The Real World Will Never Be Cyberpunk Enough For You
This essay is directed towards a very specific subset of the (now barely existent) cyberpunk subculture and will probably not make much sense to readers outside of it.
There is this expectation among futurist aficionados that as much as the cyberpunk genre presents a dystopia, they feel it is also a form of impending liberation where you no longer have to concern yourself with a greater narrative of life. Where there is no overarching society, no stable law and order, no familial expectations, no God to be trusted, no guarantee of traditional social mobility, and thus, no reason to ever care anymore. Where there is neither Gesellschaft, nor Gemeinschaft. Finally, an opportunity to dive towards complete and full hedonistic outlawry while existing on the fringes of hypercapitalist delirium in a world where no one truly owes each other anything anymore. A reality only afforded through the perfect combination of technological advancement and institutional degradation. At last, the human is no longer held back by the concrete walls of their socioculture and the shackles of their meat.
But the thing is, if you want to be an outlaw existing outside capitalism pursuing the wild and dangerous, that has arguably been a possibility since forever. If you wanted the tech component along with it, then the possibility has been around since the late 1980s. But if you are waiting for your own society to compel you to become some sort of cyberpunk wildcard, that probably won’t ever happen.
If you have to keep asking yourself whether the time is now or not, then it is probably not, and it never will be. This contradictory notion of commercial technology reducing the entry-level technological expertise needed to become a full-on cyberpunk outlaw, while still ceding enough room for individuals to actually affect and influence the world through that technology is frankly speaking, hilarious. For as we all know, outlawry that could easily be indulged by the common man quickly loses its rebellious touch and becomes part of the same boring routine of consumption. Internet piracy, for example. As are VPNs.
On top of that, what even gets to be a cyberpunk crime? What makes a cyberpunk criminal? Would there even be a metanarrative difference between a bank-robber from the 1970s and 2070s? Is the insider trading of the 2050s more cyberpunk than the insider trading of the 2010s? Would the organized crime syndicates of the 2060s feel more metanarratively cyberpunk than the syndicates of the 1980s? The technology? The aesthetic? Or the supposed empowerment of these gadgets and devices that allow us to do crime in a way never before considered? Are you really going to be an innovator of the sci-fi-sounding crime subculture just to feel something? Just do your crime right now. Stop waiting for the perfect deauther watch.
With the assimilation and enshittification of every interesting new technology into our pre-existing neoliberal ennui, it is fair to assume that all the tech we have dreamed of will eventually arrive in their least exciting and most sparingly functional forms. Something we can’t imagine living without, but also a hassle to live with. With no room for true cybernetic liberation, only greater crackdowns and regulations. Your FDVR will be paywalled, your flying car will be magnetically linearized, your body mods will operate on monthly subscriptions. The new technology will only serve to tie you further with the old world. Cyberpunk is not a future, it is merely an intensification of the “now”. The more the decades pass, the less it will feel like things really changed.
It is funny to witness that many cyberpunks have subconsciously already internalized this tragedy without consciously accepting it, as they continue to fall back into the nostalgia of the lost futures promised by Blade Runner, Akira and Neuromancer. A tendency that bleeds into a valorization of the 1980s and 1990s as a long distant past where for some godawful reason, the cyberpunk dream felt more achievable than it is now. That’s the ridiculous part. People mourning “cyberpunk pasts”. People reminiscing the colorful corporate nostalgia of the 80s through vaporwave, outrun, synthpop, kitsch and aesthetic revivals. People mourning the fall of Hong Kong’s glory; from the demolition of Kowloon and the degradation of its self-governance to the disappearance of its classic neon signs. People mourning the Wild West of the early Internet. People mourning the simultaneous suffocation and commercialization of formerly rebellious subcultures like acid ravers, freerunners, graffitists and hackers. “Is it me or is society becoming less cyberpunk the more cybernetic it gets?” Who knows. Some think so and mourn accordingly.
You won’t be rescued from the aesthetics of the present to be dropped into the fantasy concrete jungle under a permanent night sky that you’ve always dreamed of. The same old mom-and-pop shops will still exist. The same suburban sprawls, gray khrushchevkas, brutalist council houses and 18th century European manors will still haunt towns and cities. There won’t be synthwave in these streets. Just more of the same AC/DC songs the corporations had already licensed for 99 years.
You can move to New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore or Hong Kong. You can go find your own Blade Runner, your own Night City. You can go pursue the permanent 80s of Miami Vice. The outrun solitude of Drive. The noir gloom of Taxi Driver. You can search for the promised lands of Snow Crash. The sprawling skyscrapers in Ghost in the Shell. But the dystopian precarity of everything is the most primary theme of cyberpunk works. The cities in such media are bustling, colorful and dare I say it, alive, because of the permanent precarity of everyone living in it serving as the blood vessels of this beating neon heart.
Those who don’t live in such precarity will always feel like the modern scenery of these great cities are not whole in their experience, something feels missing deep down. “I am in Hong Kong. I am in Tokyo. I can see Neuromancer in front of my eyes. Yet, I don’t feel it. As a matter of fact, I feel it less and less with each coming day.” Because you won’t find it in its whole state. It will never be cinematic enough. Because it will always and only always be limited from the perspective of your own eyes, from the experience of a person who wouldn’t dare to actually indulge in the fantasies of outlawry, merely vicariously living it through cyberpunk heroes in media. All you can be is a tourist. Even when you are born in these cities. For even those who presently live in that precise precarity will be too exhausted to feel whatever indulgent joy and liberation one is supposed to feel from this whole affair. “Who cares about getting to feel like Rick Deckard or Takeshi Kovacs, I am trying to make it through the day. And fuck whoever dares to romanticize this.”
As someone who has had the privilege to travel around and live in some of these esteemed “East Asian cyberpunk cities”, that was very much what I felt. All I saw there was people existing, as always. With the long-domineering stench of the lagging present spread throughout, no one there seemed like people of the future. And it was disappointing. There were hackers, sure. But they were hacking present-day technology, no future to be found. There were larpers, of course. But the larpers were still waiting on the actual technologies they wanted to larp with, those that weren’t reality yet. It was a pretty present, but a regrettably universal one. The same life struggles one finds in neon Tokyo, you can easily find in brutalist Bishkek or gothic Strasbourg as well. The rest is just salad dressing, really.
There is of course, always a risk of the spectacle machine assimilating cyberpunk unto itself. Where you can finally larp and pretend to be a cool and rogue Techno-Cowboy™ and fight the evil capitalist overlords with your Plasma-Cockbuster™ while hacking into the megacorp mainframe with your AzureNexus-ÆonFlux-Hax0r-Interface™. Whatever the fuck all of that is supposed to look like. Nothing seems more pathetic in this subculture than choosing to larp as an edgerunner because a company marketed it to you.
The cyberpunk fans of these last few decades have shown themselves more and more likely to convince themselves into believing they are living in a society more technologically sophisticated than it already is. Diving headfirst into the promises of virtual and augmented realities, cryptocurrencies and metaverses, generative AIs, the Deep Web, nootropics, cybernetic augmentations, the Internet of things. Their expectations always coming headfirst with limitations of either the market, the technology or their body’s tolerance. But do the failures deter them? Nooooooooooo.
The failure of virtual reality to solve the problem of the human inner ear evokes greater fetishization of FDVR hypotheticals.
The failure of blockchain to solve the problem of financial inefficiency evokes greater fetishization of Stephensonian neo-currency fantasies.
The failure of large language models to solve the problem of workplace automation evokes greater fetishization of AGI wish fulfillment.
The failure of the Internet to solve the problem of information freedom from capitalism & authoritarianism evokes greater fetishization of escapism onto the Deep Web.
Maybe after obtaining all of them could they finally feel cyberpunk? Maybe after discovering, owning and using and exploiting all of them would they finally feel like the future is here? Or maybe, it’s only FDVR? Maybe only when FDVR has arrived would they feel satisfied enough? Or maybe only AGI? Maybe only when AGI has arrived would they feel satisfied enough?
Yes, most definitely. Only when AGI and ASI have arrived will we finally be able to live our neon dream. Only when AGI…
