~/culture/MANIFESTO.txt — □ ×

01 inspiration archive.

05 .

02 cyberpunk-driven.

05 .

03 i live in the physical.

04 i work in the matrix.

04 i think about the interface between both.

05 .

06 biotech / neural links / neon rituals.

07 transmissions from the neon void.

05 .

10 // the street finds its own uses for things.

11 — william gibson

~/culture/library/ — □ ×

$ ls library/ --sort=essential

the texts that rewired my brain. each one a different port into the same sprawl.

1984

neuromancer

william gibson

the book that started it all. case, a washed-up hacker, gets one last job jacking into cyberspace. gibson didn't just predict the internet — he gave it a soul. the sprawl trilogy begins here.

cyberspace AI sprawl
1968

do androids dream of electric sheep?

philip k. dick

in a decaying earth, bounty hunter deckard retires androids. but the line between human and machine dissolves with every kill. empathy becomes the last frontier. the seed that grew into blade runner.

identity empathy replicants
1992

snow crash

neal stephenson

hiro protagonist — hacker, pizza deliveryman — discovers a virus that crashes both computers and human minds. the metaverse was born here, before silicon valley tried to build it for real.

metaverse linguistics satire
1986

count zero

william gibson

three stories converge in the sprawl — a corporate mercenary, an art dealer, and a kid who flatlines jacking in. voodoo gods in the matrix. the AI from neuromancer has fractured into something stranger.

voodoo sprawl art
1988

mona lisa overdrive

william gibson

the sprawl trilogy's finale. four lives collide around a mysterious box containing a consciousness. the boundaries between meat and data dissolve for good. the matrix becomes something alive.

consciousness sprawl transcendence
1995

the diamond age

neal stephenson

a subversive interactive book falls into the hands of a street kid in a nanotech future. education as revolution. class warfare through technology. stephenson's most humane cyberpunk.

nanotech education class
1975

the shockwave rider

john brunner

a fugitive hacker constantly reinvents his identity in a networked surveillance state. written before the internet existed, it predicted worms, phishing, and identity theft. proto-cyberpunk at its purest.

identity surveillance proto-cyber
2006

blindsight

peter watts

a crew of post-humans — a vampire, a linguist with multiple personalities, a soldier — encounter alien intelligence. questions whether consciousness itself is an evolutionary dead end.

first contact consciousness hard sf
~/culture/cinema/ — □ ×

$ ls cinema/ --sort=year

movies are our shared hallucinations. hackers, outlaws, and posthuman dreams flickering in chrome and shadow.

blade runner poster
1982

blade runner

the og cyberpunk — noir, neon, and replicants in dystopian LA. ridley scott built the visual language every cyberpunk work since has borrowed from.

robocop poster
1987

robocop

corporate control, cyborg justice, and brutal satire. verhoeven's masterpiece of privatized dystopia is more relevant every year.

akira poster
1988

akira

post-apocalyptic neo-tokyo, psychic teens, and animation that still hasn't been surpassed. the film that opened the west's eyes to anime.

tetsuo the iron man poster
1989

tetsuo: the iron man

japanese industrial horror-cyberpunk — weird, raw, unforgettable. a man slowly transforms into a walking scrapyard. tsukamoto's fever dream.

the lawnmower man poster
1992

the lawnmower man

virtual reality experiments gone wrong. early 90s CG fever dream about intelligence amplification and digital transcendence.

ghost in the shell poster
1995

ghost in the shell

philosophy, hacking, and stunning animation — a pillar of the genre. what does it mean to be human when your body is a shell and your ghost is data?

johnny mnemonic poster
1995

johnny mnemonic

keanu storing data in his brain — pure 90s cyberpunk cheese. adapted from gibson's short story. the internet as a VR landscape. beautiful camp.

strange days poster
1995

strange days

illegal VR memories + end-of-the-millennium paranoia. bigelow's underrated vision of experience-as-commodity. the black market of consciousness.