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Initial commit: HPR Knowledge Base MCP Server

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- MCP server with stdio transport for local use
- Search episodes, transcripts, hosts, and series
- 4,511 episodes with metadata and transcripts
- Data loader with in-memory JSON storage

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Episode: 4073
Title: HPR4073: Is the 1990 documentary "Cyberpunk" worth watching today?
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4073/hpr4073.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 19:16:17
---
This is Hacker Public Radio episode 4,073 for Wednesday the 13th of March 2024.
Today's show is entitled, is the 1990 documentary cyberpunk worth watching today.
It is hosted by Trickster and is about six minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, in which Trickster covers the pros and cons of an old hacker watching old hacker media.
I have had a love-hate relationship with the documentary cyberpunk from 1990.
It's fascinating and it's interesting and it's an amazing time capsule.
It also unfortunately has quite a lot of errors and just strange posturing in it.
It's worth seeing and what I'm going to do is briefly tell you all about it and hopefully based on this information you'll either decide to see it or you'll decide definitely not to see it.
It consists of interviews with William Gibson, Jaren Lanier, Timothy Leary, Vernon Reed from In Living Color, a particularly interesting hacker named Michael Synergy,
and it uses industrial bands such as Front 242, Manufacturer, Frontline Assembly, and others as its musical backdrop, which was common for the scene back in 1990.
Subjects such as cyberterrorism, cybernetic implants, and enhancement, virtual reality, virtual telepresence, and the general counterculture rebellion against the system, whatever the system might be, are touched upon,
and of course some inevitable comparisons with Akira are also made.
It is not perfect.
It's an important time capsule and I think people should watch it. The problem is that it can really rub you the wrong way if you were there and you notice a lot of the stuff that it gets wrong.
It's the same reason that lawyers don't watch legal dramas and doctors don't watch medical dramas and stuff like that and it's because when you know what's wrong, it's hard to get passed.
I reviewed this documentary back in 2014 and I'd like to read some of it to you and I want to get out of the way all of the stuff that would irritate you and then finally end the review with why you should watch it and maybe that will let you make up your mind about whether or not it's worth an hour of your time.
And if you don't, well then you'll get a five minute review of the documentary right here.
So what should you know that would irritate you going into it?
While the producer and director did an admirable job making the source material interesting and presentable to the public, there are a lot of flaws with the documentary.
Some are minor and can be overlooked such as the 1990s trend of inserting fake computer graphic overlays to try to make the material more similar to the world gibson painted in neuromancer.
Many of the problems are with the pacing, there are entire sections that focus on a particular subject for too long, sometimes without impact.
One section in particular goes on so long that different digital effects start to fade in and out after a few minutes, almost as if the editor was bored and resorted to doing something with the image to keep the viewers interest.
There are also some very misrepresented facts and predictions, but it's not really fair to criticize a documentary for failing to predict the future correctly.
That being said, there are some real howlers in here from the supposed power hackers wielded against governments to the silly amateur computer graphics that obscure hackers identities to the heavily hinted at concept that neuromancer itself was responsible for shaping technology in history.
The most egregious is equating hacker with cracker, although to be fair that's happened multiple times before and since.
A special mention must be given to Michael Synergy, who perfectly embodies the Huckster who started believing his own bullshit.
Some of his claims in the documentary are so utterly patently ridiculous, so incredibly pretentious that it takes a great deal of willpower not to scream at him when he's talking, especially when he mispronounces the word genre.
Where I him, I would have wanted this stage of my life to disappear, and it seems as if that wish has come true. His moniker disappeared with the 1990s.
My personal wild speculation is that once the real actual revolution of the worldwide web occurred and it was able to finally call him out, he quietly exited stage left.
But last I heard, he worked for Autodesk in the mid 1990s and was going by his birth name again, living in Hawaii, working in IT.
If anyone has a real update, I would love to know what actually happened to him.
But most impressingly, there is a real missed opportunity with how Jaron Leneer's involvement was portrayed.
In the documentary, he comes across as a stoner who only mentions VR, which is a shame because then and now he's one of the most relevant and accurate representations of a hacker.
That the documentary includes, of everybody interviewed, Jaron is the only person who is still exploring these concepts and ideas.
And more importantly, they're unintended fallout, which you can read in one of his most recent books, who owns the future.
With that out of the way, while it may be hard to sit through, the documentary retains glimpses of the innocent, wildly optimistic, techno hippie idealism that grew with the rise of personal computing and networking.
For that, a stout effect are alone.
The time when the internet existed, but the worldwide web did not, it is worth an hour of your time.
It's also worth watching to catch which ideas were especially prescient, such as, whoever holds the most information holds the most power.
Every device will eventually be interconnected. Physical boundaries will not impede meaningful communication.
People will be individual, mobile, uncensored, broadcast stations, and considering that that is exactly how you're hearing this, I'd call this a reality.
The Matrix as a concept and or allegory for God, which is later realized to the letter almost in the Matrix movie trilogy.
You could make an interesting drinking game out of catching which idea is succeeded, although you'd get more drunk quickly by catching all of the stupid and inaccurate comments.
The restoration I did of Cyberpunk The Documentary is available at archive.org.
Grab the MPEG transport stream if you can, it is the highest quality version uploaded.
It's Blu-ray compliant, and it won't take up too much space in your memory implant.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at HackerPublicRadio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HBR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcasts, then click on our contribute link to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HBR has been kindly provided by an onsthost.com, the internet archive, and our sings.net.
On this advice status, today's show is released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.