Cyberpunk course

“Video Killed the Radio Star”

You’re probably wondering: what the hell does the song “Video killed the Radio star” written in 1979 by the British synthpop/New Wave group The Buggles have to do with death of Cyberpunk? The song celebrates the golden days of radio, describing a singer whose career is cut short by television. It’s nostalgic and quite poignant: the lyrics are directly referring to a period of technological change in the 1960′s, and “the desire to remember the past and the disappointment that children of the current generation would not appreciate the past“.

So how is this relevant to the question: Is Cyberpunk dead?

When we think of “classic” cyberpunk we think of the works of authors like Gibson, Sterling, Cadigan, Shiner, etc. we think of the dystopian, bleek visions of the future they depictied, we think of the personal, social, ethical and political questions that their works forced us to consider and struggle with. If cyberpunk has any epistemological value, then it lies here … it is that it showed us echoes of the real world, and through the vision of these writers and the world they showed us it felt as though “fiction” wasn’t that far away from “fact” that it could be real one day – and that scared us. That’s what drew us in to this genre … it’s what kept us there. Then as we grew older and the world around us changed we saw technologies advance, what was once fiction is now a reality: RFID, global surveillance, genetics, nano-technology, DRM (created and hacked ), botnets, viruses, the Patriot Act etc.

The visions those writers imagined now seem to be prophetic.

I think, therein lies the problem. When Gibson et al. were crafting vast visions of a massively connected global network ( the internet ),  where people could live out alternate lives forming relationships in a digital world ( think World of Warcraft, Second Life etc. ) to escape the real world with its social, economic, political problems, these things didn’t yet exist. Twenty or in some cases thirty years on these things are a reality, but much of the contemporary literature in this genre is still completely enamored of that golden age, so much so that its become cliched – touched upon here by Ben Iglauer in his essay “Cyberpunk Lives“:

In science fiction literature, many of the superficial conventions of cyberpunk had become cliched. Neurojacks, console cowboys, rebels on designer drugs, mirror shades and black leather, etc. had all been appropriated into boring, formula tales of detectives, cops, lone heros, and militarism. There was even a flurry of cyberpunk role playing games, which were not based on any particular work, but on the common devices of the genre as a whole: yakuza, implant weapons, mega-corporations– cool games, but not necessarily a sign of a vibrant and original literature.

It feels like we are living off past glories, rather that striving for new ones. It doesn’t feel like anyone has really come along in the last few years and really did something that pushed us further than we have already been. There are lots of new works out there, that are entertaining but nothing that feels like a real step change … cyberpunk was revolutionary once … it could be again.

I don’t think Cyberpunk is dead, I think the genre is waiting for someone to emerge to take the values and the culture that is cyberpunk and present a new generation with a vision of the future that is compelling and perhaps terrifying but crucially it is distinct enough from the visions presented to us in the past, so that when we read it we don’t immediately think Neuromancer or The Matrix, it forces us to ask some of the same questions but also new ones.

At this point the lyrics to the song seem relevant:

I heard you on the wireless back in Fifty Two
Lying awake intent at tuning in on you.
If I was young it didn’t stop you coming through.

They took the credit for your second symphony.
Rewritten by machine and new technology,
and now I understand the problems you can see.

I met your children

What did you tell them?
Video killed the radio star.