In a genre where the imagined future is just a few years from realised reality, contemporary cyberpunk writing sits in an interesting space. This week, we’ll be examining Cory Doctorow’s I, Robot and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. I, Robot is significantly shorter that Snow Crash, but it would be interesting to look at similarities and differences in the imagery, themes and narrative arc of the two stories. Do they have any factors in common that the earlier works do not? Are the worlds that they imagine any different to the worlds that writers like Gibson and Sterling imagine? Do they share moral imperatives? Are there any distinguishing characteristics to more recent cyberpunk that may not feature as strongly in the older, more classic cyberpunk?
If you could upload your pieces as a blog post by the end of Monday the 12th October, then we’ll have a day to read and comment before Wednesday the 14th’s discussion. Please tag your work with the tags Week 5, Doctorow, Stephenson and any other tags you might feel are appropriate.
“Ubik helps you connect and share with the people in your life. Your friends will say, Christ, I used to think that you weren’t fun. But now, wow! — Safe when your privacy settings match your level of comfort, do not forget to review them often. Avoid prolonged use.”
The above paraphrase is a crossbreed between Philip K. Dick’s “Ubik” ads and the Facebook Safety guidelines. I was randomly browsing my book collection, stumble upon “Ubik” read an advert and I had an eerie feeling, like the book fade out and the Giant appeared and said “It is happening again!” … then I wrote the above paraphrase. And somehow it doesn’t feel like fiction anymore, it remained fairly present after I’ve shelved the book.
Everyone loved when William Gibson said “The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.” — everybody had in mind the glorious future envisioned by the classical science fiction; but it wasn’t about that distant future, but about our near future envisioned in the cyberpunk works. Just turn the TV on, and you will see it: cyberterrorism, cyberbullying, internet addiction, internet censorship, internet legislation driven by corporations, pervasive surveillance, massive telco data retention, iris scans at the borders and we just proposed DNA profiling for immigrants.
We are now so far in that envisioned near future that early cyberpunk works read like archaeological reports full of euphemisms. And in this aspect cyberpunk is history, and you can think of even being dead. Actually, cyberpunk is alive in its very own cyberpunkish way: it is dead, and it is haunting us.
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.
The title for this essay comes from an inspiration the documentary “Punk’s Not Dead” by Susanne Dynner gave me. It proves that punks are indeed “not dead” and are demonstrated with various music genres in American culture. So if critics declare Cyberpunk for dead, they will be surprised that there are many forces who try to prove them wrong. Creative Cyberpunk writers are out there, many surely still undiscovered, contemplating about mankind’s future relationship with science, technology, computers, robots and the lot. I will describe with the help of the following short advertisement about “Cybermobbing” or “Cyberbullying” that not only writers make precautions or warnings for the future.
This advertisement produced by order of the European Union the shows how a victim becomes insulted and bullied by hostile class mates in the cyberspace of the Internet. The degree of harm might be kept within a limit in this example. The threshold to “Cyberterrorism” is stunningly low, when people consider doing worse than bullying and aim to damage others on a much severer level. The extent of harm caused would be the only difference. It shows that even the government by taking measures to inform society, is aware of the threat ruthless skilled computer users could do to political, social and economic entities. If punks roam the street and are up to no good people can call the police and get help in most situations. But cyberpunks don’t have to worry about “Internet” police trying to catch them. If skilled enough they could cause “cyber-mayhem” being invisible and leaving no trace.
In my opinion many crucial themes in Cyberpunk deal with mankind crossing borders in science and technology and not knowing the negative outcome it could have. Nearly every Cyberpunk story deals with the aftermath of terrible mistakes done by people who hold power, scientists ignoring ethnic condemnable questions or using advanced technology for a “bad” cause. It makes the issues Cyberpunk is about relevant to us, because as users we can always make wrong decisions regarding the application of technology. Cyberpunk which does not always try to entertain can be seen as comments about the progress of science and technology when misused. As science fiction fans we could imagine serious Cyberpunk novelists as “Vulcans” trying to display and educate inexperienced humans about what might happen if you make the wrong decision at the wrong time.
Is Cyberpunk Dead? No. It is, in fact, alive and well, thank you very much. Has Cyberpunk evolved? Yes. It has indeed evolved. To look at this question more closely we need two things. A working definition of cyberpunk, and a work produced recently to prove that the genre is still alive and thriving. I will use Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother as an example of a successful modern day Cyberpunk novel. My definition of Cyberpunk I take directly from our Class Description and it is a definition that I assume was written by our fair teacher Rebecca Kahn:
“Cyberpunk literature, in general, deals with marginalized people in technologically-enhanced cultural ‘systems’. In cyberpunk stories’ settings, there is usually a ‘system’ which dominates the lives of most ‘ordinary’ people, be it an oppressive government, a group of large, paternalistic corporations, or a fundamentalist religion. These systems are enhanced by certain technologies (today advancing at a rate that is bewildering to most people), particularly ‘information technology’ (computers, the mass media), making the system better at keeping those within it inside it. Often this technological system extends into its human ‘components’ as well, via brain implants, prosthetic limbs, cloned or genetically engineered organs, etc. Humans themselves become part of ‘the Machine’. This is the ‘cyber’ aspect of cyberpunk. However, in any cultural system, there are always those who live on its margins, on ‘the Edge’: criminals, outcasts, visionaries, or those who simply want freedom for its own sake. Cyberpunk literature focuses on these people, and often on how they turn the system’s technological tools to their own ends. This is the ‘punk’ aspect of cyberpunk””
Although, on the surface Little Brother may not appear to be Cyberpunk (it’s marketed as YA not SF or Cyberpunk). It really does fulfill all the requirements of the above definition. The reason that it may not seem cyberpunk at first glance is that it takes place in almost the present day. Most of the tech describes in the book exists. Some of the tech is even identified by a particular brand name or product name of something that is on the market and available to consumers right now. The rest of it is either stuff that exists, but not in the specific form that is described in the book, or is not at all hard to see being made four or five years from now. But the rest of the elements of Cyberpunk are there. There is an oppresive system, in this case the Department of Homeland Security, that infiltrates many of the lives of the people in the story. They operate a surveillance society where the DHS tracks everyones movements and everyones expenditures. People are stopped and questioned by the police if their “histograms” are non-standard. They take people off the street and wiretap the Internet. The main character of the story is a cyberpunk in the finest tradition. He is not really an anti-hero. Neo from the Matrix is not really an anti-hero either. The main character, Marcus Yallow, finds ways of using the DHS’s technology against them. He starts a techno-revolution that uses the same technology that the DHS is using to oppress people to liberate them.
Little Brother is not an older book like Neoromancer or Snow Crash, it was published last year. Furthermore, it was highly successful. It was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards for best novel. It got great reviews from several publications including the New York Times which named it as one of the best books for young people of the year. Does it look like classic cyberpunk? Not really. It is modern Cyberpunk. Today you don’t really need to invent a futuristic technology to write a cyberpunk story. You can use today’s tech just fine. That is not to say that you can’t write about futuristic technologies. There are plenty of stories that involve entoptic displays and bioware implants and nanobots. But in a few decades these may very well be real and commonplace technologies.
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.
Nayar, Pramod K., Wetware Fiction: Cyberpunk and the Ideologies of Posthuman Bodies. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1140647
Wall, David S., Cybercrime and the Culture of Fear: Social Science Fiction(s) and the Production of Knowledge about Cybercrime (July 3, 2008). Information, Communication & Society, Vol. 11, No. 6, pp. 861-884, 2008. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1155155
Blitz, Marc Jonathan, The Freedom of 3D Thought: The First Amendment in Virtual Reality (October 28, 2008). Cardozo Law Review, Vol. 30, No. 3. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1291415
open access …. from california digital library eScholarship repository …
Richard Kahn. (2005). How the West was One? The American Frontier and the Rise of a Global Internet Imaginary. InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies. Vol. 1, Issue 2, Article 6. http://repositories.cdlib.org/gseis/interactions/vol1/iss2/art6
Elizabeth Swanstrom. (2005). Wax Blocks, Data Banks, and File #0467839: The Archive of Memory in William Gibson’s Science Fiction. InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies. Vol. 1, Issue 2, Article 7. http://repositories.cdlib.org/gseis/interactions/vol1/iss2/art7
), botnets, viruses, the Patriot Act etc.