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California Dreams: Our Cyberpunk Future According

to ‘Wild Palms’
Michael Grasso / January 24, 2019 Follow

Artist rendering of Apple’s corporate headquarters in Cupertino, California, 2011

This new faith has emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley.
Promoted in magazines, books, TV programmes, websites, newsgroups and Net conferences, the Californian Ideology promiscuously
combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies. This amalgamation of opposites has been
achieved through a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies. In the digital utopia, everybody will
be both hip and rich.

—“The Californian Ideology,” Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron in Science and Culture, 1996

California is where East meets West. Where West is East. Where the future begins. Where realities are created, where for almost a
hundred years Hollywood has been the magic dream machine, the crown of creation, the unmoved mover, the void at the center of the Great
Media Wheel: The New Jerusalem arising amidst the wild palms and shimmering mirages of the desert, the New Cathedral of our twenty-
rst century self-made reality.

—Anton Kreutzer, “New Cathedrals” speech, 1994, as imagined by Norman Spinrad in The Wild Palms Reader

The 1980s saw the gradual ascendancy of cyberpunk narratives in popular science ction. The genre projected Western societal trends
seen in the decade—corporate conglomeration, the rise of computer networking and global media, and the ascendancy of Paci c Rim
economies, most prominently Japan—into a vision of the future bursting with high technology controlled by a few neo-feudal corporate
interests, while at the same time the masses bleakly toil in a decayed urban environment. The commonly accepted “founding
documents” of the genre—Ridley Scott’s 1982 lm Blade Runner, the 1983 short story “Cyberpunk” by Bruce Bethke, and 1984’s
Neuromancer by William Gibson—laid the template that would come to dominate science ction over the next few decades and arguably
in uence the direction of Western technology, fashion, and culture into our present day.

One often-overlooked but just as essential work of science ction during the cyberpunk Golden Age was Bruce Wagner’s early 1990s
comic and eventual 1993 television series Wild Palms, a satirical vision of a media-saturated present/future crawling with mind-altering
drugs, sinister conspiratorial cults, and ubiquitous computer technology promising transcendence. As a vision of a possible future, Wild
Palms would have been believable to contemporary Americans, who were then crawling free of the nuclear doom of the Cold War into a
brand new geopolitics at the “end of history.” But the extended Wild Palms universe also o ers an audience in 2019 a startling prediction
of a world where messianic technologists promote a cult-like “Californian ideology” that has spread out of control through the halls of
politics, entertainment, and big business. Futurists, writers of speculative ction, and computer scientists helped esh out the world of
Wild Palms in the tie-in book The Wild Palms Reader (1993). These predictions were so accurate because they were the very writers,
theorists, and technologists who helped shape the computer revolution of the 1990s in both media and academia.

Wild Palms creator Bruce Wagner grew up and came of age in Beverly Hills, California in the 1960s and ’70s. His early, unproduced
screenplays focused on the sleazy side of Hollywood, some of which came out of his time working as an L.A. chau eur. (One of these
screenplays would come to the big screen much later, thanks to David Cronenberg‘s 2014 adaptation of Wagner’s Maps to the Stars.) From
1990 to 1993, Wagner worked with artist and illustrator Julian Allen on the serialized Wild Palms comic series, which appeared in Details
Magazine. Wagner borrowed the phrase “The Wild Palms” from a William Faulkner novel (Wagner also was in uenced by F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s “Pat Hobby” stories, Fitzgerald being yet another literary gure who’d been through the wringer, much like Faulkner, thanks
to working in Hollywood.) Allen’s experience illustrating some of the most gripping and conspiratorial events of the 1970s for New York
magazine held him in good stead for Wagner’s story, set in a present-day Los Angeles choked by a web of weird conspiracies. Wagner and
Allen’s comic was an unforgiving look at life as part of the Hollywood machine. Protagonist Harry Wycko , an entertainment lawyer,
nds himself thrown into a conspiracy orchestrated by science ction writer, cult founder, entertainment mogul, and U.S. Senator Anton
Kreutzer that will destroy Wycko ’s family, his comfortable life, and even his ability to tell fantasy from reality.

Excerpts from Wild Palms, as it appeared in Details Magazine.

Found at the Julian Allen Art tumblr

The Wild Palms comic largely saved its savagery for the vacuousness and moral degradation of the entertainment industry: bloody ghts
and kidnappings break out at hip Hollywood restaurants, movie stars blithely joke about killing peasants on trips to the Third World, and
drug-fueled rapes and murders abound. Real-life celebrities such as Carrie Fisher (and eventual television series stars Jim Belushi and
Dana Delany) appear throughout, further blurring the lines between our world and that of the comic. Minor elements to the comic story,
such as virtual reality television, a synesthetic drug called mimezine that allows for the human brain to perceive Kreutzer’s Channel
Three network virtual reality series “Church Windows,” and the expressly political con ict between Kreutzer’s child-snatching fascist
paramilitary “the Fathers” and the leftist academic-led resistance, “the Friendship Committee,” would become more prominent and
central to the television series and its tie-in book. In the comic, these elements lurk in the background, rendering the contemporary
early ’90s setting thoroughly surreal. Wild Palms the comic reads more like the kind of story that Philip K. Dick would have written had he
lived to see the success of Blade Runner, a recapitulation of his druggy California novels like A Scanner Darkly (1977) and VALIS (1981),
charged with the kind of routine, blasé brutality one might nd in the work of J.G. Ballard. Allen’s ultra-realistic art, laden with fashion
and visual design signi ers of the high yuppie era, contrasts eerily well with both Harry’s and the reader’s journey through a violent,
hallucinogenic landscape.

The ABC network, which had been taking chances with genre-busting original series during the mid-to-late 1980s and early 1990s—
Moonlighting (1985-1989), thirtysomething (1987-1991), Max Headroom (1987-1988), and Twin Peaks (1990-1991)—adapted Wild
Palms into a star-studded week-long miniseries in 1993. Like Twin Peaks, Wild Palms had a marquee lm auteur at the helm: executive
producer Oliver Stone, hot o his own run of successes: Platoon (1986), Wall Street (1987), and The Doors and JFK (both 1991). Wagner
handled the entire screenplay adaptation for all ve episodes of the miniseries. Wild Palms was a genre mashup like Moonlighting
(comedy and detective drama) or Twin Peaks (soap opera and supernatural crime thriller). Its Hollywood setting and high-powered
family drama put it right at the tail end of ’80s network television’s obsession with powerful families jockeying for position and
backstabbing each other in prime time soap operas such as Dallas and Dynasty, but with a near-future science ction setting. The
television series makes many changes from the comic for reasons of narrative exigency but most noteworthy is the change of setting
from the contemporary early ’90s to a near-future of 2007. Fashions have changed (high-collared neo-Edwardian three-piece suits are
the fashion order of the day in 2007 L.A.) and the addition of near-future technological advances allow for the miniseries to focus less on
the internal psyche of Harry Wycko (played in the miniseries by Jim Belushi) and instead focus more squarely on the media-political-
spiritual conspiracies hatched by Anton Kreutzer (played in reliable “heavy” mode by Robert Loggia).

Dana Delany, Jim Belushi, and Kim Catrall in a promotional image for the Wild Palms TV
miniseries, 1993.

Wild Palms the television series is ultimately less of a comment on the moral void at the center of the entertainment industry and more of
a televisual comment on television-as-medium itself. The plot is more linear than the comic, more driven by Wycko ’s investigation
into the conspiracies that surround him and his long-buried family secrets. Wycko is eventually revealed to be Kreutzer’s biological
son, as is Wycko ’s own putative son Coti (Ben Savage). Coti’s role as television star and Kreutzer’s chosen scion comes into play with
Kreutzer’s messianic plans to live forever and control the American people through the mind-altering chemical mimezine and
holographic virtual reality television programs. The glimpses we catch of Coti and the other actors in “Church Windows” reveal a
program with broad punch lines, silly plotlines, and wooden acting: a perfect Platonic evocation of television’s banality. But unlike the
traditional TV sitcom, the gures appear in the mimezine-dosed TV viewers’ own living room, the drug allowing them a synesthetic full-
sensory experience. This recalls Philip K. Dick’s 1965 The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, where dirt-poor o -world colonists are kept
sedated using hallucinogens that allow them to project into diorama-like “Perky Pat layouts” that mimic a heteronormative 1950s-
style suburban home: an ur-sitcom of sorts. The miniseries’s Macgu n is the “Go chip,” which will allow Kreutzer to use Mimecom’s
virtual reality technology to live forever. The fact that this wondrous biotechnology is being used to provide a single man with
holographic immortality while simultaneously issued as cheap, hollow entertainment for the masses is yet another classic Dickian trope.

Like the comic, the TV series had celebrity cameos in abundance, including Oliver Stone himself, who is vindicated (in 2007 Los Angeles)
that the conspiracy theories proposed in JFK were proven correct. Also appearing brie y was William Gibson himself, in a meta-moment
where he is identi ed as the writer who invented “cyberspace.” And Gibson was also involved with The Wild Palms Reader, which was
devised as a tie-in to the miniseries by ABC. Network executives, worried that Wild Palms‘ plot would be too di cult for the network
television viewer to follow, produced both the Reader and a 1-900 number to help give context to the ctional history. The Reader, edited
by the series’ executive consultant Roger Trilling, recruited musical artists, science ction authors, media gad ies, and, most important,
a handful of some of the most prominent names in the development of the nascent Internet, some of whom were real-world proponents
of the aforementioned technocratic future under the “Californian ideology.”

The Wild Palms Reader is described on its back cover as an in-universe

artifact, a festschrift for Anton Kreutzer’s birthday. “This is not a book
about the world of Wild Palms, it’s a book from that world. It doesn’t know
it’s ction”—yet another postmodern blurring of the lines between reality
and narrative. The Reader does largely follow the life story of Anton
Kreutzer, with excerpts from documents detailing his family history, his
early career as a science ction writer in the 1960s, his involvement with
bleeding edge think tanks and technologists in the 1970s, his dalliances
with media ownership and politics in the 1980s, and his eventual role as
Senator, media magnate, and head of the “Church of Synthiotics” in Wild
Palms‘s projected 21st-century future. In short, Kreutzer’s ctional life story
marries the larger trends in Cold War technocratic culture and
counterculture that were united in the aftermath of the 1960s to created
our current cybernetic consensus. Moreover, the writers and artists who
populated the Wild Palms universe with these ctional documents and
artifacts were well-versed in the real-world cultural trends and
technologies present in the early 1990s that informed Kreutzer’s ctional
philosophy-religion of Synthiotics/”New Realities” and its various media
and political strategies.

The Reader‘s visual design, by Japanese graphic designer Yasushi Fujimoto

and his design house CAP, is redolent of the hip early ’90s desktop
publishing decisions—multiply-overlayed text and graphics, text laid out in
sometimes unreadable shapes, and lots of fonts—that can be seen in then
cutting-edge publications such as Wired magazine or Ray Gun. The Wild Palms Reader is absolutely an artifact of the early 1990s, just as
much as it is a book that “doesn’t know it’s ction.” And the table of contents reveals a who’s who of early-’90s gures in technology and
media: Wagner and Gibson, of course; sci authors Bruce Sterling, Thomas Disch, and Norman Spinrad; futurists and technologists like
Hans Moravec and Brenda Laurel; and even oddballs like E. Howard Hunt (who contributes a fake intelligence dossier of Kreutzer),
Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead (who penned the lyrics for an anti-Synthiotics Motörhead song from the “future” year of 1997),
Malcolm McLaren, the art collective that produced the band Laibach, and Sassy magazine editor Jane Pratt (who provides a teen-beat
interview with Coti Wycko ). So, as a cohesive work of ction, the Reader is necessarily a scrapbook, although a majority of the ctional
pieces within are provided by author and editor Hillary Johnson.

As such, Anton Kreutzer is a protean gure in the Reader. He enters the story as an orphan, his half-Japanese mother dead in an American
internment camp during World War II, his father dead from cirrhosis a few years later. In the wake of being orphaned, he retreated into
science ction; the Reader presents unpublished juvenilia which hint at child abuse at the hands of the adults in juvenile hall. By 1963, he
is publishing his own stories. The obvious comparison here is to sometime science ction author and eventual Church of Scientology
founder L. Ron Hubbard’s early experiments in both science ction and self-help, marked by his 1950 book Dianetics: The Modern Science
of Mental Health. But the cod-Golden Age sci- presented in the Reader more resembles cosmic-level stories such as Arthur C. Clarke’s
1953 Childhood’s End. One of Kreutzer’s protagonists achieves “apotheosis” on the blasted ruins of Los Angeles, ascending to a higher
plane on the giant pyramid erected over the irradiated bones of Hollywood. These early works hint at Kreutzer’s god complex and
delusions of grandeur, the classic American postwar ethic of self-improvement curdled and turned megalomaniacal.

So of course it’s no surprise that Kreutzer turns to the East to nd further wisdom on self-improvement as the late ’60s arrive, just like
many real-world tech giants. Kreutzer re-engages with his Japanese ancestry and seeks spiritual wisdom in Shinto spirituality. But
Kreutzer is also a child of California, and combines this spiritual exploration with drug experimentation, and funding research at SRI-
style think tanks to nd the key to mind-machine interface. Kreutzer founds a company, Mimecom, to work on his research into virtual
reality and cybernetics. From this fusion of spirituality, pharmacology, and computer technology, Kreutzer believes he will nd the key to
enable him to become the god he yearns to be. Any resemblance to our own world’s aforementioned technocratic champions of the
Californian Ideology seem perfectly intentional. But to make his plans come to fruition, Kreutzer, much like our real-life tech magnates,
would need one more crucial element: that of political power.

As the ctional documents turn to the 1970s, Kreutzer begins networking with other men of in uence and wealth, founding a
movement called the Wild Palms Group. Reminiscent of the Trilateral Commission, Bohemian Grove, and other secretive conspiracies
from our timeline, Kreutzer invites a group of prominent gures (including Henry Kissinger, Robert MacNamara, H. Ross Perot, and,
somewhat anachronistically for 1978, Ted Turner and Bill Gates) to join his movement for a renewal of American society that had grown
decadent and scarred in the aftermath of the 1970s: “Neither party has the answer. Politics as usual will not su ce when people stand at
the point of no return.” In this letter to these prominent gures, Kreutzer makes mention of an inner circle to the Wild Palms Group he is
founding called “the Fathers,” which we learn on the next page grew out of a neo-fascist movement in Yugoslavia, whose beliefs
Kreutzer has fused into his own private conspiracy at the top of the Church of Synthiotics.

Two excerpts from The Wild Palms Reader: Anton Kreutzer’s letter announcing the creation of “The Wild Palms Group” (left), and a ctionalized
future history of real estate in Los Angeles that traces the region’s transformation from a land of malls in the early 1990s to a giant “Wilderzone”
of slums surrounding wealthy enclaves by 2008 (right)

Obviously, the cultural touchstone from our own world that most closely resembles Kreutzer here is Ronald Reagan, who won the
Presidency in 1980 o ering an optimistic (and simultaneously retrograde, moralistic, and fascistic) cure for the malaise of the ’70s.
Reagan, too, used plays from the 20th century fascist playbook as both Governor of California and President, cloaking it in the language
of traditional values and market supremacy. Kreutzer too runs for o ce in 1980, for Senate from California, and in the world of Wild
Palms, he loses after a rambling “infomercial” airs on television, betraying Kreutzer’s more o -kilter beliefs, such as his rmly-held
faith that his development of virtual reality will allow the American people to literally make their own reality. (Given his eventual
election to the Senate in 1994, it appears that the American people were not quite yet ready for Kreutzer’s philosophy in 1980.) Calling
his followers “New Realists,” he o ers a vision of the America he seeks to make:

“ That’s why I created Synthiotics—to wake up individuals one by one. And that’s why I founded Mimecom, whose great
mission is to free the American people from the single-reality media monopoly Disneyworld of the mind that you’ve been
tricked into buying as your own collective American Dream. And to bring about the media millennium, where every
American is free to inhabit a reality of his or her own choosing, through the software science of the mind and the hardware
technology of the spirit!

This language, that of individual choice, of inhabiting one’s own personal media reality, became more and more true in our timeline in
the 1980s, as cable television and computer technology began appearing in more and more homes in America. These technologies
contributed to the fraying of the social fabric that began with the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s. Moreover, Kreutzer’s belief that his
very speci c technology, both material and spiritual, can open up literal New Realities in the form of quantum multiversal timelines; that
individual will, consciousness, and belief can shape the world around us, e ectively demonstrates how the modern techno-libertarian
ethos has e ectively used a general atmosphere of postmodernism over the past 25 years to create a moral and political relativism that
elevates the sacred individual, and individual choice under the market, into a veritable godhood. In the world of Wild Palms, this leads to
extreme economic inequality, with 2007 Los Angeles turned into a “Wilderzone” of dangerous slums, dotted with walled communities
of extreme wealth. On this prediction, the creators of Wild Palms were startlingly accurate, but they really only needed to look out their
window to see how it would all unfold.

Who is resisting this techno-libertarian fascism in the world of The Wild Palms Reader? The “Friendship Committee,” a.k.a. the “Friends,”
a group of disa ected academics who are trying to smash the illusion machine that Kreutzer, Synthiotics, Channel Three, and Mimecom
have all conspired to use to sedate the American people. The main problem with the Friends is that every glimpse of them in both the
series and the Reader makes them out to be wild-eyed prophets, screaming in the wilderness, but ultimately impotent to make any
material change in Wild Palms‘s media dystopia. Kreutzer’s old rival, Eli Levitt (played by David Warner in the TV series), conveys the
gravitas of leftist history and activism well enough, but the Reader features a manic interview with a member of the Friends who tried to
assassinate Kreutzer with a curare dart. Interviewed on television, she is allowed to rant about conspiracies, an elite lled with Synthiotic
“technoshamans” dedicated to destroying both human free will and the ecological health of planet Earth. Recuperated and made into a
laughingstock by the media as so many revolutionaries and conspiracists are in our world, she is e ectively neutralized by the very media
machine she rants about.

Immortality through “uploading” and other methods of biological life extension have become a hot topic in the past decade, with computer
scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil leading the way in heralding an eventual humanity-transforming technological “Singularity.” Cover stories
on Kurzweil and the Singularity from Time Magazine, 2011 and Wired UK, 2013

And as we get to the end of the Reader, and to the end of Wild Palms the television series, we nd out what drives Kreutzer near the end of
his mortal life: the pursuit of immortality. The aforementioned “Go chip” will allow him to download his consciousness and live forever
as a being of pure energy, a hologram, the capstone to all his dreams of apotheosis from his youth. Our own transhumanist
technoshamans are no di erent: dedicated to surviving their own physical death and even the death of our ecosystem with plans to
upload themselves; failing that, they’ll either bodily head o to Mars or  nd a nice bolthole and hunker down as the rest of the Earth (and
the 99%) burns and dies around them. With even pop songs now celebrating the possibility of eternal life as one of the Elect in an
arti cial intelligence cloud, the millenarian implications of techno-libertarianism are more immediate and more dangerous than
when Wild Palms was released. After all, if eternal life is promised to you as a “sacred” individual, what responsibility does a “Randian
hero” have to the rest of the Earth, to its living things, and to the rest of the human race not wealthy enough to ascend to a state of pure
immortal energy?

William Gibson commented on his blog in 2006 that The Wild Palms Reader “managed to pre- gure some of the most eldritch vibes of
Bush-era neoconservatism, and indeed the series can be imagined as making a very di erent kind of sense, at the time, if only Clinton
hadn’t been elected.” But Clinton was elected, and the deregulated internet giveaway that resulted in the rst dot-com boom and
bubble at the turn of the century led to our current Web 2.0 landscape, where corporations control information, reality is fungible, and
theocratic neo-fascists use their own bastardized, hollow form of postmodernism to assure us cowed viewers that there is no real truth,
only a multiplicity of supposedly equally valid alternate Realities. The same wealthy Baby Boomers who were lampooned for their
vacuity in Wagner’s original comic now clutch consensual illusions closely to their heart, each side tuned into news channels devoted to
regurgitating their political beliefs, their own custom Reality, just like the VR consumers and New Realists in Wild Palms. And even more
shocking is how closely attuned so many of the contributors to the Reader were to what was happening in technology and media in the
early ’90s, that they largely predicted our future, and ended up as impotent as the “Friends” to stop it. How much blame should the
speculative thinkers of a particular era receive when their nightmarish vision of a possible future becomes the actual New Reality we
must live in? Do our prophets merely predict the future, warning us of the dangers ahead? Or do they bear some responsibility for the
dystopia from which they’ve equipped us no escape? Sometimes, the mere ability to imagine a di erent, better future—past the wild
palms—is a revolutionary act.

Michael Grasso is a Senior Editor at We Are the Mutants. He is a Bostonian, a museum professional, and a podcaster. Follow
him on Twitter at @MutantsMichael.

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January 24, 2019 in Books & Literature. Tags: Features

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8 thoughts on “California Dreams: Our Cyberpunk Future According to ‘Wild Palms’”

Travis Johnson January 25, 2019 at 4:15 am

Fantastic bit of business and, all other considerations aside, it did lead to me tracking down a copy of The Wild Palms
Reader.

Reply

iamAldonLopez January 25, 2019 at 4:15 am

Great Article.

Reply

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