
The Cyberpunk Sensibility (2016) - zabana
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/10/27/the-cyberpunk-sensibility/
======
keypusher
The author seems to have wanted to write an article about cyberpunk, but
didn't have anything to say. There was no premise or conclusion, simply a few
rambling thoughts about the current state of technology and media.

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.

~~~
chme
Or both the government and big corporations hammering down on the humans...

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.

~~~
krapp
The original Star Trek also had a megacorp keeping workers pacified with
neurotoxins (The Cloud Minders) sex slavery with advanced pharmaceuticals
(Mudd's Women,) genetically engineered elites oppressing baseline humans
(Space Seed) and AI run amok (The Changeling, I, Mudd and others.)

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.

~~~
Izkata
_The Cloud Minders_ was the opposite. The neurotoxin was an accident that no
one believed existed until the Enterprise arrived, and it made the lower caste
violent, not pacified.

~~~
ajuc
Lol, was it an analogy for lead in fuel in real life on purpose?

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).

~~~
Izkata
It could only be "on purpose" if they could see some 40 years into the
future... The episode aired in 1969.

------
motohagiography
Was watching an Uber eats courier on a carbon fiber bike with electric boost,
complaining about the order routing and dispatch AI he worked for, while
exhaling clouds of bug juice he was pulling from a small electronic element he
kept on his belt. Not cyberpunk, just poor.

~~~
InitialLastName
Where the industrial class divide was once the window between the shop floor
and the shop office, now it's the API. Either you work above the API --
writing the programs and managing the programmers -- or you work below it --
packing the boxes and delivering the pizzas.

------
ErikAugust
Surprised cryptocurrency isn't mentioned in this article - as I feel that is
one of the more cyberpunk developments in a very cyberpunk past decade.

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](https://www.cachethegame). It's based on Ethereum
based and based on the old Drugwars classic.

~~~
exolymph
If I rewrote the article now, I would definitely mention cryptocurrencies! I
have a couple of essays in the works currently that will address the same
themes from a different perspective, with updated examples. I actually work
for a cryptocurrency-related organization now :)

~~~
davidgerard
If "Burning Chrome" had thought of cryptocurrencies, it could have been set in
the present.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Cryptonomicon largely could be.

------
ajuc
I think there are already a few subgenres of Cyberpunk. It can be seen easily
after reaction to recent trailer of Cyberpunk 2077 game

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".

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X2kIfS6fb8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X2kIfS6fb8)

~~~
acoye
Yeah Cyberpunk 2077 has a je-ne-sais-quoi that reminds me of "Ready player
one". The 80's are there.

------
auslander
I love cyberpunk. Essential ingredients are:

\- hostile AI

\- Corporations and Government surveilance and going dark

\- DNA / implant chips / biometric border controls

\- Borders protected by armed drones / robots

\- Underground Identities markets

~~~
drakonka
I think hostile AI isn't really an essential ingredient in cyberpunk for me,
but _some_ sort of AI, and often coupled with _some_ sort of conflict between
whether the AI is hostile or benevolent. I associate cyberpunk very much with
the grey area between man and machine.

~~~
auslander
AI that decides if you are not a good fit for or a threat to society. And
kicks off all kinds of threat control measures. Black Mirror S03E01.

~~~
klez
Did we see a different version of the episode? In Nosedive your score is
decided by people, not by AI. There's no hint of AI in the whole episode.

~~~
auslander
It was AI :) People's scores were just another source of data, used together
with throves of banking, social, medical, criminal, telecom datasets.

~~~
klez
I'll have to rewatch it. Not that I would mind :)

------
jancsika
> [T]aste governs every free — as opposed to rote — human response.

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...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528731-800-the-yuck-factor-
the-surprising-power-of-disgust/)

------
acoye
"The cyberpunk mental model [...] can be risky because it’s quite cynical and
pessimistic. We expect the worst of people."

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.

~~~
coldtea
> _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.

~~~
spyrosg
People who like thinking seem to overestimate the power of ideas in shaping
the world. My interpretation is that it's probably the typical arrogance of
the intellectual letting itself through.

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).

~~~
coldtea
> _People who like thinking seem to overestimate the power of ideas in shaping
> the world. My interpretation is that it 's probably the typical arrogance of
> the intellectual letting itself through._

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).

~~~
Nasrudith
What seperates ideas from viewpoints essentially? I would guess largely how
they dearly they are held. Another factor was what it did to existing ones. It
undermined authority in both economic/balance of power sense and in "claim to
being right". The church could not save them no matter how much they prayed
nor how saintly their lifestyle. Nobility could not protect them - nor even
themselves. It wasn't an enemy to be faced by big budgetted knights riding out
to slay those who raid and pillage. It left a vacuum for growth of other
forces while the society had not collapsed.

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.

~~~
coldtea
> _What seperates ideas from viewpoints essentially?_

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

------
bsamuels
if you find this article interesting, highly recommend reading The Seventh
Sense. does a great job at explaining how networks will redistribute power and
change power dynamics

~~~
mindcrime
_New Power_ appears to explore similar terrain as well.

[https://www.amazon.com/New-Power-Works-Hyperconnected-
World/...](https://www.amazon.com/New-Power-Works-Hyperconnected-
World/dp/0385541112)

Looking forward to reading both in the near future.

------
auslander
Black Mirror is pretty much cyberpunk, if you missed it somehow

~~~
klez
Not really.

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.

~~~
prophesi
There's really no agreed upon definition of what constitutes cyberpunk; for
me, the core of cyberpunk is simply the abuse of advanced technology.
Everything else is just icing on the cake; the neon lights, the overcrowded
failing city, and a track from Master Boot Record playing in the background.

~~~
klez
Eh, Case is trash, Molly kills people, the Finn sells stolen goods, Bobby (the
Count) lives in the slums, Chevette (Virtual Light) is a courier that lives in
the bridge, Hiro (Snow Crash) lives in a container and delivers pizza. I'm not
sure how much more low-life you can be in the future.

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 :) )

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk#Protagonists](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk#Protagonists)

~~~
prophesi
Hmm, I'm almost sold. I think what ties together the 'punk' part is the
gritty, visceral aspects of the futuristic dystopian city; the protagonist
doesn't necessarily need to be a representative of these lower rings of
society, but it definitely helps drive that point home.

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...](https://store.steampowered.com/app/447530/VA11_HallA_Cyberpunk_Bartender_Action/)

(I'm also a huge fan of cyberpunk, so no worries :P )

~~~
klez
I watched the trailer for that bartender game and I have to admit I didn't
understand what it's about, but yes, aesthetically it has a cyberpunk vibe.

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.

~~~
prophesi
It's a pretty awesome game. You basically choose the music that plays for the
night (has a great soundtrack), and then just talk to whoever comes in and
occasionally make them a drink. If you know your client's tastes and serve
them just the right one, they're likely to stay longer and spill their
secrets.

You eventually start to figure out what exactly happened in a huge event that
plays out, thanks to the secrets from your clientele.

