Both parties soon agreed to produce three issues under the Image banner. In Channel Zero's near future, all forms of mass communication in the U.S. are controlled by the government - from print, to the airwaves, to the Internet. This came in the form of the Clean Act, a bill that was forced through Congress and signed into law under pressure from special interest groups, most notably the Christian Right and Pro-Censorship Parents groups. And the American people go along with it. I think Channel Zero is the first to place cyberpunk aspects into current society.
Censorship is in full effect now, in certain areas like the music industry, and the print media.
It's done very subtly and underhandedly, so people dont really notice it, but it exists. Its only a matter of time before we are too lazy to care, and that's when things will happen. In the midst of the media crackdown, is Channel Zero's protagonist Jenni 2.5, an ex-performance artist made obsolete by the media legislation. The other characters in the book are smaller players, from a virus-paranoid black market software dealer, to friends of Jennie 2.5, who help her along the way, with passwords and bits of information. In Channel Zero , Wood uses captions like subliminal messages which float outside the narrative flow of the story.