There are a few genres that I really enjoy sinking my mental chops into. Post Apocalyptic fiction (I even categorize it), Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Cyberpunk.
I spend much of my fictional time in Post Apocalyptic fiction; I was raised in the 80's and movies like The Day After, Special Bulletin, A Boy and His Dog, Damnation Alley, Logan’s Run, Red Dawn the list goes on and on, this media had a very real and permanent impact on how I view the world as an adult and what my interests are.
In the late 80's shows like VR5 and Automan captured my technology imagination. Ideas about how the world might look in the future continued to assault my head. Oddly, the film Prayer of the Roller Boys was instrumental in my interest of Cyberpunk. There was a theme of how Japanese interests/corporations were buying up everything leading to rebellion and guerilla anti-corporate tactics (believe me, I’m making the movie sound better than it ever was), but it led me to the idea of Otaku, and hi-tech Yakuza.
In the late 80's I was involved in BBS’s, modems, and Fidonet, UUCP, and bagging (sneakernet!). ‘Email’ back then was nothing like today; it was raw and it was viseral. Only the technical elite or college equipped were participating at the time. There was no spam (aside from shareware postings), there was no Facebook style posts depicting personal drama, and no “I’m eating Oatmeal made with Coffee” style twitter posts. Communications was at a premium then! 2800baud meant you bagged your mail, compressed it and planned your dial times with others (then your mother destroys your connection late at night by picking up the telephone) or drop it to disk and sneakernet it to the next user. It was great and communications with others led me to ideas of computer networks being worked on and how we would communicate on them in years to come.
I lived in the middle of nowhere Indiana, we had no bookstores locally, and my parents didn’t have time to drive me to Waldenbooks nearly 45 minutes from where we lived. So media continued to shape my imagination more than books as hi-tech computers were concerned. I finally saw Blade Runner in 1985 (maybe ‘86) on a Betamax and I just knew how the next 30 years were going to play out. Corporations were going to own everything, governments would exist to serve an elite ruling corporate class and blue collar workers would have few opportunities. Which, in retrospect, really summed up my environment.
Anyway, from ‘88 to ‘91ish I’d finally gotten a hold of William Gibson and Bruce Bethke books. My little modem suddenly became a powerful weapon of communication. Fidonet was not as important as it used to be to me. I was growing up and I was an epic nerd. I built computers, read hundreds of books and got beat up by my high school ‘elite’. Our local BBS’s had shutdown and my parents wouldn’t spring for a second phone line. The calls in the middle of the night had to come to an end (even though the modem picked up first ring), so I eventually had to shut my BBS node down as well.
That’s ok, because I had then discovered SHADOWRUN and Cyberpunk was a living breathing thing for me. Until I really grew up, joined the Marines and got lost in the military. I did some gaming, but the MC was not really a place for that. I was fortunate that my job was 4033 Computer Operator, I’d learned all about mainframes, DASD, JES2, JCL, ROSCOE and communications. I thought I was living the dream, a Marine and a nerd.
So here I am, mid 2010's, and I’m digging back into my roots. I never let cyberpunk go in my head but nor did I feed it like I did other things. I’ve read pretty much all Neal Stephenson’s work (Snow Crash — omfg!) and of course kept up with Gibson. In a fit of fighting off becoming an adult I’d gotten a cyberpunk tattoo (pictured left) along my entire left flank, Fastjack the elven decker from Shadowrun, hurt like hell but it reminded me that I was a cyberpunk in soul, if not in action. Adult life had really taken it’s toll.
In the last year or so I’d gotten into Reddit, and joined the /r/cyberpunk community there.. Or, whatever passes for community out there. (I’ve got some pretty strong opinions of Reddit HiveMind) I’ve found I haven’t let go of my notions of Cyberpunk from when I was much younger and they really conflict with today’s…. what?.. Hackers? Crackers? Cypherpunks? I dunno, I’m not part of that so I don’t know what colloquialism fits. I don’t attend Defcon or other hacker cons, I quit irc when it became a joke in the late 90's, usenet had become the playground of trolls and Nigerians.
I hold the notion of Cyberpunk in my head, it’s a visceral thing. It’s sharp edged, it’s brilliant in visual and dark in emotion, it blows up convention and seeks to destroy order to make way for better, faster and tech-centric stupidity. Cyberpunk is there to show us a world of unchecked commercial involvement in the social order, and the fringe response to that invasion. Cyberpunk ideals are to take the weapons and tactics of those who seek to control and reverse them or completely dissasemble them to your own ends. A cyberpunk hacker can be an ‘otaku’ intovert who is more comfortable with his deck then the company of any human; vat-grown, synth or a natty. The decsion to replace your forearm with a syntharm, complete with blades or other weaponry so you can go head to head with another corp or corparmy is ideally the cyberpunk ethos.
So do I romanticize Cyberpunk? Fuck yeah. Am I a poseur, trying to define a genre I don’t even live? I dunno, possibly. I have a vision though, and I’d like to see our young cyberpunks keep the dream alive in whatever fashion. I’ll bitch and moan about how this isn’t right or that isn’t right, that’d be the age talking. Cyberpunk shouldn’t die, it’s a critical balance to those fringe society members that think perhaps a corporation isn’t a person, and they shouldn’t be able to get away with trodding on people and pissing all over families.
Long live Cyberpunk!! Grab your datajack, plug in, break the ICE, skim the creds!
