The digital counterculture will reject [the sci-fi film “Blade Runner’s”] bleak vision of a future in which technology enlarges the human spirit as a new tool for consciousness in much the same way that the hippies appropriated the psychoactive chemical spinoffs of the military-industrial complex. This new movement will be cyberpunk imbued with human warmth … the gospel of the post-cyberpunk movement will be one of machines in the service of enlarging our humanity.
Predictor: Saffo, Paul
Prediction, in context:In a 1993 article for Wired magazine, Paul Saffo, a research fellow at the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, California, writes: ”Optimism and a sense of community distinguished the hippies from the beatniks, and will also distinguish the cyberpunks from the coming digital counterculture. The cyberpunk world is starkly non-utopian, serving up the same sort of intimate but uneasy accommodation with technology portrayed in the movie ‘Blade Runner.’ I will bet that the digital counterculture will reject this bleak vision of a future in which technology enlarges the human spirit as a new tool for consciousness in much the same way that the hippies appropriated the psychoactive chemical spinoffs of the military-industrial complex. This new movement will be cyberpunk imbued with human warmth, substituting a deep sense of interdependence in place of lone-wolf isolationism. Cyberpunks envision humans as electronic cyber-rats lurking in the interstices of the information mega-machine; the gospel of the post-cyberpunk movement will be one of machines in the service of enlarging our humanity.”
Biography:Paul Saffo was the director of a decades-old research and forecasting foundation called the Institute for the Future, located in Menlo Park, Calif., in the 1990s. This Institute was a non-profit think tank that consulted for a large number of businesses and government entities, including telecommunications and consumer companies. (Futurist/Consultant.)
Date of prediction: January 1, 1993
Topic of prediction: Community/Culture
Subtopic: General
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: Cyberpunk R.I.P.
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.04/1.4_cyberpunk_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney