Before cyberpunk became a giant entertainment label, people on the web were trying to collect the culture while it was still close enough to touch. The Cyberpunk Project was one of the places doing it.
Visit the original Cyberpunk Project address
The site is no longer reliably reachable, but its footprint is everywhere.
Old descriptions characterize it as a database, library and information project dedicated to cyberpunk. Researchers and later websites cite individual pages for cyberpunk manifestos, cyberculture essays, postcyberpunk writing and historical texts. A 1999 Russian film journal described the project as one of the most substantial cyberpunk sites in the Russian web sphere, despite the project itself publishing in English.
The Internet Archive has preserved versions of the site, and even Wikipedia’s cyberpunk reference material has pointed readers toward an archived copy of the Cyberpunk Project.
That is the strange second life of a serious old website: the domain can fail while its citations keep walking around.
An archive that became source material
One of the project’s best-known preserved texts is Christian As. Kirtchev’s A Cyberpunk Manifesto, dated 1997. Other researchers have cited the site for Lawrence Person’s Notes Toward a Postcyberpunk Manifesto and David Silver’s Introducing Cyberculture.
The archive also carried material reaching beyond fiction into hacker culture, digital identity, futurism, art and the politics of networked life.
That broad scope matters because “cyberpunk” on the early web was not merely an aesthetic of neon cities and expensive jackets. It overlapped with real discussions about information access, privacy, networks, cryptography, identity and technological power.
For researchers, the project is useful partly because later academic work still points back to it.
For web historians, it is a warning. Important reference sites can become unavailable even while their URLs remain embedded in papers, bibliographies and old link lists.
This site was found in CacheRat’s broader Ancient Web research corpus.
Explore the 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list
The original server may be unreliable now, but the Cyberpunk Project succeeded at one thing that matters: it collected enough material that people kept citing it after the web had moved on.