyond Cyberpunk! was a little bit like that first Velvet Underground record. As Lou Reed has been quoted as saying: It only sold 30,000 (at the time), but every one of them started a band. In our case, it was 300 copies.

You can actually play around with an emulation of Beyond Cyberpunk at the Internet Archive.

***

What is the use of a book, thought Alice, without pictures or conversation.
—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

When Apple Computer released its HyperCard program in 1987, the computer world scratched its read/write head, not quite sure what to make of it. The computer press struggled to explain (“It’s a graphical database program,” “It’s an alternative to the Mac desktop,” “It’s a software construction kit.”). Consumers were intrigued but largely clueless as to how to use it. We were told it was easy to use, easy to program, and that it could magically link together text, images, and sounds into something called “hypermedia.” In today’s world of a ubiquitous, multimedia-rich web, what HyperCard heralded seems painfully obvious, but at the time, it didn’t click for many. This was technology years ahead of its time.

I got my first inkling of the potential for HyperCard/hypermedia in 1989 when a floppy disk arrived in the mail from my good friend Peter Sugarman, then living in rural Virginia. The disk had a chunky-bit, digitized picture of Peter, in a particularly pensive pose, on the laser-printed label. At the time, even a digitized photo on a disk label was exotic. Booting up the HyperCard document (called a “stack” in HyperCard parlance), I discovered more pictures of Peter and his family and a map of Virginia that made goofy sounds. And there was a little animated guy skulking throughout. I found myself peering at some weird hybrid media, a cross between an interactive letter, a family photo album, and a whimsical stroll through an eccentric friend’s mind. While it was obvious that Peter was basically digitally doodling, testing out the capabilities of this new medium, I found its potential very exciting.

At the time, I was running a monthly art/tech/culture salon in the DC area, called Café Gaga. The purpose of these gatherings was to send a group of people, from different professions and viewpoints, on fun journeys deep into some theme or idea or to go on some sort of a quest. Some events were experiential, arty; others more cerebral. The credo of the group was “art, information, noise.” Each event was supposed to have some component of art, information (data, science, the exposition of an idea), and of course, everything generates noise. When I saw Peter’s HyperCard stack, I immediately thought of how this technology could be used to create little “salons” on disk. After several weeks of blathering to others about this, someone sent me a stack in the mail called Passing Notes. It was exactly what I was talking about, a broadly-cast conversation that threaded its way through art, science, religion, and philosophy, all grappling with a single idea (in this case, the question “Are we more than the science that explains us?”). The stack even had a link to an online bulletin board (BBS) so that you could add to the conversation and see what others thought about the stack and the question it posed. Again, this all sounds like ancient history now, but back in 1989, this was eye-opening stuff.

Peter and I began having regular phone conversations about hypermedia and how it might change the nature of storytelling, media delivery, and information organization and navigation. I’d always been struck by cyberneticist Gregory Bateson’s idea of forever being mindful to balance “rigor and imagination” in one’s pursuit of knowledge. It seemed to Peter and me that hypermedia provided a perfect environment to pursue ideas deeply and rigorously, while engineering in fun, whimsy, and a sense of the unexpected—a kind of orchestrated chaos, a vibrant and alive media ecology. We began kicking around ideas for a collaborative HyperCard project to do together.

Building a Cyberpunk “Data Bucket”

While Peter and I were anxious to get our hands dirty with hypermedia, I discovered a rather exhaustive list of cyberpunk sci-fi novels on The Well BBS and thought that might be a perfect subject for our stack. I’d been reading as much of cyberpunk lit as I could get my hands on, so it was a perfect fit. The idea was originally to create a “data bucket” into which we could toss all of the information on cyberpunk that we found while surfing the Net. But, like a lot of hypermedia projects, once we started seeding our little pocket universe, Beyond Cyberpunk! quickly began teeming with unexpected life. We soon decided to go all out, make it as exhaustive as possible, and release it as a commercial product. At the time (1990), the Internet was not yet in the media spotlight. So-called cyberculture (where these near-future speculative worlds met the bleeding edge of real-life technoculture) was in its heyday, but only known out along the cultural fringes. We could sense that all things “cyber” were about to bust into the mainstream and we wanted to chart the course cyberculture had taken, from its sci-fi and early hacker roots, through the Internet, and soon, we suspected, into everyday, mainstream culture.

The project quickly mushroomed. I began talking to Mark Frauenfelder of bOING bOING (then a print magazine) about it and he got excited. My email inbox (a rather quiet and lonely place) and fax machine began to light up at all hours with Mark sending book and film reviews and ideas for other things we might include. Peter and I would later joke about the fact that, in the beginning, we weren’t even sure how serious we were about BCP until Mark jumped onboard, started taking it seriously, and we thought: “OK, I guess we’re doing this for real — we have another contributor who assumes it’s real!” I soon also approached brilliant Silicon Valley interface designer Jim Leftwich, whom I’d also met on The Well, and convinced him to sign on to this quickly expanding project–for no money.

As we began publicly discussing our plans for the project on The Well and elsewhere, we started attracting some amazing contributors. Somehow, fearlessly approaching a well-known writer or luminary seemed so much easier on the long end of an email message. We sent mail to many of the founders of the cyberpunk genre and were shocked to get enthusiastic encouragement and contributions from Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker, Richard Kadrey, Marc Laidlaw, Paul DiFillipo, Stephen Brown, and others. We also received contributions from Robert Anton Wilson, RU Sirius, Hakim Bey, Joan Gordon, Steve Jackson, Steve Roberts (the “high-tech nomad), and dozens more. And we got contributions from amazing artists, like John Bergin (who did the concept art for our CD edition that never came to fruition and one of our full-page ads, both seen here).

The process of working on BCP creatively invigorated all of us. We’d work late into the night, each in our own home offices, Peter and I in two different Virginia locations, and Mark and Jim in two California locations. We’d trade content and stack demos via email and our faxes machines would come alive at all hours, sputtering out some new icons sketches from Jim, new page designs from Peter, cartoons or reviews from Mark, or dialog or essay drafts from me.

Peter was the creative force behind the stack architecture and programming, and I was in charge of the content. With the untold number of hours it took to program BCP, Peter learned every eccentricity, fudge, and nuance of HyperTalk, the scripting language that HyperCard spoke, and he applied what he learned brilliantly. I still hear from people how in awe they were of the cleverness of his scripts and the way BCP was put together. Before BCP, Peter and I had done a lot of talking and note-taking on what makes good digital interface design. We even thought at one point we might do a book, or at least an instructive HyperCard stack, on the subject. We applied these ideas (many of them Peter’s) to BCP and it seemed to pay off. Another aspect of BCP that was very innovative for its time was the full use of sounds and animations in concert with the written content and pop-up texts, graphics, and whimsical events. The stack was narrated throughout by Kata Sutra (voiced by the late Pam Bricker). Every time you went to a new section, hit a glossary link, or triggered an error message, Kata would tell you where you were going, or would playfully chastise you (“Achtung, Chucko!”) for screwing up. Again, Peter earns the credit for his brilliant use of sounds and events to create a sense that the stack was a giant, clanking, well-meaning, but goofy data-contraption all held together with chewing gum and bailing wire and threatening to exhaust itself at any moment.

In fact, there were a couple of special “chaos events” that could be triggered and the stack would fall apart. On the Survival Research Labs entry (called “cards” in HyperCard), for instance, if you hit a certain sequence of buttons, the stack would emit the ungodly sounds of a machine taking its last breaths. With metal clanking and springs a-sproinging, chunks of the stack would fall off the screen, its wiry guts spilling out in the process. To accomplish this impressive feat – no small potatoes with 1991 consumer computer technology – Jim Leftwich laser printed and glued the digital “card” onto foamcore, cut the breaky bits out, and animated the destruction photo-frame-by-frame with real wires and springs spewing forth from beneath the foamcore. It was extraordinarily funky, but still awesome. It worked, and people flipped out when they saw it.

There was an exuberance and sense of humor in Beyond Cyberpunk!, along with a slightly askew, grubby street tech aesthetic, that made it seem old, alive, and greater than the sum of its parts. The subtitle for BCP was “A Do-It-Yourself Guide to the Future.” We sometimes also used “A Cut and Paste Manifesto.” The idea was to create this giant data bucket, loosely wire some of the contents together through hypermedia links, and then let the users create their own connections, drawing from that bucket the information and ideas that best suited them.

Jacking Into the Matrix, Please Stand By…

So, what exactly was contained within Beyond Cyberpunk! and how did it work? The main program, which was released on November 14, 1991, was a 5.5MB HyperCard stack. It came as a compressed self-extracting archive on five 3.5” floppy disks. The black disks had embossed silver and black labels on them and came in a clear Lucite box with a silver and black booklet. On the tiny budget we had, we tried to make it look like some artifact from the future. You also got a 20-page Beyond Cyberpunk! mini-comic starring Kata Sutra, with art by Mark Frauenfelder and text by Mark and myself. Kata Sutra was a character Mark originally created for bOING bOING. She was a punky, fiery “fractal anarchist” badass who lurked among the pages of the zine, usually thinking of elaborately outrageous reasons why readers had to subscribe to bOING bOING. When she saw all of the fun the rest of us where having over at BCP, she couldn’t resist ingratiating herself into the stack’s multimedia content. She brought with her a new character Mark created (and I helped write), an opportunistic data-retrieving AI with a K9 personality and a nose for mischief, known as codeHound. With their rather rough-shod, chaotic, but endearing personalities (with tongues always close to their cheeks), Kata and codeHound were in many ways cartoon expressions of the four of us. Kata became the voice of BCP and haunted the stack via text pop-ups, audio statements, and Director animations (which had her periodically zooming across the screen on a circuit-board-encrusted hover-disk designed by Jim). All the statements and animations were programmed into the stack as random events or triggered by sequences of a user’s actions.

Beyond Cyberpunk! was divided into four zones: Manifestos, Media, Street Tech, and Cyberculture. Each zone contained essays, reviews, artwork, animations, and sounds. There were over 600 cards, over 300 articles, 122 different sound clips, 19 animations, and 35 text pop-ups. There was also a glossary with vocal pronunciations, and a 1000-word hyperlinked index.

Each zone in BCP had a series of essays followed by a resource section (books, magazines, zines, organizations, etc.) associated with the theme of that zone. Manifestos covered higher-ordered thinking around cyberpunk fiction and cyberculture and looked at things like the political ramifications of the genre and its relationship to the post-modern thought/critical theory of the time. Media was the heart of the stack and explored hundreds of books, movies, comics – mainline cyberpunk science fiction. Street Tech looked at real-world hacker culture, media hacking tools, and pirate media. And finally, Cyberculture looked at art, music, fashion, and modern primitivism.

In 1993, we released a one-disk follow-up called the Beyond Cyberpunk! Update Stack. It was subtitle: “What happened to the future since the last time we talked?” This release provided us with an opportunity to assess where cyberpunk/cyberculture had gone since the original release of BCP and it was the first time I’d had an opportunity to tell my side of the Billy Idol story of working on Idol’s Cyberpunk record. It also contained a bizarre and beautiful interactive art piece by Darick Chamberlin (author of the unhinged cyberpunk novel, Cigarette Boy). Dubbed “The Blipvert Zone,” it was a dynamically-assembled collage of art, text, sounds, and narration done in the same Burroughsian “mock machine epic” style as Cigarette Boy.

“It’s the Future, No?”

It’s the the second annual CyberArts Festival in Pasadena, California, November 1991. Peter, Mark, myself, and several other contributors meet and shake hands literally in front of the program we made together as it merrily gurgles and chugs through its cyber-industrial soundtrack. Peter and I are meeting Mark face-to-face for the first time. We’ve spent hundreds of hours working together in a virtual computer lab, and now we’ve gathered in Pasadena to dine on the fruits of our labors. Beyond Cyberpunk! has been chosen as a featured exhibit for the CyberArts Gallery. We’re munching on hunks of stinky cheese and sipping white wine while proudly showing off our digital baby to the world. We meet the Mondo 2000 staff, and some of the future staff of Wired (who are showing off a preview of the magazine on a portable video player). We show BCP to Timothy Leary, Dwayne Goettel of Skinny Puppy, and other members of the cyberatti. Italian astrophysicist and musician Dr. Fiorella Terenzi bends down to watch the stack on its tiny 9” Macintosh screen, looks up in amazement, and says: “It’s the future, no?” That statement becomes an oft-repeated phrase for the rest of the weekend and beyond.

We’re immediately struck by the sight of our low-budget, indie project alongside expensively produced, commercial multimedia programs. BCP looks humble and unassuming on its little black-and-white SE screen, but as soon as people start playing with it, they’re drawn into its dense, engaging world, its irreverent humor, and its startling, periodic “chaos events.”

In the months that followed, the critical acclaim for Beyond Cyberpunk! was overwhelming. It received positive reviews in MacWeek, MacWorld, TidBITS, Mondo 2000, even the New York Times and Newsweek. MacWeek claimed that BCP “put the Mac back on its revolutionary track.” It was also mentioned in a cyberpunk cover story that Time magazine did. In November, 1993, University of Iowa professor and sci-fi scholar, Brooks Landon, published a lengthy essay on Beyond Cyberpunk! in Science-Fiction Studies (Vol. 20, No. 3), arguing that it was one of the more important documents in “the first generation of canonical hypertexts.” Other tech journalists and writers who praised it included David Pogue, Adam Angst, Ric Ford, and cyberpunk founding father Rudy Rucker.

Celebrity fans of BCP included Robin Williams, Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner, William Shatner, Billy Idol, and filmmaker John Badham. (Rumor has it that, on the set of Point of No Return, Bridget Fonda was lusting after Badham’s Kata Sutra T-shirt so badly that he literally gave her the shirt off his back.) Years later, Peter, bound for a tech conference in Europe, sat next to author and media critic, Doug Rushkoff, on a plane. Doug proclaimed that “It all began with BCP.”

But despite all of the positive press and wild enthusiasm from early purchasers and a few influential people, BCP never found a wide audience. We invested thousands of hours of work and thousands of our own dollars into it. The critics loved it, but ultimately, BCP bombed at the box office.

The program itself wasn’t the problem, it was the ugly specter of exposure and distribution that still plagues DIY projects today. We can only imagine how things might’ve been different if we’d hooked up with a software company, or even a small, aggressive distributor. But, as with many such labors of love, the real riches gained are not measured in dollars or units sold. We made tremendous connections and friendships that continue today. Creator of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, once defined the web as “a universe of interconnected hypermedia documents.” Several years before the web would make its official debut, Beyond Cyberpunk! was like a web on an individual’s desktop, with HyperCard as the browser.

Working on BCP was one of the happiest times of my life. The entire team gained valuable experience and exposure for our ideas. We ended up in major media venues and got work opportunities out of it. We built significant parts of our careers on the project. It was partially because of my knowledge of hypermedia through BCP that, in 1993, I was asked by Ventana Press to write the first book about the web (Mosaic Quick Tour: Accessing and Navigating the World Wide Web).

The strangest thing about this whole chapter of my life is the extent to which people are now ignorant of the link between HyperCard/hypermedia/Beyond Cyberpunk! and today’s hyper-webbed world. I’ve had more than one person ask me: “Hey, you know that whole hypermedia thing that you were going on about in the early 90s – whatever became of all that?”

Seriously? The future – YOU’RE SOAKING IN IT!


Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards

Join Adafruit on Mastodon

Adafruit is on Mastodon, join in! adafruit.com/mastodon

Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.

Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.

Join us every Wednesday night at 8pm ET for Ask an Engineer!

Join over 36,000+ makers on Adafruit’s Discord channels and be part of the community! http://adafru.it/discord

CircuitPython – The easiest way to program microcontrollers – CircuitPython.org


Maker Business — “Packaging” chips in the US

Wearables — Enclosures help fight body humidity in costumes

Electronics — Transformers: More than meets the eye!

Python for Microcontrollers — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: Silicon Labs introduces CircuitPython support, and more! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi

Adafruit IoT Monthly — Guardian Robot, Weather-wise Umbrella Stand, and more!

Microsoft MakeCode — MakeCode Thank You!

EYE on NPI — Maxim’s Himalaya uSLIC Step-Down Power Module #EyeOnNPI @maximintegrated @digikey

New Products – Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers! — #NewProds 7/19/23 Feat. Adafruit Matrix Portal S3 CircuitPython Powered Internet Display!

Get the only spam-free daily newsletter about wearables, running a "maker business", electronic tips and more! Subscribe at AdafruitDaily.com !



No Comments

No comments yet.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.