Cyberpunk Now

One of the tropes of cyberpunk is an increasing globalization, expressed as an increased flow of language and culture and often a merging of one culture with another. The ways cultures impact each other are becoming ever more unavoidable and the forms it takes are fascinating.

In the cases if syncretism, we may see multiple levels as with William Gibson’s use of Voudoun where the street has further repurposed a syncretistic religion (just as the street finds its use for things, it finds a use for culture). Or, in the case of Bladerunner’s cityspeak, borrows from them.

It’s this borrowing that I find the most interesting. Henry Jenkins has speaks and writes about this whole notion of pop cosmopolitanism where cultural artifacts like music, language, and iconography travel across boundaries and, in many cases, become at least partly or sometimes wholly recontextualized. It seems to bear some resemblance to when subcultures become mainstream, but it happens at such a different scale that the shift is more profound. And because a subculture is already embedded within a given culture, it’s assimilation into the greater whole would seem to assume a certain level of context that’s completely different from when something from one culture impinges on another.

On the surface, it’s very easy to imagine a future where everyone speaks some sort of Spanish-Chinese-English patois (or, more properly, creole) and billboards display equal parts Kanji and Cyrillic and where kids listen to K-Pop from Ghana. But when cultures begin combining at more than the surface level, a strange sort of alchemy occurs and the result is often as strange and unpredictable as voudon.