The author seems to have wanted to write an article about cyberpunk, but didn't have anything to say. There was no premise or conclusion, simply a few rambling thoughts about the current state of technology and media.
What I find fascinating about the cyberpunk sensibility is the dramatic shift from the classical view of the future. When you dig into older science fiction it is almost universally accepted that the future will be clean, bright, and government-controlled. Sure, the spaceship crew might have to dispatch some weird bug creatures, or family's robot might have gone haywire, or Big Brother might be watching your every move, but it's taken for granted that technological progress has kept pace, rockets are zooming around, and power has been steadily accruing upward to the government, which is basically taking care of things. The biggest problem might be that the government (or should I say The Empire) has gotten a bit too much control, and some rebels have banded together for the sake of Freedom.
The cyberpunk sensibility and vision is not only darker, but significantly more subversive. Power has not conglomerated in the hands of the government, it's been usurped by corporations and wealthy individuals. Technology has not solved hunger, poverty, sickness, or human suffering, in fact in many cases it has made them worse. The environment has been fucked by centuries of industrial abuse, the cities are a mess, drugs and crime are rampant, the streets are dirty, even the rain is dirty. Technology never managed to lift mankind out of its daily struggle, humanity never banded together in search of the stars, and the hope of that clean, bright, government controlled future has become a cruel joke.
> dramatic shift from the classical view of the future
This was always the colonial view of the future, perhaps adapted up to the Eisenhower era. Like everything else, science fiction writing has adapted to post-colonialism. The watershed was probably somewhere around the 60s-70s:
> Technology has not solved hunger, poverty, sickness, or human suffering, in fact in many cases it has made them worse. The environment has been fucked by centuries of industrial abuse, the cities are a mess, drugs and crime are rampant, the streets are dirty, even the rain is dirty.
i.e., the present western milieu from about the 1970s: acid rain, nuclear rain, superfund sites, New York as "no go area". Many of which have actually improved since then but survive as tropes.
Remember that the "cyber-" prefix relates also to control systems, both in the sense of industrial control like PID loops and by analogy social control systems through feedback. Look for the control systems. Neuromancer (1982) provides lots of great examples of this; almost every character including the AIs are labouring under external control which they are trying to shake off.
Yes, I think the works of 60s/70s author John Brunner ("Stand on Zanzibar", "The Shockwave Rider") anticipated many cyberpunk ideas even before the Gibson/Sterling era. Key to this idea was a recognition that that the "third world" was going to matter more and more in the post-colonial world.
>What I find fascinating about the cyberpunk sensibility is the dramatic shift from the classical view of the future. When you dig into older science fiction it is almost universally accepted that the future will be clean, bright, and government-controlled.
I know that this is a popular narrative about science fiction of the past but I'm not sure it is actually true. For instance looking at the greats from 19th C. to the first half of the 20th C (although perhaps looking at the greats is not the best approach).
1. Isaac Asimov's "The Foundation" (1942) is about the collapse of an empire and the birth of a new empire. Social science turns out to be more powerful than spaceships but it has some pretty serious failure modes.
2. Jules Verne's "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" (1869) is largely about a rebel. Technology doesn't seem to be fixing problems.
3. H.G. Well's "Time Machine" (1895) has the end of all human civilization and "The Shape of Things to Come" (1933) while utopian is also extremely grim at points.
4. Stapledon's works, "Star Maker" (1937) and "First and Last Men" (1930) which were extremely influential on the science fiction of that time are grand and chaotic. Several of the time periods described could easily be cyberpunk.
5. C.S. Lewis's Cosmic Trilogy (1938) is explicitly anti-progress.
Cyberpunk was essentially a switch from telling pulpy adventure stories to telling pulpy noir stories.
George R. Stewart, The Earth Abides (1949), Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818), On the Beach, John Brunner Stand on Zanzibar (1968) The Shockwave Rider (1975), and The Sheep Look Up (1972). John Christopher (Christopher Samuel Youd)'s Tripod trilogy (1967) and The Sword of the Spirits, George Orwell (Eric Blair) 1984 (1948), Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1931), Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962). Much of the work of Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick.
I'd gotten into this with David Brin a few years back on G+ when he was grousing that modern sci-fi is pessimistic in was the classics never were. He is wrong. Though happy stories do tend to sell better.
Verne's "Paris in the Twentieth Century" (which wasn't published because he was told it was too negative) has an extremely pessimistic view of the future as well. It's and extremely sad book
There is one major point you have to consider about sci fi. The rise and golden era of sci fi were during times of great nationalism. This was in large part the US (who I will focus on, but a similar picture is true across the world) had real and present enemies to unify the people against. The "golden age of sci fi" is considered to be 1938-1946. WW2 was 1939-1945. Star Trek of course came much later, yet Gene Roddenberry was born in 1921 and flew nearly 100 combat missions in WW2. To say he this period had an influence on his views and life would be quite the understatement!
During these times of nationalism, people looked outward for enemies and inward for unification and progress. You can see this exact metaphor within the federation. The enemies take unfamiliar shapes and forms from other literally alien cultures. Cyberpunk started to emerge during the 60s and 70s, with Neuromancer being released in 1984. We went from World War 2 to Vietnam, the rise of anti-nationalism, and an American people ever more able to find their own enemies from within. We went from a government that culminated in sending a man on the moon to a government that, especially after the end of the WW3 that did not happen - the Cold War, seemed to lack any direction or purpose eventually culminating in a behavior mimicking society of simply finding its own enemies within and eating itself alive.
And that trend continues to this very day. The reason sci fi had a utopic future vision was because that's what seemed probable. Today how do you perceive the future in a couple of hundred years? I think "The Expanse* does a phenomenal take of considering this without resorting to trope. I also think Deep Space Nine was also well ahead of its time here. The episode "Past Tense" in particular is something that seems practically prophetic of the times today, down to the exact area and timeline.
I love the short story "The Gernsback Continuum" for this reason. Gibson writes about his rejection of a bright, optimistic, pseudo Aryan future for reality. It's framed as a writer plagued by hallucinations, but I read it more as a commentary on the absurdity of classical sci fi in the modern day (or at least, the 80's). All the elegant flying cars and people in white jumpsuits eating food pills are visions of the future from the far more innocent, optimistic era of the 40's and 50's. But writing those same stories now just doesn't make any sense.
Yes, "The Gernsback Continuum" is basically Gibson's declaration of abolishing the traditional utopian, optimistic view of the future and the beginning of cyberpunk. Strongly recommended.
Technology has always been about increasing efficiency. But it's always been expensive as R&D requires wealth. It makes sense that the primary benefiters of tech are the asset class who fund them.
The outcome is that there are real tech contributions to society but only as side-effects to return on investment for the asset class. Eventually, the goals diverge, as the primary objective of an individual or corporation holding any amount of wealth is to increase it.
The counterweights to that trend are open government research, and open-source tech. Encouragingly, much of technology is information itself; and information wants to be free.
(Comment sent over IP, leveraging a network built for a government defense system... but using a proprietary device paid for by a job in technology that primarily benefits corporations.)
Or both the government and big corporations hammering down on the humans...
I do miss the optimistic view of the original Star Trek series. A world where technological and sociological development of humanity went mostly parallel. We now seem to develop technology faster than ourselves. Current SciFi is therefor mostly on the dark and dramatic side.
The original Star Trek also had a megacorp keeping workers pacified with neurotoxins (The Cloud Minders) sex slavery with advanced pharmaceuticals (Mudd's Women,) genetically engineered elites oppressing baseline humans (Space Seed) and AI run amok (The Changeling, I, Mudd and others.)
It was optimistic, but it was also a product of the 60's. Fear of the future was there, it just tended to be presented in political terms, through metaphors of the Cold War and Vietnam, rather than technological.
The Cloud Minders was the opposite. The neurotoxin was an accident that no one believed existed until the Enterprise arrived, and it made the lower caste violent, not pacified.
Instead, it has somewhat realistic space physics, a trade-off I will gladly take.
If I want mind-bending stuff there's still Legion and Mr Robot out there, not exactly "cyberpunk VR darknets" but very strong on alternate reality/conscious themes.
> I do miss the optimistic view of the original Star Trek series.
If you haven't yet, check out The Orville. It's the spiritual successor to Roddenberry's vision of Star Trek.
It got badly marketed as a comedy in space akin to Galaxy Quest, but that was mostly bad marketing. The first episode or two were high on the comedy (and I've heard a theory that they did it to trick Fox into picking up the series), but it rapidly toned down, to where it's more like Star Trek with realistic people instead of a utopian version of humanity without any vices.
For a one-episode introduction, if the initial comedy turns you off, I suggest episode 3, About a Girl.
What I find amazing is that anybody would utter that phrase and not consider it a "cruel joke" in and of itself. Government is antithetical to Freedom and self-ownership, and there's no particular reason to aspire towards a future where everything (or most everything) is controlled by the government.
That is even more true when you realize the truth that "the government" and "the corporations and wealthy individuals" collapse into the same thing in the end.
There will (probably) always be battle between decentralized power and power that aggregates in the hands of entities like corporations and governments. Everyone should keep this in mind, and always remind themselves that both governments and corporations are a threat to Freedom, autonomy and self-ownership / self-direction.
That is a fair point, but it's leading us down the rabbit hole of debating exactly what we mean by "government". I say groups of individuals can choose to voluntarily band together to exercise what Bastiat described as "the collective extension to our individual innate right to self defense". You might say "but that is government". I on the other hand would say that the word "government" implies something more, based on how present day implementations of the term "government" function.
The main distinction I would make is that, in practice, "governments" tend to arrogate to themselves the "authority" to do things that no individual could do themselves. And in my world-view, if an individual can't rightfully do something, then neither can a group of individuals, no matter how large.
All of this is ultimately just me paraphrasing Bastiat, so for anyone who isn't already familiar with his works, and who finds anything interesting in this line of thinking, I suggest reading The Law[1].
>And in my world-view, if an individual can't rightfully do something, then neither can a group of individuals, no matter how largebased organization.
This is interesting idea. Do you have any examples of this incorrectly applied in modern times?
At it's core the law takes away the permission to apply violence from your average person and puts it in the hands of supposedly fair/blind judges.
From Bastiat:
"It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all."
So ultimately were making the same point I think about protection of property?
You feel like the govt has crossed a boundary somewhere though and I'm curious where.
> Do you have any examples of this incorrectly applied in modern times?
Not sure about "rightfully" but groups of people are definitely treated more leniently as to what they can do. Individual when he kills more than 20 people usually doesn't get away with just a fine like GM did.
Government is the one that holds biggest most advanced gun and won't let anyone take it away from him.
It's very useful to have as few governments as possible. Especially if range of their weapons overlap. It's also useful to have sharp difference between governments and non-governments. Both of those usefult things reduce likelihood of actually using biggest guns and that use severely harms everybody's business.
You shouldn't be amazed that not everyone is, or historically has been, an anarchist who views government as antithetical to capital-F freedom (whatever that's supposed to mean.)
While I personally am an anarchist, that isn't actually relevant to what I was saying above. There really isn't any actual question that government (as a centralization of power in the hands of a few) is antithetical to the freedom of individuals to live without fear of coercion. But in this context, I'm not arguing for a totally stateless society with NO government at all. In this context, I'm just saying that I find it amazing that people (apparently) want a "government run future" - a phrase which, to me, suggests a much higher level of government control of the details of our lives, compared even to what we have now.
Now we may just be quibbling over the semantics of what "government run future" means, which is fine. It just jumps off the page at me as something that is far from being self-evidently desirable.
Bear in mind, we're talking about the future past, and probably a particularly American one. Before cyberpunk and dystopia in science fiction became more common, certain premises like the value of centralized authority, militarism, colonialist ideals and even eugenics were often taken for granted (depending on the author.)
Views like yours become a lot more interesting if someone managers to reconcile them against monopolies and lack of free education, public works, etc in the absence of government.
The author doesn't really get cyberpunk hence the confusion. Cyberpunk is an aesthetic, yes, but it is no mere aesthetic a la Romanticism or abstract art. Cyberpunk is an aesthetic that asserts that it is real. It's what troublesome about Cyberpunk; unlike goofy classical sci-fi which deliberately juxtaposes a fictional future with our present Cyberpunk insists that it actually is the future. Further, the Cyberpunk aesthetic itself advocates nothing more than the triumph of the virtual/digital/illusory world over the real world. This is the postmodern demon: an illusion that insists illusions are more real than the real world. This is the dreaded hyperreality [1].
The interesting thing about the hyperreal is that the best Cyberpunk art captures so well well is that there's no escape. There's no "going back" to the real world. It is a perfect philosophical trap: all attempts to separate "fake news" from "real news" will accomplish nothing but to further undermine any notion of "real news", all attempts to separate "fake humans" and "real humans" will lead only to the creation of better, more sophisticated, more real "fake humans." Nobody can build a "reality detector" and no victory is possible against the AIs and the other Super Simulators. The horrifying truth is that organizations which embrace this and pour real resources into producing fake news and fake humans have such an enormous economic advantage and that their victory is all but assured.
Was watching an Uber eats courier on a carbon fiber bike with electric boost, complaining about the order routing and dispatch AI he worked for, while exhaling clouds of bug juice he was pulling from a small electronic element he kept on his belt. Not cyberpunk, just poor.
Where the industrial class divide was once the window between the shop floor and the shop office, now it's the API. Either you work above the API -- writing the programs and managing the programmers -- or you work below it -- packing the boxes and delivering the pizzas.
Surprised cryptocurrency isn't mentioned in this article - as I feel that is one of the more cyberpunk developments in a very cyberpunk past decade.
I dig the author's take on the internet being more meritocratic but prone to monopoly -- due to a sort of lack of friction. Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc.
The dystopian/cyberpunk logic is that things that begin decentralized/open end up centralized/monopolized. I fear that happens with cryptocurrency, much like it happened with the internet.
I'm working on a game that explores that theme through that lens: https://www.cachethegame. It's based on Ethereum based and based on the old Drugwars classic.
If I rewrote the article now, I would definitely mention cryptocurrencies! I have a couple of essays in the works currently that will address the same themes from a different perspective, with updated examples. I actually work for a cryptocurrency-related organization now :)
I think there are already a few subgenres of Cyberpunk. It can be seen easily after reaction to recent trailer of Cyberpunk 2077 game
People either love it (cause it shows the 80s atmosphere and is basede on pen&paper rpg Cyberpunk 2020 from 80s), or hate it, because it's "not dark enough", and it doesn't rain all the time, so it doesn't resemble Bladerunner.
I quite like it so far.
According to Max Pondsmith (the creator of the p&p rpg from 80s) - Cyberpunk is "high tech - low life".
From my understanding of cyberpunk, AI isn't really an essential ingredient. Cyberpunk feels very human.
AIs are either of the "weak" kind, like a robot guard being able to recognize and attack intruders but not much more, or the indistinguishable-from-human kind of Blade Runner replicants. The intelligent but definitely not human kind like HAL from 2001. The kind I tend to think of when talking about AI-based stories don't seem to be that common in the cyberpunk genre.
We do see a lot of things like mind uploading, brain augmentation, people losing their humanity to technology, etc... but it is always centered on the human mind.
I think hostile AI isn't really an essential ingredient in cyberpunk for me, but some sort of AI, and often coupled with some sort of conflict between whether the AI is hostile or benevolent. I associate cyberpunk very much with the grey area between man and machine.
I wouldn't mind a Nosedive redux episode where you discover she is part of an experiment by an AI to see how quickly people can drop off and keep them bumping along the bottom of society. Sort of social Flappy Bird.
Well...Wintermute wasn't essentially hostile to humanity - it just had it's own goals. I find that way more cyberpunk than a dystopian AI bent on humanity's destruction.
> [T]aste governs every free — as opposed to rote — human response.
Also apparently governing every free human response-- the smell of farts[1].
I think what Sontag meant to say in that quote is that if you have more than adequate amounts of food, shelter, comfort, and agreeable company then "taste" tends to govern the way in which you interact with your agreeable compatriots.
I'm not sure what this has to do with Cyberpunk. But it's just too tantalizing not to mock these types of exaggerations from authors like Sontag.
>If that does model best mankind and society, maybe it is not that much cynical and pessimistic but realistic. That said, it is only a model, a tool to better understand ourselves.
Therein lies the problem, though. Models when used by people are not only models. They shape and influence reality in return in a feedback loop.
Even if a cynical model "does model best mankind and society" as it stands, there is the possibility that using a less realistic one could help improve mankind and society.
People who like thinking seem to overestimate the power of ideas in shaping the world. My interpretation is that it's probably the typical arrogance of the intellectual letting itself through.
For example, there are arguments that the renaissance was a result of the social and economic conditions created by the black death, not the intention of any human actor. The post-WW2 social wellness a result precisely of the war, and so on.
Not everybody agrees on what "improve mankind and society" should mean, so you're back to either submitting to a common concept of objective truth, where the "bad" but realistic model wins, or political arm wrestling for your ideas to win against the other's (on the basis of faith if you're in the middle ages, or whim if you're a postmodernist).
>People who like thinking seem to overestimate the power of ideas in shaping the world. My interpretation is that it's probably the typical arrogance of the intellectual letting itself through.
This was not about ideas -- it's was about viewpoint, which has enormous impact in shaping the world.
>For example, there are arguments that the renaissance was a result of the social and economic conditions created by the black death, not the intention of any human actor.
Well, there were other periods similar to the renaissance throughout history, periods not affected by the black death. E.g. the rise of ancient Greece city states (from the so-called "middle ages" of pre-historic antiquity), or the rise of the islamic culture.
And even if the black death was a major factor of change, the way the change took shape is all ideas and viewpoints.
In fact a common argument is that the renaissance was indeed a response to the conditions created by the black death, but the mechanism of change was a change in viewpoints ("let's celebrate life", etc).
What seperates ideas from viewpoints essentially? I would guess largely how they dearly they are held. Another factor was what it did to existing ones. It undermined authority in both economic/balance of power sense and in "claim to being right". The church could not save them no matter how much they prayed nor how saintly their lifestyle. Nobility could not protect them - nor even themselves. It wasn't an enemy to be faced by big budgetted knights riding out to slay those who raid and pillage. It left a vacuum for growth of other forces while the society had not collapsed.
It had an interesting cultural remnant so embedded that nobody notices it - desensitization to skeletons. Nobody reacts to skeletons in an elementary school classroom or doctors office in the west.
Yet Chinese variants of video games widely censor their apperances despite other brutality. One in a moba notably changes a spell icons from skeletons to a tortured bald man - more graphic to us but not them. China does have their own hangups but it highlights how weird it is fundamentally that we are okay with dead bodies reduced to their very core and reassembled. Keep preserved other internal organs around small children and people would ask what is wrong with you. The unacceptable ethics in sourcing were the main driver for the switch to plastic if I recall correctly. Cheaper now but they started when the fine details were more expensive and at risk of being less accurate.
>What seperates ideas from viewpoints essentially?
I used the first to refer to general abstract theories (marxism etc) and the second to refer to more concrete ways of viewing the world that people share / adopt etc.
In the 60s for example there were several abstract theories about this and that, but also a shared viewpoint about the need of change, revolution, etc
I'll keep amalgamating viewpoints and ideas, as I don't see the usefulness of the distinction so far.
As you say, for the renaissance, the change in viewpoints were caused by the conditions of the time. The power of social change ultimately lies in big changes in the physical world, not in civilised humans and their thinking and arguing.
As I mentioned, that last idea seems to me to be just a covert way to pretend we have any control, when we are actually rather effete and incapable of shaping the world into what we'd like.
You mentioned the western revolutionary sentiment of the sixties in another answer. If you believe Strauss and Howe (http://www.fourthturning.com/), they didn't have a choice. That generation believed whatever humans believe when they are put into the conditions they were in, repeating a pattern with little self-consciousness.
edit: the power of change -> the power of social change
Thank you for this comment. I've had this thought so many times and you've phrased it more eloquently than I ever could have thought of.
I grew up in a poverty-heavy community, where people often felt hopeless, and believed that everything was aligned against them (a pessimistic viewpoint). I then studied Philosophy and learned to try and be as "correct" as possible, and thought it was always the best method to try and be correct about things (a realistic viewpoint). After a while, however, I realized that some of the most successful and happy people I knew, and (I believe) in the world, are incredibly naive, and that this naivety and optimistic viewpoint played a large part in their success.
Even if determinism/fatalism are true concepts and/or nothing matters in the end, you'll have the best life if you disregard those concepts and assume that anything is possible, and everything matters, and it's all up to you. Positive viewpoints, even if incorrect, can be empowering and create this positive feedback loop.
if you find this article interesting, highly recommend reading The Seventh Sense. does a great job at explaining how networks will redistribute power and change power dynamics
Sure, it's dystopian and futuristic, but that's not enough to make it cyberpunk.
Usually cyberpunk is seen from the point of view of the lowest part of society (the "low life" in the "high tech - low life" motto). This is mostly missing from Black Mirror.
There's really no agreed upon definition of what constitutes cyberpunk; for me, the core of cyberpunk is simply the abuse of advanced technology. Everything else is just icing on the cake; the neon lights, the overcrowded failing city, and a track from Master Boot Record playing in the background.
Eh, Case is trash, Molly kills people, the Finn sells stolen goods, Bobby (the Count) lives in the slums, Chevette (Virtual Light) is a courier that lives in the bridge, Hiro (Snow Crash) lives in a container and delivers pizza. I'm not sure how much more low-life you can be in the future.
Also, from Wikipedia[1]:
> This emphasis on the misfits and the malcontents is the "punk" component of cyberpunk.
Otherwise it's just "cyber".
Then again, I've seen dystopic sci-fi movies defined as cyberpunk when I wouldn't agree with the definition.
(NOTE: I'm being argumentative because I love cyberpunk, not to score internet points or to be told me I'm right, so keep firing, I'm not fighting, I'm enjoying this :) )
Hmm, I'm almost sold. I think what ties together the 'punk' part is the gritty, visceral aspects of the futuristic dystopian city; the protagonist doesn't necessarily need to be a representative of these lower rings of society, but it definitely helps drive that point home.
Not sure if I'm wording this right... Basically, cyberpunk needs to show those gritty aspects to be cyberpunk, but the main characters don't necessarily need to be those punks. For instance, a game where you play as an AI that defects from an evil corporation, or perhaps play as a bartender[0] who simply listens to her clients' crazy stories.
I watched the trailer for that bartender game and I have to admit I didn't understand what it's about, but yes, aesthetically it has a cyberpunk vibe.
And now that I think of it you're probably right. To be cyberpunk a piece of work needs those punk elements, but they don't need to be the protagonists.
It's a pretty awesome game. You basically choose the music that plays for the night (has a great soundtrack), and then just talk to whoever comes in and occasionally make them a drink. If you know your client's tastes and serve them just the right one, they're likely to stay longer and spill their secrets.
You eventually start to figure out what exactly happened in a huge event that plays out, thanks to the secrets from your clientele.
What I find fascinating about the cyberpunk sensibility is the dramatic shift from the classical view of the future. When you dig into older science fiction it is almost universally accepted that the future will be clean, bright, and government-controlled. Sure, the spaceship crew might have to dispatch some weird bug creatures, or family's robot might have gone haywire, or Big Brother might be watching your every move, but it's taken for granted that technological progress has kept pace, rockets are zooming around, and power has been steadily accruing upward to the government, which is basically taking care of things. The biggest problem might be that the government (or should I say The Empire) has gotten a bit too much control, and some rebels have banded together for the sake of Freedom.
The cyberpunk sensibility and vision is not only darker, but significantly more subversive. Power has not conglomerated in the hands of the government, it's been usurped by corporations and wealthy individuals. Technology has not solved hunger, poverty, sickness, or human suffering, in fact in many cases it has made them worse. The environment has been fucked by centuries of industrial abuse, the cities are a mess, drugs and crime are rampant, the streets are dirty, even the rain is dirty. Technology never managed to lift mankind out of its daily struggle, humanity never banded together in search of the stars, and the hope of that clean, bright, government controlled future has become a cruel joke.