Cyberpunk Vivisection

Before you kill it, you should know what it is

Cyberpunk began dominated by science fiction writers. Pat Cadigan, Tom Maddox, Bruce Sterling, and of course William Gibson — these people wrote for SF mags, published novels, and generally put out genre fic as a way to make a living. These people, like most genre authors, were STEMtards, and they used fiction as a way to talk about the systems they studied in math and science in relation to humanity, and at a light conceptual level, as opposed to the plodding technicality of formal research. “Cyberpunk” was this technique applied to the concepts of cyberspace, specifically. Today, cyb is dominated by artists and consumers, who value creation for emotive expression, and use cyberpunk as a means of expressing their feelings about their place in society. This inflection point between professional algobrains and hobbyist artcels explains many of the differences (even reversals) between classic and contemporary cyb.

Bruce Bethke coined the name in 1980 with “Cyberpunks”, a short story about kids being hackers. At the time, “young punks” were a genuine concern — gangs of mostly-teens roaming the streets, stirring up trouble, committing vandalism and petty crime, starting turf wars and scaring the hell out of the proto-boomer suburbanites who lived near them. Bethke believed the punks were mostly amoral, due to a lack of socialization — not maliciously vagrant, but simply pursuing their own enjoyment with little regard for the impact on other people. The other half of the name comes from cyberspace: the ethereal conceptual realm of computer networks and computerized systems. The internet of 1980 was just beginning to blossom into the informatic cancer it is today, and although many institutions were modernizing, relatively few people within those institutions really understood it. Proto-boomers used analogies to realspace tech, such as “series of tubes” and “information superhighway”. These analogies made sense to most people, who still thought solely in the context of pre-networked society, and only computer nerds who made it their business to genuinely understand cyberspace cringed at these crude comparisons. But the next generation would grow up wired in from the start — soon all young people would have the natural intuition for the rules of cyberspace that was initially only held by nerds. Bethke combined this idea of youthful adaptation to new tech with the amorality of punks and generational conflict to define a new class of hooligans: cyberpunks.

The teenage hackers of “Cyberpunks” are not anarchist, or decks-for-hire — they’re kids who slip into the school computer to change their grades, and then make a sloppy attempt to digitally rob a bank for shits and giggles. Although they’re pushed toward more ambitious crime by a darker, slightly older member of the group, most of them are simply bored and unbothered by ethical concerns. This brings me to the first big conflict between old and new: the average cyberpunk [is, is not] ideological. This doesn’t mean they don’t have an ideology or belief, but their antisocial punk behavior is driven by curiosity unhampered by moral qualms, or else by necessity, as in Neuromancer. Compare to the modern hacker: Elliot, from Mr. Robot, is explicitly driven by a desire for revenge on the show’s resident megacorp, and on capitalist society in general. Case is trying to prevent his organs from failing, Elliot is trying to erase all debt and fundamentally change society.

The ideological shift in focus goes deeper than motivation for a protagonist. The conversation as far north as Noah Berltsky is about how cyberpunk is “losing its anarchist roots”, “struggling to stay socialist”, “losing to capitalism”. Besides being unclear on whether this is a socialist or anarchist genre, these statements express a revisionist view that cyberpunk [is, is not] an activist genre. I’m biased on this issue — I hate activist fiction for the most part. I find it trite, preachy, and a waste of potential, especially in cyberpunk, a genre full of paradoxes that should elude political solutions. I won’t begrudge people their right to make that kind of stuff if it interests them. I will take issue with the common notion that cyberpunk began as an anarchist project. The Mirrorshades were professional writers — they wrote for money, and they wrote to sell copies. Their work was naturally influenced by their beliefs, but the purpose of their writing was to make a saleable product. Cyberpunk as a genre was driven by capitalism from the start.

This ultimately shouldn’t matter to you much if you’re actually writing cyberpunk, rather than merely consuming it. Consumers of cyberpunk are the most vocal branch of what passes for the community these days, and ironically very concerned with keeping consumerism out of cyb, but if you’re putting words on a page you’re welcome to write whatever kind of story interests you, and leave the conceptual calipers on the shelf. But at this point, if cyb doesn’t have to be activist, what is it? If you turn to the most prominent examples of the genre and try to pick out a few commonalities within five minutes, you might come to the conclusion that cyberpunk [is, is not] an aesthetic vision. Neon lights, cloudy megacities, urban crush, teched-up junkies — most contemporary cyberpunk seems to be ripped directly from the first page of Neuromancer, with maybe a little Blade Runner thrown in if the author’s an epicure. For many people, “cyberpunk” conjures up striking, colorful costumes, distinctive techno, or dystopian vistas, but very little in the way of recurring themes or compelling characters. I think this is laziness on the part of consumers: even Neuromancer spends as much time in a Rastafarian space station as it does mucking around the urban sprawl. I think the visual spectacle of cyberpunk, what Rudy Rucker called “eyeball kicks”, distracted readers and became the main focus for most. Visual spectacle was meant to be a technique that disoriented readers to give them a sense of the high-speed information dense world of cyberspace, but it has become the only thing many people remember. Perhaps it worked too well — or perhaps readers did not take the stories seriously enough. Maybe Gibson is responsible for his own complaint that Cyberpunk 2077 looks like “GTA skinned-over with a generic 80s retro-future”.

“Оставь,” I can practically hear you shouting, “you’ve gone on and on about how old and new cyberpunk disagree on whether cyb is or is not something, and always old has taken the side of is not. You haven’t quite said it outright, but you seem to believe the classic model is better. But you haven’t told us anything about what the classic mode of cyberpunk actually is, only what it isn’t! Do you actually have a reason to prefer the old style, or do you just think ‘new thing bad’?”

There is a positive vision in cyberpunk, but I needed to peel away the cruft first. Most of the people who read this will believe in the more modern interpretation, because that’s the mode of thought that has spread through forums and thinkpieces, because that’s the interpretation of cyberpunk adopted by the loudest voices, whether mainline socialists or video game publishers. If you don’t let these voices filter your understanding of cyb, if you just start reading and don’t stop, you’ll find that cyberpunk is about something tangible. It’s even in the name: cyberpunk is about people and networks. You can rename “networks” to anything you’d like — spheres, webs, graphs, circles. The networks can have any kind of node you want — computers, people, families, trees (hello, Orson Scott Card). The people are often amoral, antisocial, aimless, adrift — punks — but they don’t have to be. Every cyberpunk story starts with a network of interconnected elements, then posits people interacting with that network, then imagines how the network changes those people, and vice versa. Those are the only two elements fundamental to the genre — no neon required. Everything else is tropes.

Through this lens, cyberpunk comes into focus. Motifs that are mostly incidental to cyb-as-activism, such as the emphasis on computer skill, or the youth of all the most talented hackers, become natural to cyb-as-networks. Corps are no longer Disney villains for cyberpunks to relentlessly undermine at every opportunity — they are ultra-powerful entities on the network, still dangerous, but not unifaceted. This definition allows creators freedom to play with the tropes of cyberpunk in ways they simply can’t when those tropes are themselves the defining features. It gives readers an initial conceptual string to pull on when trying to unravel the meaning of a cyberpunk work. And it gives me, as an editor, a simple test for whether a written work is doing cyberpunk well. If the network is nonexistent or incidental, it probably doesn’t belong in my zine.

Network cyberpunk is what I’m passionate about, why I care about the genre in the first place. I’m not just uninterested in activist cyberpunk — I resent it for stealing attention away from what I believe cyb could be. And as for aesthetic -punk suffixes, well, the less said about that the better. None of these things are mutually exclusive with the other, but putting networks first is the only way to draw out cyb’s full potential. The other two are natural fits for the genre, but they have damaged cyberpunk by becoming its main focus. Always remember where “cyberpunk” comes from: “cyber”, for the network, and “punk”, for the dangerous people who use it.