4 ms·

It's a very strange feeling to see that cyberpunk has become irrelevant today, while still being right on some judgments. Corporations are bigger than ever, the

It's a very strange feeling to see that cyberpunk has become irrelevant today, while still being right on some judgments. Corporations are bigger than ever, the Net has become vital resource for billions of people, climate is changing and air became unbreathable in many giant megalopolises but... it's not a dystopia, it's just the future that came and felt different from what we had expected, a sort of normality that is not worse than anything in the history before. Probably, the reason is that we've got 404 in our search of the ultimate evil to oppose to. There's no single ultimate evil to resist, there are many smaller ones and many come from the resistance itself, because there's no ultimate truth to defend. The future has come and there's no cyberpunk in it.

krapp 10y ago
>The future has come and there's no cyberpunk in it. It's likely that the last Presidential election was decided, in no small part, by the efforts of a neo-anarchist site publishing classified information and a group of meme obsessed netizens attempting to disrupt and undermine the establishment. That seems pretty cyberpunk to me.
- orblivion 10y ago
  My favorite was when this neoanarchist site published a video of the military killing people, and the credit card companies refused to continue to serve them. And then an amorphous non-organization known as "Anonymous" brought down the credit card companies' websites. Meanwhile the neoanarchists switched to a newly emerging "crypto-currency" created by a shadowy entity known only as "Satoshi Nakamoto".
  - krapp 10y ago
    A Holocaust museum had to stop people from coming inside to catch augmented reality poison gas monsters with their cellphones. That's some Neal Stephenson stuff right there.
  - beaconstudios 10y ago
    and said amorphous non-organisation also arose from a neo-anarchist online collective. And the digital crypto-currency was used to buy drugs and other contraband from digital bazaars hidden in the "deep web". It's quite funny when you think about it, cyberpunk fiction predicted many of the most recent technology intrigue stories/events.
    - krapp 10y ago
      >It's quite funny when you think about it, cyberpunk fiction predicted many of the most recent technology intrigue stories/events. That's not entirely coincidental, considering how influential cyberpunk was during the nascent days of the internet. We have it to thank for the term "cyberspace" after all, and like the technology in Star Trek, a lot of people who grew up with it have been trying to "make it real" with limited success. Still can't store a human consciousness on a tape drive, though.
- ivan_gammel 10y ago
  It looks like the D.C. after Washington means "Default Country" - so deep is the assumption that the only interesting things are happening in the USA. Since there's the Net, it's inevitable that there will be hacking scandals and there will be some cyberwarfare in action, but it's a tiny part of the bigger world and the local events like the recent presidental election in USA do not define the image of modern civilization. There's no cyberpunk in the hot air and sunlight among the ruins of Syria, in the alcoholic reality of Russian monotowns or in the frozen technoutopia of silently ageing Japan. Cyberpunk today looks the same as steampunk: the form without the content, something without the grounds to exist.
  - krapp 10y ago
    >so deep is the assumption that the only interesting things are happening in the USA. I never assumed only interesting things are happening in the USA. I mentioned one thing that happened in the USA. >There's no cyberpunk in the hot air and sunlight among the ruins of Syria, in the alcoholic reality of Russian monotowns or in the frozen technoutopia of silently ageing Japan. First, that doesn't invalidate the premise. Cyberpunk is about the fringes of society and the cutting edge of technology, and liberation from the corruption of authority though anarchy and transhumanism, not about the mainstream. If you were to extrapolate many settings depicted in cyberpunk fiction, you would probably find that there isn't "cyberpunk" in most of them, either. As far as cyberpunk is concerned, none of that is interesting. Second, I can't believe you unironically used "frozen technoutopia" to argue against the presence of cyberpunk in the modern world.
    - ivan_gammel 10y ago
      There's a good saying that cyberpunk is "high tech low life", which is not the reality of today. USA may be close to it, because social progress is not linked to the technical progress there, but in the rest of the world it's not like that. There are lo-tech areas with low quality of life and balanced and sustainable high-tech societies. Cyberpunk is usually about dystopia: mentioning utopia as an example against it is thus perfectly valid (and if you go to Japan, which might was an inspiration for cyberpunk writers in 1980s, today it's everything but cyberpunk).
- alphonsegaston 10y ago
  With a data given to them from hackers tied to Russian intelligence services. Honestly seems like a prequel to the military incident in Neuromancer. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/guccifer-20-is-likely-a-russian-government-attempt-to-cover-up-their-own-hack https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/guccifer-20-is-li...
  - mirimir 10y ago
    It's just enemy-of-my-enemy stuff. If I recall correctly, the initial Wikileaks trove was supposedly skimmed by a malicious Tor exit from Chinese intelligence traffic. So yeah, pretty damn cyberpunk.
- maus42 10y ago
  >That seems pretty cyberpunk to me. The problem is that it does not rain all the time and the ads are not in Japanese. The visual direction is simply off. Also the soundtrack leaves much to be desired. (Instead of Vangelis and Kenji Kawai, we have ... Gangnam Style?) It is not recognizable as cyberpunk. Less in jest: much of the "cyberpunk" (at least for people like me) even when not talking about the genre of fiction but about the more general ethos or an idea ... was influenced by the presence of the certain set of fiction, especially visual medium (film, comics, the Japanese varieties anime, manga). And with fiction, you have aesthetics and narratives. Maybe an opportunity to entertain a kind of romanticism. The real life lacks all that. Instead of neural implants, we have touchscreens that get dirty. The advent of artificial intelligence does not come with military grade AIs escaping into wild, followed by action involving tanks and deep philosophical discussions; the advent of AI means that we have very good image classifiers (and other machine learning systems that perform well in fairly restricted tasks such as speech recognition or Go), amazing opportunities for applying statistics to marketing, and bunch of geeks who have read too much Kurzweil writing decision theory papers in California. Instead of identifiable protagonists doing cool things while opposing identifiable antagonists of the story, we get n+1 people thinking they are the cool protagonists, in other words, Occupy and Wikileaks and Anonymous and alt-right. [The same thing works in both directions of time, really. Cyberpunk science fiction liked the underground scene of punks" resisting the system. The historical fiction as a genre has always loved the idea of underground revolutionaries. (Think about Les Miserables.) And in reality it was much more boring and nasty and ambiguous, because no matter have much you try to be grim and realistic when writing fiction, in fiction even grim and gritty kinda still glitters.]
  - xor1 10y ago
    Funny that you bring up Gangnam Style, since modern South Korea (the Seoul metro region in particular) is the closest thing to how William Gibson imagined Chiba City in Neuromancer, right down to the unregulated black clinics (though specializing in cosmetic surgery instead of cybernetic implants/enhancements. I'm sure SK's population will be among the first to adopt them en masse once they're available).
nilved 10y ago
Not sure which world you live in but today is as cyberpunk as ever.
digi_owl 10y ago
Well Gibson was "bemused" that people considered the world he described a dystopia, as that was never his intent.
cyberpunk 10y ago
> The future has come and there's no cyberpunk in it. I'm still here...... :P
- mirimir 10y ago
  I'm shocked that you got that username less than a year ago! But "cypherpunk" is >9 years old, and inactive.
  - cyberpunk 10y ago
    I have some similar domains too ;)
cyberpunk 10y ago
One of the key settings in cyberpunk lit is where corporations are more powerful than governments.. We are already there in some ways. Take the situation in the UK where, say, apple don't pay any tax to the national govt -- this is a perfect example where a massive corp is more powerful than a govt. There is absolutely no way that the uk govt could change the situation. There are a few options they could try, but they would all fail and so they're not even attempted as trying and failing would be an embarrassment and admitting that they're powerless. The options? Take them to court? The govt would run out of money before they even got into a courtroom. Sales ban? Unless the cost of stopping doing business in the UK is more than paying tax in every other country who would immediately take the same steps if it worked then they'd just leave the uk. Guilt trip? Sure, people are annoyed but it's barely a news cycle at a time and everyone will still pay 1k for the new iphone (8 is rumored at around there... apparently). That's even before you read about the revolving door between govt and big corp and the toothless ACOBA. The lobby/'campaign donation' culture in US politics is an even stronger litmus, to me at least, that in contract to your view the future has come, and the cyberpunk is in it.

krapp 10y ago

>The future has come and there's no cyberpunk in it. It's likely that the last Presidential election was decided, in no small part, by the efforts of a neo-anarchist site publishing classified information and a group of meme obsessed netizens attempting to disrupt and undermine the establishment. That seems pretty cyberpunk to me.

orblivion 10y ago
My favorite was when this neoanarchist site published a video of the military killing people, and the credit card companies refused to continue to serve them. And then an amorphous non-organization known as "Anonymous" brought down the credit card companies' websites. Meanwhile the neoanarchists switched to a newly emerging "crypto-currency" created by a shadowy entity known only as "Satoshi Nakamoto".
- krapp 10y ago
  A Holocaust museum had to stop people from coming inside to catch augmented reality poison gas monsters with their cellphones. That's some Neal Stephenson stuff right there.
- beaconstudios 10y ago
  and said amorphous non-organisation also arose from a neo-anarchist online collective. And the digital crypto-currency was used to buy drugs and other contraband from digital bazaars hidden in the "deep web". It's quite funny when you think about it, cyberpunk fiction predicted many of the most recent technology intrigue stories/events.
  - krapp 10y ago
    >It's quite funny when you think about it, cyberpunk fiction predicted many of the most recent technology intrigue stories/events. That's not entirely coincidental, considering how influential cyberpunk was during the nascent days of the internet. We have it to thank for the term "cyberspace" after all, and like the technology in Star Trek, a lot of people who grew up with it have been trying to "make it real" with limited success. Still can't store a human consciousness on a tape drive, though.
ivan_gammel 10y ago
It looks like the D.C. after Washington means "Default Country" - so deep is the assumption that the only interesting things are happening in the USA. Since there's the Net, it's inevitable that there will be hacking scandals and there will be some cyberwarfare in action, but it's a tiny part of the bigger world and the local events like the recent presidental election in USA do not define the image of modern civilization. There's no cyberpunk in the hot air and sunlight among the ruins of Syria, in the alcoholic reality of Russian monotowns or in the frozen technoutopia of silently ageing Japan. Cyberpunk today looks the same as steampunk: the form without the content, something without the grounds to exist.
- krapp 10y ago
  >so deep is the assumption that the only interesting things are happening in the USA. I never assumed only interesting things are happening in the USA. I mentioned one thing that happened in the USA. >There's no cyberpunk in the hot air and sunlight among the ruins of Syria, in the alcoholic reality of Russian monotowns or in the frozen technoutopia of silently ageing Japan. First, that doesn't invalidate the premise. Cyberpunk is about the fringes of society and the cutting edge of technology, and liberation from the corruption of authority though anarchy and transhumanism, not about the mainstream. If you were to extrapolate many settings depicted in cyberpunk fiction, you would probably find that there isn't "cyberpunk" in most of them, either. As far as cyberpunk is concerned, none of that is interesting. Second, I can't believe you unironically used "frozen technoutopia" to argue against the presence of cyberpunk in the modern world.
  - ivan_gammel 10y ago
    There's a good saying that cyberpunk is "high tech low life", which is not the reality of today. USA may be close to it, because social progress is not linked to the technical progress there, but in the rest of the world it's not like that. There are lo-tech areas with low quality of life and balanced and sustainable high-tech societies. Cyberpunk is usually about dystopia: mentioning utopia as an example against it is thus perfectly valid (and if you go to Japan, which might was an inspiration for cyberpunk writers in 1980s, today it's everything but cyberpunk).
alphonsegaston 10y ago
With a data given to them from hackers tied to Russian intelligence services. Honestly seems like a prequel to the military incident in Neuromancer. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/guccifer-20-is-likely-a-russian-government-attempt-to-cover-up-their-own-hack https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/guccifer-20-is-li...
- mirimir 10y ago
  It's just enemy-of-my-enemy stuff. If I recall correctly, the initial Wikileaks trove was supposedly skimmed by a malicious Tor exit from Chinese intelligence traffic. So yeah, pretty damn cyberpunk.
maus42 10y ago
>That seems pretty cyberpunk to me. The problem is that it does not rain all the time and the ads are not in Japanese. The visual direction is simply off. Also the soundtrack leaves much to be desired. (Instead of Vangelis and Kenji Kawai, we have ... Gangnam Style?) It is not recognizable as cyberpunk. Less in jest: much of the "cyberpunk" (at least for people like me) even when not talking about the genre of fiction but about the more general ethos or an idea ... was influenced by the presence of the certain set of fiction, especially visual medium (film, comics, the Japanese varieties anime, manga). And with fiction, you have aesthetics and narratives. Maybe an opportunity to entertain a kind of romanticism. The real life lacks all that. Instead of neural implants, we have touchscreens that get dirty. The advent of artificial intelligence does not come with military grade AIs escaping into wild, followed by action involving tanks and deep philosophical discussions; the advent of AI means that we have very good image classifiers (and other machine learning systems that perform well in fairly restricted tasks such as speech recognition or Go), amazing opportunities for applying statistics to marketing, and bunch of geeks who have read too much Kurzweil writing decision theory papers in California. Instead of identifiable protagonists doing cool things while opposing identifiable antagonists of the story, we get n+1 people thinking they are the cool protagonists, in other words, Occupy and Wikileaks and Anonymous and alt-right. [The same thing works in both directions of time, really. Cyberpunk science fiction liked the underground scene of punks" resisting the system. The historical fiction as a genre has always loved the idea of underground revolutionaries. (Think about Les Miserables.) And in reality it was much more boring and nasty and ambiguous, because no matter have much you try to be grim and realistic when writing fiction, in fiction even grim and gritty kinda still glitters.]
- xor1 10y ago
  Funny that you bring up Gangnam Style, since modern South Korea (the Seoul metro region in particular) is the closest thing to how William Gibson imagined Chiba City in Neuromancer, right down to the unregulated black clinics (though specializing in cosmetic surgery instead of cybernetic implants/enhancements. I'm sure SK's population will be among the first to adopt them en masse once they're available).

nilved 10y ago

Not sure which world you live in but today is as cyberpunk as ever.

digi_owl 10y ago

Well Gibson was "bemused" that people considered the world he described a dystopia, as that was never his intent.

cyberpunk 10y ago

> The future has come and there's no cyberpunk in it. I'm still here...... :P

mirimir 10y ago
I'm shocked that you got that username less than a year ago! But "cypherpunk" is >9 years old, and inactive.
- cyberpunk 10y ago
  I have some similar domains too ;)

cyberpunk 10y ago

One of the key settings in cyberpunk lit is where corporations are more powerful than governments.. We are already there in some ways. Take the situation in the UK where, say, apple don't pay any tax to the national govt -- this is a perfect example where a massive corp is more powerful than a govt. There is absolutely no way that the uk govt could change the situation. There are a few options they could try, but they would all fail and so they're not even attempted as trying and failing would be an embarrassment and admitting that they're powerless. The options? Take them to court? The govt would run out of money before they even got into a courtroom. Sales ban? Unless the cost of stopping doing business in the UK is more than paying tax in every other country who would immediately take the same steps if it worked then they'd just leave the uk. Guilt trip? Sure, people are annoyed but it's barely a news cycle at a time and everyone will still pay 1k for the new iphone (8 is rumored at around there... apparently). That's even before you read about the revolving door between govt and big corp and the toothless ACOBA. The lobby/'campaign donation' culture in US politics is an even stronger litmus, to me at least, that in contract to your view the future has come, and the cyberpunk is in it.