SOURCE: “The Future of a Commodity: Notes Toward a Critique of Cyberpunk and the Information Age,” in Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1, March, 1992, pp. 75-87.

In the following essay, Whalen explores the cyberpunk notion of “information” and its place in post-industrial society.

Imagine an alien … who's come here to identify the planet's dominant form of intelligence … What do you think he picks? The zaibatsus, Fox said, the multinationals. The structure is independent of the individual lives that comprise it.

—William Gibson, “New Rose Hotel”

Near the end of the Introduction to the Grundrisse, Marx unexpectedly launches into a discussion of the relation between art and society. After some provisional commentary on the role of Greek art in bourgeios culture, Marx abruptly breaks off his discussion without ever developing a coherent aesthetic theory (46-48). This lapse into silence has attained much notoriety, but rarely does anyone acknowledge that the...