A Cyberpunk Manifesto – Revised
neondystopia.com
neondystopia.com
Looking back at this as an adult, having not read it for many year, I'm shocked at how antisocial it is. Did I really believe this stuff?
I'm guessing it was a way for an intelligent, yet powerless, kid to gain some sense of control -- identifying strongly with my skills to feel superior to the society that denied me the freedoms I desired.
Now, as an adult member of society, I'm acutely aware how much I depend on the established systems for my security and well-being. Young people shouldn't feel the need to withdraw and create their own subcultures to gain a sense of belonging or security. We should be incorporating them into society, giving them a sense of purpose and belonging, and equipping them to make meaningful contributions.
Any thoughts how we can achieve that?
I did. And I remember how much. Today I think being thrown wide and clear of "the mainstream" by my teenaged rebellion was valuable. It gave me a great view from the outside so that as I began my journey back i could better find my place in it.
What I saw that most changed my mind? I was expecting a world of nefarious villains, but what I found was nothing but a bunch of weak anit-patterns and emergent behaviours. The world didn't suck because illuminati super-villains were oppressing the sheeple, it sucked for the same reason parks get trashed. Garbage accumulates and nobody bothers to pick it up.
Excellently phrased. And paradoxically, harder to fix.
Everyone is willing to play at being the hero, but no one wants to pick up garbage.
I'm not sure if this at all possible or even desirable. I'm not a psychologist, but my impression is that a certain degree of exploring identities is an important part of growing up - and that often involves separation from established structures and a change of relationship to family, school, etc, at least for a while. In the past, those spaces were physical, today they are a mix of physical and virtual.
That said, not everyone is rebellious as a teenager and there are many people who easily find their identities as parts if well-established groups. However people are different and I don't think those groups would at any time be desirable for everyone. ( Or if they were, we'd have a scarily homogeneous society)
Of course some subcultures and alternative groups can lead people in bad directions and be in fact harmful to them. But then the task should be to protect against those bad groups - or even better, give people the strength to protect themselves. Even in those cases, it's important to keep in mind why exactly the groups are harmful.
Seeing the existence of sub-cultures per se as the problem seems too simple to me.
I think the primary problem humanity has is that adults kinda forget that we learned our way as much by experiencing things first hand as being lectured on what was good and what was bad. Forbidden fruit and all that.
BTW, i seem to recall reading that giving kids responsibilities early results in them grouping up to behave responsible. The example used was a kid watching the family store while the parent was out running and errand or some such.
It says how in the manifesto. Schools & universities do the job of indoctrination:
'Society suppresses us. Yes, it suppresses freedom of thought. With its cruel education programs in schools and universities. They drill into children their view of things and any attempt to express a different opinion is denied and punished.'.
> Now, as an adult member of society, I'm acutely aware how much I depend on the established systems for my security and well-being
The System in its current form is one configuration. If you benefit from the current system, you're likely inclined to the status quo. A pig in a cage on antibiotics.
Congratulations, you've lived long enough to become the villain. /s
None of that matters when you're a teenager. A large part of puberty is establishing identity and a unique sense of self, in contrast to the sense of belonging to family and community that existed in a healthy childhood. And as for security - the trope that teenagers feel invincible exists for a reason, and not for a cultural one.
Anytime society attempts to define what it means to make a "healthy" contribution, remember that it is society making that determination, and not the individual. Part of growing up is figuring out for yourself what kinds of decisions are healthy for you as an individual, and the job of parents and educators is to give the benefit of their experience as mentors and help guide young people into understanding whether or not the decisions they are making are actually healthy for them.
Parents restricting their adolescent children to choices which are healthy for the parents/society (but not for the child) is ultimately one of the biggest ruptures of family relationships.
But to answer directly your question, I would say abolish tuition fees, mass incarceration and UX paradigm.
It's likely that the last Presidential election was decided, in no small part, by the efforts of a neo-anarchist site publishing classified information and a group of meme obsessed netizens attempting to disrupt and undermine the establishment. That seems pretty cyberpunk to me.
The problem is that it does not rain all the time and the ads are not in Japanese. The visual direction is simply off. Also the soundtrack leaves much to be desired. (Instead of Vangelis and Kenji Kawai, we have ... Gangnam Style?) It is not recognizable as cyberpunk.
Less in jest: much of the "cyberpunk" (at least for people like me) even when not talking about the genre of fiction but about the more general ethos or an idea ... was influenced by the presence of the certain set of fiction, especially visual medium (film, comics, the Japanese varieties anime, manga). And with fiction, you have aesthetics and narratives. Maybe an opportunity to entertain a kind of romanticism.
The real life lacks all that. Instead of neural implants, we have touchscreens that get dirty. The advent of artificial intelligence does not come with military grade AIs escaping into wild, followed by action involving tanks and deep philosophical discussions; the advent of AI means that we have very good image classifiers (and other machine learning systems that perform well in fairly restricted tasks such as speech recognition or Go), amazing opportunities for applying statistics to marketing, and bunch of geeks who have read too much Kurzweil writing decision theory papers in California. Instead of identifiable protagonists doing cool things while opposing identifiable antagonists of the story, we get n+1 people thinking they are the cool protagonists, in other words, Occupy and Wikileaks and Anonymous and alt-right.
[The same thing works in both directions of time, really. Cyberpunk science fiction liked the underground scene of punks" resisting the system. The historical fiction as a genre has always loved the idea of underground revolutionaries. (Think about Les Miserables.) And in reality it was much more boring and nasty and ambiguous, because no matter have much you try to be grim and realistic when writing fiction, in fiction even grim and gritty kinda still glitters.]
That's some Neal Stephenson stuff right there.
It's quite funny when you think about it, cyberpunk fiction predicted many of the most recent technology intrigue stories/events.
That's not entirely coincidental, considering how influential cyberpunk was during the nascent days of the internet. We have it to thank for the term "cyberspace" after all, and like the technology in Star Trek, a lot of people who grew up with it have been trying to "make it real" with limited success.
Still can't store a human consciousness on a tape drive, though.
I never assumed only interesting things are happening in the USA. I mentioned one thing that happened in the USA.
>There's no cyberpunk in the hot air and sunlight among the ruins of Syria, in the alcoholic reality of Russian monotowns or in the frozen technoutopia of silently ageing Japan.
First, that doesn't invalidate the premise. Cyberpunk is about the fringes of society and the cutting edge of technology, and liberation from the corruption of authority though anarchy and transhumanism, not about the mainstream.
If you were to extrapolate many settings depicted in cyberpunk fiction, you would probably find that there isn't "cyberpunk" in most of them, either. As far as cyberpunk is concerned, none of that is interesting.
Second, I can't believe you unironically used "frozen technoutopia" to argue against the presence of cyberpunk in the modern world.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/guccifer-20-is-li...
If I recall correctly, the initial Wikileaks trove was supposedly skimmed by a malicious Tor exit from Chinese intelligence traffic.
So yeah, pretty damn cyberpunk.
We are already there in some ways. Take the situation in the UK where, say, apple don't pay any tax to the national govt -- this is a perfect example where a massive corp is more powerful than a govt. There is absolutely no way that the uk govt could change the situation.
There are a few options they could try, but they would all fail and so they're not even attempted as trying and failing would be an embarrassment and admitting that they're powerless.
The options?
Take them to court? The govt would run out of money before they even got into a courtroom.
Sales ban? Unless the cost of stopping doing business in the UK is more than paying tax in every other country who would immediately take the same steps if it worked then they'd just leave the uk.
Guilt trip? Sure, people are annoyed but it's barely a news cycle at a time and everyone will still pay 1k for the new iphone (8 is rumored at around there... apparently).
That's even before you read about the revolving door between govt and big corp and the toothless ACOBA.
The lobby/'campaign donation' culture in US politics is an even stronger litmus, to me at least, that in contract to your view the future has come, and the cyberpunk is in it.
I'm still here...... :P
But "cypherpunk" is >9 years old, and inactive.
I wonder how that would be revisited today. Now misinformation comes from all corners, many factions all vying to misinform their way into being "the system".
The idea that some cyberpunk underground stands in resistance to this "system" is frankly hopeless. Do you want 9-11 truthers and Obama birthers? That's how you get them. Do you want antivaxers and chemtrails believers? Then let them think that they have a secret truth. Do you want the "alt-right" ? This is where it grew.
To use a machine learning analogy, all the pravda out there - everyone's relative truths - is your training set. If you limit your training set, you lose some ability to generalize to the real world.
Can you demonstrate that the discourse does move towards truth?
> all the pravda out there - everyone's relative truths -
"relative truth", eh? Is vaccine denial is relative truth? How about "Sandy hook was staged?" how about "Obama is a foreign muslim, and he founded ISIS" ?
I know that these beliefs come from a place of ignorance, anger and fear, but weaponising ignorance and fear is not a "discourse which moves toward that truth" and these memes are not a "relative truth", they are a near totality of the opposite. And yet they affect the fate of nations.
I certainly don't have answers, but I know that you first have to ask the right questions, and that this manifesto no longer does.
No. You're right. But then I also wouldn't write a manifesto about taking down the Establishment Media. That comes across completely differently now.
I don't want to see a manifesto asking for this outcome that we already have, I want to see a manifesto for how we can mitigate the worst of the resulting damage, while keeping the good parts such as they are.
The System was never a single entity (e.g. just the government) in the first place.
As for smaller independent fractions, those are not really relevant, because its a power law that defines what people believe. 20% of the media/outlets/social media accounts/etc set the tone for 80% of reality (and recursively, 20% of those set 80% of the tone).
Trying to change things is not futile, but the idea that this cyberpunk media underground will help us has borne toxic fruit, any fix must first grapple with the reality that this strategy was hopeless.
This version is awkward to read and that draws attention to how silly some of its statements are. Like that you might just want to take a little walk sometimes is not a crucial component of the manifesto, it just helped that paragraph flow before.
> 1. The Society surrounding us is clogged with conservancy, pulling everything and everybody to itself, while it sinks slowly into the quicksand of time.
> 3. The System must impose its truth upon us so that it can rule. The government needs us to follow it blindly. For this reason, we live in an informational eclipse. When people can only acquire information from the government, they cannot distinguish right from the wrong. So the lie becomes a truth – truth, fundamental to everything else. Thus, leaders control with lies and ordinary people have no notion of what is true and follow the government blindly, trusting it.
> 12. Those who control the Net, control the information.
These seem as relevant today as they were yesterday. And it's quite likely they will still be relevant tomorrow; human nature is slow to change.
Is that really as relevant today as it was yesterday? It seems to me now far more complex and entangled than the monolithic "resist the government system" set out:
In the US, rather than the government controlling the truth, a certain clique of fringe peddlers of a distorted narrative - the likes of Breitbart and Infowars, have done so well as to attempt a hostile takeover of government, and so far are succeeding. Is the name "Infowars" not a self-conscious echo of the sentiment that you quote above? But the content is poisoned fruit.
In the UK, the Murdoch press drives government policy, not vice versa. And has for a long time.
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