The article analyzes the cyberpunk genre as an understanding of the phenomenon of the information society. The emergence of cyberpunk associated with the proliferation of personal computers, thanks to which many scientific ideas materialized in the 1950s and 1960s. The most famous representatives of this direction can be called Walter Yon Williams, Allen Steele, Rudy Rücker, Pat Cadigan. In the CIS, the first cyberpunk literary work was the story “The Network”, written jointly by A. Tyurin and A. Shchegolev. Elements of cyberpunk are found in the works of S. Lukyanenko, V. Panov, A. Zorich, D. Simmons.If the cyberpunk was originally part of the underground and infatuation of the information elite, then gradually, as major publishers became interested in it, it became part of popular culture and dissolved in it. Both theorists of the information society and representatives of the cyberpunk genre tried to analyze the world in which life would change radically under the influence of computer technology. The cyberpunk ideologists used their books as a metaphorical warning against the alarming trends in the development of modern society. The creators of the theory of the information society mainly focused on its positive aspects, while cyberpunks talked about the negative that can come into the life of society and an individual person if it becomes a reality. Cyberpunk focused on the dark side of high technology, without which the existence of any phenomenon is impossible. Neither the philosophical constructions of the theorists-apologists of the information age, nor the gloomy prophecies of the representatives of the Movement were fully embodied in reality. The reason for this can be seen in the fact that the understanding of the information that the first and the second operated on turned out to be false (more realistic, obviously, is the consideration of information not as a resource, but as communication). The information, according to D. Ivanov, is communication, the operation of transmitting characters, encouraging action. Its huge technical, economic, political role is explained precisely by the fact that it is not meaningful (as opposed to knowledge) and not substantive (as opposed to a product). Information is operational, it serves to justify action. That is why it is so valuable to modern man, being his idol. In a traditional society, or in a modernizing society, built on an ideological basis of activity, information on such a role could not claim.