On the 40th anniversary of Cyberpunk
Rethinking an old-new genre that never existed anyway
I was excited to see that Bruce Bethke, who coined the word “cyberpunk”, is putting together a special anniversary issue of Stupefying Stories for the 40th anniversary of his short-story, also named “Cyberpunk”.
I grew up with movies like Blade Runner, The Terminator, Aliens, Robocop, and Total Recall (Verhoeven’s 1990 version, the only real one). I’ve got Akira in a special Blu-Ray edition, and Ghost in the Shell is around here somewhere. Neal Stephenson and William Gibson take up a modest portion of the real estate on my ample bookshelves.
Forget all the rainy Los Angeles night-glow, the neon, the mohawks, the synthesizer music. Cyberpunk, as far as one of its creators understands it, turns on one key question about technology:
We know what it’s designed to do and how it’s supposed to be used. Now, how will our characters misuse it, for things they aren’t supposed to do?
That, to me, remains the core question of cyberpunk.
Cyberpunk attracts me and repels me at the same time.
The articles I’ve written here since the beginning of the year are all highly critical of technology and — more precisely — the relentless extension of its icy grip into all things formerly known as human. Not even your mind, your thoughts, or your own senses, are safe.
While such criticisms of technology and its politics are one of the main threads woven through the cyberpunk genre, there’s also a fatalism motivating the whole thing.
Technology will march on and it’s going to get you whether you like it or not.
Unlike your Star Trek tier space operas, which send a message of optimism and hope along with their technological determinism, cyberpunk considers the darker, seedier side of life. It’s hard-boiled noir and existentialist drama with a soundtrack by the Ramones and the Sex Pistols.
I’m cool with all that. The aesthetic left its mark on me at a young age and to this day the gritty 1985 retro-future holds an otherwise inexplicable grip on my imagination.
But a grip it is, and I start to wonder why such things have that power. Even the goldfish must occasionally catch a glimpse of the water.
Bruce Bethke asks us whether cyberpunk has any meaning for us anymore. I’m only just barely old enough to remember the 1980s, but I do remember the Cold War politics, when Japan was the Asian Tiger occupying China’s current role, when computers were seeping into public consciousness but nobody was quite sure what to do with them or what they would become.
Up here 40 years later, we’ve seen some of this shake out. There’s no more Soviet Union, though history does love its rhymes, so we find the US-led West is still locking heads with Russia, in a tense situation with the Greater East, and, really, the greater Eurasian landmass.
Maybe some things don’t change that much.
We have concerns about computers and information technology that nobody quite foresaw in the 80s. When Case in Neuromancer plugs into cyberspace, he uses an Atari console to trawl a simulated world which is nothing like the ways we experience “online” in 2023. No signs of our smart [sic] phones, the commercial internet, the surveillance state, or the self-imposed panopticon of public sousveillance.
That 80s retro-future is the same and worlds apart from real life.
As I contemplated what, if anything, I’d send in for Bruce’s 40th anniversary party, I wondered if it’s a genre that still interests me beyond the superficial Blade Runner aesthetics and 80s movies.
You can count me as bearish on “technology”, if you haven’t picked up on that theme here.
I no longer believe that Progress is going to deliver us to that mythical future of flying cars, commercial fusion power-planets, and domed cities on the Moon and Mars. I have no intention of defending the reasoning that led me to this belief. In short form, I think our civilization has reached very near to the limits of its competence given our resource base and the complexity of what we’ve built. The low-hanging fruit is picked in every venue, from science (which is falling off a cliff) to energy (ditto) to management of organizations (everything bureaucrats touch gets worse).
That’s a separate issue and I won’t linger on it. The present question is, what do you make of cyberpunk when you no longer have faith in technology’s relentless progress?
Is there anything left to say about “cyberpunk” when you don’t believe you’ll see that future of brain implants and cyborgs and mile-high arcologies named after Japanese mega-corporations?
What could you make of cyberpunk, without repeating warmed-over Blade Runner and Cyberpunk 2077 aesthetics, and without presuming the endless reach of Faustian civilization toward the infinite?
I have two ideas on that.
Idea One: There are no straight lines in history
A scenario where technological progress fails over the long run will likely be broken into uneven patches of growth.
A social reality as complex as ours will not simply collapse into Mad Max dystopia overnight. It’s quite possible to imagine dreams and nightmares birthed by the sciences of information, cognition, and biology in the course of a protracted decline.
Technology, as I’ve written here many times, is more than the artifacts we build. It’s also a way of thinking about the world, organizing experience to give it meaning, and understanding ourselves.
It’s language, in other words.
Bruce writes in “The Etymology of Cyberpunk” how he first came on the idea that children have a magic-like ability to acquire languages, and this is not limited to natural human languages. What happens when you combine a native fluency with machines, the ethical limitations of teenagers, and the incapacities of the present system to deal with that chaos?
“Speaking computer” is but one of the possibilities.
We see more and more how public figures, writers, and the self-appointed thinkers and intellectuals casually use metaphors of technology and neurological sciences to talk about themselves and about human actions.
Your brain makes you overeat, the social media feed gives you a hit of dopamine, your mind processes information. These are metaphors that reach so close to home that you don’t think about them and the often nonsensical implications.
(A neurochemical like dopamine or norepinephrine can’t cause you to feel or act. A cause is separate from its effect. So who is this “you” which experiences the effect of that biochemical cause? If it’s all brain chemistry, there’s no difference between you and your brain. It’s all very confused.)
You could imagine a few decades hence when languages of neuroscience, which are languages of information and computation, have seeped down much further into the roots of common sense talk. Maybe there’s a generation in a hellish hypothetical future where they no longer speak of their own mental states, but use expressions for neurochemicals instead. People already have a hard time comprehending experience without that further destroying all the concepts we use to understand them. What would that world look like?
Where Bruce Bethke asks what the fluent “native speakers” of new tech can do with it that the designers never intended, I’d add that we can ask that same question of our own brains and biology.
Organic systems like human bodies make great metaphors for complex mechanical systems. Consider how quickly the appearance of cheap AI has created a cottage industry of “GPT whisperers”, consultants who show you how to prompt the machine so that it spits out useful results. This is a total conceptual shift away from traditional coding, which uses formal languages to out explicit steps.
Expand that point just a little, and you arrive at the thought that you don’t need a definite technological progress under human control to secure the basic premise of a cyberpunk story.
Which brings us to the second idea.
Idea Two: We’re telling the wrong kind of story
Here’s a useful way to contrast action/adventure stories and horror stories.
In the adventure story, the human characters are agents struggling against other agents.
In the horror story, the adversary is an impersonal force, often inscrutable to the characters and the reader, which transcends human action and drama.
Hollywood and mainstream pop culture don’t much care for horror stories if we go by sheer popularity. Even when horror does go popular, the mainstream can’t resist personalizing the adversary. Good horror, like Alien and The Thing, doesn’t make that mistake (unless Ridley Scott rips the mask off and reveals the cosmic horror as a living Greek statue in a flight suit)
I suggest, though, that these differences amount to more than which category you’re browsing in your Netflix account. They stem from fundamentally different ways of making sense of the human condition and our place in the wider world.
If you aren’t up on your philosophical and psychological jargon, an agent is a self-directed being with its own purposes, which it pursues through intentional actions.
One way to cash out the difference between the action and horror genres is by their respective portrayals of human agency and its significance. Robert E. Howard’s characters often end up splitting the monster’s skull with a broadsword, where one of Lovecraft’s protagonists is as likely to be driven mad by the same creature.
Horror stories present a worldview that challenges the meaning and value of human agency.
Consider how deeply runs the belief that in all events, there is a Hero working to overcome a Villain who is the cause of the evil in the world. This belief reaches beyond simple entertainments. Pick any current event you like, and you’ll find that however impersonal and mechanical the origin of the problem, there’s plenty of people ready to pin it on a human Villain. This has been the theme of national politics in the US over the last decade, at the least, and it ranges well beyond that. (Listen to Art Bell’s old call-in shows from the 1990s for great fun with this theme.)
The urge to personify runs deep in the psyche.
Cyberpunk stories gravitate towards the horror end of this spectrum. There are character dramas acted out, as there must be, but they tend not to have the heroic world-changing impact of an action story.
In the end, Bethke tells us that his own motivation was to show off a type of character who exists in the high-tech status quo that they saw coming circa 1980:
… what I set out to do was to name a character type. And the primary definition of cyberpunk -- the one that gets used in every news story about computer crime -- is my definition: a young, technologically facile, ethically vacuous, computer-adept vandal or criminal.
The Etymology of "Cyberpunk"
Let’s try to pull some of these threads together.
We have a pessimistic take on technology, its effects on the human condition, and ultimately, its own prospects for never-ending progress.
We have a type of story that is bearish on human action, which compares favorably with horror stories and ancient Greek tragedies.
We have a character type who is an “outsider” figure, a bit of a misfit and anarchist, along with a native fluency in the languages of various technologies.
Technologies are understood broadly enough to include human beings and their parts, like brains and sense organs.
I think you could do something with that, updated for 2020s fears, concerns, and geopolitical realities. Here’s just a few ideas that hit me:
What happens if that “transhumanist” project, that cult-like belief system that fascinates all the Silicon Valley tech-bros, fails? Assume that it won’t fail gracefully or without mutilating the flesh and souls of a good many true believers.
The Cult of Safetyism is out of control. What sorts of characters would be on the wrong end of that stick and take action against it?
What kind of people come out of a future where the basic conditions for personal identity no longer hold true? What happens to kids who grow up saturated in AI-generated texts, videos, and pictures, so over-stimulated by fake realities that they can’t tell the physical world from the electronic dream? What if those brain-computer implants take off?
There’s plenty more than that.
Again, the theme is not “technology good/bad”, but what happens when these impersonal forces of human design transform reality from the ground up and a new generation of “digital natives” speaks the new languages in a way the designers never imagined.
I won’t likely write anything for Bruce’s project. Since I don’t have any faith in the core ideas behind cyberpunk, and since I don’t have the imaginative chops to write the innovative sort of story he’s looking for, I don’t see much reason.
If anyone wants to take up the themes I sketched out here, mixing one part technological pessimism with one part anti-humanist horror tale, it’s all yours.
-Matt
I’d ask you to share and like and such, but there are no real people on the internet and everything is fake, so whatever.
Excellent article, Matt. I'll talk it up in tomorrow's Journal.