{"id":414,"date":"2015-04-26T14:50:30","date_gmt":"2015-04-26T21:50:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/?p=414"},"modified":"2015-04-26T14:54:19","modified_gmt":"2015-04-26T21:54:19","slug":"cyberpunk-is-dead-long-live-cyberpunk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/?p=414","title":{"rendered":"Cyberpunk is dead; long live cyberpunk"},"content":{"rendered":"

USC recently hosted a conference on cyberpunk (Cyberpunk: Past and Future<\/a>), featuring many of the movement\u2019s old titans (such as Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker) and new gods (Alex Rivera, John Jennings and Claire Evans). Hosted by Henry Jenkins, the conference was, among other things, a good reminder of cyberpunk\u2019s origins and influences\u2014and of its rapid slide into obsolescence, a fate that engulfs most literature like any other technology (especially a literature about<\/em> technology).<\/p>\n

A brief historical recap: The sunny, hippy narrative of computer lib and communal empowerment through technology in the 1970s darke\"i_2015_04_24_Cyberpunk_150x200\"ned into gothic paranoia, corporate domination, and libertarian-tinged resistance in the science fiction of 1980s and 90s. William Gibson\u2019s Neuromancer<\/em> didn\u2019t christen the era, but it crystallized it; and while many declare cyberpunk dead by the early 1990s, I see The Matrix<\/em> as an artistic, thematic, and popular endpoint, a transition into a post-cyberpunk world. When Neo morphs from underground hacker into simulation savior, cyberpunk is no longer cyber or punk.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s unclear if cyberpunk will ever recover from its success, so to speak, or find new relevance. Like film noir, it seems both hidebound to an historical era and ubiquitous in its influences. For younger generations, cyberpunk remains hidden in plain sight; whenever I mention William Gibson or Neal Stephenson to my new media students, I get blank stares. Younger generations probably can\u2019t be blamed for this blind spot, for much of what cyberpunk celebrated and feared has become the new normal. The computer cowboys hacking the mega-corporations are just another part of the world\u2014a world of digital toolsets, of applications\u2014of endless technology and gadgetry (new device of the week: Apple Watch). There\u2019s nothing inherently punk about tech anymore (see the bro-ification of Silicon Valley as cultural proof). Techno-culture is, essentially, just plain culture, for better and worse; it seems to have consumed cyberpunk’s subversive edge.<\/p>\n

Claire Evans\u2019 brief talk at the conference\u2014and her wonderful article on cyberpunk at Motherboard<\/a><\/em>\u2014underscore the definitive death and endless, if fragmented, afterlife of a sensibility that still informs our ideas about politics, aesthetics, society and individualism, augmented consciousness\/embodiment, and yes, technology. Perhaps cyberpunk as a cultural brand\u2014and as a conference topic\u2014is going through the standard cultural spin cycle of obsolescence, rediscovery and reification. But cyberpunk\u2019s interrogations of technology and culture remain fertile for modding and repurposing. As cyberpunk\u2019s leading luminary Bruce Sterling contended in his conference remarks, no one interested in writing sci-fi today should create a cyberpunk novel; they should focus on creating visions for the 22nd<\/sup> century. But one could do worse than crack open the case of an old Gibson, Stephenson, Sterling or Rucker literary machine, look under the hood, and contemplate to what future visions and voices those wires might lead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

USC recently hosted a conference on cyberpunk (Cyberpunk: Past and Future), featuring many of the movement\u2019s old titans (such as Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker) and new gods (Alex Rivera, John Jennings and Claire Evans). Hosted by Henry Jenkins, the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=414"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":418,"href":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414\/revisions\/418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}