Cyberpunk Now

After being reported cancelled, it appears that director Shekhar Kapur’s new movie, Paani (“Water”) may be made. In a recent interview between Kapur and the Times of India, he said:

Your next film Paani is about water wars. What made you choose this particular topic?

I don’t think you’ll be living in India and not be aware of this issue. I grew up as a kid thinking that water would never run out. And now as a grownup I realise that water is running out. People keep saying that we are facing an environmental issue if we are not careful. But the problem right now with water is that 90 per cent of this world is already short of water and we are heading towards huge social unrest over water. The film is about the same issue.

After gestating for five years, it’s a topic that Kapur feels passionate about, both in interviews about the film and as noted on a Bollywood News site:

In a tweet on March 7, 2011, film helmer Shekhar Kapoor said:
“Paani is not just about Water, it is about Water as a weapon of war against people by those in Power.”

There’s an outside chance that fans might get to see a decent cyberpunk movie, perhaps as early as 2013, between a movie based on Neuromancer directed by Vincenzo Natali (Cube and Splice) and a follow-up to Bladerunner directed by Ridley Scott.

The Natali-directed film for Neuromancer sounds more interesting, though lining up financing in order to do it properly may be a challenge.

Seven Arts Pictures PLC has announced an agreement with Prodigy Pictures, Inc. to jointly produce and distribute the highly-anticipated motion picture Neuromancer, based on the best-selling science fiction novel by William Gibson.

Prodigy hopes to arrange substantial financing for the film, which is expected to have a production budget of approximately $60 million.

Fans have been somewhat lukewarm about Scott returning to make a new Bladerunner movie. Part of the issue is when the movie takes place and, given that prequels tend to be a little too much retreading of familiar ground, the movie could simply wind up being a dull nostalgia-fest.

The filmmakers have not yet revealed whether the theatrical project will be a prequel or sequel to the renowned original.

In the meantime, despite which movie you’re anticipating (or not), Memetic Tees has some great shirts with a variety of designs to display your inner geek without looking like you lack a sense of style.

Having recently returned from Guangzhou, I realized how much we take clean drinking water for granted. The simple act of being able to wash my toothbrush in the sink and not worrying about germs is amazing. Likewise, not having to go out and buy bottled water every day or boil water just to have something to drink is a luxury. I was reminded that today, March 22nd, is World Water Day and that there are organizations in need of donations to help provide clean water. The theme this year is “Water for Cities”, a particularly apt theme from my point of view since Guangzhou is China’s third-largest city, but you’re advised not to drink water from the tap.

While cyberpunk is often about the impacts of technology on daily life, the impact on deeper structures like morality and social structures is also present. Unfortunately, with visual media, it’s easy to lose sight of that. That’s why I thought it was interesting that a brief article in the Italian version of Vogue about the game Deus Ex: Human Revolution focused on that in examining the gameplay options.

While Shanghai and Hong Kong get the lion’s share of attention, in part because of how visually striking they are, it’s not a surprise that Deus Ex: Human Revolution has a futuristic Shanghai as one of the settings that the player will visit.

But Hong Kong isn’t the only city in the Pearl River Delta. Adjacent is the Shenzhen special economic zone and just up the river is the capital of Guangdong province and one of China’s five National Central Cities. But more than that, there are now plans to create the largest mega city in the world.

The “Turn The Pearl River Delta Into One” scheme will create a 16,000 sq mile urban area that is 26 times larger geographically than Greater London, or twice the size of Wales.
The new mega-city will cover a large part of China’s manufacturing heartland, stretching from Guangzhou to Shenzhen and including Foshan, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Zhuhai, Jiangmen, Huizhou and Zhaoqing. Together, they account for nearly a tenth of the Chinese economy.

Interestingly, the merger of these cities is less about centralization, but more about linking these areas together and spreading industry and population through the delta.

However, [Ma Xiangming] said no name had been chosen for the area. “It will not be like Greater London or Greater Tokyo because there is no one city at the heart of this megalopolis,” he said. “We cannot just name it after one of the existing cities.”

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.