What Was Cyberpunk? In Memoriam: 1980-2020

Outstanding essay, thank you for posting. I highly recommend reading at least the first third, through the discussion of the short story Mozart in Mirrorshades, because it gives an excellent and vivid explanation of an example cyberpunk story with no megacorp, no rain drenched night city, etc. I think that sets up the pivotal distinction that carries the rest of the essay. I strongly recommend the discussion of William Gibson that follows, but if you at least get to the mirror shades part you'll have the basic idea.

I have only barely played Cyberpunk 2077, so I can't say much about the specific predictions about the game itself, I just know what I know from a certain amount of cultural osmosis from reviews and looking at gameplay and watching the trailers. I think the prediction that it it grabs a bunch of tropes and blends them into a meaningless puree, that it stays in one city, that it doesn't give you a Tracer-Tong esque young to fundamentally upend the system, are lately correct. William Gibson famously decried the new cyberpunk game it as little more than a reskinned GTA and I think the diagnosis of cyberpunk as aesthetic, sometimes intended as a compliment, was quite on point.

Others who know more about the game will be able to say more than me, but I do remember how disappointed I was in the Cyberpunk 2077 trailer, the complete lobotomized absence of specificity in the news reports, such as the news ticker referring to "anti-corporate protests", without any reference to any corporation or aspect of the economy whatsoever or any kind of detail that would compliment any story in the game. The most familiar feeling I have to that was the similarly lobotomized DX:HR dialogue that couldn't bring its characters to say anything more than "augmentations can really help people."

And while the article is a criticism, it's coming from a place of imploring us to understand what was so fascinating about cyberpunk as an emerging genre, and it speaks to what, for me, is the most precious thing in fiction writing, which are the acts of imagination that give birth to new genres, and I think the reason I will have an enduring fascination with cyberpunk is for its illustration of that process.

The aesthetic lives on, even some of the rhetoric.

Cyberpunk as a genre died a rare very final death, the stories came true, the futures they warned of became fact.

long argument. you have to state what the punk element is first, which requires an anti-heroism. then, just like how comedy doesn't age well because it's the dissonance of a cultural moment, cyberpunk was a response to a fin de siecle period just before the tension and uncertainty about computers resolved into our present experience of tech.

what's changed is (cyber)punk was a set of symbols and representations, where DIY (doing it yourself) meant adopting constraints to moralize your quest- a heroic journey with the self-imposed handicaps of dumb haircuts, bicycle transport, and tattoos, but we can simulate or undo almost all of those now, so they aren't the honest signals of heroism or anything else they once were. the cultural moment where these constraints were dissonant and created tension has passed. to be punk today you'd have to choose to be an amputee or some other irreversible disfigurement. ritual suicide and terrorism are maybe the other replacement constraints people choose to moralize their journeys. it played on an underlying instinct from nature about colourful plumage, where nothing that stupid and wasteful can survive- so surely it must have a power we can't see...

I think now that people who grew up with tech and social media have adapted a hyperawareness to symbols and representations and can't fall for that. there are no edges or ambiguities in their brands and narratives and they compete on that. the ideal is to become the perfect representation of something, a brand where an inner life is basically off brand drama. cyberpunk was predicated on the idea of not only edges and seams, but an elsewhere and an other that can't exist now in the social. Where previously cyberpunk had some literary sci-fi cred because it provided new insights and metaphors for understanding an unevenly distributed future, by now it's probably a set of tropes that form a fantasy genre.