Life through Mirrorlenses: Cyberpunk as a Reflection of Reality

"The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel."

- William Gibson, Neuromancer

It is common knowledge that art is a reflection of the time in which it is created. Literature is no exception, from the post-modern cynicism of the post-war period to the space operas beginning after the space race, speculative fiction tells us a lot about how authors felt, what concerned them, and which trends they saw as important.

In the 1980's, technology underwent a significant uptake by the masses. Personal computers saw exponential growth. Television became common in third world countries. Tech companies seized the opportunity to carve out empires of silicon chips and 8-bit data, and the ARPANET set the stage for what would eventually become the Internet, arguably the single most important invention in the history of mankind.

During this period, the economy experienced a substantial recovery from the recession of the late 70's. Capitalist consumerism ran rampant and Wall Street investors saw millions in the zeroes and ones that flooded out of the tech market. All the while, the wealth gap began to grow, and the manufacturing boom towns of the late 50's started to empty out, leaving only the poor and desperate to fight over the tattered remains.

Enter cyberpunk.

Cyberpunk blues

Cyberpunk is one of the most evocative genres to carve a niche for itself in the past century of writing. It has it all: the hardboiled neo-noir detective, the lethal femme-fatale, the daring code cowboy slicing his way through cyberspace - the tropes have become prevalent in other works now, too.

The tone of cyberpunk is one of unreserved dystopia, with a cynical veneer that exudes cool nihilism. It is a visceral reaction the tech boom of the 80's and the subsequent trend of human-technology interfacing. 

I remember my first introduction to it, although I didn't realise at the time, was from the manual of a video game from the late 90's called Starsiege. Back then, games weren't digital releases; they came in a big box with a manual, colour printouts, art, and in the case of Starsiege, a compendium that provided backstory to the game. While Starsiege had you controlling a giant mech and played like a grittier Mechwarrior, the compendium lovingly filled in the blanks. An earth divided by megacorporations under the banner of a united Empire, the cybernetic augmentations of everyday citizens, and the meddling with technology that ultimately causes the deaths of billions. I remember poring over the pages of the book as a child, mesmerised by the cyborgs and androids plastered there. The artwork was grisly and cartoonish, but very real.

Years later, I watched Blade Runner. My love for that film is a topic for another post. Cyberpunk film and literature became a staple of my reading diet, and I consumed voraciously. I read Gibson's catalogue back to back, sprinted through Phillip K. Dick and J. G. Ballard, and played my way through System Shock and Deus Ex. I was hooked.

The technolinguistic gap

There was something about cyberpunk that resonated deeply with me. I was a child of the late 90's, and I had missed the golden age of CRT monitors and arcades. But I was born in time to witness the internet becoming ubiquitous, changing from a screaming dial-up modem wired into the landline and becoming a seamless, integrated wireless field that permeates every square inch of the urban world. I was lucky in that regard. This Cambrian explosion of information technology, the internet of things, Web 2.0, would all become formative experiences for me. 

Now I wonder, though, if my understanding and perspective on cyberpunk is markedly different from someone born, say, ten years after me. The gap in technology is so wide that references which we take for granted are likely lost on a younger reader. The "television tuned to a dead channel" line from Gibson's Neuromancer only makes sense if you have an understanding of how an analog television functioned, in the days before digital streaming. Similarly, describing the screech of dial-up to a child who has only know the internet to be wireless can be an exercise in futility.

While this may seem irrelevant, it does have a significant impact on the readability of the genre. It dates it, forces obsolescence on books that are only now coming into their own. This is a pity; a genre predicated on the dystopian effects of hypercapitalism is more relevant now than ever. 

Cyberpunk needs to evolve with the times.

A new vision

Cyberpunk can and should take the core of the genre and transplant it into something more recognisable to a twenty-first century reader, something that holds a dark mirror to the world we live in. There are some brilliant entries into the genre, from Richard K Morgan's Altered Carbon (and the subsequent Netflix adaptation) to more contemporary pieces of speculative fiction like Black Mirror, that shine a light on the way we live today. 

Life in the fin-de-siecle digital space is far from simple. As our tech becomes more streamlined, portable and integrated, so too does our interaction with it become more complicated. The internet moved from a single point of access on an ageing family computer to a handheld device that streams 4K resolution video in seconds at the touch of a finger. The barrier between online and offline blurred. Email became instant messengers which quickly became video calls and end-to-end encrypted chat software. The old players fell away and were replaced by the social networks, as apps started to swallow each other up and become bloated abominations. Facebook was no longer something you would check once a day - it was now a constant presence, controlling your Instagram feed, connecting you via Messenger. Now, vast social networks vie for supremacy in the digital battleground, all the while pinging us and sapping our attention from anything else.

Early cyberpunk writers envisioned our connection to cyberspace as being covered in wires, spinal sockets and physical hardware interfaces. Now, the reality is different. We are all connected to a vast unknowable leviathan of data and impulse, a symbiotic relationship where we feed it our lives and receive information in return. We are addicts, craving the next hit of data shunted from the ether into the device that barely leaves our hands. Our eyes, short sighted from years of screen use, now bask in the glow of cyberspace. And in the darkness, artificial intelligence moves closer and closer to the singularity point.

And I think that's worth writing about.