In the popular imagination of many in the so-called West, Asia enjoys a romantic and intimate relationship with high technology. Visionary representations of the future, such as those elaborated in films like Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) or novels like Neuromancer (William Gibson, 1984), often lend the global future an Asian fl avour, either as a sign of the world’s possible cosmopolitan destiny or more simply as an indication of the way that digital technology and East Asia appear to be closely interwoven. This associative weave is particularly strong in the cyberpunk world of virtual reality, artifi cial intelligence, networked communications, and explorations of cyberspace as the new fi nal frontier. CyberAsia weds Asia to the politics of futurities in complicated and diverse ways.
