Outstanding essay, thank you for posting. I highly recommend reading at least the first third, through the discussion of the short story Mozart in Mirrorshades, because it gives an excellent and vivid explanation of an example cyberpunk story with no megacorp, no rain drenched night city, etc. I think that sets up the pivotal distinction that carries the rest of the essay. I strongly recommend the discussion of William Gibson that follows, but if you at least get to the mirror shades part you'll have the basic idea.
I have only barely played Cyberpunk 2077, so I can't say much about the specific predictions about the game itself, I just know what I know from a certain amount of cultural osmosis from reviews and looking at gameplay and watching the trailers. I think the prediction that it it grabs a bunch of tropes and blends them into a meaningless puree, that it stays in one city, that it doesn't give you a Tracer-Tong esque young to fundamentally upend the system, are lately correct. William Gibson famously decried the new cyberpunk game it as little more than a reskinned GTA and I think the diagnosis of cyberpunk as aesthetic, sometimes intended as a compliment, was quite on point.
Others who know more about the game will be able to say more than me, but I do remember how disappointed I was in the Cyberpunk 2077 trailer, the complete lobotomized absence of specificity in the news reports, such as the news ticker referring to "anti-corporate protests", without any reference to any corporation or aspect of the economy whatsoever or any kind of detail that would compliment any story in the game. The most familiar feeling I have to that was the similarly lobotomized DX:HR dialogue that couldn't bring its characters to say anything more than "augmentations can really help people."
And while the article is a criticism, it's coming from a place of imploring us to understand what was so fascinating about cyberpunk as an emerging genre, and it speaks to what, for me, is the most precious thing in fiction writing, which are the acts of imagination that give birth to new genres, and I think the reason I will have an enduring fascination with cyberpunk is for its illustration of that process.
I discovered this yesterday night. I made a post on r/cyberpunk asking how come we don't have almost no modern day cyberpunk medias, and except for a few things nothing really came close to what i thought we would think of a cyberpunk future (for me, it would be similar to mirror's edge catalyst glossy distopic corporate world). Eventually to answer to a guy i started looking for postcyberpunk on reddit and i found a post that linked to this essay, but it was not available anymore on its website. so i had to time machine it.
It was a very and eyes opening read to me, because at least i found someone who agrees that we lack modern day cyberpunk medias. I envision it as something very fake and happy, everyone living in debt (but with the latest tech), clean cities and so on... it's a shame we don't have much of it. That's just my idea of course. Nothing would change with different esthetic but the same anti corpos and anti authoritarian themes
i don't know whether you play games, but cloudpunk - despite having the classic rainy days and neon esthetic - is a very nice walking simulator that doesn't rely too much on tropes and feels fresh, at least to me. There is humor, but it's not the oh you got the nerd reference humor, it's almost always a bitter humor, and i didn't find it shallow by any means, even if it's just a game and it's not questioning about the sense of life itself. it's just a city crushing its people, and you just want to do your job of delivering parcels, but of course the plot will become intertwined with something much bigger than that
Were Cloudpunk a book, you'd call it a page turner and talk about how you had to read just one more chapter because of the lurking sense of mystery. "What's wrong with Control?" "What is CORA?" "Why are people waiting in line for a death elevator?" The game is simple, but the choices are not, and it feels like the player is finding the story, not just having it spoon-fed.
>that it doesn't give you a Tracer-Tong esque young to fundamentally upend the system
Oof, that should be a Tracer-Tong esque option
Deus Ex was really brilliant in its ending, because its an ending that only pays off if you care about the meaning that exists within the game, you have to at least somewhat care about ideas, and the game earned the right to ask you to care. It may be the only game other than Alpha Centauri to convince me its creators were interested in ideas for their own sake.
Well, we don't have androids (yet), we don't have corpos lobbying much more than the past (at least in europe, where we even sometimes care about digital rights. Different results in the us tho). We don't have cybernetic talons that spread from your limbs to kill someone. We don't have much of what the classic cyberpunk scenario has.
We do, however, have an always (or almost always) available way to connect with other people in the world always with us, we're approaching new types of ownership (where you don't own nothing, but rent everything), to me the future we'll live into will be much different than what cyberpunk author's envisioned
long argument. you have to state what the punk element is first, which requires an anti-heroism. then, just like how comedy doesn't age well because it's the dissonance of a cultural moment, cyberpunk was a response to a fin de siecle period just before the tension and uncertainty about computers resolved into our present experience of tech.
what's changed is (cyber)punk was a set of symbols and representations, where DIY (doing it yourself) meant adopting constraints to moralize your quest- a heroic journey with the self-imposed handicaps of dumb haircuts, bicycle transport, and tattoos, but we can simulate or undo almost all of those now, so they aren't the honest signals of heroism or anything else they once were. the cultural moment where these constraints were dissonant and created tension has passed. to be punk today you'd have to choose to be an amputee or some other irreversible disfigurement. ritual suicide and terrorism are maybe the other replacement constraints people choose to moralize their journeys. it played on an underlying instinct from nature about colourful plumage, where nothing that stupid and wasteful can survive- so surely it must have a power we can't see...
I think now that people who grew up with tech and social media have adapted a hyperawareness to symbols and representations and can't fall for that. there are no edges or ambiguities in their brands and narratives and they compete on that. the ideal is to become the perfect representation of something, a brand where an inner life is basically off brand drama. cyberpunk was predicated on the idea of not only edges and seams, but an elsewhere and an other that can't exist now in the social. Where previously cyberpunk had some literary sci-fi cred because it provided new insights and metaphors for understanding an unevenly distributed future, by now it's probably a set of tropes that form a fantasy genre.
Well, we do have examples of modern day cyberpunk tho, mr robot, watch dogs 2, mirror's edge. just the first i could think of. black mirror too. perhaps black mirror is more dystopic than cyberpunk. Anyway.
They're all grounded on a very near future, they have characters who are against the status quo established by some corpos, but i do agree with you on something. The world's different. We've grown affictionated to brands, unions memberships sank (although i guess it is slowly coming back up), we've grown to be more lonely and individualistic people than before. In this context, an old cyberpunk could be seen as "people vs corpos", but all the examples i brought you manage to adapt to the new world and are "people vs corpos AND other people"
I think they get to that in the first third of the essay.
>just like how comedy doesn't age well because it's the dissonance of a cultural moment, cyberpunk was a response to a fin de siecle period just before the tension and uncertainty about computers resolved into our present experience of tech.
I don't know, I think the consensus is that ours is in fact the realization of many critical themes of cyberpunk, so it is now at its apex of relevance to our present moment, as it is effectively an anticipation of and criticism of it. And it turned out to be interestingly predictive, and that opens a million interesting conversations about why it was predictive.
>what's changed is (cyber)punk was a set of symbols and representations[...]
I don't know that I've ever encountered such a roller coaster of a paragraph. Cyberpunk was a "set of symbols and representations"? I mean, maybe, maybe not, but we just read a whole essay about it, and it doesn't talk that way and in fact identifies entirely different things, so what happened to those, and it's not clear what you mean, and you're not necessarily wrong but there are other equally true things to say of it. In short: ...wha???
You contrast cyberpunk to DIY which is never a contrast I've encountered before, and seems like a crossing of dissimilar categories, like comparing mice to nostalgia. I can't follow the thing about self-imposed constraints or how those were "honest" (huh?) signals of heroism or needing to be an amputee to be a punk? Replacement constraint? Plumage? We're not even on Mars at this point, we're the Voyager I.
>by now it's probably a set of tropes that form a fantasy genre.
And somehow the plane lands on a coherent point, that amazingly, I find myself agreeing with. It really is at essence a style or a group of tropes at this point equivalent to fantasy genre tropes.
I have only barely played Cyberpunk 2077, so I can't say much about the specific predictions about the game itself, I just know what I know from a certain amount of cultural osmosis from reviews and looking at gameplay and watching the trailers. I think the prediction that it it grabs a bunch of tropes and blends them into a meaningless puree, that it stays in one city, that it doesn't give you a Tracer-Tong esque young to fundamentally upend the system, are lately correct. William Gibson famously decried the new cyberpunk game it as little more than a reskinned GTA and I think the diagnosis of cyberpunk as aesthetic, sometimes intended as a compliment, was quite on point.
Others who know more about the game will be able to say more than me, but I do remember how disappointed I was in the Cyberpunk 2077 trailer, the complete lobotomized absence of specificity in the news reports, such as the news ticker referring to "anti-corporate protests", without any reference to any corporation or aspect of the economy whatsoever or any kind of detail that would compliment any story in the game. The most familiar feeling I have to that was the similarly lobotomized DX:HR dialogue that couldn't bring its characters to say anything more than "augmentations can really help people."
And while the article is a criticism, it's coming from a place of imploring us to understand what was so fascinating about cyberpunk as an emerging genre, and it speaks to what, for me, is the most precious thing in fiction writing, which are the acts of imagination that give birth to new genres, and I think the reason I will have an enduring fascination with cyberpunk is for its illustration of that process.