The Cyberpunk Sensibility (2016)
ribbonfarm.com
ribbonfarm.com
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.
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.
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.
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on the human face, forever."
- George Orwell
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.
Cause it's roughly how this worked in the real life (20 years after ban of leaded petrol in each country violent crimes fall dramatically).
If you haven't yet, check out The Orville. It's the spiritual successor to Roddenberry's vision of Star Trek.
It got badly marketed as a comedy in space akin to Galaxy Quest, but that was mostly bad marketing. The first episode or two were high on the comedy (and I've heard a theory that they did it to trick Fox into picking up the series), but it rapidly toned down, to where it's more like Star Trek with realistic people instead of a utopian version of humanity without any vices.
For a one-episode introduction, if the initial comedy turns you off, I suggest episode 3, About a Girl.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Government being the only reason ownership is possible without constantly fighting off invaders. Thank you laws.
Assertion not necessarily fact.
There are other models one can imagine which would refute this claim.
The main distinction I would make is that, in practice, "governments" tend to arrogate to themselves the "authority" to do things that no individual could do themselves. And in my world-view, if an individual can't rightfully do something, then neither can a group of individuals, no matter how large.
All of this is ultimately just me paraphrasing Bastiat, so for anyone who isn't already familiar with his works, and who finds anything interesting in this line of thinking, I suggest reading The Law[1].
This is interesting idea. Do you have any examples of this incorrectly applied in modern times?
At it's core the law takes away the permission to apply violence from your average person and puts it in the hands of supposedly fair/blind judges.
From Bastiat: "It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all."
So ultimately were making the same point I think about protection of property?
You feel like the govt has crossed a boundary somewhere though and I'm curious where.
Not sure about "rightfully" but groups of people are definitely treated more leniently as to what they can do. Individual when he kills more than 20 people usually doesn't get away with just a fine like GM did.
It's very useful to have as few governments as possible. Especially if range of their weapons overlap. It's also useful to have sharp difference between governments and non-governments. Both of those usefult things reduce likelihood of actually using biggest guns and that use severely harms everybody's business.
I.e. what's your alternative?
I'd be willing to accept protections against monopolies, "free" education in the form of vouchers, public works if we got rid of most everything else.
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.
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.
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. It's based on Ethereum based and based on the old Drugwars classic.
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".
- hostile AI
- Corporations and Government surveilance and going dark
- DNA / implant chips / biometric border controls
- Borders protected by armed drones / robots
- Underground Identities markets
AIs are either of the "weak" kind, like a robot guard being able to recognize and attack intruders but not much more, or the indistinguishable-from-human kind of Blade Runner replicants. The intelligent but definitely not human kind like HAL from 2001. The kind I tend to think of when talking about AI-based stories don't seem to be that common in the cyberpunk genre.
We do see a lot of things like mind uploading, brain augmentation, people losing their humanity to technology, etc... but it is always centered on the human mind.
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...
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.
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).
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).
It had an interesting cultural remnant so embedded that nobody notices it - desensitization to skeletons. Nobody reacts to skeletons in an elementary school classroom or doctors office in the west.
Yet Chinese variants of video games widely censor their apperances despite other brutality. One in a moba notably changes a spell icons from skeletons to a tortured bald man - more graphic to us but not them. China does have their own hangups but it highlights how weird it is fundamentally that we are okay with dead bodies reduced to their very core and reassembled. Keep preserved other internal organs around small children and people would ask what is wrong with you. The unacceptable ethics in sourcing were the main driver for the switch to plastic if I recall correctly. Cheaper now but they started when the fine details were more expensive and at risk of being less accurate.
I used the first to refer to general abstract theories (marxism etc) and the second to refer to more concrete ways of viewing the world that people share / adopt etc.
In the 60s for example there were several abstract theories about this and that, but also a shared viewpoint about the need of change, revolution, etc
As you say, for the renaissance, the change in viewpoints were caused by the conditions of the time. The power of social change ultimately lies in big changes in the physical world, not in civilised humans and their thinking and arguing.
As I mentioned, that last idea seems to me to be just a covert way to pretend we have any control, when we are actually rather effete and incapable of shaping the world into what we'd like.
You mentioned the western revolutionary sentiment of the sixties in another answer. If you believe Strauss and Howe (http://www.fourthturning.com/), they didn't have a choice. That generation believed whatever humans believe when they are put into the conditions they were in, repeating a pattern with little self-consciousness.
edit: the power of change -> the power of social change
I grew up in a poverty-heavy community, where people often felt hopeless, and believed that everything was aligned against them (a pessimistic viewpoint). I then studied Philosophy and learned to try and be as "correct" as possible, and thought it was always the best method to try and be correct about things (a realistic viewpoint). After a while, however, I realized that some of the most successful and happy people I knew, and (I believe) in the world, are incredibly naive, and that this naivety and optimistic viewpoint played a large part in their success.
Even if determinism/fatalism are true concepts and/or nothing matters in the end, you'll have the best life if you disregard those concepts and assume that anything is possible, and everything matters, and it's all up to you. Positive viewpoints, even if incorrect, can be empowering and create this positive feedback loop.
https://www.amazon.com/New-Power-Works-Hyperconnected-World/...
Looking forward to reading both in the near future.
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.
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 :) )
Not sure if I'm wording this right... Basically, cyberpunk needs to show those gritty aspects to be cyberpunk, but the main characters don't necessarily need to be those punks. For instance, a game where you play as an AI that defects from an evil corporation, or perhaps play as a bartender[0] who simply listens to her clients' crazy stories.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/447530/VA11_HallA_Cyberpu...
(I'm also a huge fan of cyberpunk, so no worries :P )
And now that I think of it you're probably right. To be cyberpunk a piece of work needs those punk elements, but they don't need to be the protagonists.
You eventually start to figure out what exactly happened in a huge event that plays out, thanks to the secrets from your clientele.
But Black Mirror take is wider, more profound, escaping the known cyberpunk into new, unchartered dimentions. It is cyberpunk and more.
I don't know how I could have missed that.
Thanks for the heads-up!