SOURCE: “Hyper-Punk: Cyberpunk and Information Technology,” in Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 28, No. 2, Fall, 1994, pp. 81-92.

In the following essay, Jones discusses cyberpunk's place in the “information marketplace.”

What is it you're after?

Uh, information?

Oh. Another one. Life was simple before the first war. You wouldn't remember. Drugs, sex, luxury items. Currency in those days was no more than a sideline … Information. What's wrong with dope and women? Is it any wonder the world's gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?

—from Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon

I

The clearest statements of cyberpunk ideology come from contemporary science fiction texts that combine information, technology and ideology to construct a reality in the near future (a time that seems almost parallel to the present rather than ahead of it) in which information fuels not only the global economy but individual existence. Where...