Hello and welcome back. Today, we’re taking a
break from milquetoast white middle class takes on socio-political issues and
getting back to what I’m really good at: Nonsensical waffling about deeply
nerdy shit. That’s right, today we’re going to talk about cyberpunk.
Here’s what I said about the genre back in
March:
Cyberpunk is a wonderful genre, so fun, so full
of cool gadgetry, bass-ass mofos, gangsters, mercs, techno-blitzkrieg action,
neon, rain and bare buttocks gyrating to electronica. I love it, really I do.
But damn is it a limited, self-referential genre.
It is. It’s a narrative straight-jacket capable
of telling about three possible stories, all of them involving a hacker, a
gun-toting mercenary and a prostitute with a heart of gold. Spoilers: They all
die and live happily ever after.
That said, it’s surprising how long and how
well the genre has survived since it downloaded itself into the public infosphere
back in the early 80s. In the 90s it was rebooted through Neal Stephenson’s
books and the Matrix trilogy, the Shadowrun RPG as well as William Gibson’s
Bridge trilogy (peak Gibson, to my mind), then saved from the Y2K bug by things
like the “Blade Runner” sequel or Richard Morgan’s “Altered Carbon” series
(covered here, here and here), which later became a Netflix series (here and
here). Everything from “Black Mirror” to “Love, Death and Robots” owes a deep
debt to this genre.
And it keeps going. Pandemic willing, we are currently
four months away from the November 19 release of CD Projekt Red’s latest game, “Cyberpunk
2077” (which I wrote a little about here) and its promise of infinitely
customizable genitalia. A tie-in anime has also been announced, slated for
release in 2021. Cyberpunk has never been hotter, or cooler, or whatever your
desired ambient temperature may be.
The question is, Why?
Why does this genre, so evidently a product of
a very specific place and time (my bedroom, circa 1990) continue to enjoy such
popularity?
Part of the reason cyberpunk is enjoying a
revival, as British author Adam Roberts suggests in his blog Morphosis, is
probably because kids like me who grew up in the 80s are now in positions to
make creative decisions about what gets made, and we’re all feeling a little nostalgic
for some babes, bikes and Blade Runner.
Another part of the reason may be pure fashion.
Black never goes out of style. William Gibson’s seminal novel “Neuromancer”
published in 1984 gets a lot of the credit for kicking off the genre, but it’s
worth pointing out this was actually two years after both Katsuhiro
Otomo’s manga series “Akira” (movie-fied in 1988) and Ridley Scott’s “Blade
Runner”, which together established a set of aesthetics that have survived the
intervening 30 years as a shorthand for effortless dystopic cool.
It’s the aesthetics that have stuck with us more
than anything, but I’m not sure those alone explain the longevity of such an
(apparently) niche genre. To be sure, the fact that cyberpunk gives artists a
fig leaf to cover the fetishization of gratuitously bloody gunplay and
large-breasted girls is attractive to some. That doesn’t explain, for example,
Altered Carbon’s use of the genre to explore themes of resistance to power and
control though, or Blade Runner: 2049’s more mournful contemplation of the definition
of self.
There is, I think, an ideological core to
cyberpunk which still resonates with us, even 30 years later. The concerns the
genre raises have not gone away, and indeed, have become ever more pressing.
What is the cyberpunk manifesto? Let’s have a
look.
Tenet 1: Technology will become increasingly ubiquitous
and invasive
The first and most important assertion cyberpunk
makes about our future (looking forward from the 80s) is that we will become dependent
on technology in every aspect of our lives.
Information networks will become connected and
regulate everything from finance to consumption to politics.
In parallel, technology will also invade the body,
leading to physical enhancement or even the total separation of mental and
physical selves, but also a growing alienation and loss of control over
ourselves. As your mind and body become increasingly digitized, you will suffer
the same vulnerabilities as all digital devices—subject to manipulation and
hacking.
Tenet 2: Privatization of everything and societal
collapse
Cyberpunk’s corollary to the increasing
colonization of every aspect of society by technology is that such technology
will make it easier and easier for wealth and power to be accumulated in
private hands, while public institutions grow weaker and weaker until they are
effectively useless.
The lawless vacuum their collapse creates will
be filled with private armies, mercenaries and assassins, drug dealers, sex
workers, gangs, especially the yakuza, cyborgs and killer robots.
Tenet 3: It’s up to the lone-wolf antisocial
rebel hero to save the day
The governments, the police, the corporations,
and pretty much every institution you can name is either powerless or corrupt
or more likely some neon-blended combination of the two. As a result, it’s up
to individuals to fight back against oppression, exploitation and evil.
Okay, so that didn’t happen
At first glance, it seems easy to dismiss many
of the predictions cyberpunk tried to make about the future of society.
Cyberspace, for example, has not become an
immersive VR experience, but instead a Matryoshka collection of nesting screens
growing paradoxically both smaller and more intrusive.
Governments have not collapsed, as electorates
and oligarchs have increasingly turned to “strong men” clamping down harder and
harder the more they sense the world is slipping from their grasp.
Japanese corporations, far from continuing to
buy up larger and larger swathes of North America, have gone into retreat.
Indeed, the 90s yellow-peril specter of Japanese domination (see Michael
Crichton’s “Rising Sun” and Tom Clancy’s “Debt of Honor”, ’92 and ’94 respectively)
now seems positively quaint.
Yet if you stop for a moment and look past the
surface aesthetics and focus instead on what cyberpunk is actually saying, it’s
clear many of these issues are very much still with us today.
Has technology invaded our lives? Are we
dependent on it?
Ooh you betcha. Uploaded consciousness or total
body prosthesis is still the realm of SF, but come on.
We all carry little rectangles of plastic and wiring
that connect us 24/7 to a global information network of reaction gifs, porn,
unhinged political tweets and inanely niche blogs. Social media is in the
process of monetizing every aspect of our private lives. Facial recognition
software and surveillance technology mean we are never truly alone. Your phone
might be listening to everything you say. Your car is evaluating how well you drive,
and telling your insurer. Your TV is talking to your fridge, and they think you’re
a loser.
Technology has never been more omni-present in
our lives, and despite appearances, I don’t think we’re any more comfortable
with it than we were 30 years ago. We’ve just adopted a kind of learned
helplessness, accepted that there’s nothing we can do to avoid it.
Have social institutions weakened? Are
corporations becoming laws unto themselves?
I mean, come on. High-tech companies like
Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple or Microsoft are effectively ungovernable. Septuagenarian
senators haven’t the faintest clue what these companies even do, much less how
they might be regulated. Meanwhile health costs skyrocket, education fails to
deliver either basic life skills or post-graduate employment, families are
divided across Facebook battlezones, and ununionized workforces trapped in the gig
economy Uber-drive in their spare time just to get by.
While corporations themselves have not
accumulated power into the hands of faceless boards, that role has instead been
played by the charismatic hero-CEO, the Jeff Bezos, Zuckerbergs and Musks of
the world, the infamous 0.1% against whom even the wealth of the 1% pales into
insignificance. Cyberpunk is worried about the way technology creates an
inequality of information that in turn accelerates the inequality of wealth,
and this is perhaps the defining characteristic of late-stage capitalism.
Lawlessness has absolutely been the result, as
people slowly realize the way in which traditional power structures have been
co-opted to operate to service the elite. Our cousins in the good ole US of
Americuh are one month into nation-wide protests against the perceived failings
of their police and judicial system. Just before that, gun-armed protesters
were storming state capitals to demand a lifting of restrictions on economic
activity. There is an increasing sense that systems don’t work, and it’s up to
people to take matters into their own hands.
And I think that’s why we still have cyberpunk.
The core unease, the sense that Joe, Jane and Gennefer average has lost control
of the technology we use, and by extension of the societies we live in, has not
gone away. It’s here, and it’s stronger than ever. And so is cyberpunk.
