Cyberpunk Now

In his recent on-line writing, Charles Stross hit the nail on the head about the cyberpunk lifestyle in his auobiography (Charles Stross: The Early Years).

“The cyberpunk lifestyle reads a whole lot better in fiction than as a lifestyle manifesto. Take it from someone who’s lived through it.”

“Picture this: you’re a former drug dealer who has turned to hacking for a living. You’re crashing in an apartment a bit older than Texas, surrounded by about seventeen computers, sleeping on a futon with a girlfriend with metre-long purple dreadlocks, and planning your defection from one net-based futuristic corporation to another over Korean take-away food. It sounds like something out of an early story by William Gibson, but the reality is a whole lot less glamorous. I’ve been there; I speak from experience. Cyberpunk is very nineteen-nineties: as a lifestyle statement it leaves something to be desired. Given that the late seventies and early eighties are the height of fashion right now, I reckon we’re about fifteen years away from the inevitable revival — I’ll be there, doddering around on a Zimmer frame and waving my fist at those young punks who’ve never used a command line interface.”

All the heroes of cyberpunk really epitomize the romanticization of a lifestyle that can easily become rather unpleasant. Whether it’s being a bike messenger, an anime otaku (or any kind of otaku, really), a punk rock musician, or simply homeless, it’s really not that great. Living in a squat with a dozen other people is all well and good until someone steals your stuff or the police show up and forcefully evict everyone.

In the intro to Shirley’s City Come A-Walkin’, William Gibson wrote, “John Shirley was cyberpunk’s patient zero, first locus of the virus, certifiably virulent.” .

I was going through some old papers and chanced across a copy of 21C magazine that included that quote. Interestingly, while some things seem dated, the 21C interview with John Shirley seems as relevant today as it did then.

“I mean, a subculture is by its nature reactive, which is one of its limitations. If you’re always reacting, you’re limited in how much insight you can have, and how much objectivity and how conscious you can be.”

“The fringe becomes the mainstream sometimes. Even where it doesn’t become the mainstream, the social organism feeds from the fringe in some way. It’s like a starfish. You have these weird little tendrils on the exterior of its body that takes in little bits of things and eventually it metabolizes the little pieces into the heart. The social organism is almost that cohesive and organic.”

But Shirley has always been the one who put the punk in cyberpunk with his rock musician sensibility and his Eclipse (Song of Youth) books remain some of the most important books of the Cyberpunk movement.

Recently, he revisited some of his other ideas and his novel Black Glass is both a look back at some of those ideas while retooling them in a thoroughly modern fashion. Talking about the book with H+ Magazine, on writing Black Glass, he said:

“My sensibility was more or less hard-nosed pulp, with surreally artistic overtones, the way that punk rock is largely structured noise elevated by the poetry of defiance. That’s not very Neal Stephenson or Cory Doctorow — guys who personified the 2007 paradigm to me.”

I’m always fascinated by ideas and Shirley’s thinking about the present is definitely food for thought:

“We shift our center of identity into digital representations. We overlap with our technology. And sometimes that’s a useful enhancement — other times it only magnifies what’s wrong with us…”

For other reading and further thoughts, check out EdgeTrends online magazine.

The future is dystopian in the world of cyberpunk. No matter the location, there is a general sense of disaster, either spoken or unspoken. The air is begrimed, the water befouled, and a myriad trace toxins are found everywhere. Despite that, there always seems to be enough water.

World Water Day was Sunday, March 22nd. The central theme is that of transboundary waters and the recognition that the need for water is univeral among all humanity despite national (or even local) boundaries. But issues of water seem somewhat abstract and the shortage of water something that merely needs a technological helping hand. Even the omnipresent rain in Bladerunner, despite its toxicity (as stated in the script, as compared to Philip K. Dick’s book, “The morning air, spilling over with radioactive motes, gray and sun-beclouding, belched about him…”), comes out of the taps cleanly. At least, it seems to, since we rarely see the omnipresence of plastic bottles of purified water, samovars or kettles of boiling water or all the other accoutrements prevalent in the third world where even municipal water supplies are not considered suitable for drinking. Certainly, few cyberpunk protagonists are ever laid up with giardiasis, cholera, amebiasis or any of the other ills of impure water.

A spinner on a rainy street in Bladerunner

The few novels that do mention water are typically those where it forms some part of the plot, being either recent (Ian McDonald’s River of Gods) or are more of the proto-cyberpunk camp (J.G. Ballard’s The Burning World (AKA The Drought) and John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up). However, the former seems more an echo of already existing issues and the latter two books have environmental disaster as their primary focus, being eco-disaster novels like many others of that era.

Despite not being a cyberpunk novel, The Burning World sounds more prescient than most, despite the novel having been published in 1964:
“Johnstone brushed aside the money with the barrel of the shot-gun. ‘We take no cash for water here, son. You can’t buy off the droughts of this world, you have to fight them. You should have stayed where you were, in your own home.’”

I think this assumption of the ready availability of water or the human organism’s adaptation to bad water that cyberpunk comes across as dismissive of the realities of the dystopia that’s being projected. If you’ve never lived in a dust bowl, grown up in a slum like Dharavi, or otherwise been impacted by a lack of water simply for drinking and bathing, it’s very easy to give short shrift to the problem or to gloss over it (something along the lines of the author saying, “the whole world’s going to hell, so I can be vague”). It’s the contrast between much of cyberpunk literature and a literary movement like Afrocentrism. The baseline assumptions seem fundamentally different and even the protagonist’s basic needs and goals are fundamentally altered.

Even if the wars of the future aren’t over water, many of cyberpunk’s tropes play themselves out in the way issues of water management and allocation play themselves out. The corporate privatization of water by multinational companies has a very mixed success rate, but could have a dramatic impact on the daily life of people all over the world.

I’ve been reading quite a bit about liminal spaces as they relate to cyberpunk. I’ve also been thinking about how few films capture what might be termed a cyberpunk aesthetic. That’s why the short film “Abigail” by filmmaker Emily Yoshida caught me off-guard since, to judge from the trailer, it encapsulates the idea of liminality with a futuristic feel that also reminds me of what films like Johnny Mnemonic and Code 46 perhaps should have been.

It shouldn’t be surprising considering that she cites Bladerunner as an influence and I hope I’m able to see the film at some point.

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.

Writing about things like politics and privacy, science fiction writer David Brin maintains a blog to further explore discussions that arise on his official site.

As a writer who is very knowledgeable about future trends and an active imagination (a necessary prerequisite for any science fiction writer), you should give him a read over at Contrary Brin.

Home.

Home was BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis

Program a map to display the frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse. the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta. . .

William Gibson, Neuromancer

I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of cities on a vast scale, whether they’re dense agglomerations of people in arcologies or unimaginably vast sprawls of apartments and skyscrapers. The ultimate outcome of such a concept is typified by the concept of the ecumenopolis or “world city.” Various sizes of concentrations of people on a larger scale than currently exists are part of the study of Ekistics, the study of all kinds of human settlements and how they develop.

As the human population increases, barring the colonization of space or a great die-off that reduces the population of Earth, the growth of larger cities and the increased blurring of lines between urban areas seems inevitable. Already, parts of the planet have great areas of very dense population, as shown in this demographic information (PDF). The densities of the cities of India, particularly Mumbai and Kolkata are amazing, but we shouldn’t overlook places like Kinshasa which are large and extremely dense cities.

The term information asymmetry is specifically applied to economics and represents the seller (or sometimes the buyer) having more information and, therefore, an advantage in a transaction. It’s an interesting extrapolation that relates to game theory and a bunch of cool stuff like that.

Interestingly, I think it applies in quite a few other situations. I’ve been reading quite a bit about China’s cyberwarfare planning (as explored in the paper “Like Adding Wings to the Tiger”) and asymmetric warfare (particularly guerrilla war in urban settings).

Similar concepts apply to chess as explored in the article, “Chess! What is it good for?” Interestingly, this article suggests tempo is the key to winning battles. Some theorists I’ve read say that adequate intelligence is necessary, such as being able to read an opponent at the individual level, in order to set and maintain the right tempo. In many cases, tempo depends on coordinating quite a few things at once, making for a very information-dense environment, so the ability to collect information and effectively filter it are key to maintaining that tempo.

Are we still headed for the dystopian crash that’s been predicted for decades?  Or will the future be even stranger and darker than we can imagine.  This is my take on some of the few trends and possibilities based on recent developments.