The prefix cyber is found everywhere today as an all-purpose term for digital and internet activities. Teenagers persecuted on Facebook are suffering from “cyber-bullying”; other teenagers banned from accessing the internet by their parents, perhaps because they’ve been bullying classmates on Facebook, have been “cyber-grounded.” Those engaging in advanced forms of flirtation via their computer screens, or worse, may say they’re having “cyber-sex”; those wanting to be portentous about all things digital may talk about the “cyberverse.”
The variations are almost endless, and can extend deeply into life beyond the screen: from pervasive concerns over “cyber-security” and “cyber-stalking” to real world “cyber-parks” in which a large number of technology companies are concentrated.
All of these are terms of the last few decades. Cyber itself, however, has an impressively long etymological pedigree. The prefix featured for the first time in the English language as part of the word cybernetics—coined in 1948 by the American mathematician Norbert Wiener in his book of the same name, which explored the properties of self-regulating information systems.
Wiener borrowed cybernetics directly from ancient Greek, in which a kybernetes was both the person who steered a ship and the rudder of that ship. Wiener was using the word in a metaphorical sense, originally deployed by no less an authority than Plato to describe the governing or “steering” of people themselves.
Cybernetics, then, became a way of speaking about the possibilities of self-steering information systems—and by the 1970s it had become a familiar enough term among specialists for a range of supercomputers to be released by manufacturers CDC under the brand “Cyber.”
It wasn’t until its adoption by a young science fiction author in 1982, however, that cyber truly broke into mainstream culture. The author was the American-Canadian William Gibson, who in his story “Burning Chrome” coined a tantalizing term for new realms of human-technological interaction: “cyberspace.”21
It was a word that truly took off two years later thanks to its central role in Gibson’s debut 1984 novel Neuromancer22—a book which successfully predicted, and indeed helped shape, whole swathes of what would become the popular cultural movement known as “cyberpunk.”
Confusingly enough, the term “cyberpunk” itself predates both Neuromancer and “Burning Chrome,” originating instead in a 1980 short story of that name by author Bruce Bethke about a gang of teenage computer hackers. Bethke’s story was not actually published until November 1983, just in time for its title to be indelibly taken up as a description of the aesthetic of Neuromancer and its countless imitators and innovators.
These range from films like 1999’s The Matrix (whose title is itself a direct borrowing from the name of the computer network in Neuromancer) to the novels of authors like Neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling, not to mention video games, Japanese anime strips and films, music videos and albums, and even architectural and fashion styles. Simply Google “cyberpunk fashion” and its more recent relative, “cybergoth,” for more leather, metal, and plastic than you can shake several modems at.