Cyberpunk Now

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.

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.