the ramble dump

Cyberpunk: high tech, low life. That seems to work as a good summary, although I don't know whose summary it is. People living in a society deeply affected by rapid technological development, usually on its underside.

As a political outlook--from what I can tell after having a little look around this thing we call cyberspace--it's a bit dubious. By nature of living in an increasingly technological world, upon which we are becoming ever more dependent, we must be wary of authority and hidden information. Fair enough. We're all digitally recorded in various ways about a gazillion times each day; my school, for example, has a CCTV network that means I'm caught on at least twenty different cameras moving from one end to the other. It's enough to make me paranoid. And whenever anyone says 'If you're doing nothing wrong, you've got nothing to worry about', I always think of 1984.

But then, those who call themselves cyberpunks push for anarchy over democracy as well as totalitarianism, and anarchy for people who have a penchant for shiny weapons is probably something to be wary of. They seem too willing to throw themselves into a technological future where technology and humanity will inevitably (and literally) merge, which as likely as it may be...well, that's got to conflict with any ideals of independence. While you're refusing to submit to the government, you're just submitting yourself, gratuitously, to something else. They shamelessly admit style over substance, and in fact seem to promote it. There's lots of emphasis on attitude and Fighting The Power. Indeedy, it seems more like a teenaged sort of attitude problem in the guise of a political conscience than anything else.

It's hard to tell if they're being serious. Maybe they aren't. Mostly it just seems like people having some obscure kind of fun. Whatever subcultures or so-called cyberpunk manifestos have formed on the internet, though, as a genre, cyberpunk still holds a lot of interest, independent of those trying to make a coherent political outlook out of the genre's features.

Cyberpunk as a genre has a lot of style. It's a grungey sort of style, written with noir elements and an edge that reflects a sense of aesthetics and cool and the fascination of possibilities of the world it writes about, while at the same time reflecting the whole 'low life' thing, the technological chaos, the danger and violence of the lives of characters living on the edge. Dependence on technology and existence of virtual worlds are major themes that have become ever more relevant in recent years, and many cyberpunk novels have already proven to be somewhat prophetic. So for all its distinct style, cyberpunk is also stirring because it's really not that far from being a reality.

While The Matrix trilogy had a little bit of naff and a whole lot of bloated allegory, I still liked it because it had that cyberpunk aesthetic, especially the first film. It had the virtual world; the characters' dependence on technology and machinery; the noir feel; the grungey, gloomy, decaying urban settings; and a sense that the characters were living on the edge, struggling for an existence and finding themselves in violent situations (not that Hollywood would have it any other way).

After taking a renewed interest in the genre, I recently bought William Gibson's Neuromancer, one of the original cyberpunk novels. Its vision of the future is over twenty years old, but still feels very believable. And aside from that, it's just a lot of fun to read. Before long I'll be getting the others in the trilogy.

There's charm and intrigue to the urban decay and perverse technology of cyberpunk, as paradoxical as that sounds. There's a fascination to these worlds that draws you in, both thrilling and disturbing, and the way in which all the questions about what it is to be human are amplified.

Labels: cyberpunk, films, i am the ramblemaster, literature, neuromancer, science, the matrix, william gibson

# posted by Chris @ 11:07 PM 0 comments