[8] An early contributor to the study of cyberculture and the cultural effects of the digital age, Dery has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, Lingua Franca, The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, Spin, Wired, Salon.com, BoingBoing, and Cabinet, among other publications.

Dery’s books include monographs such as Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (1996) as well as the edited anthology Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (1994) and a collection of essays, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams (2012).

In 1990, Dery's New York Times article "The Merry Pranksters and the Art of the Hoax" offered an early discussion in the mainstream media of the practice of "cultural jamming" by an emergent generation of activists.

"[2] In the piece, Dery interviews three African-American thinkers — science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany, writer and musician Greg Tate, and cultural critic Tricia Rose — about different critical dimensions of Afrofuturism, and it is in his introductory essay to "Black to the Future" that Dery coins the term 'Afrofuturism', which now figures prominently in studies of black technoculture.

Widely reviewed,[10][11][12][13][14][15] the book is the first biography of the eccentric figure, putting Gorey's idiosyncratic creations into a more personal context.