By the 1960s, the science fiction genre was going stale and feeling repetitive. Too many action-filled, space-cowboy operas where a lone male protagonist saved the girl and the galaxy, all with his intellect and physical prowess, saturated the market. Some writers saw that science fiction could be so much more than just a simple hero journey and started to rebel. Writers wanted a writing style that could ask difficult and philosophical questions about the future, technology, and how society and our psyche would change. This is known as the New Wave.
New Wave authors like Phillip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin, and Philip Jose Farmer made us question our relationship to reality, gender, and technology. With their books, they began representing the social anxieties of the time. One of these stories was “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” by Phillip K. Dick. In it, the main character, Richard Deckard, a hunter of hyper-realistic androids, questions his own humanity and realizes he also might be a robot. It served as inspiration for the 1980s film Blade Runner. Within stories like these, we find the inspirations and origins of the subgenre known as Cyberpunk. One of the genre’s most iconic books, Neuromancer, written by William Gibson, features a washed-up hacker hired to do one final job: fight against powerful artificial intelligence (AI) overthrowing humans. Typically, the genre shows a dystopian future that combines a low-expectation life surrounded by high technological advancements where governments no longer exist. Instead, corporations run the world. Some well-known examples of the Cyberpunk film subgenre include the Matrix Trilogy, Ghost in the Shell, RoboCop, Akira, and Judge Dread.
Imagine yourself trying to deliver pizza in a futuristic Los Angeles that is even more densely populated than it is now. If you don’t 
deliver the pizza in 30 minutes, your employer, the Italian Mafia, will kill you. As you run late for a delivery, a young courier tries to hitch a ride on your motorcycle, embroiling you in a plot to use ancient Sumerian magic to mind-control everyone in the Metaverse. This unlikely plot became one of the most influential sci-fi novels, Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson in 1992. In it, Stephenson developed the idea of a virtual reality where people interact and live most of their lives through avatars (characters created to represent you in a cyber universe). The author was inspired to do this through a different means than we would imagine today. Stephenson envisioned cable television as the foundation of his network, rather than the internet, which would be accessed through goggles and equipment connected to the cable system.
Stephenson’s ideas have inspired many of the virtual reality experiences we see today. People have cited Snow Crash as the inspiration for programs we currently use, like Google Earth, video games like Quake and Second Life, and systems like Xbox Live, where people can play multiplayer games and have live conversations during the game. Stephenson significantly influenced Silicon Valley innovation and the creation of Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta.
Interestingly, something like cable television, not the early Internet, inspired the way technology now exists. It is hard to imagine how technologies will develop. Still, sometimes, your imagination can be so powerful that it influences the development of technology in a world where AI and virtual reality have become of such great importance that maintaining a rebellious hacker attitude might be necessary for our survival.