Mind Hacks 5: 1982 – Tron

Sucked into cyberspace.

In Tron we have the first major motion picture where the main action takes place inside a computer, in what has become known as cyberspace. This world, of course, has no visual reality. To depict this world in film, then, one must invent a visual language. The language invented for Tron derives from video games, experimental film, and visionary imagery of psychedelia.

Through the wonders of computer graphics, the computer itself now becomes the medium for a Trip. The lead character of Tron was based loosely on computer guru Alan Kay – his wife was one of the screen writers – who is best-known as the developer of the GUI interface that has come to dominate both personal computers and high-end workstations. When Tron was made the personal computer revolution was in full swing, and Apple’s ground-breaking Macintosh computer was only two years away. The Macintosh would change the way people interacted with computers and make them more accessible to adults as well as to children.

Drinking cyberwater.

The counter-cultural sixties were thoroughly over and the high tech world of PCs had absorbed much of the adventurous spirit of youth. In the 1960s and 1970s young people turned on, tuned in, and dropped out to form communes and other collective living arrangements. In the 1980s and into the 1990s bright and adventurous young people formed high-tech companies in hopes of becoming wealthy at an early age. They dressed informally and listened to rock and roll though headsets while programming their way, if not to fame and fortune, then at least to exhaustion and sleep. Just as San Francisco and its hinterlands played a seminal role in the counter-cultural 60s, so the same region, and often the same people, played a seminal role in the personal computer revolution of the 70s and 80s.

Space ship in cyberspace.

New Age this and that became part of the cultural landscape. Yoga and the martial arts were fixtures of shopping malls across the land. While Yoga had been introduced into the West late in the nineteenth century, it owes much of its current popularity to receptiveness engendered in the psychedelic 60s. The martial arts master, with his superior physical prowess and mystical powers of insight and concentration, had become a figure of popular culture. Alternative forms of medical treatment had become more widely available; even the most prestigious medical institutions were teaching meditation to heart attack patients.

Meanwhile the elite world of artificial intelligence had fallen into disarray. The brilliant promises of the 1950s and 1960s went un-kept and the attempt to turn AI into a commercial enterprise went belly-up. The so-called “AI-winter” set in. At the same time the nation’s War on Drugs had kicked into high gear by the moralizing enthusiasm of William Bennett. The post-war baby boomers began moving into middle age.

The tyrant of cyberspace.

Selected Milestones:

• 1977: Star Wars became a motion-picture blockbuster, wedding martial arts mysticism with a space opera story and high tech special effects.
• 1981: William Bennett appointed to head the National Endowment of Humanities, his first government post. This positioned him to declare and lead a culture war. Later he would become “Drug Czar” under President Bush.
• 1981: Ted Nelson publishes Computer Liberation, in which he describes an elaborate hypertext system he called Project Xanadu (after the kingdom described in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”).
• 1984: Apple Computer advertised their new Macintosh in a Super Bowl advertisement that pitched IBM in the role of Big Brother and the Mac as humankind’s liberator.
• 1984: William Gibson combines video game imagery with reggae music and mythology and sets it in the future, thus placing psychedelia and computing on equal terms in the cyberpunk world of Neuromancer.
• 1985: Steve Jobs purchases Pixar, from George Lucas, and establishes it as an independent computer graphics company. Pixar would go on to produce the first completely computer-generated motion pictures.

Your interpretation here.