11 ms·

The Cyberpunk Sensibility (2016)

99 points by zabana 8y ago

keypusher 8y ago
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.
- chme 8y ago
  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.
  - colordrops 8y ago
    The Expanse is an interesting mix of Star Trek optimism and cyberpunk sensibilities.
    - auslander 8y ago
      No dark nets, hackers and William Gibson stuff
      - a-saleh 8y ago
        High-tech & Low-life enough for me ;-)
      - freeflight 8y ago
        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.
        auslander 8y ago
        Merge Mr Robot into The Expanse, and lets see :)
  - freeflight 8y ago
    > Or both the government and big corporations hammering down on the humans... "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on the human face, forever." - George Orwell
  - krapp 8y ago
    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.
- _hardwaregeek 8y ago
  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.
  - bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y ago
    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.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  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.
- pjc50 8y ago
  > 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.
  - jhbadger 8y ago
    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.
- dnomad 8y ago
  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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality
- eli_gottlieb 8y ago
  Eh. I don't feel like our reality has really resembled cyberpunk in specific so much as grimdark in general. I liked this other article better: http://outermode.com/warhammer-40000-is-predicting-the-present http://outermode.com/warhammer-40000-is-predicting-the-prese...
- athenot 8y ago
  Yes! 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.)
- mindcrime 8y ago
  government controlled future 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.
  - krapp 8y ago
    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.)
    - mindcrime 8y ago
      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.
      - krapp 8y ago
        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.)
- EthanHeilman 8y ago
  >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.
  - TremendousJudge 8y ago
    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
  - dredmorbius 8y ago
    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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dystopian_literature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dystopian_literature
- ataturk 8y ago
  As someone who has read most of the genre and taught a college course on the subject, I agree that the article didn't say that much, but it's fine. I appreciate the "lived in universe" whether it is cyberpunk fiction or Han Solo's Millenium Falcon. "The future is here, it just isn't evenly distributed." I take exception to the ideas about anti-globalism, though. There are plenty of educated people, like me, who are against global plutocracy. The idea that only backwoods hicks support Trump is horribly toxic. Trump is himself a cyberpunk. He's practically a one-man junta against the globalist slavers. He and the faction of the intelligence community that are desperately trying to right the ship deserve our support, not our scorn. Just look at the criminal acts the FBI and CIA have committed, as well as the Dept. of State in fomenting wars and destruction of civilization (Libya, Syria) for the sake of corporate profiteering. 9/11 was the same deal, too--a major false flag designed to enhance big government and corporate profits. Cyberpunks want to tear these people down!
ErikAugust 8y ago
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 https://www.cachethegame. It's based on Ethereum based and based on the old Drugwars classic.
- exolymph 8y ago
  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 :)
  - davidgerard 8y ago
    If "Burning Chrome" had thought of cryptocurrencies, it could have been set in the present.
    - pavel_lishin 8y ago
      Cryptonomicon largely could be.
  - ErikAugust 8y ago
    Awesome, great article by the way —- we do not see too many cyberpunk discussions being facilitated here!
- pjonesdotca 8y ago
  https://cachethegame.com/ https://cachethegame.com/ <<< fixed the url link
jancsika 8y ago
> [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. [1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528731-800-the-yuck-factor-the-surprising-power-of-disgust/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528731-800-the-yuck...
bsamuels 8y ago
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
- mindcrime 8y ago
  New Power appears to explore similar terrain as well. https://www.amazon.com/New-Power-Works-Hyperconnected-World/dp/0385541112 https://www.amazon.com/New-Power-Works-Hyperconnected-World/... Looking forward to reading both in the near future.
acoye 8y ago
"The cyberpunk mental model [...] can be risky because it’s quite cynical and pessimistic. We expect the worst of people." 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 8y ago
  >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.
  - spyrosg 8y ago
    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).
    - coldtea 8y ago
      >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).
auslander 8y ago
I love cyberpunk. Essential ingredients are: - hostile AI - Corporations and Government surveilance and going dark - DNA / implant chips / biometric border controls - Borders protected by armed drones / robots - Underground Identities markets
- drakonka 8y ago
  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.
  - auslander 8y ago
    AI that decides if you are not a good fit for or a threat to society. And kicks off all kinds of threat control measures. Black Mirror S03E01.
    - klez 8y ago
      Did we see a different version of the episode? In Nosedive your score is decided by people, not by AI. There's no hint of AI in the whole episode.
      - auslander 8y ago
        It was AI :) People's scores were just another source of data, used together with throves of banking, social, medical, criminal, telecom datasets.
        klez 8y ago
        I'll have to rewatch it. Not that I would mind :)
    - KevanM 8y ago
      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.
auslander 8y ago
Black Mirror is pretty much cyberpunk, if you missed it somehow
- klez 8y ago
  Not really. 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.
  - prophesi 8y ago
    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.
    - auslander 8y ago
      Love this track. Efi cover just doesn't cut it :)
    - klez 8y ago
      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 :) ) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk#Protagonists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk#Protagonists
      - 8y ago
motohagiography 8y ago
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.
- InitialLastName 8y ago
  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.
ajuc 8y ago
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". [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X2kIfS6fb8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X2kIfS6fb8
- acoye 8y ago
  Yeah Cyberpunk 2077 has a je-ne-sais-quoi that reminds me of "Ready player one". The 80's are there.

99 points by zabana 8y ago

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.

chme 8y ago
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.
- colordrops 8y ago
  The Expanse is an interesting mix of Star Trek optimism and cyberpunk sensibilities.
  - auslander 8y ago
    No dark nets, hackers and William Gibson stuff
    - a-saleh 8y ago
      High-tech & Low-life enough for me ;-)
    - freeflight 8y ago
      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.
      - auslander 8y ago
        Merge Mr Robot into The Expanse, and lets see :)
- freeflight 8y ago
  > Or both the government and big corporations hammering down on the humans... "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on the human face, forever." - George Orwell
- krapp 8y ago
  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.
_hardwaregeek 8y ago
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.
- bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y ago
  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.
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
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.
pjc50 8y ago
> 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.
- jhbadger 8y ago
  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.
dnomad 8y ago
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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality
eli_gottlieb 8y ago
Eh. I don't feel like our reality has really resembled cyberpunk in specific so much as grimdark in general. I liked this other article better: http://outermode.com/warhammer-40000-is-predicting-the-present http://outermode.com/warhammer-40000-is-predicting-the-prese...
athenot 8y ago
Yes! 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.)
mindcrime 8y ago
government controlled future 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.
- krapp 8y ago
  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.)
  - mindcrime 8y ago
    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.
    - krapp 8y ago
      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.)
EthanHeilman 8y ago
>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.
- TremendousJudge 8y ago
  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
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dystopian_literature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dystopian_literature
ataturk 8y ago
As someone who has read most of the genre and taught a college course on the subject, I agree that the article didn't say that much, but it's fine. I appreciate the "lived in universe" whether it is cyberpunk fiction or Han Solo's Millenium Falcon. "The future is here, it just isn't evenly distributed." I take exception to the ideas about anti-globalism, though. There are plenty of educated people, like me, who are against global plutocracy. The idea that only backwoods hicks support Trump is horribly toxic. Trump is himself a cyberpunk. He's practically a one-man junta against the globalist slavers. He and the faction of the intelligence community that are desperately trying to right the ship deserve our support, not our scorn. Just look at the criminal acts the FBI and CIA have committed, as well as the Dept. of State in fomenting wars and destruction of civilization (Libya, Syria) for the sake of corporate profiteering. 9/11 was the same deal, too--a major false flag designed to enhance big government and corporate profits. Cyberpunks want to tear these people down!

ErikAugust 8y ago

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 https://www.cachethegame. It's based on Ethereum based and based on the old Drugwars classic.

exolymph 8y ago
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 :)
- davidgerard 8y ago
  If "Burning Chrome" had thought of cryptocurrencies, it could have been set in the present.
  - pavel_lishin 8y ago
    Cryptonomicon largely could be.
- ErikAugust 8y ago
  Awesome, great article by the way —- we do not see too many cyberpunk discussions being facilitated here!
pjonesdotca 8y ago
https://cachethegame.com/ https://cachethegame.com/ <<< fixed the url link

jancsika 8y ago

> [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. [1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528731-800-the-yuck-factor-the-surprising-power-of-disgust/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528731-800-the-yuck...

bsamuels 8y ago

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

mindcrime 8y ago
New Power appears to explore similar terrain as well. https://www.amazon.com/New-Power-Works-Hyperconnected-World/dp/0385541112 https://www.amazon.com/New-Power-Works-Hyperconnected-World/... Looking forward to reading both in the near future.

acoye 8y ago

"The cyberpunk mental model [...] can be risky because it’s quite cynical and pessimistic. We expect the worst of people." 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 8y ago
>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.
- spyrosg 8y ago
  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).
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >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).

auslander 8y ago

I love cyberpunk. Essential ingredients are: - hostile AI - Corporations and Government surveilance and going dark - DNA / implant chips / biometric border controls - Borders protected by armed drones / robots - Underground Identities markets

drakonka 8y ago
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.
- auslander 8y ago
  AI that decides if you are not a good fit for or a threat to society. And kicks off all kinds of threat control measures. Black Mirror S03E01.
  - klez 8y ago
    Did we see a different version of the episode? In Nosedive your score is decided by people, not by AI. There's no hint of AI in the whole episode.
    - auslander 8y ago
      It was AI :) People's scores were just another source of data, used together with throves of banking, social, medical, criminal, telecom datasets.
      - klez 8y ago
        I'll have to rewatch it. Not that I would mind :)
  - KevanM 8y ago
    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.

auslander 8y ago

Black Mirror is pretty much cyberpunk, if you missed it somehow

klez 8y ago
Not really. 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.
- prophesi 8y ago
  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.
  - auslander 8y ago
    Love this track. Efi cover just doesn't cut it :)
  - klez 8y ago
    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 :) ) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk#Protagonists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk#Protagonists
    - 8y ago

motohagiography 8y ago

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.

InitialLastName 8y ago
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.

ajuc 8y ago

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". [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X2kIfS6fb8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X2kIfS6fb8

acoye 8y ago
Yeah Cyberpunk 2077 has a je-ne-sais-quoi that reminds me of "Ready player one". The 80's are there.