A "countercultural sensibility," says Rudy Rucker, is at the heart of the cyberpunk genre. According to Rucker:
Cyberpunk is a stage in the endless Bohemian subculture that created the beats, the hippies, the punks, and the grungers of today. This type of counterculture sensibility will never go away. But cyberpunk in the sense of writing about computers may someday not be interesting, just as writing about space flight is no longer interesting (qtd in Newitz, Bad Subjects , Issue #24, February,1996).
To Rucker's way of thinking, this countercultural sensibility informs writing about computers and the information age -- just as it has informed other countercultural movements -- and is clearly more important than the trappings of technology that are traditionally associated with cyberpunk sci-fi. Since Rucker has clearly been interested in countercultural movements in the past -- in his 1996 interview with Bad Subjects Rucker reminisces about getting high with Allen Ginsberg and talks about being a member of a punk rock band -- it is of little surprise that he spends so much time imagining alternative, futuristic cultures in Software. The foremost among these is Disky, the lunar society of independent living robots.
Disky is imagined as an anarchy of individual robots living together without any common government or police force. Exchange in Disky takes place through bartering, as there is no common currency. While there is no law in Disky, there are realities that govern its society. These realities, however, are represented as physical limits rather than regulations, and are imagined as being beneficial and productive.
Every bopper, for example, lives in its body for ten months before it is disassembled (Rucker 23). In that ten-month period, a bopper can build a scion in order to survive its disassembly. If a bopper has a scion, its memory, or software, will be transferred to the scion when its old body is taken apart. The scion then becomes its new body, or hardware. This alternative way of existing is viewed as democratic, as even the big boppers must live by its limitations. The transference of software is also presented as rejuvenating. When a bopper has its software transferred, parts of its memory are deleted and other parts are randomized by the giant computer link called the One. Ralph Numbers, the first robot to live independently of humans, explains that this controlled havoc is meant to erase previously developed sub-routines in boppers so that they will "replace old solutions with new and better ones" (Rucker 24). Most importantly, the transference of software opens a window on immortality. Ralph Numbers has lived 35 different times in 35 different bodies. By transmitting its software to new hardware, a robot on Disky can save its own life, so to speak, and live forever in regularly renovated bodies. The attractiveness of this alternative existence is understandable even before Cobb, who created Ralph Numbers, allows himself to become a robot. The counterculture of Disky is meant to be chaotic, but beautiful. The risk of a brief and unregulated existence is counterbalanced by the promise of immortality, rejuvenation, and social democracy.
More to the point, punk rock music is based on the understanding that chaotic sounds can be bewildering and beautiful at the same time:
Rucker believes the world's complexity is a factor of its numerous interacting parts. This interaction, on a grand scale, creates complexity, but it also creates beauty and a more perfect order:
The moral is that a lot of the world's apparent complexity is the result of there being lots of different things in the world rather than a result of the world having complicated laws. You can think of the world as a huge parallel computation, with lovely things emerging from the interaction of simple rules" (qtd in Newitz, Bad Subjects, Issue #24, February,1996).
The lovely things that emerge from the interaction of simple rules are clearly what Rucker hopes to create by imagining alternative and countercultural societies like Disky. Like the beats and the punkers, Rucker is trying to imagine a freer, more fulfilling existence than exists in mainstream society. What he imagines is a human-bopper fusion that has strong countercultural currents. Still, Rucker never goes so far as to completely endorse the alternative existence he envisions. Even as he imagines the benefits of a human-bopper fusion, Rucker problematizes this vision with characters like Sta-Hi who worry about what will have to be sacrificed.