Tech Journal: Cyberpunk
Our writing for this project will revolve around two main questions: (1) what kinds of commentary about contemporary culture can Cyberpunk and postmodern SF make possible? (2) What kinds of theoretical and practical possibilities can be created through imaginative integration with worlds, organisms and technology radically different from, yet reflective of, our own? Since we are focusing on Cyberpunk, a genre that encourages us to pragmatically speculate, we will be examining a variety of classic and current themes such as dystopian futures, cyberspace, intersections of the body and technology, bio-modification/warfare and alternate realities, among others. A special emphasis will be given to current intersections of postmodern fiction and cyberpunk, including bio-politics, identity studies, gender studies, information theory and ethics.
What are the tendencies of Cyberpunk?
Adapted from Professor Mark Cooley
Envisioning a Globalized Future
Envisioning a globalized future characterized by multiculturalism, combined with extreme class division and the hegemony of a corporate state. Stories often focus on street-level disenfranchised or disaffected characters who are often compelled to engage in dangerous border crossings of one type or another. Whether their travels be in geographic space, cyberspace, or psychological space, crossing over into forbidden zones is always met with intense danger and hostility.
Engaging with info-tech, biotech, and nanotech
Engaging with info-tech, biotech, and nanotech by suggesting how the human body, the psyche, and society will transform with the development and use of invasive technologies, while insisting that these changes won’t likely be dropped from the sky for the “benefit of all mankind,” but rather, engineered and disseminated inside systems of tight economic, political, and social controls.
Using the human-technology interface
Using the human-technology interface (the Matrix) as a way to explore how the conditions of post-modernity challenge deeply embedded paradigms of western thought; in particular, binary oppositions such as reality/illusion, originality/duplication, life/death, human/inhuman, male/female, organic/inorganic, artifice/nature.
Critiquing The Corpo-State and/or Megacorporations
Instead of portraying industry and technology as the savior of mankind, as much Golden Age SF does, Cyberpunk, critiques the Corpo-State by depicting bleak and ecocidal post-industrial quasi-fascist states where tyrannical corporations wage war on public and individual interests for the benefit of powerful private parties. Particularly of interest is the way in which the rational society uses invasive technologies and city and social planning as apparatuses of control through surveillance, propaganda, and overtly hostile acts.
Privileging a DIY attitude
Cyberpunk privileges a DIY attitude in the punk and hacker traditions with an ambivalent stance toward technology as both a tool of dominance and liberation, ecstatic pleasure and unrivaled pain. Characters often work toward changing the beneficiary of technology by turning oppressive technologies against the interests that they were designed to serve.
Elevating the Anti-hero
Cyberpunk often subverts typical Golden Age Science fiction tropes of CIS male heroes (with morally acceptable goals and world saving powers) with the antihero: a queered figure whose gender, morality, goals, body, and psyche have a conflicted relationship with themselves and the rapidly changing world around them.
