>you have to state what the punk element is first I think they get to that in the first third of the essay. >just like how comedy doesn't age well because it'

>you have to state what the punk element is first I think they get to that in the first third of the essay. >just like how comedy doesn't age well because it's the dissonance of a cultural moment, cyberpunk was a response to a fin de siecle period just before the tension and uncertainty about computers resolved into our present experience of tech. I don't know, I think the consensus is that ours is in fact the realization of many critical themes of cyberpunk, so it is now at its apex of relevance to our present moment, as it is effectively an anticipation of and criticism of it. And it turned out to be interestingly predictive, and that opens a million interesting conversations about why it was predictive. >what's changed is (cyber)punk was a set of symbols and representations[...] I don't know that I've ever encountered such a roller coaster of a paragraph. Cyberpunk was a "set of symbols and representations"? I mean, maybe, maybe not, but we just read a whole essay about it, and it doesn't talk that way and in fact identifies entirely different things, so what happened to those, and it's not clear what you mean, and you're not necessarily wrong but there are other equally true things to say of it. In short: ...wha??? You contrast cyberpunk to DIY which is never a contrast I've encountered before, and seems like a crossing of dissimilar categories, like comparing mice to nostalgia. I can't follow the thing about self-imposed constraints or how those were "honest" (huh?) signals of heroism or needing to be an amputee to be a punk? Replacement constraint? Plumage? We're not even on Mars at this point, we're the Voyager I. >by now it's probably a set of tropes that form a fantasy genre. And somehow the plane lands on a coherent point, that amazingly, I find myself agreeing with. It really is at essence a style or a group of tropes at this point equivalent to fantasy genre tropes.