this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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Cyberpunk

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"High tech, low life."

"The street finds its own uses for things."

We all know the quotes and the books. But cyberpunk is more than a neon-soaked, cybernetic aesthetic, or a gritty dystopian science fiction genre. It is a subculture composed of two fundamental ideas: PUNK, and CYBER.

The PUNK: antiauthoritarian, anticapitalist, radical freedom of expression, rejection of tradition, a DIY ethic.

The CYBER: all that, but high-fuckin'-tech, ya feel? From DIYing body mods to using bleeding edge software to subvert corporate interests. It's punk for the 22nd century.

This is a community dedicated to discussing anything cyberpunk, be it books, movies, or other art that falls into the genre, or real life tech, projects, stories, ideas or anything else that adheres to these ideals. It's a place for 'punks from all over the federated Net to hang out and swap stories and meaningful content (not just pictures of city nightscapes).

Welcome in, choom.

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Lawrence Person positions postcyberpunk as the natural and perhaps even rightful successor to cyberpunk, the thing that not only is replacing it, but deserves to replace it and should be celebrated in doing so, primarily because it is more mature in some sense — more calm and staid and optimistic, less alienated and angry and nihilistic:

Postcyberpunk uses the same immersive world-building technique, but features different characters, settings, and, most importantly, makes fundamentally different assumptions about the future. Far from being alienated loners, postcyberpunk characters are frequently integral members of society (i.e., they have jobs). They live in futures that are not necessarily dystopic (indeed, they are often suffused with an optimism that ranges from cautious to exuberant), but their everyday lives are still impacted by rapid technological change and an omnipresent computerized infrastructure.

Postcyberpunk characters frequently have families, and sometimes even children... They're anchored in their society rather than adrift in it. They have careers, friends, obligations, responsibilities, and all the trappings of an "ordinary" life. Or, to put it another way, their social landscape is detailed as detailed and nuanced as the technological one.

Cyberpunk characters frequently seek to topple or exploit corrupt social orders. Postcyberpunk characters tend to seek ways to live in, or even strengthen, an existing social order, or help construct a better one. In cyberpunk, technology facilitates alienation from society. In postcyberpunk, technology is society.

Cyberpunk tended to be cold, detached and alienated. Postcyberpunk tends to be warm, involved, and connected.

The problem is that, looking around at the world we live in today, I don't think that postcyberpunk is actually more relevant than cyberpunk to the sociopolitical and technological landscapes we're facing. Maybe, to give Lawrence his due, this wasn't true in 1999 when he wrote this essay — maybe there was more cause for optimism — but whether that was true or not there's certainly no cause for optimism now.

For instance, millenials (and soon generation Z as well) have found themselves in a position where it is nearly impossible to get a steady career job, have kids, own a home, and become a part of the middle class like Lawrence talks about. Economic forces beyond our control have made that dream impossible for most of us, and we are doomed to forever remain to some degree on the outside of "the system" compared to the postcyberpunk protagonists that Laurence lauds as more realistic and mature. Likewise, the social isolation and atomization of our times, our lack of community and friends and real social fabric, has been extensively documented in study after study, affecting even the older generations.

Meanwhile, corporations have only extended their control over every aspect of our lives. Nearly everything we do and have is now partially owned and controlled by corporate overlords, to a degree those of the 80s and 90s could only have dreamed of, from subscription services to allow you to use your car's full capabilities to EULAs and data collection. Not to mention how those same corporations have, with vast reptilian intelligence and depthless patience, bent our entire political and economic system to their monomaniacal will.

Postcyberpunk's view of technology and social reform seem far less in tune with reality as we've experienced it in the last twenty years than cyberpunk's as well. Postcyberpunk seems like a return to the belief that the inevitable march of technological progress will eventually bring us to a point where society has been changed — or at least can be changed — substantially for the better from within the system, by reform and liberal notions of progress. I would argue that cyberpunk's view of technology as a fundamentally amoral, neutral force which can just as easily be put to oppressive uses as liberatory ones and which, therefore, will only serve to accentuate and hyperaccelerate whatever hierarchies and systems already exist is a far more realistic one.

Even if, for example, we eventually create the technology to enter a truly post-scarcity fully automated luxury communist world, if the systems and hierarchies that are in place when that happens are capitalist ones, then it is capitalists that will own such technological means, capitalists that will possess the intellectual property that allows you to create them, and capitalists that will own the materials, and so they will view it as just a means of reducing their production costs to nothing, while keeping their prices the same. Nothing will change radically but an increase in the centralization of power. It will take some radical leaking the intellectual property, and then a huge movement of people making such production machines and refusing to stop — even in the face of the police officer's baton — to break capitalism's hold. And what does this sound like?

Cyberpunk characters frequently seek to topple or exploit corrupt social orders.

We cannot dismantle the master's house with the master's tools.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. Cyberpunk as a genre is fundamentally capable of being more radical, and sees the nature of our now more clearly, than postcyberpunk can. Postcyberpunk is a reformist, humanist, optimistic genre that is fundamentally a return to the Asimov philosophy of science fiction with the tools, but not the insight, of cyberpunk. That's not to say that all cyberpunk is so — only that cyberpunk has more of a capacity to be, that good cyberpunk is. There's always the derivative fluff.

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[–] lezgineer@dataterm.digital 3 points 1 year ago

Cyberpunk was very much a product of the 1980s. The societal fears in the US revolved around rising crime rates, unchecked capitalism, Japan’s rise in influence, etc.

I mean, replace Japan with China/Russia and this very much applies to the 2020s.