(CYBER)PUNK IS DEAD

by Molly Noise

“The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.”
William Gibson, The Economist, December 4, 2003

The above is untrue.

Search online and you’ll certainly find plenty of citations on extracted-from-context-quotes-from-generally-regarded-as-clever-people sites, but there is no issue of The Economist from that date, nor articles published online that correspond. The first appearance of just the quote is in the june 20th 2001 issue.

Anyone doing a perfunctory check is going to get bad info, and from seemingly many disconnected sources. Even when simply trying to pin down a single fact, It can be overwhelming.

Future Shock was envisioned as a hypothetical problem, “what if the rate of change was too much for some people to handle”. You can see that in cyberpunk with over-augmented bodies undergoing “cyber psychosis”, it’s there in the 1995 film Johnny Mnemonic with Henry Rollins ranting (as he is wonderful at doing) about bodies overwhelmed by electronic signals (while slapping various pieces of hardware.)

(The black and white re-release of Johnny Mnemonic is on Criterion)

With the current text-generating LLM abominations, marketed in naked farce as “AI”, I’d add to Future Shock an additional wrinkle: we are going to be dealing with not only an overload of information but an overload of junk info; in short, we will be drowning in shit.

How many large language models will regurgitate the opening quote & date with the right kind of prompting? How many more times will it be reproduced by those same LLM’s on ad revenue sink sites?

(Repeatedly copied errors predate LLM’s, obviously, but I would hardly expect garbage-in garbage-out machines to improve things)

So let’s consider our updated Future Shock as: The rate of change; that is, the rate of new information and the quality of it; coming too fast and causing shock.

I think Bo Burnham’s “Welcome to the internet” got there before me:

“Here’s a healthy breakfast option

You should kill your mom

Here’s why women never fuck you

Here’s how you can build a bomb

Which Power Ranger are you?

Take this quirky quiz

Obama sent the immigrants to vaccinate your kids”

That last line, a kind of q-anon conspiracy word salad, has been on my mind a bit. Human LLM’s, smashing together half-remembered shock headlines until they are very angry and upset that transexual welfare queens are putting forever chemicals in the water, or whatever madlib has made them mad at the libs today.

This is people in shock due to technology. How Very Cyberpunk

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I was delighted to be asked to compile a playlist and write some short words on this genre,

Which is not a music genre.

Yet, according to that great and trustworthy institution, Wikipedia, cyberpunk music is:

Vangelis’s score for Blade Runner, David Bowie’s “Outside” and Nine Inch Nails’s “Year Zero” (and a few others)…

I have those on one of many hard disks so I’ll put them on loop while I try achieve #CyberpunkMindset

Why not Spotify/Tidal/PMusic*/Apple Music?

Because, streaming isn’t sexy, but it is the way to get heard (although, perhaps not paid).

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Artists and Listeners may be delighted to know that they are also indirectly funding “Artificial intelligence to serve our democracies” (that means making software for warfare, to the uninitiated)

The dominance of music streaming, one of Platform Capitalism’s shining examples, has been very good for a small number of artists who get paid due to old-fashioned labels and THE BLESSED SHAREHOLDERS, but not great for most every other artist. It sure is convenient though; I can listen to endless “AI” generated music made by fake artists.

How many layers of alienation are we on now?

(I digress, I often do.)

Being online, for someone like me with ADHD is—simply—bad.

It’s having access to near everything and incredible difficulty focusing on anything.

…

It’s probably unsurprising to say we are already experiencing it: not just having to maintain the devices of older relatives who simply can’t keep up with UI changes or deal with endless notifications, but the endless stream of horror that is 24/7 news and social media.

Shorn of its orientalism and tech fetish, Cyberpunk is a vibe;

I don’t mean its setting, which is generally A world choking on pollution (like Blade Runner) or Incredible wealth disparity and the laws not applying to the rich (like the world beyond your screen)

I mean the sensorial feel—alienation and atomisation, individuals feeling powerless in the face of corporate behemoths (ever been banned from twitter for telling a nazi to fuck off or lose access to an email address? Good luck finding a human being to fix that) and unable to form connection.

That dissociative feeling: knowing how bad everything is but having to put on a smile to work 8+ hours doing something you do not care about, trying not to notice the watchful eye of

the Machine

From spirit, then, to meat:

Cyberpunk has a (sometimes) uncritical view of cyborg bodies. I can see the appeal in a flawless pair of machine eyes, a brain augmentation to store data and so on. I would not do this because I know how long an SSD lasts and how much companies care about human beings.

I worked with a woman who had improperly removed a USB stick from her computer and suddenly every photo of her daughter growing up was now trapped on a non-functional flash memory chip.

….ive seen attack ships on people lose access to online accounts and tons of irrecoverable data because they only realised their phone was everything 30 seconds after losing it

It’s 10pm. Do you know where your data is?

* * * * *

As a visual style, cyberpunk can be nothing more than another aesthetic to overlay on cars driving at night and thin women holding guns (a critique I would not aim at Ghost in the Shell, despite it being clear that Masamune Shirow has A Type based on all his artwork)

(53% of synthwave artists have admitted to visualising driving a car at night through neo-tokyo while composing)

When you only think of style, you end up with Cyberpunk: Edgerunners; and it IS stylish, but also a bit by-the-numbers otherwise.

When you think about the internet too hard you get Serial Experiments Lain, who by all accounts has become a kind of saint for the too-online.

(I think if i wanted to get yelled at, I’d call Lain “mid” on the-social-media-platform-formerly-known-as-twitter)

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The cyberpunk future arrived not with a bang, but a whimper,

intrusive tracking serving obnoxious adverts

films and TV going down the memory hole as a tax write-off

social connections severed because you were mean to a bigot online

platforms who make their money from you and only give you back a little

You live in the world outlined by early cyberpunk, except everything is just a bit more crap

Corporate Consolidation: don’t you love spending most of your time on six websites owned by six different kinds of monster? I’m glad a bunch of American guys own online; it’s great actually, my friends are all here out-of-shot, laughing with me

The Present is Eating the Future

if the money-men get their way you’ll stream everything and, if it’s not available, tough shit
everything you do SHOULD have several intermediaries and the state should be hollowed out for the investment bankers to lay their eggs in
- watch them scurry into its vacant hulk
  - squatting and squirting out hundreds of shiny white eggs with a little speck of a fetal Expert wiggling, worm-like, within, intoning “WELFARE REFORM” (or your country’s relevant worker-hating crank phrase here)
We may not be able to deal with climate change but at least the EU is going to make it easier to replace your phone battery

I’m sure if we all are extra special careful about our carbon footprint, every oil exec and shareholder’s head will just magically separate from their shoulders and a colossal Ken Saro Wiwa, animated by underpaid hollywood CGI artists, will stride across the earth. Trees will spring to life as Carrie Fisher and thousands of other dead celebrity faces are composited onto underpaid stand-ins, desperately trying to maintain a look of humanity while applauding, digital tears running down their faces in an unnatural display of the dead-puppeted-to-life, one last job to do for the Great Mouse

Chelsea Manning, in an act of cyberpunk heroism, smuggled out proof of U.S. war crimes on a CD labelled “lady gaga” and spent 7 years in prison for Showing Us The Truth and i’m pretty sure the U.S. was still welcome to hang out with all the countries who definitely were not killing civilians that year

(Snowden has to live in Russia; i’m not sure which option I would have picked)

What’s supposed to happen: the good guys get The Truth out and the people rise up and the overlords all flee, or at least the world changes. Right?

Except they have wealth, and so men with guns who protect them.

Manning is an actual hero and i’m not denigrating her actions one bit, but the idea that the lone hero would jack into cyberspace, bypass the black ICE, hack the Gibson, grab the info and free the world is just another Heroic Individual myth that infects cyberpunk as a genre.

The Panama papers, the Pandora Papers — did you feel the earth move when these truths were published, or did you still go to work the next day?

We don’t just need to know the truth, we actually need to act collectively.

(Yes, it has always been COLLECTIVE ACTION that is needed, dear comrades.)

this is cyberpunk

people getting high on data overload

Q and Q angles (if you don’t know, it’s better I don’t explain)

Space lasers and David Icke’s vernacular

Vitalism and Goop

corporate behemoths fencing off the control of culture

everything you love could just disappear any moment

but scrolling tiktok gives you dopamine and makes you think you might be autistic and have BPD (i mean, it’s plausible: look into that)

your boss is an app that yells at you if you don’t behave like an abashed peasant in the presence of an emperor to every Definitely-Not-Suffering-From-Lead-Poisioning customer in their forties who just longs for the opportunity to hurt

people are getting funky with pronouns and genders

—music is pretty good—

—everything on tv is shit and every screen is a TV now—

—what happens when we catch up with the speculation and just keep going?

we are being haunted by past imagined futures we collided with

time is flattened out

kids are doing early 00’s nostalgia

i heard papa roach’s last resort playing from some foetus’s phone while on a bus; it’s a fun meme song now.

I’ve had enough future, can I please be excused from the table?

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At the start of The Matrix, Neo retrieves some minidiscs from a hollowed-out copy of Simulacra and Simulation — that’s what cyberpunk is: hollowed out from its inspirations

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In his 90’s “far-fetched fiction” cyberpunk-farce Armageddon: The Musical, Robert Rankin writes of a future where Income is dependent on eye-tracking software logging what you watch on TV

this was, he imagined, utterly absurd

But to predict the future, one only need extrapolate current trends and imagine the most stupid thing that could happen:

Your phone might already have eye-tracking and your TV might soon, too. Imagine having to stand up and scream at your screen to dismiss an advert.