What happened to cyberpunk? | Hacker News Reader

What happened to cyberpunk?

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14 pointsdtm13 comments

Speculative science fiction is not so much a window into the future, but rather a reflection of the present in which it was written. By drawing on current trends, authors can extrapolate a future. The cyberpunk aesthetic arose around the same time as the personal computer, early Internet, 80's corporate greed, continuing urban sprawl, the Japanese economic bubble leading to property purchases all over the world, etc. -- inspiration for many themes that appear in cyberpunk works. Many of these things have cased to be novel (in the same way) or exist at all. For instance, computers and connectivity is ubiquitous now, massive conglomerate corporations haven't totally taken over for governments (depending on who you ask, at least), China has somewhat replaced Japan, and the world has moved on. Unless they were just writing genre fiction, authors like Gibson would not keep cyberpunk going because the world today is very different from the one that spawned it.

Another thought is to compare it to the other famous "-punk" style, steampunk. Steampunk benefits from the fact that all the technological foundation (steam, mechanical, analog) it is based on exists. I'd argue that the genre can thrive because a well-defined foundation exists from which to create. With cyberpunk, some of the foundations exist (computer hacking and espionage), but many are still left as future speculation (synthetic organs, cybernetic implants). It becomes harder to have a consistent foundation when there are still moving targets. I guess we can still have trench coats and mirror shades ;)

I really enjoy the cyberpunk aesthetic, and I wish it had more of a footprint in current music/film/TV. It may be though that true cyberpunk is really a product of the 80's. The spirit of what drove it, technology-driven dystopia, continues to this day.

I agree; I think the main thing happened is that a good chunk of the cyberpunk world arrived, and we found out that it sounds way more interesting on paper than it ends up being in the real world.

Chinese kids sell their organs to buy iPads -- sad, but predictable, not some novel dystopian problem.

The CEO of IBM holds a meeting in a virtual world via avatar -- sure, a shitty pixelated avatar in a ho-hum world kind of like the one my Sony PlayStation 3 boots into

Hunter-killer robot drones swooping out of the sky to kill citizens (and nearby children) with no regard for law or constitutional rights -- ugh, again? Change the channel.

It's not all here of course; if Chinese black ice could kill me through my computing terminal, that would still be pretty interesting. But by now we're all familiar enough with the matrix to know that it can't really kill me, except maybe through a heart attack induced by annoying popup Flash ads for erectile dysfunction pills. Boring.

Chinese kids selling their organs to buy iPads is straight out of a cyberpunk novel, as you say many things we read about 10-20 years ago are already here, but it's human nature to find the present the most boring place to be.

But as the article duly notes, -punk is about counterculture, and counterculture is timeless. And when you look at how many people still code in neon green on black background, or read those books, there still seems to be a need for these topics. The conversation is not over yet.

I'm a fan of the daydreaming induced by cyberpunk novels, although I don't understand why, since it's something we experience daily already anyway (and I can take or leave the leather coats, shades, matrix rain, and all other visual hallmarks of cyberpunk). But I think a modern cyberpunk work of fiction can be done, and I hope we will see it done someday.

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