The scope of cyberpunk

(I know cyberpunk isn't specifically /lit/ but couldn't think of a better board) I have been wanting to have this conversation for a while. What exactly is the scope of the "cyberpunk" genre? Lately, and especially since Cyb2077, I feel like most people associate cyberpunk with transhumanism, sometimes to the point of mixing them up, and I really couldn't agree less. So as a conversation starter, allow me to give my half-thought cyberpunk definition: A Cyberpunk world is a dystopia, where instead of thinking "what if there was a nuclear winter?", we ask ourselves "what if humanity lost the information war?". "Which war?" you may ask; well, it's the war that we are currently living in. Computers made information central to everything we do. Information is what defines us, what any given entity can emit and receive. Information is biased. It's not knowledge, because information is interpreted. Now for the stakes; it's actually quite simple, and it's about who controls the information. Most cyberpunk worlds depict dystopias where those who hold power on a societal level are corporations, who control everything through information. In today's world, that would be the big "tech" companies, that despite not exercising an important power over governments, are still powerful enough to influence life or death (cf. the Rohingya genocide). Cyberpunk is a world where the average citizen is a slave of information, and can only exist on a spectrum from "outsider entities know all information that can be known about this person" to "no information is known in this person and they don't exist in the eyes of society" (with ofcourse intermediary steps). Cyberpunk is a world where you can no longer decide which information about you is created, stolen, processed, transfered, or deleted, and your only escapism is to not participate in society. It feels weirdly familiar... So, to get back to my original introduction, transhumanism is indeed cyberpunk if we consider the alienation of our body to external entities. What do you guys think about this information-centered definition? Would you argue with it?

A punk is "a usually petty gangster, hoodlum, or ruffian" Cyber means something related to computers. It comes from the word cybernetics, which "is a wide-ranging field concerned with regulatory and purposive systems." Cyberpunk would therefore be about people doing illegal stuff using computers. In order to portray the protagonist as a hiro, the whole society is usually portrayed as corrupt, such that the crimes can be justified, and even seen as virtuous. That's my take anyway!

Cyberpunk is just a depiction of late-stage capitalism and the strugles of people in that society trying to go against it's institutions or at very least try to get by.

>>8238 I agree with your assessment for the most part, but I believe that punk can also be associated with the underbelly of society in a broader sense. That is why the saying "high tech, low life" exists. You need not be using computers for illegal things, but you have to depict a generally grungy society that is integrated with computers and technology to a point that they inescapable within the setting. This is why haphazard bodily modifications are associated with cyberpunk. It is not the bodily modification itself that sets the theme as being cyberpunk, it is the idea of these high tech bodily modifications being used in grungy societies with little regulation and questionable quality. I believe that the reason this genre is so popular is because it takes computers and technology, paragons of progress and wealth, and it contrasts them with regressive and poor societies. Older series would prefer to turn up the contrast by stripping computers down to show their raw interiors (SEL comes to mind with Lain's room and the VR goggles guy) while more modern ones take a mixed approach showing both stripped tech and futuristic tech in order to differentiate technology used by the poor from that of the rich such as in Cyberpunk 2077. >>8239 Many eastern European countries have quite strong cyberpunk aesthetics due to their mixture of poverty and high tech. Cyberpunk fiction takes place in corporatist societies because capitalist societies are the ones that historically trend towards higher technologies. Cyberpunk aesthetics are also largely inspired by crowded Japanese cities, aesthetics inspired by a capitalist society with rising mega corporations, hence the trend towards the representation of such societies as crowded corporatist hellscapes.

>>8238 I would tend to disagree, because steampunk/solarpunk aren't about people doing illegal stuff using steam/sunlight. "Punk" used as a standalone and a suffix don't convey the same meaning imo (and it's why it still feels weird to me to hear "cyberpunk" used to qualify people) >>8239 >Cyberpunk is just a depiction of late-stage capitalism and the strugles of people in that society trying to go against it's institutions or at very least try to get by. I agree, but I think it's a very unclear definition, and it doesn't include anything technology-wise

>>8238 This is the best definition so far imho. >>8239 Typically yes, however I'm not sure that I would consider it to be part of the core definition of cyberpunk.

>>8241 > illegal stuff using steam Made me think of this ol guy. But yeah that's not quite what those mean. More about the aesthetic right?

I've been thinking about this a lot I think one of the most common misconception about cyberpunk, and the very reason why the genre isn't more popular, is that people tie it to retrofuturism. Cyberpunk has nothing to do with retrofuturism, and the only reason people think it does is because the apogee of the genre (the 80s) had a distinct idea of the "future" that 2020s humans tend to be nostalgic about. Maybe we should try to requalify the genre, or invent a new label for Cyberpunk that isn't 80s nostalgia retrofuturist garbage but actual literature about information and power

>>8237 "high tech, low culture" sums it up best. I'd say cyberpunk is fiction that sits at the point where poverty or some level of marginalization and outsider status meets with a society where high technology has proliferated en masse and shows how everything seems to be dominated by power in ways that corrode human worth. It's not enough to do one or the other, but both. Take Steins;Gate, it doesn't have that boilerplate aesthetic people associate with cyberpunk, but it's about a bunch of low life otakus and chan site dwellers building a time machine with junk they found in Akihabara, but it also explores how high tech is used by the powerful to dominate society (mass surveillance, time manipulation) and the ways technological advancement deprives us of freedom. SEL obviously qualifies for similar reasons, but the world we live in now looks a lot like the world in that show and not like Cyberpunk2077 garbage. As for cyberpunk culture, that's a hard thing to actually pin down. Did a cyberpunk culture ever exist? Is it even relevant in a society where the average person owns multiple computers and carries them around in their pocket? It's hard to answer because the fiction genre came first and there's now a very streamline and standardized corporate cyberpunk churned out by major studios. >>8956 This. Cyberpunk has just become this soykafty aesthetic that's a mix of Tesla-esque design aesthetics, AI generated garbage vaporwave and crackpot leftist political theory that has no real connection to actual people anymore.

we've been discussing this for a decade but I'm autistic or something so I guess I'll bite. cyberpunk is a name given to a turn in the science fiction genre that was against the utopianism of "high science fiction" in works like those by Isaac Asimov (although some consider I, Robot to be a precursor to cyberpunk as well). Instead of focusing on the triumph of humanity as it extends into the far future, cyberpunk focused on the immediate consequences of social excess and the contradictions inherent to this genre. for this reason, I feel cyberpunk can be understood as a new romanticism - a response to the nuclear age as gothic literature was a response to industrialism. I would also argue this new romanticism challenged the hold utopian, perhaps humanistic, scientistic science fiction held on reality. this new realism found itself capable not only of criticizing the fetishism of scientific progress, which is itself spiritual, but also discovering a new spirituality - explicit in some cases like the magic in Count Zero, but also with the recognition of older sci-fi's implicit spirituality, as well. cyberpunk in this sense isn't the first to do this - itself descending from the new wave of science fiction that was a response to its golden age, and World War II. "cyberpunk" itself is a label applied after the writing of works called The Movement. but this literary understanding falls short of how the word cyberpunk is used: people are called cyberpunks often in association with rebellion and technology. there is a constant ongoing conversation about what is truly cyberpunk in terms of both what confirms certain genre conventions and also what holds to a particular spirit of rebellion to the extent that there are competing, popular definitions that vary by community and values. as cyberpunk is both a coveted recognition of righteous subversion and a descriptor of a dystopian setting that exists in criticism of a particular techno-utopianism, which itself can see cyberpunk aesthetics as cool, edgy, and worthy of embrace. transhumanism is cyberpunk in the sense that there are rich transhumanists who hope to live forever, who see the human condition improved through cybernetics - itself an unfortunate child of ecology, information theory, and the military industrial complex. it is also cyberpunk in the sense that there are other transhumanists who biohack with limited resources as a form of radical bodily autonomy, it is also neither of those things and not cyberpunk in the sense that naive techno-utopianism is, that transhumanists are blind to the real issues, that their humanism arrives at a false sense of consensus about what's good for others, fetishizing the illusion of progress and innovation just as the industrialists who kicked off the past few centuries of environmental devastation once did. this also makes it cyberpunk. >What do you guys think about this information-centered definition? I don't think the world you're describing is the only or ur-cyberpunk world but I do think we live in it - in the sense that cybernetics and its successor in systems theory have informed policy in the world's most powerful government for as long as we've lived. This is not a new development - it is remarkably close to the notion of society as an organic system, which developed in progressive European state policy around the early 1900s. What might be different is how surveillance has been a part of this our entire lives even as it evolved fundamentally in the wake of 9/11 (still the entirety of life for many, or close to it), and theoretically speaking "new materialism", or "information realism" - where information became the mode of holding power. I would argue however, against the determinism of this world as reality or a warning about reality - rather it is the navigation of an information economy, within an economic society, that produces this vision alongside others, which are themselves socially strategic navigations. Yet I would also argue that social theory predating the internet - Marshall McLuhan, for instance - also predicted and predated this surveillance society in a way that feels no accident policymakers would *try* to bring it about. this system of mass surveillance however falls short in the volume of information to be processed exists in excess of the ability to process it, alongside the insistence of proles to reject the status quo.

>>8962 Great post, lainon. People consider the romantic movement to be situated around 1800-1850 period. Cyberpunk is probably about to or already past a 50 year old mark as a movement. Would you say that it's about to become obsolete and be replaced by something else? If so, what do you think will supplant it? Another symptom I find is that Blade runner 2049 flopped just like the original, while Ready Player One did gangbusters. As in the aesthetic has been captured by the corpos and is used to profit while smothering the spirit of the movement. Interested to hear your thoughts, you seem much more knowledgeable on this subject

>>8963 thanks, i feel like it was mid because it wasn't responsive enough to the last 2 posts before, both of which were good, and said a lot of the same things in fewer words, what's more it was only the start of what i wanted to elaborate. >Would you say that it's about to become obsolete and be replaced by something else? I feel like we have these almost-movements that keep struggling to be born. theres a lot of different movements that position themselves against the status quo in some capacity but don't quite get it, and i want to be very careful not to project my own ideas about what resistance to authority should look like - the inadequacy of these things is something that ive heard from others and also feel myself. i don't think any of these will be the next big thing but i see some genuine emergence of an anti-establishment ethos that can have influences in all these things. but you can also see the elements of a fascistic revival in all these groups as well - i think it's possible to imagine internal strife in all these groups increasingly consolidating among class lines, but i also don't mean to say that blind of how so many have been waiting for that. i think that there actually are confounding variables in terms of the fact that money is unprecedentedly moving between generations, the sentence "largest wealth transfer of history" makes sense actually. and i think thats not the only factor but that modern social issues are also a form of wealth transfer, for instance in how the years following the legalization of gay marriage money moved into the LGBT community, or the widespread proliferation of DIY HRT changed drastically what trans people are capable of. this said, i feel like the blueprint for how that money would move and stay in the upper class was already made, and what we are witnessing now is simply the extranae that wasn't fully accounted for. the widespread decriminalization of drugs in the United States is another piece of the broader social chaos, which itself already has a consolidating blueprint. on a broader scale i think we are witnessing the balkanization of the United States, something that has been discussed for years but is finally becoming apparent. while not as deep, I think the recent OpenAI stuff, if nothing else, was a moment of consolidation because it made bedfellows of parties whos opposition or unfamiliarity with one another seemed unusual. in terms of cultural movements i feel that, as it happened historically, there is no name for the next movement - i do not expect a singular verbalized paradigm to last especially long. the internet remains unusual in that it ties local subcultures to wider networks, such that local subcultures are manifestations of their virtual communities, - disembodied entities in cyber culture, where virtual communities have been consistently suppressed - the massive scale-up of discord / group chatification as a whole is a reversal of this trend, but its different now in that its not open protocols. so i think we're still realizing what these entities are capable of doing, COVID being the first stress test that, again unprecedently, uplifted the virtual. even if none of this is true, my actual response to your question is that the future remains unwritten, and that what will exist can be created by people like you and myself. prediction and speculation upon prediction is something largely done by and for those who remain in power, all i hope to provide is a few points towards possibility other than what is.

I like to think of cyberpunk as Prometheus gave fire to Human, and Human made real good use of it until he realized he could burn the swamp down to get rid of mosquitoes. So grinning madly he does it, everything goes up in flames and he goes on in his life occasionally jumping and dancing about how all the damn mosquitoes are gone while he himself is living in burnt mud, ashes, coals, and soot. He doesn't even see that he's breathing coal dust (or he doesn't care), he bent nature to his will, and he takes tearing out nature from his life as an upgrade from suffering its ails. So when Human started the fire in the swamp, all he had to do was light it and it killed all the mosquitoes for him. But the fire also did something else. It fuarrrked up the land, burnt it black and now toxic soot flies in the air, nothing grows from the earth and he is weaker than ever. He himself did not have to lift a finger, did not have to sweat and toil to craft the world he wanted to see. He could have followed the justice of natural law, and as a result Nature would have rewarded him with a stronger body. But when he saw the task at hand, and was faced with the law of nature, he thought himself above it, and chose the path of facilitation, the path of fire. He didn't think further. To this you gotta add that cyberpunk would not be as big in my opinion if it wasn't a relevant observation of the real world, its potential future, and the problems arising from Human making everything around him fully convenient with fire and all that entails. Fire in this regard can mean a host of things from pharmaceutics to refineries to computation. First instead of submitting to the justice of the natural law, he takes out everything natural from his life, not because it is natural, but because it pesters him. Thus he bypasses the natural justice in his body having to fight viruses in order to become stronger. He bypasses the natural justice of needing to be physically apt in order to shape the world around him with combustion engines and having fire do the work for him. He bypasses the natural justice of having to be intelligent in order to understand the world by having a machine think in his stead. By trying to bend all nature to his will, Human broke its laws. When those laws were broken, consequences logically began to arise. Not all were immediate; Human had time to tune and twist the knobs, pushing fire around so it worked a bit closer to what he had in mind, and not blatantly burn the forest down too. But the consequences are coming. Consequences which come in the form of natural justice. The engine sweat for him, he became weak. The computer thought for him, he became dumb. When he bypassed the natural law, he lost a bit of nature inside of him. Cyberpunk is like pushing back against these consequences so damn far that they become irrelevant. Human breaks all of nature's laws and somehow survives because he replaces these laws with his. He creates conditions that answer to him, and after having broken all the boundaries that could be broken, just as a logical progression of his masculine will, he reigns alone in the soot, free of nature's ails, having made up his own instead. The master of soot. I always think back of Deus Ex, Human Revolution, and the first time I laid my eyes on Hengsha City. A city... atop a city. And all the hot, stuffy, dirty streets with the gangsters and miserably poor dregs living in sewers, the prostitutes and their slavers, the common joe who just keeps looking at the sky... Nature. It was such an impression on me when Adam Jensen took that escalator shuttle from Tay Yong Medical all the way up to the Upper city, when I was looking out the front see-through wall as it was going up, and when I realized I was looking at a completely different city. A clean, white, modern-looking sprawl, wide and open, with great green parks and gardens and tennis fields and exalted universities and the like. All manners of luxury and restaurants full of clean, well-fed intellectuals... The world which man wanted to craft. I thought of what the average student's life there would be like. If they had been to the lower city like Malik says she did at some point, back when she used to study there. Or if the Upper City Hengsha denizen even thought of the world below them at all. When I got all the way up at Zhao Yu Run's penthouse, crawling through the open space offices, I was in utter awe in the golden penthouse hall with the soft chanting as OST. I felt like I was on top of all humanity, and I was; Tay Yong Medical is a colossal company and Zhao essentially an Illuminati. I instinctively thought of the pyramid, the Eye in the top part that, enlightened, sees. Look at that symbol again; you won't see the top part attached to the rest of the pyramid. Top part doesn't care; it will play with fire all the way. It's got shiny respirators that keeps the dust out its antibiotic lungs. But for that to become a possibility it has to sit its ass on the bottom part and pull, even as it tries to launch off. When it eventually does, bottom part will just become a fading memory. Purely betrayed, free to live on its misery and try to mend its broken world after having been wrung dry of all it had. Top part will go on, pushed onward by the call to destiny. Not even because it needs to, but because it is fire, and fire likes to burn. So all in all it makes sense why the gods punished Prometheus. Or it really is just laptop gangsters and I'm a debil. But just do something for me quick and look up alchemical symbol of the element of fire. >>8964 I think it's kind of funny how trannies force themselves into a conversation again not because it seems obvious to you that they'd be in this topic, but because it's ironic in light of what I just wrote about. Trannies are nothing more than Human realizing he is still bound to natural law in some way and deciding that he doesn't like that. It is his process of subverting natural truth with his own.

>>8238 >>8239 I always thought that the punk aspect pertained to the revolt against authority or corporate control. In this sense, any actor fighting some authority for a sense of autonomy would encompass the genre of punk, hence Ghost in the shell, while being a futuristic police drama, and blade runner being A SCI-fi detective noir drama are all consistent with the low life aesthetic. The role of technology in this rebellion makes it cyber. By contrast you have similar genres like steampunk (focus on steam and alternate technologies) but still many times dystopian, or solarpunk which is less fatalistic and polluting because technologies are sustainable and environmentally compatible, but still encompasses the man vs society or man vs authority narrative. Look at mirrors edge, what genre would you call it? As a counterexample look at post-cyberpunk as a genre too.

>>8964 >I feel like we have these almost-movements that keep struggling to be born. It seems the internet and social media have created this situation where emerging countercultures can be dismissed, contained or strangled in the cot. Like mold or fungi, subcultures need dark fringe corners to grow and develop in but enough access to wider society to really spread. With the modern internet, it's very easy for something to start and either become a pastiche aesthetic spread by corpos (e.g. dark academia or cottagecore) or eternal september happens. Hacker culture has gone, replaced by the tech bro, jihadism has been bombed to the stone age, /p0l/ is contained and impotent and cyberpunk is just another cottagecore type social media aesthetic. It's become far too easy for the powers at be to crush or co-opt any kind of movement they perceive as threatening, no matter how overblown, and in a post-9/11 world, our rulers see threats literally everywhere. When it comes to cyberpunk, you see multiple intentional attempts to spark some kind of movement based on fiction, anime and /g/ culture. But it remains vague, weak, almost lost and indecisive in a way. The punk movement of the 70s had a clear ethos and values, even if nobody put it down in a manifesto everybody just knew it organically. Imageboard cultures work in a similar way, but whereas punk was a movement built around young kids socializing, 4chan derived IBs are downright anti-social and the user base is characterized more by what they are not (NEET - not productive) than anything else. >>8968 Prometheus and fire is an interesting example of instrumental technocratic mentality. When I visited a rural village in India, a very traditional community, I found the locals giving offerings to a river feared for drowning fishermen and swimmers. The logic behind this is that by making a deal with the river, by giving it a gift, you create a reciprocal relationship of mutual care and respect and it's less likely to be drown people. With the modern technocratic mindset, everything is just an object to be catalogued and exploited, that instrumental attitude of Prometheus has taken over literally everything. We'd think nothing of dumping toxic waste into a river and we laugh at the idea that water can be sentient, it's just stuff we can manipulate for selfish ends. We've pushed that mentality to such an extreme that even things common sense would dictate are irrational and suicidal, like building a vast arsenal of nuclear weapons or weaponizing smallpox, are treated as ordinary, to be expected, as somehow rational and sensible policy. Humans are little more than cattle, statistics to be toyed with by some bureaucrat or corpo exec who can socially engineer society at will, and by enlarge people are trained to accept this as normal. Hengsha eerily resembles the world we live in. The only difference is that the poor and rich don't really live together. New York is for the wealthy, the poor live in Jersey and commute to do the dirty work. In Dubai it's even more stark, the city is entirely for the wealthy while the poor live in Sharjah and commute. This was by design, it meant the mass protests and failed revolutions of 2011 could not happen in the UAE. The people couldn't come out into the streets because they don't live anywhere near them. It's the scary totalitarianism of our modern developed societies. Even in feudal Europe, the peasants could revolt and turn over a king, today people are less and less capable of even legal protest.

>>8977 The next step is DIY cybernetic enhancements, like a small device that absorbs your Voice through the skull and delivers sound to your inner ear. You could hook up something like a digital assistant/AI to expand your capabilities. Even if neuralink fails the general idea is doable so it will come sooner or later and you would be actually able to jack in the internet while being inside the sensory deprivation tank. As for the nuclear weapons. There's a good podcast episode on that. Logical insanity from Hardcore history. The gist is that it's always incremental and by the point you get Hiroshima and Nagasaki they weren't the most destructive bombings of the war because fire bombings of Japan have been going for a while and they were more horrific than that. We currently have conventional weapons that can produce explosions on par with those first bombs bombs if I remember correctly. Like the N2 (non nuclear) bombs from Evangelion.