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cyberpunk was trying to visualize and possibly to affect our rapidly oncoming future. If people’s only concept of the future is
Star Trek,
then we’re doomed to a bland fascism of the most corporate type. In a remark that I already mentioned above, Bruce Sterling said he wanted to get into those plastic futures and spray-paint them. One of the purposes of the cyberpunk novels was to show people by example that high-tech futures could be gnarly, with a nearly anarchist lack of any central control. The flourishing of the essentially unregulated World Wide Web shows that we were accurate in our dream.
    I also want to say a bit about the countercultural aspects of the other modern SF movement I’ve been associated with: transrealism. My feeling is that a major tool in mass thought-control is the myth of consensus reality. Hand in hand with this myth goes the notion of a “normal person.” A transrealist author creates characters who are realistically neurotic. One doesn’t glorify the main characterby making him or her unrealistically powerful, wise, or balanced. And the flipside of that is to humanize the villains.
    There are no normal people—just look at your relatives, the people that you are in a position to know best. They’re all weird at some level below the surface. Yet conventional fiction very commonly shows us normal people in a normal world. As long as you labor under the feeling that you are the only weirdo, then you feel weak and apologetic. You’re eager to go along with the establishment, and a bit frightened to make waves—lest you be found out. Actual people are gnarly and unpredictable, this is why it is so important to use them as characters instead of the impossibly good and bad paperdolls of mass-culture.
    The idea of breaking down consensus reality is important. This is where the tools of SF are particularly useful. Each mind is a reality unto itself. As long as people can be tricked into believing the reality of the ever-faster news-cycles, they can be herded about like sheep. The “president” threatens us with “nuclear war,” and driven frantic by the fear of “death” we rush out to buy “consumer goods.”
    If you turn off your news feed you can reenter the human world. You eat something and go for a walk, with infinitely many thoughts and perceptions mingling with nature’s infinitely many gnarly inputs.
    Cyberpunk and transrealism are paths to a revolutionary SF.
CHANGING THE WORLD
    Our society is made up of gnarly processes, and gnarly processes are inherently unpredictable.
    My studies of cellular automata have made it very clear to me that it’s easy for any kind of social system to generate gnarl. If we take a set of agents acting in parallel, we’ll get unpredictable gnarl by repeatedly iterating almost any simple rule—such as “Earn an amount equal to the averages of your neighbors’ incomes plus one—but when you reach a certain maximum level, go bankrupt and drop down to a minimum income.”
    Rules like this can generate wonderfully seething chaos. People sometimes don’t want to believe that such a simple rule might account for the complexity of a living society. There’s a tendency to think that a model with a more complicated definition will be a better fit for reality. But whatever richness comes out of a model is the result of a gnarly computation, which can occur in the very simplest of systems.
    As I keep reiterating, the behavior of our gnarly society can’t be predicted by computations that operate any faster than does real life. There are no tidy, handydandy rubrics for predicting or controlling emergent social processes like elections, the stock market, or consumer demand. Like a cellular automaton, society is a parallel computation, that is, a society is made up of individuals leading their own lives.
    The good thing about a decentralized gnarly computing system is