"What is Cyberpunk?"

I ran across this great essay, "What is Cyberpunk?", today by Rudy Rucker. Its title pretty much sums it up...good stuff. Here's an excerpt that struck me.

The real charm of punk is that stupid hippies dislike it as much as do stupid rednecks. “What’s the matter with them? What do they want?” Anyone who was ever a hippie for the right reasons — a hatred of conformity and a desire to break through to higher realities — is likely to appreciate and enjoy the punks. But a lot of basically conventional people slid through the ’70s thinking of themselves as avant-garde, when in fact they were brain-dead. What’s good about punk is that it makes all of us question our comfortable assumptions and attitudes. Wait . . . look at that last sentence, and you can see I’m forty. How complacently I slip the “us” in there — trying to coopt the revolution. How Life magazine of me, how plastic, how bullshit. What’s good about punk is that it’s fast and dense. It has a lot of information...