Was the cyber revolution a technology-driven business revolution, a battleground in which only innovators survived? Was it a cyberpunk genre portrait of immersive virtual reality, in habited by avatars wandering the virtual streets in search of computer-simulated escapades that are real – or, even better, that have a heightened, psychedelic sense of reality? Results of a web search on the subject might have you believe that this is the case. I think the real meat of the cyber revolution is less about technology and more about the alternate literary, aesthetic, and spiritual memes which found their way into technoculture, cyberculture, cyberpunk.

The ’50s beat generation through hippiedom to the early ’90s cyberculture created a continuum of alternative culture, fed upon at each stage by a mainstream culture that tends to appropriate alternative symbols and paradigms without completely getting the meaning. In the latter part of the ’80s, a bunch of us who were thirtysomething and had once been university-bred hippie-radical progeny of an affluent ’50s and ’60s society bemoaned ’80s lameness and greed. But we felt that the ’90s would be different, that there would be another pass at the same revolution that sparked in the ’50s (beat generation) and ’60s (flower children) without ever quite igniting.

We were right: the same alternative cultural ambience reappeared, this time in the context of an explosion of new technologies and new ways for the fringe cultural elites to find connection. The uniforms were different (instead of long hair, beads, and work shirts it was tattoos, piercings, rainbow hair) but the marching orders were the same: pursuit of a higher truth/justice/sanity and a fervent desire to overcome mundane culture. I was one of the boomer pharts who surfed the continuum, more comfy with raves than Rolling Stones, convinced that the Internet would make the eye-opening difference.

And in some ways it did. Paco Nathan and I formed a company called FringeWare, Inc., and in explaining our intentions I always said this: every town in the world has a fringe element, a few geeks with accelerated consciousness and a fervent desire to transcend the mundane. With the Internet, these denizens of diverse fringes can come together and find community, and for us that was the real revolution.

So it happened, and throughout much of the ’90s geeks old and new were jammin’ email and chat sessions and forums, building affinities and fighting flame wars, working their various networks, putting aside science fiction novels for science fiction lifestyles.