===============================================================================
001-cyberpunk2015.txt
===============================================================================
What Cyberpunk means in 2015.
—————————–
Back in the 90’s Cyberpunk was a slightly confused Willow O’ The Wisp concept. The term had been co-opted by fashion, music, futurists, hackers and technologists all around the same time. In the true spirit of the punk part of the term there was no coherency, and no sense of organisation and no cult of dogma. It was a loose term to describe someone into the extremely diverse array of fiction that sported the term and or the aesthetic of those worlds they portrayed.
Fast forward to the present day.
The history of popular opinion now erroneously regards the 90’s as a far more coherent time for a movement called Cyberpunk. After all so much of what we associate came from or was ‘culted’ at that time. As an example consider the movie and literary aesthetic of Cyberpunk, films like; Terminator 2, Hackers, Blade Runner, The Matrix etc (the list goes on, exhaustively in many places online including http://cyberpunkonline.net/cyberpunkarchive) and all the works of Gibson, Jeff Noon etc etc.
All of this work is heavily and consciously associated with Cyberpunk as a ‘movement in retrospect’, in truth many aspects of those films do not fit at all with the underlying themes (or one another), it’s only when viewed as a whole does the picture of Cyberpunk form as a wonderful world and subculture. Cyberpunk differs from many other flavours of subculture and fiction however. In the case of Cyberpunk the wisp that was a dream, that was a mere train of thought in the minds eye of technologist creatives, somewhere along the line, began to manifest in reality - like a snowball rolling down a mountain side turning into an avalanche.
The perception of a type movement in the past is false, but that doesn’t matter - the movement happened none the less albeit in a much more subtle way.
The world imagined by the aesthetic and predicted technology of Cyberpunk is here in 2015. From fashions, the dystopian avant-garde politics, cyber warfare, hideous personal surveillance, the complete apathetic allowance and acceptance by the general public of both nation-state and corporations alike obvious (and amateur) erosions of individual privacy in the name of freedom and commerce and the corporate enslavement of all but the richest private citizens… and perhaps most importantly the role technology plays in our everyday lives; dominating them, sucking us into algorithms of big data and demographics. The future imagined by writers like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson (to name but two) have gradually become frighteningly prophetic as the snow ball gained momentum down the mountain of reality - to put it very succinctly, we’re living in a 90’s Cyberpunk Novel. No, really. We are.
We have sleep walked into dystopia. 2015. This is the age of Cyberpunk made real by technological advance and the decline of the nation state. The first world has seemingly embraced absolute corporatism, as the third world is left behind in a dark age of mismanaged philanthropy, exploitation and neglect - left to scavenge the scraps of advancement by the pseudo utopian oligarchs gifted near ultimate power by the ignorance of government in the past few decades who have let their own grasp on power be usurped by the march of the unholy alliance of corrupt big business and eager, hungry and naive talented technologists.
The human race appears to have stumbled the world and civilizations they created into a new social system, and not by mass consensus, indeed by mass apathy, where a technological elite now props up old world money and banking largely only for appearances sake. The post scarcity economy is coming. Automation is coming. AI is coming. And the lists of the have and have nots of this brave new world have already been drawn up by those turning the cogs and I doubt you are on the have list.
All those who chased after the colourful dragon and ultimate tech romance of the Cyberpunk future during the 90’s are now getting to taste the dystopia we thought would be so cool - before we get to hand the crumbling, burning tech hell we’ve created to our children as the only existence they have ever and will ever know. Grim isn’t it?
Unlike previous contemporary radical and revolutionary social movements from the 1950’s, and in particular the much reminisced about 1960’s (what did the hippy’s actually achieve?) who dreamed and preached of change and revolution -my- generation actually achieved it through technology - bypassing governments and ideologies like deft ghosts in the shadows until it was too late to stop them. The world has changed forever due to the nerds, geeks, hackers, punks and phreaks of yesteryears basements.
Like all revolutions the change started small and ended bloody, dramatic and in no way resembling what those who instigated it actually wanted. And in this instance it may have ultimately destroyed life as we know it, and human freedom as we deserve it. Because it’s true to say the only thing this the real Cyberpunk Era lacks from it’s embryonic speculative fiction predecessors is perhaps the most important element of those wonderful, inspiring stories which spawned it;
tl;dr Welcome to tech Hell.
===============================================================================
EOF
tangentwithtanner
janainaart
jbbartram-illu
discoholicmusic
pixelskylines
ellievsbear
kianamaiart
