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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] keypusher|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pjc50|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] EthanHeilman|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] TangoTrotFox|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] _hardwaregeek|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] athenot|7 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] chme|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] eli_gottlieb|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ataturk|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mindcrime|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dnomad|7 years ago|reply
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality
[+] [-] motohagiography|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] InitialLastName|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ErikAugust|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] exolymph|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjonesdotca|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajuc|7 years ago|reply
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".
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X2kIfS6fb8
[+] [-] acoye|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] auslander|7 years ago|reply
- hostile AI
- Corporations and Government surveilance and going dark
- DNA / implant chips / biometric border controls
- Borders protected by armed drones / robots
- Underground Identities markets
[+] [-] GuB-42|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] drakonka|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjonesdotca|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanBC|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jancsika|7 years ago|reply
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.
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528731-800-the-yuck...
[+] [-] acoye|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] coldtea|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bsamuels|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mindcrime|7 years ago|reply
https://www.amazon.com/New-Power-Works-Hyperconnected-World/...
Looking forward to reading both in the near future.
[+] [-] auslander|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] klez|7 years ago|reply
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.