Cyberpunk in the Nineties (1998)
streettech.com
streettech.com
The 90's are 30 years ago(??). I've often wondered if the people taking piracetam or whatever it was back then have had any long term effects, good or bad. It felt like dialing up your IQ and awareness was possible. You just had to figure out the right combination of substances to take.
I just spent 20 minutes looking over google results for nootropics and seems like little has changed.
Edit: Thought archive.org might have this magazine and, of course, they do!
It's a lot harder to read than I remember and the ads are better than I remember. There's also more nudity than I recall... so maybe don't open this at work.
We might not have the great hacker collectives and hackerspaces of the past, but the culture is still out there. L0pht might be gone from Boston, sure. But these kids give me a ton of inspiration. [0]
Don't mean to 'go off', but life has no meaning beyond that which you give it. If you 'fictionalize' your existence in the context of cyberpunk, and great science fiction books, and compelling video games, you become a character in those stories. Life is richer for it.
https://www.wired.com/story/mtba-charliecard-hack-defcon-202... [0]
There was generally a ton of tech promise and a vibe of excitement, libertarian nonjudgmental sexuality that didn't demand both labeling AND acceptance as it seems to now (as can be seen throughout that magazine)... all of this at the cusp of the explosion of the Internet...
You can’t watch “Are We the Baddies?” as a war story. It introduced such elements simply to establish who’s getting made fun of. They remain in character but that’s it, the war story plot doesn’t progress the skit just keeps hammering the parody. Some parody has a more complete story but “Scary Movie” progresses the underlying plot to make fun of different elements of the movies it’s making fun of.
Harry Potter on the other hand calls out many of the tropes it’s using. House of the lions vs house of the snakes, guess who’s supposed to be the hero and who the villain. Except the characters once introduced are telling an actual story.
Snow Crash is between those extremes but focuses too much on the underlying story and its characters to be an actual parody. Over the top elements exist in the world, but they are played straight more Gulliver's Travels than Spaceballs.
I feel like snow crash it's kinda along those lines.
I think where NGE really shines is the art, design, animation, which are all stunning. I have much respect for NGE, but specifically as a deconstruction of the mecha genre I've never been impressed.
That punchline...
And in the real world there's the Earth model that heavily influenced Google Earth, and the librarian's "intelligence without consciousness" conversational style is looking pretty damn prescient right now.
Edited to be more polite - my intention was not to be rude or uncivil.
edit: True Names surely should have been added in my brief list.
It has all the vibe of cyberpunk except for the magick, but if you mentally replace magick with "quantum futuristic alien tech masked as godly one" it still fits with the lore.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sttm8Q9rOdQ
There are currently 3 parts to the series, and it is an interesting overview of the genre.
[0]you had to buy a descrambler to watch it [1]she would never explicitly say it was cracked, because of course everything was cracked [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjDHhdx_tGY
Resident Evil, the Umbrella Corporation.
Or, further back, Bubblegum Crisis, Genom Corporation.
Most of those cyborg stories (Edgerunners, the newer Deus Ex's games, Ghost In The Shell) are more like... Hmm, perhaps Phantom of the Opera.
That includes Motoko Kusanagi--even when it's been hinted she has relied on artificial bodies since childhood, that's still a very human form of alienation.
My point was that if you want Cyberpunk’s “Frankenstein”, it’s probably not to be found in works that look too much like Frankenstein on the surface—those’ll just be borrowing tropes or tending toward parody, and won’t be Frankenstein-like in ways that matter.
Alien/s, now that's SciFi about motherhood.
I guess if I was going to approach "cyberpunk Frankenstein" I'd end up somewhere adjacent to Michael Marshall Smith's Spares ("human clones, the ultimate health insurance").
Given the author’s bio and stuff like her mom dying from giving birth to her, yeah, I’d say it’s there. A very particular point of view and concern with it, not exactly “ain’t pregnancy and motherhood beautiful?”, yes, but it’s there. “Death of the author”, sure, but it’s there in the book even if you don’t know Shelley’s bio.
I’ll have to read it with gothic literature in mind, next time.
But as I recall, we also sought goth in other places and characters. The whole metaverse with AI running amok, and the Corto/Armitage character being almost a reverse Frankenstein's monster, for example.
And worse yet, as promised in Popular Science / Mechanics; "A flying car in every garage by the year 2000!"
The whole concept of a counterculture is gone. The closest thing we have to a counterculture in the US today is the MAGA/militia/Q-Anon movement.
You're probably just getting old
There are structural and cultural reasons that make it difficult to have one now (the internet's total immediacy and transparency of everything, post-modernism which means nothing is ever really new now, just recombinations).
I agree that now counterculture sits with the deplorables. The old style stuff has been fully adopted by the mainstream.
China now has a "lying flat" counterculture, where young people move to cheap third-tier cities where they can escape the rat race. The government is not happy about this.[1] (The term refers not to people lying down, but to crops flat in fields and not harvestable.)
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-lying-flat-movement-s...
Generally there may be some confusion of categories. There is a difference between alternative, sub and counter cultures. There are lots of sub cultures still around, and lots of groups doing their own alternative thing. I think previous counter cultures had sub cultural manifestations. Punk is a classic example with the "punk ethic". The sub culture got recuperated and commodified, and the ethic mostly but not completely died.
I'd say cyberpunk lives on in the critical take of hackers towards AI and technological capitalism for example but even if its not a subculture now and even if there's no real counter culture it still influences many counter cultural ideas. The spirit or ideas of cyberpunk hasn't been fully adopted by mainstream at the same time the aesthetic subculture was.
By that yardstick, I'd say the alt-right or whatever you want to call it is a reactionary counterculture rather than a progressive counterculture, largely as a result of progressive countercultural values from the 1950s-90s having been incorporated into mainstram culture.
A few months ago I asked ChatGPT to use the principal of the Hegelian dialectic to tell me what the synthesis arising from the current progressive culture and the alternative reactionary one would be. Naturally it was useless.
[EDIT: I just reframed the question for it today and the answer was actually reasonable, if a little uninspired, obvs]
So for communities to form there has to be other barriers. The foundational ideas being distasteful batshit is one option, but it's probably not the only one.
You might be surrounded by interesting countercultures and not even know about it: whatever properties save them from instant commoditization also keep you out.
Impenetrable jargon. Like that VM/protocol/cloud/blockchain mashup that gets mentioned occasionally. Um... Urbit. That's it.
Ah. Crypto.
Relevant new book on crypto and influencers: "Easy Money", by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman.
But there's always subversive, alternative sub cultures out there. A world of 8 billion, where the Internet has been a thing for over 30 years, with literal hundreds of giant cities. And you think "there's no more counter culture because I ain't seeing any"? Really?
And they didn't hit culturally like mere recombinations.
Blues were an "folk" art form from blacks, expressiving everyday problems, heartbreaks, poverty etc, in a speficic expressive and cultural context.
Rock even from its early days operated in a very different context (teen fun and rebellion initially), and developed into very different aesthetic and social spheres, from student protests and civil rights to anti-war and mind-expansion.
Except from understanding that it had blues as part of its musical (and only musical) heritage, it wasn't perceived as a mere recombination of blues, and it didn't serve the same social role as blues did.
>But there's always subversive, alternative sub cultures out there. A world of 8 billion, where the Internet has been a thing for over 30 years, with literal hundreds of giant cities.
The recentness doesn't really change much about how fast something can spread. For example almost everybody of age in those 8 billions has a mobile phone now (even in the poorest African countries) and yet phones have really been a thing for 25 years.
If your point is "we might not see subversive, alternative sub cultures out there" but surely there must be some in some of those "literal hundreds of giant cities" all over the world, I think it makes my point. Countercultures were major impactful movements in the western world for decades. And your answer basically amounts to "just because you can't see them doesn't mean there's not some still going on in Cairo or Okinawa".
It's like saying "shoe cobbling isn't dead, there's some such shops in New York" or "Addis Ababa has quite a few".
In any case, it wasn't the crucial difference between the social function (and the aesthetic development) of blues and rock.
There's a full generation of adults who grew up taking the Internet for granted is my point. There are many orders of magnitude of information flowing there than you can even imagine. Yet you claim to _know_ counter culture isn't a thing anymore because you don't see any mainstream cultural narratives describing any aspects of it. Do you see the problem in this logic?
"Rock" is a post hoc narrative packaging something that came organically from counter cultural movements. Same goes for "blues" or "hip hop". These labels and the packaging of counter cultural (i.e. subversive of the values of the establishment) manifestations for mainstream consumption, are where counter culture goes to die. That's why I said they're just a re-packaging of something that came before and appeared organically.
Once it has a widely known name and a section in the nearest media outlet, it's by definition part of the mainstream.
So if you look around and you can't see any grand narratives about new cultural artifacts from "the youths/the minorities", how impactful they are and where you can buy an album, and conclude there's no more counter culture. I guess you're just telling on yourself at this point.
In this logic, yes, meaning your argument :)
Counter-culture doesn't mean obscure and indiscoverable. So "there's so much internet, there's bound to be some counter-culture in there you've missed" is not an answer.
Even if it was, it would be irrelevant. What made counter-culture relevant (as opposed to "what a very small bunch a people do for their own amusement"), was the interplay at the edges of established culture, and the influence it exerted over it. Until the next one came, and so on.
So, "once it has a widely known name and a section in the nearest media outlet, it's by definition part of the mainstream" is precisely what's not been seen happening (with insignificant exceptions).
In any case, it's not like this hasn't been covered a lot. See Mark Fisher's writings for an example.
It's just that the internet has allowed them to form communities.
There's not really a mainstream culture now. Even the biggest consent-manufactories like the 'mainstream media' are actually a minority in an overall fragmented and dissenting pseudoculture that's becoming more like an ecosystem than an expanding monoculture. What would have been 'the dominant culture' in the civil rights era, the domain of the Cronkites of that era, is now just another minority, perhaps the largest single minority but still distrusted or ignored by the majority.
What the counterculture movement of the 70s and 80s presented, at least externally through hair, clothes, tattoos, piercing, etc is now post mainstream.
It’s like this huge portion of society “rebelling” against a Nixon that no longer exists, or is a much smaller portion of the population than it was when it was an oppressive majority.
I remember in middle school I was paddled by the headmaster because my hair was too long. It touched my shirt collar in the back.
[0] premiered in 2012, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Comes_Honey_Boo_Boo
"{x} never died, it just became {y}"
Almost edited s/didn't die/never died/
Look around the net and you'll see it now and then.
https://jalopnik.com/the-porsche-928-never-died-it-just-beca...
Take absurdism, or the deconstruction of gender for example. Or people using mastodon just to show the 12-ish friends that they repaired a their dirt cheap bike. I think also you could also argue that Meta-Irony is some form of counterculture.
Just think things that are not commodified yet.
Aside from identity, is there no counterculture, or is everything so interconnected and observable via Internet and social media that nothing is in a "dark corner" anymore? I can see that argument.
Maybe twenty years ago, it’s hit a significant low single digits and had a chunk of prime shelf space to display mass produced merchandise at Target.
I think the change is that things are marketed as if they are cool and novel and rate, because that sells more. But it’s obviously not rare and counterculture if Walmart is ordering a million “Yas queen” t-shirts and selling them in 25k population cities.
Controversial doesn’t mean counter-culture. There’s just different preferences in the mainstream.
Some people liked Michael Jackson, some liked Garth Brooks. Neither were counter-culture. They were both very mainstream.
So, in a nutshell, counter-culture can't exist because of fast-fashion?
I believe we should separate the ability for commercial brands to provide products to increasingly small market segments, and acceptance of sub-cultures that these products are marketed to.
In 2023, somebody dressing like a punk or a prep means nothing, they both buy their clothes from the same stores and probably have the same mainstream ideas and values. Their preference for clothing style is no more meaningful than somebody's preference for vanilla, chocolate or strawberry icecream. These kind of preferences don't indicate any kind of counter-culture.
Furthermore, niche subcultures aren't counter-cultures. Subcultures exist within some greater cultural context, they don't stand apart from and oppose that greater 'mainstream' culture. To be counter-culture, truly, you need to transgress against the mainstream culture. Simply having unusual niche tastes doesn't cut it. There is no average man, everybody is unusual when you consider enough factors[0]. Consider the intersection of all of your personal attributes you can think of, physical, emotional, historical, intellectual.. how many people exist in that set? Probably just you. It is this way with everybody. Possessing a very unique set of attributes isn't counter-cultural, it's the norm. Everybody exists in subcultures, even the counter-culturals have subcultures. Existing in a subculture is not what it means to be counter-cultural.
[0] In the 1950s, USAF researchers measured the physical attributes of their pilots, found the averages of those measurements, then found that not a single pilot was average across the board. Utterly average individuals don't exist.
Their messaging is grassroots - stickering, small-scale protests bringing together a network of like-minded women. They exist on the fringes of the internet, corralled off into their own online spaces after being forcibly removed from the mainstream.
Must the movement be struggling to be considered? If it is just "what the majority political parties agree is unpalatable" then I guess we could say actual socialism or anti capitalism is there.
MAGA is way too mainstream to be a counter culture. QAnon is more like a belief in certain conspiracies than an ethos you live by, no?
wfh
automating away exploitative labor
intentionally not having kids/imploding nuclear family as the norm
<50% in US are convinced god exists
local AI/ML threatening copyright rent seekers
steam/proton
online retail impact on brick and mortar
Spearheaded because of huge pandemic "extreme condition" measures, with more to come.
>automating away exploitative labor
And relegating of pesky ex-workers to slums Soylent Green / Ellysium style.
>intentionally not having kids/imploding nuclear family as the norm
Massive demographic collapse, with societies full of older selfish adults, Children of Men style.
><50% in US are convinced god exists
But 99% still worships money and the rat race as god.
>local AI/ML threatening copyright rent seekers
And non-local AI killing the livehoods of artists and creatives, for the benefit of AI corporate overlords.
>online retail impact on brick and mortar
Consolidation of consumer market on a handful or corporate behemoths, Robocop style.
You say all those things as if they're good...
(And the fact that "steam/proton" even makes the list as something of similar importance is cherry on top)
Go in semantic circles if you want, these things are displacing old cultural norms; they run counter to established culture
Maybe log off the fucking internet where you spin in circles in vain seeking a perfect solution and tackle those problems you called out? Nah, much easier to be an energy vampire from your armchair
Here’s let’s lean in:
So sad for Hollywood artists who covered for pervs and leches; if it’s about the art they can “slum it” in local theatre; capitalism never owed them glamorous lives as humanity never owed them deflating themselves for a handful of pretty people
Taxes are an option for dealing with corporations but you're keen to propagate mopey whiner on the internet rather than “tax the rich”
steam/proton undermines Windows market share, you know that thing produced by big corporate you so hate
wfh has people talking about QOL more than money and the shitshow that is hustle culture
…you’re crying about your chains, too unimaginative to see the bits and pieces around you that could serve as a lock pick
I never meant to imply Heaven on Earth was around the corner. Was responding to the idea there’s no counter movement to contemporary cultural norms
Social norms are not immutable physics https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37258231
Things getting worse is not refuted by things never having been perfect. There are periods of time when things were better and periods of time (including extended for centuries periods of time) that things were crap. Even more pronounced and evident regionally. We, in many countries, are getting on a crap slope.
>Maybe log off the fucking internet where you spin in circles in vain seeking a perfect solution and tackle those problems you called out? Nah, much easier to be an energy vampire from your armchair
Who said I don't "tackle those problems I called out" outside the internet? And who said I'm optimistic about the potential of my interventions, or the preventability of changing the outcomes in general?
Maybe not assume and make it personal with ad hominems?
The rest of the points I find either wrong or irrelevant. I'll give an example instead of bothering to answer to each:
"So sad for Hollywood artists who covered for pervs and leches; if it’s about the art they can “slum it” in local theatre; capitalism never owed them glamorous lives as humanity never owed them deflating themselves for a handful of pretty people"
The point wasn't about Hollywood actors or screenwriters, as if they're the only creatives (or even the ones more) threatened by AI. It was more about the rest of the already squeezed fields, illustrators, graphic designers, musicians, and so on.
But even staying at the "hollywood artists" here (which I didn't even have in mind in my argument), the counter-argument that AI taking their livelihood is fine because they "covered for pervs and leeches" is non seguitur BS.
First, if you work at a company and your boss or some higher executives are scumbags, do you also "cover for pervs and leeches"? Or you just work there, and words like "cover" should be constrained to those actually covering misdeeds?
And would the AI discriminate and only reduce the jobs of those that e.g. covered for Weinstein, and not those who called him out? Or will it only replace highly paid actors, and not eg. lowly VFX artists and other such jobs? This is more bile against "those rich Hollywood actors deserve what's coming at them" than an argument about the impact of AI on the film industry.
>…you’re crying about your chains, too unimaginative to see the bits and pieces around you that could serve as a lock pick
Yeah, let's see how this "AI will liberate us" work our for us. I've seen the same stuff play out when the web arrived and "information wanted to be free".
Counterculture existes in libre gaming, distros, hackers, underground games such as Nethack, IF games from IF archive, niche electronica/rock/metal/blues from Jamendo (Revolution Void, Proleter, Helfervescent, Nanowar (ok, now is half-mainstream, but still...) and now saved back in archive.org thanks to James Scott...
The defining characteristic of 80s-90s cyberpunk is that it's about near-future crime. So it shares an awful lot -- if not absolutely everything -- with noir. The "punk" aspect is that cyberpunk stories are often told from the perspective of the criminal rather than the detective.
The r*dditors who go on and on about "i-it's all about urban dystopia and corporate conspiracies!" are dead wrong, because both elements don't always (-- indeed very rarely --) feature in the foundational literary works of the genre. Take Burning Chrome, for instance: All of the stories are about crime, but the features of the settings are rarely clear.
So much for literary cyberpunk. Cyberpunk in art -- e.g. www.cyberpunk.tech -- is its own thing, and just as old.