Futureculture

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'Future Culture' is a mailing list also known as "FUTUREC" or "FC" that currently resides on listserv.uark.edu.

Contents

History

The mailing list was created in 1992 on a public Unix system by Andy Hawks, then in high school. After a fallout with the rest of the group, Andy destroyed the list of members early 1993 and took the list offline. Various subscribers have since continued the Future Culture list at a different address and the list moved from nyx.cs.du.edu, ending up on the UAFSYSB mainframe (fondly remembered as "list dad") at the University of Arkansas under the care of Clark Wilson Moore (June 27, 1953 - November 3, 2018) who sent and signed his emails "Alias Datura" ("list mom"). See here for a brief overview of the early days of Future Culture.

Andy Hawk's original Future Culture Manifesto, also known as the Bubble Manifesto, can be considered to be an historical document reflecting the state of mind at the dawn of the Internet, specifically the aspect of "virtual culture". This document refers to key movements in the early 1990s that have led to – and have strongly influenced – how society thinks about and uses technology and specifically the internet.

The pre-corporate Internet was envisioned as a place of massive movement of thought; the manifesto documents this and approaches the ideas of transformation: from an economic-based world to an ideas-based world. As it turned out, this did not happen, but the idea was documented here and referred to repeatedly in a variety of different media, especially by academics working in Internet-related fields of study. (cf MIT Media Lab (mediaMOO), as well as a variety of people working under the general rubric of PostModernism.)

Although many of the Future Culture list were vehemently opposed to making the archives of their postings publicly available, a selection [1] of the emails that were exchanged during the initial period found their way to the web. These archived messages give a good impression of the topics that were typically discussed.

An indication for the popularity of Future Culture during its hey-days, is that the group was mentioned on Billy Idol's album Cyberpunk .

A document listing a variety of influences this mailing list has had on other groups or that carry on in the same memespace is found on Marius Watz' FutureCulture page. This page also serves as a link to a memorial for Michael Current, who was among the most active members. His death was a huge shock for the Future Culture community. An in-depth coverage of the events leading up his death, a hoax suicide threat, and the painful aftermath has been written [2] by a Future Culture's member. This sad event was also an inspiration for Mia Lipner's sound art piece Requiem Digitatem. [3] [4]

FutureCulture had part in 'liberating' the William Gibson work Agrippa: A Book of the Dead. [5] [6]

The list has been mentioned in at least two books introducing the reader to the world of cyber cultures, Victor J. Vitanza's CyberReader 2/e, "an anthology of readings on the new technologies and their impact on social and individual identities" [7] and in Jonathan Marshall's ethnography of the mailing list Cybermind, Living on Cybermind [8]

It is mentioned as "landmark event" by Andrew Edmond in his article "Pioneers of the Virtual Underground: A History of our Culture" in issue 1, 1997 of The Resonance Project. [9]

Purpose

Future Culture was originally created as a forum for the discussion of the integration of fringe technology and fringe culture; a mix of the digital underground and the new countercultures such as modern primitives, rave culture and post punk technologists. The William Gibson quote "The street finds its own uses for things" was an appropriate guideline for the topics on the list.

The topic of the mailing list, as stated in the accompanying, but rarely updated, Future Culture FAQ is to be a forum for "real-time discussion of cyberculture/new-edge/technoculture" which is a deliberately vague description of its contents.

However, as time passed, the topics on the list drifted and the people on the list have, instead, formed a rather tight community discussing everything, including the stated topics, but more often personal and everyday things.

At the best of times, one could say that the Future Culture mailing list defines the future culture. At the worst of times, one can say that it's a mailing list of continuous thread drift that is often concerned with retrocomputing, film and book reviews, and idle conversation. As if stopping in at one's local pub...

Community

The FC mailing list has an overlapping memespace and membership with a few other online communities, in particular the Leri mailing list, the NEXUS-GAIA crowd, the Collective and the Cybermind mailing list.

Members of FC were also involved in the production of the first Internet opera, Honoria in Ciberspazio. The libretto was an example of collaborative writing initiated by a student at the Computer Writing and Research Lab at The University of Texas at Austin. Several of the notable members of the FC list are cast as characters in the libretto.

FC members were also active in the MIT Media Lab MediaMOO, were there were notably building bearing the FC mark.

During 1996 and 1997 some 10 members of Future Culture participated [10] in a Web based game called Nomic.

FC'ers are continuing to be active in many other forms of cultural and technological expressions.

See also

Related Research Articles

Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a dystopian futuristic setting that tends to focus on a "combination of low-life and high tech" featuring advanced technological and scientific achievements, such as artificial intelligence and cybernetics, juxtaposed with a degree of breakdown or radical change in the social order. Much of cyberpunk is rooted in the New Wave science fiction movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when writers like Philip K. Dick, Roger Zelazny, John Brunner, J. G. Ballard, Philip José Farmer and Harlan Ellison examined the impact of drug culture, technology, and the sexual revolution while avoiding the utopian tendencies of earlier science fiction.

Cyberspace notional environment in which communication over computer networks occurs

Cyberspace is a concept describing a widespread, interconnected digital technology. The term entered the popular culture from science fiction and the arts but is now used by technology strategists, security professionals, government, military and industry leaders and entrepreneurs to describe the domain of the global technology environment. Others consider cyberspace to be just a notional environment in which communication over computer networks occurs. The word became popular in the 1990s when the uses of the Internet, networking, and digital communication were all growing dramatically and the term cyberspace was able to represent the many new ideas and phenomena that were emerging.

William Gibson American-Canadian speculative fiction novelist and founder of the cyberpunk subgenre

William Ford Gibson is an American-Canadian speculative fiction writer and essayist widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk. Beginning his writing career in the late 1970s, his early works were noir, near-future stories that explored the effects of technology, cybernetics, and computer networks on humans—a "combination of lowlife and high tech"—and helped to create an iconography for the information age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s. Gibson notably coined the term "cyberspace" for "widespread, interconnected digital technology" in his short story "Burning Chrome" (1982), and later popularized the concept in his acclaimed debut novel Neuromancer (1984). These early works of Gibson's have been credited with "renovating" science fiction literature in the 1980s.

Internet culture, or cyberculture, is a culture that has emerged, or is emerging, from the use of computer networks for communication, entertainment, and business. Internet culture is also the study of various social phenomena associated with the Internet and other new forms of the network communication. Examples of these new forms of network communication include, online communities, online multi-player gaming, wearable computing, social gaming, social media, mobile apps, augmented reality, and texting as well as issues related to identity, privacy, and network formation.

Joi Ito Japanese-American activist, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist

Joichi "Joi" Ito is a Japanese activist, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist. He is the former director of the MIT Media Lab and a former professor of the practice of media arts and sciences at MIT. He is a former visiting professor of practice at the Harvard Law School.

Biopunk is a subgenre of science fiction that focuses on biotechnology. It is derived from cyberpunk, but focuses on the implications of biotechnology rather than information technology. Biopunk is concerned with synthetic biology. It is derived of cyberpunk involving bio-hackers, biotech mega-corporations, and oppressive government agencies that manipulate human DNA. Most often keeping with the dark atmosphere of cyberpunk, biopunk generally examines the dark side of genetic engineering and represents the low side of biotechnology.

The Metaverse is a collective virtual shared space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical reality and physically persistent virtual space, including the sum of all virtual worlds, augmented reality, and the internet. The word metaverse is a portmanteau of the prefix "meta" and "universe" and is typically used to describe the concept of a future iteration of the internet, made up of persistent, shared, 3D virtual spaces linked into a perceived virtual universe.

"A Rape in Cyberspace, or How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society" is an article written by freelance journalist Julian Dibbell and first published in The Village Voice in 1993. The article was later included in Dibbell's book My Tiny Life on his LambdaMOO experiences.

A MOO is a text-based online virtual reality system to which multiple users (players) are connected at the same time.

Cybermind is an Internet mailing list devoted to "the philosophy and psychology of cyberspace." It was co-founded by Alan Sondheim and Michael Current in mid-1994 to explore, exemplify and discuss multiple aspects of cyberspace, both from theoretical and experiential perspectives. The list was born in the split of the spoon collective lists from the Thinknet group, over issues of free speech and appropriate philosophical expression. Early membership involved much overlap with the Futureculture List. In more recent years discussions have become more general, but the list still has members from its founding period.

<i>Cyberpunk</i> (album) 1993 studio album by Billy Idol

Cyberpunk is the fifth studio album by English rock musician Billy Idol, released on 29 June 1993 by Chrysalis Records. A concept album, it was inspired by his personal interest in technology and his first attempts to use computers in the creation of his music. Idol based the album on the cyberdelic subculture of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Heavily experimental in its style, the album was an attempt to take control of the creative process in the production of his albums, while simultaneously introducing Idol's fans and other musicians to the opportunities presented by digital media.

Cyber-ethnography, also known as virtual ethnography, and most commonly online ethnography, is an online research method that adapts ethnographic methods to the study of the communities and cultures created through computer-mediated social interaction. Online ethnography has by far the wider use. As modifications of the term ethnography, cyber-ethnography, online ethnography and virtual ethnography designate particular variations regarding the conduct of online fieldwork that adapts ethnographic methodology. There is no canonical approach to cyber-ethnography that prescribes how ethnography is adapted to the online setting. Instead individual researchers are left to specify their own adaptations. Netnography is another form of online ethnography or cyber-ethnography with more specific sets of guidelines and rules, and a common multidisciplinary base of literature and scholars. This article is not about a particular neologism, but the general application of ethnographic methods to online fieldwork as practiced by anthropologists, sociologists, and other scholars.

<i>Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)</i> book by William Gibson

Agrippa is a work of art created by science fiction novelist William Gibson, artist Dennis Ashbaugh and publisher Kevin Begos Jr. in 1992. The work consists of a 300-line semi-autobiographical electronic poem by Gibson, embedded in an artist's book by Ashbaugh. Gibson's text focused on the ethereal, human-owed nature of memories retained over the passage of time. Its principal notoriety arose from the fact that the poem, stored on a 3.5" floppy disk, was programmed to encrypt itself after a single use; similarly, the pages of the artist's book were treated with photosensitive chemicals, effecting the gradual fading of the words and images from the book's first exposure to light.

Internet-related prefixes such as e-, i-, cyber-, info-, techno- and net- are added to a wide range of existing words to describe new, Internet- or computer-related flavors of existing concepts, often electronic products and services that already have a non-electronic counterpart. The adjective virtual is often used in a similar manner.

Cyberdelic

Cyberdelic was the fusion of cyberculture and the psychedelic subculture into a new counterculture of the 1980s and 1990s.

Alan Sondheim is an American poet, critic, musician, artist, and theorist of cyberspace.

Amy S. Bruckman Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology

Amy Susan Bruckman is a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology affiliated with the School of Interactive Computing and the GVU Center. She is best known for her pioneering research in the fields of online communities and the learning sciences. In 1999, she was selected as one of MIT Technology Review's TR100 award, honoring 100 remarkable innovators under the age of 35.

Geert Lovink Dutch academic

Geert Lovink is the founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures, whose goals are to explore, document and feed the potential for socio-economical change of the new media field through events, publications and open dialogue. As theorist, activist and net critic, Lovink has made an effort in helping to shape the development of the web.

The Jargon File is a glossary and usage dictionary of slang used by computer programmers. The original Jargon File was a collection of terms from technical cultures such as the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) and others of the old ARPANET AI/LISP/PDP-10 communities, including Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Carnegie Mellon University, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute. It was published in paperback form in 1983 as The Hacker's Dictionary, revised in 1991 as The New Hacker's Dictionary.

References

  1. ↑ Index of /Zines/ASCII/Future.Culture
  2. ↑ Ten Reasons Why Essay: The Word and The Body Archived 2007-08-29 at the Wayback Machine
  3. ↑ WandP Issue 17: HEARING THE NET: MIA LIPNER
  4. ↑ Issue 17
  5. ↑ Gibson, William: Agrippa: A Book of the Dead Archived 2013-11-23 at the Wayback Machine .
  6. ↑ Kirschenbaum, Matthew G: "Hacking 'Agrippa'": The Source of the Online Text" in Mechanisms: New Media and the New Textuality (forthcoming from MIT Press). ISBN   978-0-262-11311-3.
  7. ↑ "Vitanza, CyberReader 2/e Web Site, Allyn&Bacon". Archived from the original on 2007-06-23. Retrieved 2007-08-30.
  8. ↑ Marshall, Living on Cybermind: Categories, Communication and Control, NY:Peter Lang, 2008
  9. ↑ Erowid Psychoactive Vaults : "Pioneers of the Virtual Underground"
  10. ↑ FutureNomic Home Page
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