7 ms·

Cyberpunk is dead?

60 points by rl1987 16y ago

wladimir 16y ago
The problem with cyberpunk is that it's no longer the future, it's the present. Sometimes when I read the news I've got the idea we're kind of living in a dystopian 90's cyberpunk future... When it's the new normal it makes sense that the word is "dead" as a denominator.
- mrcharles 16y ago
  Yes, the only thing truly missing is the idea of a direct neural interface and some kind of virtual world... but in reality that virtual world will likely never exist outside games. Why, you ask? Because the main conceit of the cyberpunk virtual world is that it's entirely like reality with the exception that it's more fantastic. But an amazon/itunes search with a quick click to buy is infinitely faster and more convenient than jumping in to a virtual world and 'physically' trying to find something. Alternate reality is the new future, not virtual reality. We already have a perfectly good reality, so we'll just spice it up.
  - demosthenes 16y ago
    What is the difference, if any, between alternate reality and augmented reality?
    - mrcharles 16y ago
      As far as I can really tell, none. So I kind of use the terms interchangeably. Both are about layering virtual information over top of reality, as far as I know. I guess augmented is the superior term.
    - burgerbrain 16y ago
      As I understand it, an alternate reality doesn't need to correspond with the primary reality (the metaverse, the grid, the matrix, etc) whereas an augmented reality is essentially a HUD type setup for the primary reality.
    - Rhapso 16y ago
      Augmented reality is an overlay onto what is truly there. Alternate reality or Virtual Reality is a simulation of an entirely new universe.
  - wladimir 16y ago
    Given the advances in EEG and other brain scan techs, I believe direct neural interfaces aren't that far away anymore. One step at a time, we'll first have to get used to motion-based interfaces. Neural interfaces will probably be like moving a limb but not actually moving. With such interfaces, there is no reason anymore to restrict to planar screens. Everything can be 3D. For buying stuff you're right -- just clicking and using an efficient search system is much more efficient. But the market for experiences is another thing. Many people will disagree with you that we already have a "perfectly good reality". They might desire things they cannot have in life, for example, or want to do things that physics makes impossible in real life (teleportation?). Just imagine the possibilities. As soon as the tech is there, there will be a huge market for it. And don't forget collaboration over a distance. "telepresence". It's not just for games and fun.
    - demosthenes 16y ago
      Videoconferencing and telepresence is big business. I expect those applications will lead the way, with the technology being adapted for entertainment purposes soon after.
      - mrcharles 16y ago
        Yes, I agree here too, telepresence would be a pretty good reason. But even then, that's probably actually less useful than just a videoconferencing system, since you could continue to have your hands/eyes free for other things like taking notes or whatever at the same time.
        wladimir 16y ago
        I don't agree it'll be less useful. Actual telepresence has a lot more possibilities than just a video stream. You could interact with people in the virtual environment, build or design something together, brainstorm in new ways (For example, imagine architects designing a building while walking in it in realtime), and take notes digitally. Once you can do everything in the virtual "world", you don't need your hands/eyes free for other things. (and I'm sure there will be a pop-up HUD interface in which you can do other things if you really want to be distracted like browsing HN during a meeting :).
- daeken 16y ago
  My thoughts exactly. I don't mean to threadjack, but I'm running a new startup where I'm building augmented reality displays ( http://gothameyewear.com/ http://gothameyewear.com/ if anyone is interested -- haven't posted it here before, simply because there's not much there), and I occasionally have that "well shit, it's the future" realization in working on it. We may not be in the 2011 of Shadowrun, but we'll have decks soon -- they'll be our smartphones.
  - vetler 16y ago
    I've convinced myself that augmented reality displays are right around the corner. Don't we have the technology to to do this now? I suppose the challenge might be to make everything light and compact enough. The future is so close I can smell it.
    - daeken 16y ago
      There are two challenges: getting it into a form factor where normal people would wear it (our initial dev units will not be too far off this mark) and getting the price down to something sane. The latter is the really hard part, if you care about quality; the 0.5" 800x600 OLED displays we're using are $800 for a single unit, and don't drop to $400/unit until you hit a volume of 1000+ units. Of course, they'll get cheaper over time, so I'm not terribly worried about it.
      - rl1987 16y ago
        Considering the first, I suppose it's best to try and integrate display into ordinary-looking sunglasses. Some work has been done to develop "covert HMD" like that. [1,2] However, the prototypes don't seem to have solved the problem of inputting vision field video - there is no camera hidden inside the sunglasses as far as I can tell. [1] Steve Mann - Intelligent Image Processing. [2] http://users.cwnet.com/vvortex3/hmd/ http://users.cwnet.com/vvortex3/hmd/
        daeken 16y ago
        I did a good bit of research into it, but it just doesn't seem to be viable at this point. It's insanely expensive (fiber stuff isn't cheap), and you can't really do AR due to the lack of a camera. Eventually we'll get there, but as of now it's just going to be goggles.
- ThomPete 16y ago
  That's exactly Gibsons take on it which is why he wrote a book like Pattern Recognition which interestingly enough is much less dystopian than his first three books. These days cyberpunk seems to be more about transhumanism and posthumanism ala Charles Stross books "Accellerando" & "Singularity Sky".
  - cstross 16y ago
    Er, no. Cyberpunk (in written SF) died around the time "Vincent Omniaveritas" folded his zine Cheap Truth in 1986 (which you can find an archive of here: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~erich/cheaptruth/ http://www.its.caltech.edu/~erich/cheaptruth/ ) ... by 1992, when Bantam Spectra published Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" it had descended into self-parody (hint: a heroic central character called Hiro Protagonist? Try saying that aloud). Transhumanism/posthumanism was big in the 1990s -- Vernor Vinge coughed up the hairball that is the singularity in the mid-1980s and Hans Moravec of CMU popularized it and spread the fertile soil for the early 1990s transhumanists, who also hybridized with libertarians and cypherpunks by way of the extropians mailing list circa 1990-95. But again, by the time you get to the late 1990s folks like Ray Kurzweil were bandwagoning on it, and these days that, too, is ancient history. "Accelerando" was written circa 1998-2003, and "Singularity Sky" -- not its original title, but one dropped on it by the publisher in search of teh sexxy -- in 1996-98. If you're pointing to them as signs of where SF is at, I'll just get my coat -- because SF is dead.
    - joshu 16y ago
      So is it wrong to gush, fanboy-style, on HN?
      - zachbeane 16y ago
        I loved delicious!
        joshu 16y ago
        I use the img macro generator all the time!
dublinclontarf 16y ago
Not dead, just moved. I think the whole bitcoin thing is very cyberpunk-ish. A digital crypto-currency.
- demosthenes 16y ago
  Spot on. Also, browsing pages on Tor and similar networks reminds me a lot of exploring the internet in the early '90s. It's messy, there are lots of abandoned, hastily put together pages. There are weird rants. The internet that the author misses is still out there. It's just not as close to the surface as it was in the early days of the internet or BBS.
  - lloeki 16y ago
    "It's just not as close to the surface as it was in the early days of the internet or BBS." Precisely. I'll add that today that 'underground' is a very small (yet important, if not critical to its future) part of the whole internet whereas in the early days it was most of it; hence the appearance of it being farther from the surface. No need to reach for Tor, take HN whose volume is certainly much lower than those Facebook streams and various LOLcats, yet it is certainly pivotal to what's actually built on the internet. The next Facebook won't come from its users, it will come from one of you. Human-Computer interaction as envisioned is at its peak. Dare you tell me that Second Life, World of Warcraft, or Eve Online are not quite akin to the metaverse that was envisioned in Snowcrash. Tell me that those robotic prosthetic limbs are not close to what you see in Gunnm (Battle Angel Alita in the US). All those eyes, ears, and even memory prosthetic devices (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6574 http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6574) seen in Ghost in the Shell and Johnny Mnemonic are not dreamt of anymore, they are very real and useful to many (although admittedly they did not reach such levels of advancement, but that's a matter of time). Tell me those efforts to control and monitor everything including the internet "for the safety of everyone and his dog" are not dystopian in many ways, and get a look at how the third and fourth world are manipulating technology in ad-hoc, cheap, creative and dangerous ways to try and follow us in our first-world countries steps. Of course there is some error correction to apply with regard to what was envisioned before all of that was even remotely possible; it is no wonder that fiction varies from reality. Cyberpunk lives, for the best and the worst, today.
locopati 16y ago
"If I write something set 60 years in the future I am going to have to explain how humanity got there and that's becoming quite a big job," [Gibson] said. "Compared to that further investigation of our alien present seems actually way more doable and it may be more fun to do because it shakes all sorts of people out of the woodwork that want to talk to me," [Gibson added]. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11502715 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11502715 Also, http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/09/william-gibson-interview/ http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/09/william-gibson-interv...
- demosthenes 16y ago
  Interestingly, Gibson's latest book - Pattern Recognition - is set in the present. It's very good. http://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Recognition-William-Gibson/dp/0399149864 http://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Recognition-William-Gibson/dp/... It's not the same dystopian future he envisioned in the 1990s. But his keen eye draws out the darker sides.
  - spacemanaki 16y ago
    He's written two books since then, Spook Country and Zero History which are also set in the present. I haven't read them but supposedly they constitute a sort of informal trilogy. I agree that Pattern Recognition is very good. Although I will always have a soft spot for Neuromancer and his related books and stories.
    - dedward 16y ago
      Read those other two - they're as good, if not a little bit better. Nothing stunningly different. As a long-time neuromancer and Gibson fan, I can say his writing has changed and approached the modern day just as it should. Neuromancer made sense at the time it was published - the net wasn't around, it was a far out concept - lots of room for imagination. If it were only released today, it would just seem like really bad sci-fi because the net exists, now, and it's not quite what Gibson wrote about. I'd the pattern recognition/spook/zero set are not so much current day as very near-future. They're entirely plausible with current technology, with a few inventions along the way that don't currently exist, but probably could. PLus they're a good read.
bricestacey 16y ago
I thought the last two paragraphs were delightful and might help explain the recent trend for people to leave HN. Otherwise, the piece is barely legible.
demosthenes 16y ago
This piece reads awfully. I haven't seen anything like this since trying to understand inscrutable postmodernist literary criticism at college. I am very interested in this, but I'm having a lot of trouble understanding it. What's he trying to say? Todays market of representations means that we exchange images that are valued by statements without consequence, statements whose only value is the one of attention, something we have learned from the advertising process, which has become the key process of culture. This cultural praxis fails to find a history of the human faces. The faces tried to break the boundaries of word and image, they were processes of conscious creation of speaking images for the feelings that words fail to describe.
- Dickdavis 16y ago
  I have a hunch this was written by a non-native English speaker (see the quote usage near the beginning). Anyway, I think he's saying that our faces, which allow us to communicate without words (the last sentence of your quote), are now nothing more than static images/advertisements (e.g., profile pictures). Communication on social networks has been reduced to using advertising techniques to gain attention.
- schrototo 16y ago
  I have to confess, I've got a sort of fondness for this writing style. It's got a certain rythm that makes everything seem more... impactful than it really is. edit: of course, what I meant to say was: While aesthetically confusing on a surface level, the subcurrent of ryhtmic tonality in these disquisitions impacts the reader's thought process in subliminal ways. Hitherto the paragon of collegiate studies, these textual discourses nowadays propagate freely in the super-plebeian fantasy-made-reality cyber-utopia that is the infosphere. The parentally linked-to hypertext is a two-fold example of not only the skillfull mastery of the avant-poetic style, but also the post-print arrangement common in todays socioeconomic conditions.
  - epochwolf 16y ago
    Congratulations, I have not read text like that since my philosophy courses in college.
DanI-S 16y ago
The article defines punk (in general) as a deviant subculture that parents are afraid of. Perhaps the general decline of punk can be attributed to modern parents being much less afraid than parents in the 70s. Cyberpunk isn't really exciting when your parents all have iPhones.
- demosthenes 16y ago
  I'm not sure why Anonymous does not fit the article's definition.
  - kragen 16y ago
    They do, explicitly: Contrary to this, CHAN-culture (imageboards, fast communication channels) and the ANON-meme (crowd orientated cyber actions) try different ways in waging real mass-based cyberwars, they reach this point by being more punk again, punk as in: deviant subculture that parents are afraid of. I read this as saying that Anonymous and 4chan (and friends) have reached the point of being punk again, in that sense.
  - jokermatt999 16y ago
    Between Anonymous and Wikileaks, I feel like we're practically living in a cyberpunk story. We're just the blissfully uninvolved citizens who don't live in the seedy underbelly.
    - DanI-S 16y ago
      I'm not sure we at Hacker News are blissfully uninvolved; we're busy building tomorrow's sinister megacorporations. Or Mr Lee's Greater Hong Kong.
      - deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
      - count 16y ago
        At what point do you realize what you're building is what your protagonist heros always fought against? And does that realization make you stop?
pnathan 16y ago
Cyberpunk got somehow stuck in mirror shades and virtual reality worlds, and then wandered off into the artistic fringe. There was also very little grasp of programming by the cyberpunk writers that I've read. No understanding of the Cyber part of the Punk. That would have increased its ability to stay relevant.

60 points by rl1987 16y ago

The problem with cyberpunk is that it's no longer the future, it's the present. Sometimes when I read the news I've got the idea we're kind of living in a dystopian 90's cyberpunk future... When it's the new normal it makes sense that the word is "dead" as a denominator.

mrcharles 16y ago
Yes, the only thing truly missing is the idea of a direct neural interface and some kind of virtual world... but in reality that virtual world will likely never exist outside games. Why, you ask? Because the main conceit of the cyberpunk virtual world is that it's entirely like reality with the exception that it's more fantastic. But an amazon/itunes search with a quick click to buy is infinitely faster and more convenient than jumping in to a virtual world and 'physically' trying to find something. Alternate reality is the new future, not virtual reality. We already have a perfectly good reality, so we'll just spice it up.
- demosthenes 16y ago
  What is the difference, if any, between alternate reality and augmented reality?
  - mrcharles 16y ago
    As far as I can really tell, none. So I kind of use the terms interchangeably. Both are about layering virtual information over top of reality, as far as I know. I guess augmented is the superior term.
  - burgerbrain 16y ago
    As I understand it, an alternate reality doesn't need to correspond with the primary reality (the metaverse, the grid, the matrix, etc) whereas an augmented reality is essentially a HUD type setup for the primary reality.
  - Rhapso 16y ago
    Augmented reality is an overlay onto what is truly there. Alternate reality or Virtual Reality is a simulation of an entirely new universe.
- wladimir 16y ago
  Given the advances in EEG and other brain scan techs, I believe direct neural interfaces aren't that far away anymore. One step at a time, we'll first have to get used to motion-based interfaces. Neural interfaces will probably be like moving a limb but not actually moving. With such interfaces, there is no reason anymore to restrict to planar screens. Everything can be 3D. For buying stuff you're right -- just clicking and using an efficient search system is much more efficient. But the market for experiences is another thing. Many people will disagree with you that we already have a "perfectly good reality". They might desire things they cannot have in life, for example, or want to do things that physics makes impossible in real life (teleportation?). Just imagine the possibilities. As soon as the tech is there, there will be a huge market for it. And don't forget collaboration over a distance. "telepresence". It's not just for games and fun.
  - demosthenes 16y ago
    Videoconferencing and telepresence is big business. I expect those applications will lead the way, with the technology being adapted for entertainment purposes soon after.
    - mrcharles 16y ago
      Yes, I agree here too, telepresence would be a pretty good reason. But even then, that's probably actually less useful than just a videoconferencing system, since you could continue to have your hands/eyes free for other things like taking notes or whatever at the same time.
      - wladimir 16y ago
        I don't agree it'll be less useful. Actual telepresence has a lot more possibilities than just a video stream. You could interact with people in the virtual environment, build or design something together, brainstorm in new ways (For example, imagine architects designing a building while walking in it in realtime), and take notes digitally. Once you can do everything in the virtual "world", you don't need your hands/eyes free for other things. (and I'm sure there will be a pop-up HUD interface in which you can do other things if you really want to be distracted like browsing HN during a meeting :).
daeken 16y ago
My thoughts exactly. I don't mean to threadjack, but I'm running a new startup where I'm building augmented reality displays ( http://gothameyewear.com/ http://gothameyewear.com/ if anyone is interested -- haven't posted it here before, simply because there's not much there), and I occasionally have that "well shit, it's the future" realization in working on it. We may not be in the 2011 of Shadowrun, but we'll have decks soon -- they'll be our smartphones.
- vetler 16y ago
  I've convinced myself that augmented reality displays are right around the corner. Don't we have the technology to to do this now? I suppose the challenge might be to make everything light and compact enough. The future is so close I can smell it.
  - daeken 16y ago
    There are two challenges: getting it into a form factor where normal people would wear it (our initial dev units will not be too far off this mark) and getting the price down to something sane. The latter is the really hard part, if you care about quality; the 0.5" 800x600 OLED displays we're using are $800 for a single unit, and don't drop to $400/unit until you hit a volume of 1000+ units. Of course, they'll get cheaper over time, so I'm not terribly worried about it.
    - rl1987 16y ago
      Considering the first, I suppose it's best to try and integrate display into ordinary-looking sunglasses. Some work has been done to develop "covert HMD" like that. [1,2] However, the prototypes don't seem to have solved the problem of inputting vision field video - there is no camera hidden inside the sunglasses as far as I can tell. [1] Steve Mann - Intelligent Image Processing. [2] http://users.cwnet.com/vvortex3/hmd/ http://users.cwnet.com/vvortex3/hmd/
      - daeken 16y ago
        I did a good bit of research into it, but it just doesn't seem to be viable at this point. It's insanely expensive (fiber stuff isn't cheap), and you can't really do AR due to the lack of a camera. Eventually we'll get there, but as of now it's just going to be goggles.
ThomPete 16y ago
That's exactly Gibsons take on it which is why he wrote a book like Pattern Recognition which interestingly enough is much less dystopian than his first three books. These days cyberpunk seems to be more about transhumanism and posthumanism ala Charles Stross books "Accellerando" & "Singularity Sky".
- cstross 16y ago
  Er, no. Cyberpunk (in written SF) died around the time "Vincent Omniaveritas" folded his zine Cheap Truth in 1986 (which you can find an archive of here: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~erich/cheaptruth/ http://www.its.caltech.edu/~erich/cheaptruth/ ) ... by 1992, when Bantam Spectra published Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" it had descended into self-parody (hint: a heroic central character called Hiro Protagonist? Try saying that aloud). Transhumanism/posthumanism was big in the 1990s -- Vernor Vinge coughed up the hairball that is the singularity in the mid-1980s and Hans Moravec of CMU popularized it and spread the fertile soil for the early 1990s transhumanists, who also hybridized with libertarians and cypherpunks by way of the extropians mailing list circa 1990-95. But again, by the time you get to the late 1990s folks like Ray Kurzweil were bandwagoning on it, and these days that, too, is ancient history. "Accelerando" was written circa 1998-2003, and "Singularity Sky" -- not its original title, but one dropped on it by the publisher in search of teh sexxy -- in 1996-98. If you're pointing to them as signs of where SF is at, I'll just get my coat -- because SF is dead.
  - joshu 16y ago
    So is it wrong to gush, fanboy-style, on HN?
    - zachbeane 16y ago
      I loved delicious!
      - joshu 16y ago
        I use the img macro generator all the time!

dublinclontarf 16y ago

Not dead, just moved. I think the whole bitcoin thing is very cyberpunk-ish. A digital crypto-currency.

demosthenes 16y ago
Spot on. Also, browsing pages on Tor and similar networks reminds me a lot of exploring the internet in the early '90s. It's messy, there are lots of abandoned, hastily put together pages. There are weird rants. The internet that the author misses is still out there. It's just not as close to the surface as it was in the early days of the internet or BBS.
- lloeki 16y ago
  "It's just not as close to the surface as it was in the early days of the internet or BBS." Precisely. I'll add that today that 'underground' is a very small (yet important, if not critical to its future) part of the whole internet whereas in the early days it was most of it; hence the appearance of it being farther from the surface. No need to reach for Tor, take HN whose volume is certainly much lower than those Facebook streams and various LOLcats, yet it is certainly pivotal to what's actually built on the internet. The next Facebook won't come from its users, it will come from one of you. Human-Computer interaction as envisioned is at its peak. Dare you tell me that Second Life, World of Warcraft, or Eve Online are not quite akin to the metaverse that was envisioned in Snowcrash. Tell me that those robotic prosthetic limbs are not close to what you see in Gunnm (Battle Angel Alita in the US). All those eyes, ears, and even memory prosthetic devices (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6574 http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6574) seen in Ghost in the Shell and Johnny Mnemonic are not dreamt of anymore, they are very real and useful to many (although admittedly they did not reach such levels of advancement, but that's a matter of time). Tell me those efforts to control and monitor everything including the internet "for the safety of everyone and his dog" are not dystopian in many ways, and get a look at how the third and fourth world are manipulating technology in ad-hoc, cheap, creative and dangerous ways to try and follow us in our first-world countries steps. Of course there is some error correction to apply with regard to what was envisioned before all of that was even remotely possible; it is no wonder that fiction varies from reality. Cyberpunk lives, for the best and the worst, today.

locopati 16y ago

"If I write something set 60 years in the future I am going to have to explain how humanity got there and that's becoming quite a big job," [Gibson] said. "Compared to that further investigation of our alien present seems actually way more doable and it may be more fun to do because it shakes all sorts of people out of the woodwork that want to talk to me," [Gibson added]. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11502715 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11502715 Also, http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/09/william-gibson-interview/ http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/09/william-gibson-interv...

demosthenes 16y ago
Interestingly, Gibson's latest book - Pattern Recognition - is set in the present. It's very good. http://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Recognition-William-Gibson/dp/0399149864 http://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Recognition-William-Gibson/dp/... It's not the same dystopian future he envisioned in the 1990s. But his keen eye draws out the darker sides.
- spacemanaki 16y ago
  He's written two books since then, Spook Country and Zero History which are also set in the present. I haven't read them but supposedly they constitute a sort of informal trilogy. I agree that Pattern Recognition is very good. Although I will always have a soft spot for Neuromancer and his related books and stories.
  - dedward 16y ago
    Read those other two - they're as good, if not a little bit better. Nothing stunningly different. As a long-time neuromancer and Gibson fan, I can say his writing has changed and approached the modern day just as it should. Neuromancer made sense at the time it was published - the net wasn't around, it was a far out concept - lots of room for imagination. If it were only released today, it would just seem like really bad sci-fi because the net exists, now, and it's not quite what Gibson wrote about. I'd the pattern recognition/spook/zero set are not so much current day as very near-future. They're entirely plausible with current technology, with a few inventions along the way that don't currently exist, but probably could. PLus they're a good read.

bricestacey 16y ago

I thought the last two paragraphs were delightful and might help explain the recent trend for people to leave HN. Otherwise, the piece is barely legible.

demosthenes 16y ago

This piece reads awfully. I haven't seen anything like this since trying to understand inscrutable postmodernist literary criticism at college. I am very interested in this, but I'm having a lot of trouble understanding it. What's he trying to say? Todays market of representations means that we exchange images that are valued by statements without consequence, statements whose only value is the one of attention, something we have learned from the advertising process, which has become the key process of culture. This cultural praxis fails to find a history of the human faces. The faces tried to break the boundaries of word and image, they were processes of conscious creation of speaking images for the feelings that words fail to describe.

Dickdavis 16y ago
I have a hunch this was written by a non-native English speaker (see the quote usage near the beginning). Anyway, I think he's saying that our faces, which allow us to communicate without words (the last sentence of your quote), are now nothing more than static images/advertisements (e.g., profile pictures). Communication on social networks has been reduced to using advertising techniques to gain attention.
schrototo 16y ago
I have to confess, I've got a sort of fondness for this writing style. It's got a certain rythm that makes everything seem more... impactful than it really is. edit: of course, what I meant to say was: While aesthetically confusing on a surface level, the subcurrent of ryhtmic tonality in these disquisitions impacts the reader's thought process in subliminal ways. Hitherto the paragon of collegiate studies, these textual discourses nowadays propagate freely in the super-plebeian fantasy-made-reality cyber-utopia that is the infosphere. The parentally linked-to hypertext is a two-fold example of not only the skillfull mastery of the avant-poetic style, but also the post-print arrangement common in todays socioeconomic conditions.
- epochwolf 16y ago
  Congratulations, I have not read text like that since my philosophy courses in college.

DanI-S 16y ago

The article defines punk (in general) as a deviant subculture that parents are afraid of. Perhaps the general decline of punk can be attributed to modern parents being much less afraid than parents in the 70s. Cyberpunk isn't really exciting when your parents all have iPhones.

demosthenes 16y ago
I'm not sure why Anonymous does not fit the article's definition.
- kragen 16y ago
  They do, explicitly: Contrary to this, CHAN-culture (imageboards, fast communication channels) and the ANON-meme (crowd orientated cyber actions) try different ways in waging real mass-based cyberwars, they reach this point by being more punk again, punk as in: deviant subculture that parents are afraid of. I read this as saying that Anonymous and 4chan (and friends) have reached the point of being punk again, in that sense.
- jokermatt999 16y ago
  Between Anonymous and Wikileaks, I feel like we're practically living in a cyberpunk story. We're just the blissfully uninvolved citizens who don't live in the seedy underbelly.
  - DanI-S 16y ago
    I'm not sure we at Hacker News are blissfully uninvolved; we're busy building tomorrow's sinister megacorporations. Or Mr Lee's Greater Hong Kong.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - count 16y ago
      At what point do you realize what you're building is what your protagonist heros always fought against? And does that realization make you stop?

pnathan 16y ago

Cyberpunk got somehow stuck in mirror shades and virtual reality worlds, and then wandered off into the artistic fringe. There was also very little grasp of programming by the cyberpunk writers that I've read. No understanding of the Cyber part of the Punk. That would have increased its ability to stay relevant.