A random vanity search sent me off on a diversionary romp through cyberspace yesterday that landed me on Wikipedia.

Lyotard defined postmodern as "skepticism of metanarratives" and not surprisingly others (such as Habermas) countered that this, too, was a metanarrative, suggesting that a) human thought cannot escape totalizing, grand tales of the world and b) postmodern thinkers are hypocrites. I'm a rank tourist when it comes to philosophy, but it seems to me that Lyotard's statement is more a description of a fact in "the post-modern age" first and an organizing philosophic principle second, which would mean that the critique is a non-starter. I remember fondly my days of misspent youth as a fundamentalist-piece-of-shit-godfucker repeating the old saw "It's absolutely true that there are no absolute truths". Heh, in one sentence the innumerable philosophers based on moral relativism and postmodernism have been toppled. Toppled! Of course, no one had ever said there are no absolute truths, they had observed that truth in situational. That what's true really depends on the context. This is hardly controversial, but it does tend to freak out the grand idealists.

Today, I was on Wikipedia again looking at something else, and found this quote: 


The construction of the statement takes its meaning beyond the simple

judgemental observation, "Information should be free" by acknowledging

that the internal force or entelechy of information and knowledge makes

it essentially incompatible with Capitalist notions of proprietary software,

copyrights, patents, subscription services, private property, etc.

Information is dynamic, ever-growing and evolving and cannot be contained

within (any) ideological structure.
I was struck at how similar the cyperpunk idea of the way information relates (or doesn't relate) to capitalism is to Lyotard's definition of postmodern. Are the cyberpunks just evidence of Lyotard's acumen and a part of the postmodern or are they directly influenced by postmodern thinkers? I don't know.