Cyberpunks in Cyberspace: The Politics of Subjectivity in the Computer Age

Abstract

In the Cold War, Americans constructed the political world as a closed system of ideological conflict. Computers were developed to support a closed-world discourse with centralized, computerized military command and control, embodied in Vietnam-era systems and Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. Simultaneously, at the level of individual minds, a cyborg discourse about intelligent machines linked the microworlds constituted by computer programs to human thought processes. Popular science fiction of the 1980s, such as the Star Wars film trilogy, Neuromancer, and The Terminator merged closed-world political themes, such as military computing and global conflict, with cyborg discourse about machine subjectivity and virtual space. This political history provides a critical counterpoint to cyberpunks' overenthusiastic embrace of cyberspace.