Cyberpunk course

Punks Not Dead – Week Four – Assignment Four – P2PU – Brian Williams … brian.williams@gmail.com.  “BTDUs (bathroom tissue distribution units (i.e., rolls))” (NEW TP POOL REGULATIONS) at 265.  “Give me convenience or give me death.” Dead Kennedys

I would argue the “warnings sounded by Gibson, Stephenson and Sterling” became “reality” at the instant it became possible for these bio-organisms to imagine such a narrative, future, and to extrapolate from that narrative image to a sonic present where pizza will be delivered in “30 minutes or less” … or else … and we don’t need to go forward to imagine unimaginable things and endless cyberpunk content, storytelling.  Cyberpunk comes from inside the authors, like all meaningful writing or storytelling.

The cyberpunk’s eye is the prism through which they distinguish their content.  They may, as in Snow Crash, imagine alternative realities that flow from civilizations millennia before … The Code of Hammurabi is the most ancient, first known subject arrangement of laws.  The phrase, a subject arrangement of laws, is the very definition of “code” and code and snow crash and language and infection and disease and virus and Eden are all ingeniously tied up in knots: Cyberpunk as backward looking and timeless black comedy …

Yet it can hardly be disputed:  Something about our species seems to force our culture to bury the very styles, movements, and genres, we once experienced as transcendent, vital.

Our society kills fun things by posturing about whether a particular thing is “dead” and our fear of death informs this process –to describe a music or genre or style as dead is to metaphorically kill it. Yet neither cyberpunk nor punk is dead.

And, never mind the bollocks, or the encyclopedia that reads like a tombstone — “Cyberpunk began dying off as a literary subgenre in the early 1990s, as acceptance of cyberculture and computers increased among the public” (Cyberpunk. Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Gale Group, 2001. p170-367.) – there are plenty of academics who view the cyberpunk genre as well, healthy and changing, as all living organisms  must, who find in cyberpunk the depth requisite to sustain the curiosity, imagination, of  readers and writers alike.