Cyberpunk Dreamers: This World Needs You
The internet revolution is not the future anymore. It’s here I guess. I couldn’t get my 2nd grandma on it before she passed away. Not being connected was surprisingly problematic, and despite our best efforts, her unwillingness to engage with the internet left her lonely in her final days. I guess that’s a measure of ubiquity if there ever was one.
What scares me is that we stopped dreaming about how technology can change us, how it can subvert systems which abuse power, and how it can shape our future. In short, we don’t have enough Cyberpunk Dreamers.
We understand already that things never quite live up to all we dreamed they would be. Imaginary things require no compromises, and the slow settling of them into reality undermines that. I’ve seen it often enough. Nobody plans flaws into their grand vision, so before it exists it can be perfect. Then, slowly, as it is actually implemented, the list of things it can become narrows and the list of things it actually is becomes longer, and eventually people feel an important priority has been rejected or a value has been undermined, and they lose interest. I saw it first happen with a hackerspace I helped with for many years. Within a year of founding, a staggering percentage of the folks on the founder’s plaque were no longer a part of it. I never even met a fair handful of them in person. They felt they’d bought into something grander, and while there wasn’t anything explicitly wrong with the place that they’d protest openly, they had hoped for so much more. In less than 5 years, a series of extremely practical tradeoffs had all but weeded these idealists out completely. Maybe it’s part of some natural cycle.
What weirds me out is how content we suddenly are with our visions of the future being compromised, and how we don’t seem to fight as hard anymore. Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein, widely considered the first science fiction book, in 1818. For almost 200 years we’ve dreamed of what freedoms the future can give us and what that will cost us. Now, despite the fact that we live in a reality where a man has fled his country to protest government surveillance, the societal discussion in English grappling with these subjects seems to have all but dried up. Sometimes we go the Post-Apocalyptic method and grapple with the fallout of our choices, but rarely do we discuss the actual process of paving the road to hell.
There are some small niche markets some places. Japan had one a few years ago with Psycho Pass (2012),and Shin Sekai Yori (2012). Maybe it has petered out now, or maybe Psycho Pass 2 means there is hope. They’re doing yet another reboot of Ghost In The Shell, but they whitewashed the protagonist into not being trans so it’s a bit hard to imagine it the biting societal questioning the original series once stood for. Like our renditions of V for Vendetta (2005) and Watchmen (2009), it shows people still care, but that for some reason we feel a need to sand off the really difficult questions of who we are and where we are going for mass audiences. At the same time, those questions were all acceptable years ago in 1989, 1988 and 1986, the respective dates when these franchises were originally produced. It doesn’t give me a lot of hope.
“Cyberpunk Dreams” may not be the best word for these ideas as there are many examples of science fiction questioning what makes us who we are and who we want to become, but they certainly encapsulate the last time I saw people worried about this stuff in popular culture. Hackers (1995), Transmetropolitan (1997), Gattaca (1997), Contact (1997), Final Fantasy VII (1997), The 5th Element (1997) Pi (1998), Serial Experiments Lain (1998), System Shock 2 (1999), The Matrix (1999), Deus Ex (2000) Metropolis (2001), Metal Gear Solid 2 (2001), Minority Report (2002) Equilibrium (2002) and even the original TV-show for Ghost in the Shell (2002) fall in this group. In some ways the late 90's and early 00's encapsulated people’s belief that moderate comforts were not enough for the masses to subsist on, and that access to these comforts would erode if positive uses of technology did not keep up with the bleak alternatives we’d make for a buck.
“I’m not sick but I’m not well,
And it’s a sin, to live so well.I want to publish zines,
and rage against machines…”
Like many popular things, Cyberpunk existed about two decades before it reached enough mainstream popularity to support multiple huge titles a year. The aforementioned book classics with recent remakes are joined by Akira (1982), Neuromancer (1984) and countless others. Some of those early things even broke through into the mainstream then, like Blade Runner (1982), Tron (1982), Brazil (1985), RoboCop (1987) and Max Headroom.
The genre isn’t completely gone from the face of the earth either. Stephenson is still writing of course, and there still is a following there. Other attempts, like Dollhouse (2009) never got a real following. Fundamentally however, despite the fact that the internet revolution has not slowed down, we have stopped asking ourselves new questions about what that means, and who we want to be.
This is our world now… the world of the electron and the switch, the
beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore… and you call us criminals. We seek
after knowledge… and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color,
without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals.
You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us
and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals.Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.”
The Conscious of a Hacker, also referred to as The Hacker Manifesto by The Mentor. Published by Phrack in Volume One, Issue 7, Phile 3 of 10. Written on January 8, 1986
Part of this is the natural progress of time and the way the internet revolution has moved large pieces of the internet firmly into “the establishment.” The internet is now home to multi-billion dollar companies. They negotiate directly with nations on issues of privacy and other forms of doing right by their users, weighing the cost to their shareholders.
The cyberpunk protagonist normally is entirely outside the system. These “console cowboys” are “criminals, outcasts, visionaries, dissenters and misfits.” In the post-cyberpunk sub-genre, the anti-heroes may be a part of the system, but they are willing to sacrifice their place in it for the greater good or at least struggle with the question of if they should.
It is natural, just like that hackerspace I helped with, for things to become less counter-cultural and rebellious as they gain power. No compromises were required when it was only an idea, and there is only so much power you can obtain before you become The Establishment. Over a long enough time period, probably all of these currently-successful tightrope-walkers will fall. I’m only concerned when new ones stop cropping up to take their place, and where the need for such new powers isn’t discussed.
Today people are pretty openly comfortable about not caring, even in otherwise intellectual or educated circles. There is a key lack of people realizing that perhaps in order to build to better the world we’re going to have to take a slightly less comfortable path. Perhaps after whatever revolution comes, we won’t be the ones with power anymore, but we will have a freer society for it. Maybe September 11th scared us. That was about the end of new mainstream cyberpunk brands. Maybe the 2009 market crash scared us because we realized how much we have to lose, or perhaps, humanity isn’t ready to live up to the potential of the internet revolution.
I see the vestiges of cyberpunk sometimes, especially in SF: the piercings, the mohawks. It’s nice to see nonconformity alive and well, but it isn’t the same as people sitting up and cranking out ways to break exploitative systems, who are willing to contribute to an open source project to protect people’s privacy and dignity.
I recently had a discussion with a nice human who is responsible for some product decisions on a major browser. I was complaining how stupid our location-privacy options in browsers are now that we carry the internet everywhere, especially on phones. Even if we turn off our GPS, websites can pinpoint our entire lives by our IP addresses, and there’s relatively nothing to stop this.
“There’s no good solution” he lamented. “If we put a proxy up for you then we have all your data. If we pass it through, the individual sites have the data.
That, to me, was the essence of the loss of our Cyberpunk Dreams. We have known for a long time that the natural order of things is a long series of difficult choices with no easy answers. What sets the Cyberpunk Dreamers apart is the commitment to looking at those uncomfortable questions and creating good options, even through great personal sacrifice.
The answer to my friend’s conundrum was relatively simple: default to using your proxy servers and support options to either create and host your own with open-source software or even just make it easily configurable so 3rd party services can pick up the slack. You could even just configure Tor. The solution isn’t particularly relevant to this issue though, because the problem was that people were not willing to keep looking for better solutions. They were happy to settle.
I’m appalled how easily we’re willing to settle, to accept the state of things as immutable, our options unchangeable, and our societal power structure worth protecting because we fear the chaos of the unknown or the punishments for stepping out of line. I’m terrified that we’re now using technology to enhance our blinders, to shut out discussions just because we feel the powers are outside of our control, or that the discussion is annoying. There isn’t a real social line between the internet and real life anyways, so thinking this behavior will stop offline is laughable. I guess it was only a matter of time before somebody tried to shut up a discussion they could overhear of the Baltimore Riots with “I don’t care,” but it has already happened to me.
Now that the internet is here, we are faced with the gargantuan responsibility of looking at our dreams and budgeting to make them happen. I understand the enormity of asking people to stick to their guns on these issues, but over 30 years of cyberpunk literature has already documented the terrible things we face if we do not.
There are still too many people to name doing amazing work. There just are never enough of them. There are never enough people who are unwilling to settle over what’s “good enough,” who are ready to educate themselves on that dark futures we could create for ourselves, and who are ready to sacrifice to make sure a better one comes to pass.
So, CQ CQ.
Calling all Cyberpunk Dreamers.
Come in Dreamers.
This world needs you.
