“Cyberpunk creeps up on us. Some kind of alchemy transforms its fictions into truths, and draws us towards places we thought unreal.” — @uttunul
Conventionally speaking, cyberpunk is a media genre. It brings to mind William Gibson’s Neuromancer. You fondly remember Blade Runner, and maybe Deus Ex or Ghost in the Shell. The phrase “high tech, low life” floats up from the back of your brain. You picture an exaggerated version of Hong Kong with a heavy dose of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. You’re envisioning the Walled City of Kowloon plus lots of computers. Within tiny apartments, disheveled vigilante hackers stare at their screens, busily infiltrating the databases of megacorps.
Illustration by Grace Witherell
But perhaps you’ve also noticed that cyberpunk plot points are turning up in real life. Robot security guards patrol shopping malls. A near-billionaire startup founder sees virtual reality as salvation for the downtrodden global poor. San Francisco’s Tenderloin district is flush with VC money and homeless drug addicts at the same time. And speaking of those vigilante hackers, they’re here in our reality too, pwning companies of all sizes. Some state-sponsored ones like to meddle in foreign politics. It’s all very exciting! Only plutocrats and nouveau mafiosos can avoid feeling uneasy.
Cyberpunk examines the way computing changes power relationships. Asymmetric information warfare has become the norm, as foretold by our pulpy sci-fi prophets. The technological changes that have been snowballing over the past fifty years now mean that anyone can talk to anyone, anywhere, with their identity hidden or not. Edward Snowden can stroll away from his NSA job with a priceless cache of secret documents that detail the crimes of an empire, then escape across continents in a matter of days, to hole up with a rival regime.
So, why bother with any of this if you don’t intend to commit espionage?
A Suspicious Lens
Elements of our reality correspond to elements of fictional ones, sure. But I’m not saying that we live in a cyberpunk world. Rather, we live in a world that can be productively viewed through a cyberpunk lens. The difference is subtle but important — cyberpunk is the map, not the territory. I look at it as a mental model with which to interpret the near-past and near-future.
“[T]aste governs every free — as opposed to rote — human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion — and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. […] Taste has no system and no proofs. But there is something like a logic of taste: the consistent sensibility which underlies and gives rise to a certain taste.”
Cyberpunk is a type of “taste in ideas” that weds aesthetics with politics. It is not a framework with a specific hypothesis or clearly defined rules. Rather, cyberpunk is an assemblage of loosely related themes, tropes, and aesthetics. Viewing the arc(s) of history through this cyberpunk lens helps highlight certain trends as being worth paying attention to. Noticing the moments of techno-dystopia in our world can jolt people awake, causing them to realize how computing — especially the internet — is impacting their lives on every scale.
The events or ideas that trigger the mental switch-flip are usually exotic, like crime-deterring robots, but the deeper level of using the cyberpunk mental model is looking at mundane things like commerce and subculture formation and seeing how computers and the internet change the dynamics that we used to be used to.
Tech-biz analyst Ben Thompson wrote on his blog, in 2013:
“[I]f there is a single phrase that describes the effect of the Internet, it is the elimination of friction. [¶] With the loss of friction, there is necessarily the loss of everything built on friction, including value, privacy, and livelihoods. […] Count me with those who believe the Internet is on par with the industrial revolution, the full impact of which stretched over centuries. And it wasn’t all good. Like today, the industrial revolution included a period of time that saw many lose their jobs and a massive surge in inequality. It also lifted millions of others out of sustenance farming.”
Our new technologies have fractal effects that can be observed on global levels, societal levels, and individual levels. Consider the environmental effect of high-tech manufacturing; consider conflict minerals going into so many laptops; consider the effect the ubiquity of smartphones has on geopolitical discourse; on national discourse. Consider where the American stock market would be without big tech companies. Consider where you would be.
Asymmetric Seismic Upheaval
Let’s say you’ve been observing the United States election. Whether you want to or not, you probably haven’t been able to escape this topic entirely. And let’s say you’re worried about “white genocide”. Next step: start a pseudonymous Twitter account.
“Neil [Turner]’s profile picture was a pouty mirror selfie of a skinny white kid, wearing what was clearly a Photoshopped ‘Make America Great Again’ hat. The self-proclaimed warrior against #PoliticalCorrectness and #WhiteGenocide claimed to be from Mississippi, maintained a healthy 20-something-thousand followers and had been mentioned in publications like Fortune for his hateful, white supremacist commentary on Twitter. But most notably, he was often the first to reply to tweets from Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton — a historically coveted, high-exposure spot in online social networks and comments sections.”
Spoiler alert: he used a bot to automate responses. This is very cyberpunk. Whoever “Neil Turner” really is, he brilliantly leveraged computing to take advantage of presidential candidates’ publicity. Now instead of being just another Twitter troll, ignored by most, he has thousands and potentially millions of eyes on his thoughts.
Activists in other political conflicts have also used the ubiquity of digital technologies to flip or push back on analog power differentials. Mahmoud Salem, a participant in Egypt’s 2011 Arab Spring uprising, wrote in World Policy Journal:
“Blogs become a means for mass protest. Facebook fuelled further organization, and with the advent of Twitter in 2007, protesters could communicate and document their often-tumultuous journeys in 140-characters or less. In short, by January 2011 there was a well-established network of tools for revolutionaries to employ in their struggle to modernize Egypt.”
America’s #BlackLivesMatter movement has flourished on social media. Their grievances have been substantiated as video after video circulates on various platforms, putting extrajudicial police killings on a loop for an audience of all races. Protest organizing takes place via hashtag and DM. Twitter in particular is a hotspot because of its public nature, but Philando Castile’s girlfriend Lavish Reynolds livestreamed him bleeding out on Facebook.
Of course, large institutions have access to the same tools. A company called Geofeedia harvested data from social media sites to help police pinpoint protesters. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter cut off Geofeedia’s API access, but Geofeedia was not the only tool of its kind. Facebook itself took town the video of Castile’s ordeal, then claimed this action was a “glitch” after being widely chastised.
How many videos has Facebook removed that were then forgotten for lack of public outcry?
Protesters’ advantage is their ability to take over the news cycle, simultaneously in every part of a given country, because the internet means information travels instantaneously. Many of us have smartphones that ding us every time something new develops. “Did you see… ?!”
But the police and other fiat institutions have the same advantage they’ve always had — the ability to lock people up, sometimes justified but often not. What’s new to the law enforcement arsenal is being able to sort and target high-impact targets at scale.
A project by Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology recently released “Perpetual Line Up”, a report on US law enforcement’s massive facial recognition databases, noting that “at least five major police departments — including agencies in Chicago, Dallas, and Los Angeles — either claimed to run real-time face recognition off of street cameras, bought technology that can do so, or expressed a written interest in buying it.”
A less political example is the infamous saga of Silk Road, a libertarian “Dark Web” drug marketplace run by a man who called himself Dread Pirate Roberts. Investigative journalist Joshuah Bearman chronicled Silk Road’s rise and fall for Wired, and it’s a remarkable story.
For years, Ross Ulbricht (DPR’s real name) was able to hide his various whereabouts by using the anonymous web browser Tor (which is ironically mainly funded by the US government) and bitcoin; he could run his platform remotely without ever outing his legal identity. Eventually an IRS agent working with the FBI found the clue that unraveled Ulbricht’s anonymity, by combing through old forum postings, cross-referencing usernames. When he first launched Silk Road and wanted to promote the marketplace, Ulbricht made the mistake of using a handle that could be tied back to him.
Again, see the interplay of power: an individual enables anonymous drug smuggling through the legal mail, and the government uses its manpower to comb through the digital detritus this individual was not savvy enough to hide.
Of course, these kinds of power gradients are not unique to a world with computers. Activists and the police using social media to fight each other is not so different from communist pamphlets and leftist magazines, met with McCarthyism and calculated subversion. (Take a look at the CIA’s ties to the Iowa Writers Workshop, or the FBI’s interference with the Black Panthers.) The story of Ross Ulbricht’s capture has parallels to 1920s and ‘30s gangster-hunts, or efforts to round up New York mob families throughout the twentieth century.
However, the world with computers makes it easier. What computers are really good at is brute-force math and copying things perfectly. They do those things very, very quickly. A few simple capabilities have been built up into myriad programs, and ultimately programmers’ work has transformed our everyday lives.
Tradeoffs of the Cognitive Underbelly
The cyberpunk mental model has a lot of predictive power because it heavily weights the influence of computing, but it can be risky because it’s quite cynical and pessimistic. We expect the worst of people. Cyberpunk is not an outright basilisk, but it can drive the mind toward paranoia. I’ve received some perturbing emails.
Fundamentally, the danger is that mental models are the enemy of complexity. They’re useful as sources of decision-making heuristics, shortcuts that guide you in reacting to new developments. This is just a thing that human brains need because contemplating every single occurrence and choice in depth is mentally taxing.
The internet enables more individual opportunity than ever before — how would my words manage to reach you otherwise? And the internet is more meritocratic than the landscape it took over, because anyone can distribute their own work to a potential audience of millions, but of course age-old power dynamics can’t be erased in one fell swoop. It also enables winner-take-all businesses, like Amazon’s dominance in ecommerce and Facebook’s reign over news media.
These companies obviously aren’t pure monopolies with no competitors at all, but they have massive and ever-increasing mindshare (hence wallet-share as well). Their overwhelming advantage comes from the way the internet has upended distribution — any company can reach any person. Like Ben Thompson said, the friction is gone. Hence a given company’s addressable market is limited only by old-world logistics (e.g. getting people online, hence initiatives like Zuckerberg’s much-maligned Internet.org, or Google’s dilemma in being unable to bypass China’s Great Firewall).
When your audience is the whole world, the flip side is that each consumer can choose whoever they want. They choose the highest quality — Google — or the most convenient — Amazon — or the one with network effects — Facebook. And that leads to One Giant Winner who amasses lots of power. On balance, it’s usually a good thing, but that doesn’t mean there are no negative effects.
Globalization in general has incensed a demographic close to home, as Nils Gilman chronicled for The American Interest:
“For the traditional working classes, gone are not only jobs but also the wellsprings of traditional forms of social esteem, replaced with a blighted landscape of deindustrialization, drug addiction, and elite disdain. To be sure, African-Americans have been experiencing this sort of social devastation forever; what is new is whites experiencing the same, while at the same time being denied the traditional consolation prize of elite-sanctioned ethno-racial supremacism.”
Economic upheaval always has profound cultural effects. Cyberpunk highlights the power of vigilante hackers, sure, but it also points to the power of institutions, whether stultified or moving fast and breaking things. The balance between these two types of entities is what’s fascinating and crucial to watch.
About Sonya Mann
It would be fun to try and trace the genealogy and boundaries of cyberpunk. I’ve read Neurmancer, Sterling’s Schismatrix stuff, a couple of Neal Stephensons and watched Blade Runner.
Interesting thing is that aside from tech stuff that the old sci-fi writers couldn’t have really guessed, there is striking recurrence in themes. So shaper vs. mechanist is a cyberpunk echo of themes you see in Asimov’s spacer and foundation worlds. I think the sensibility lies in large part in inverting the sort of high-modernist ‘trust the institutions’ ethos of classic sci-fi (a la asimov, clarke). In those old books, the heroes are usually examples of what David Brin called ‘bureaucratic heroism’: people who work within fundamentally legitimate systems and institutions. Cyberpunk heroes work through many of the same narrative arcs on earth or in space, but do so as hacker-outsiders.
One person who intrigues me is Vernor Vinge… contemporaneous with the core cyberpunk crowd, yet different because too optimistic.
In terms of motifs in the world that are particularly cyberpunk in the thoughts they evoke: container shipping, banking, things that are boring/backend/infrastructure, over-the-top ideologues…
I’m not sure crime per se is a cyberpunk core element except insofar as it serves to provide commentary on institutions. Jabba the Hutt is not very cyberpunk in the same sense as the lowlives in Diamond Age who cause the bootleg primer to fall into the hands of the prole girl.
The subtlety there I think is that it isn’t crime per se, but crime in the context of non-ideological noise and friction… the girl gets the primer intended for someone else by accident. So I think there IS a big element of friction in cyberpunk… the platforms may be frictionless, but the ecosystems are very high friction where a lot of weird shit can happen due to non-normal accidents. Maybe weird but not contrived accidents are the essence of cyberpunk plots.
You make the essence of cyberpunk sound like crusty heroes of serendipity emerging serendipitously in a world defined by bahramdipity and incumbent zombie zemblanity coasting on the subsidy of history.
There’s work to be done on the history of cyberpunk, & I’m not sure how much of it has been done at all. After all, this is a genre that, in its pure form, lasted a pretty short time: popularity brought shallow copies very quickly, and what most “cyberpunk fans” venerate is an aesthetic simulacrum based on a misunderstanding of early works. (I would love to dismiss them out of hand and call them fakes, but they’re just really into something that happened later with the same name, and so I can’t exactly invalidate them; I can only criticize them for an ignorance of history.)
I see cyberpunk as a kind of conjunction of punk & hardboiled sensibilities conjoined with the kind of cybernetic/systems based political and cultural criticism that filtered out of post-structuralism. From punk, cyberpunk gets a nihilistic perspective on wealth inequality and a DIY ethos; from hardboiled fiction we get the loser-as-hero; post-structuralism adds the idea of society as malfunctioning machine; then, we get a couple of ideas shared between influences: a distrust of institutions, a grey-and-black morality, the idea of a tragedy without specific villains, and a suspicion of the enlightenment grand narrative of progress as unqualified good. What came directly out of Bruce Sterling’s zines in the early 80s (the birthplace of cyberpunk, insomuch as it contained all the core initial cyberpunk authors the same way Black Mask published all the first-wave hardboiled authors & Weird Tales published all of Lovecraft’s circle) contained all these elements, even as John Shirley was really the only proper “punk”.
Great points. I would actually argue that Dougis Copland (Microserfs) is cyberpunk.
Thank you for posting this, I enjoyed it!
Really good primer on cyberpunk, which I’ve never really felt I had a good handle on. Very slippery stuff, as it seems to be defined inductively from reverse engineering influential works, rather than deductively creating a genre that books then fit into.
I wonder how Ursula K. Guin fits into this, as her works address power gradients pretty directly yet don’t strike me as cyberpunk at all.
She’d be half a generation earlier in soft sci-go with PKD no? More balancing out physics with social than doing values/ideology commentary.
Btw there was a good Netflix series on sci-fi
UKG ain’t cyberpunk at all. Cyberpunk relies on anti-heroes. Tyranny isn’t replaced by freedom, it’s replaced by more effective tyranny 2.0.
Cyberpunk is an examination of social DNA with the marketing brochure ripped away.
Doh, “anti-heroes”… I knew there was a simple but big thing I was missing. Of course they’re all anti-heroes…
This blogger has a great acronym for it:
Culture –
AND
Lower-
OR
Middle-
Class
Opportunistic
Rebel
https://gaikokumaniakku.wordpress.com/the-essence-of-cyberpunk-in-one-image/gibsonian-cyberpunk-is-a-special-case-of-calomcor-fiction/
I think that exp is the shiz but, the tools of the hero can’t just be of the “lower” or “middle” class. The effectiveness of the tools require a unacknowledged or forgotten dependency of the “upper” classes with regard to those same tools. That dependency allows for the subversion of the “upper” class system. The “man” can never use his own current/future tech for subversion because because he ends up subverting himself in the process, while ancient tech, has no influence on the “man”. There must be a mutual dependency across all classes in order for the “tool” to be used effectively.
All my video-game-playing friends read your exolymph.news site, Sonya! Wait ’til they hear that you noticed me!
I’ve got that yandere “senpai noticed me” face right now…
…my face pretty much looks exactly like this:
http://i.imgur.com/Z7dfGIx.jpg?fb
Immediately after leaving this comment, found the most cyberpunk tweetstorm of all time, a guy discovering a secret typewriter museum in rural Spain. Feels like many alternative world lines represented: https://twitter.com/mwichary/status/791709895083102209
… and? You only wrote half the article…
What do you feel was left out? I’m going to be addressing this topic again and I’m open to suggestions / directions.
I can’t say what’s missing but it only felt like half an article to me as well. Maybe its because of that fact that at the end of the article my scroll bar was only halfway down the window. I truly feel there is something missing though, something untouched, something … unless … damn you scrollbar.
Interesting observations about how recent imagination is starting to become real at a startling pace. Despite it’s many benefits, social media also resonates with dystopian visions of a complete loss of privacy. Interactive voice systems are becoming eerily accurate in understanding unstructured speech.
Still, reading the article I had some questions. I’d like to know the essential elements of Cyberpunk. Yes it’s a media genre, but doesn’t that mean almost by definition that it follow a loose formula? If it’s a model of reality, what does that model look like? If we polish the lens a bit more, it will be easier to use Cyberpunk as a way to frame potential futures.
This great Bruce Sterling rant Cyberpunk: Past and Future a reader forwarded me I think gets at some of the most interesting nuances.
Venkatesh Rao, the feather for “cyberpunk ur-text” belongs to John Brunner’s 1975 “The Shockwave Rider,” and not to William Gibson’s “Neuromancer” (1984) nor Bruce Sterling’s “Schismatrix” (1985, and not cyberpunk).
True dat, peepz never mention “The Shockwave Rider”….always Gibson, never Brunner.
That’s because nobody ever made movies out of Brunner’s stuff.
And, to be fair, it wasn’t very visual. Neuromancer had cybernetic eyes, plugging your brain into computers, killer drone helicopters, women with implanted sunglasses and switchblade fingers. Shockwave Rider had…a tv that you talk to? Hotel beds with complimentary dildoes?
I’d also cite Brunner’s “Stand On Zanzibar” as part of the originating cyberpunk canon.
He describes a nightmare future dystopia of…splashy media graphics, scantily-clad women, genetic engineering and training via operant conditioning. First-world nations in a state of perpetual conflict, fought mostly through interference in developing third-world countries, their oen societies disintegrating from within as fetish-saboteurs wreck things for the lulz.
And I’m all “sounds like Tuesday…”
“For the traditional working classes, gone are not only jobs but also the wellsprings of traditional forms of social esteem, replaced with a blighted landscape of deindustrialization, drug addiction, and elite disdain. To be sure, African-Americans have been experiencing this sort of social devastation forever; what is new is whites experiencing the same, while at the same time being denied the traditional consolation prize of elite-sanctioned ethno-racial supremacism.”
Ah ha, but this is not true. There is a massive erasure of African American history here. The thriving black business districts and communities in major cities were hollowed out aggressively by big box stores and other capitalist developments in the second half of the twentieth century, as well as government actions that would at first blush seem to help, like the original Civil Rights Act. Beware of projecting current situations onto the past!
http://czasomierze.com.pl/wynajem-aut-dostawczych.htm
Shopping for a new or used auto can be a hard procedure should you not know what you really are doing. By educating yourself about car buying before you go to the car dealership, you possibly can make stuff simpler on your own. The following advice can help the next buying vacation become more pleasurable.
Usually provide a auto technician coupled when buying a brand new motor vehicle. Auto merchants are notorious for selling lemons and you do not wish to be their next victim. Provided you can not obtain a mechanic to check out cars along, a minimum of ensure that you have him evaluate your closing selection before you purchase it.
Know your limits. Before you begin store shopping for your auto or van, choose how much you can manage to spend, and stick to it. Don’t overlook to incorporate desire for your computations. You can expect to spend around twenty percent as a payment in advance at the same time, so be well prepared.
Prior to going to a dealership, know what type of vehicle you want. Study each one of you choices ahead of purchasing so that you can figure out what works best for your financial budget and household demands. Shop around to find out how much you ought to be paying for the prospective automobile.
Prior to signing any agreement make time to go through every line, for example the fine print. When there is anything outlined that you simply do not understand, do not indicator till you purchase an solution which you comprehend. Unsavory salesmen are able to use a binding agreement to insert several costs that have been not mentioned.
If you keep the previous guidance under consideration next time which you go purchasing a automobile, you will be more prone to get a good offer. Buying a auto does not have to be a headache. Use the tips from this post and you could have the car you want at the very good selling price.
RE:The Cyberpunk Sensibility Валок Unia Слюдянка