ABSTRACT

Cyberspace is a term coined by William Gibson in his 1984 novel Neuromancer, a work about a computer hacker (“Cowboy”) riding along the “information-space.” In an alternative future, economic and political power have been transformed into huge databases that are located in a structural manifold called the matrix or cyberspace,

bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void. The virtuosi of the matrix can experience cyberspace through electrodes attached to their foreheads and manipulate its structures through a keyboard computer called a deck. Cowboy operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a by-product of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the matrix.