Honestly cyberpunk’s not that insightful about or even really about neoliberalism so much as that a lot of the early defining stuff should really be counted as part of the “neon noir” 80s detective renaissance, so obviously “a client hires a private agent to resolve some shady issue in a world too complex and multilayered for legitimate authorities to exercise hegemony over” is the basic narrative drive

prokopetz:

Prior to the mid 1990s, RAM was the most expensive component of a personal computer, to the point that the RAM could easily cost more than the whole rest of the computer put together. Businesses that provided computers in their offices would routinely solder the RAM chips to the motherboards in order to prevent tech-savvy employees from pilfering the RAM and walking out the door with thousands of dollars worth of easily concealable computer chips in their pockets. There was literally a thriving black market for stolen RAM.

I bring this up both as a fun bit of historical trivia, and as a critical piece of cultural context for understanding first-wave literary cyberpunk. From a modern perspective, the genre’s preoccupation with ultra-valuable black market computer chips as a plot device might look like more evidence that the people writing this stuff had never actually used a computer in their lives (which was often true) – but no: at the time, that’s genuinely how it worked!

Blackmagic Design (who?) should start licensing the Fairlight name, as the cyberpunk-equivalent-of-mithril that IP’s possibly their biggest asset.

ultraviolet-techno-ecology:

ultraviolet-techno-ecology:

ultraviolet-techno-ecology:

So like… is she tokyo cyberpunk or seattle cyberpunk?

Tokyo Cyberpunk: Emphasizes human relationship to technology, identity, psychological transhumanism, and the human-as-resource. In Tokyo Cyberpunk - Capitalism wants to own you.

Seattle Cyberpunk: Emphasizes class analysis through technology disparity, physical transhumanism, and the disposability of humans. In Seattle Cyberpunk - Capitalism wants you gone.

Aesthetically speaking…

Tokyo Cyberpunk showcases nightlife where clean streets are illuminated by neon signs tempting you into consumerism as a therapy for your alienation. It’s percieved cleanliness acts as a symbol where corporations justify their rulership through the illusion of social progress. The robot is friendly, companionable. Societal problems and capitalist contradiction are silenced and swept away without the common person knowing.

Seattle Cyberpunk showcases a nightlife of homelessness and decay with corporate monoliths on the horizon. The streetlights no longer work, but the darkness is kept partially at bay by the neon tubes of bars where people watch wishes of their youth vanish at the bottom of the bottle. The lucky ones working for the corporations do so with the fear they will be kicked to the street. The robot is an expression of force intended to keep the common person afraid. Corporations do not try to justify their rulership, social problems and contradiction are solved with force.

argumate:

sci-fi plot: yeah and in this futuristic city he meets a woman–

producer: is she a stripper? is she a callgirl? does she get her tits out? is she a cop working undercover as a stripper? is she a sexy assassin who has sex with her victims and then kills them sexily? is she a robot stripper? is she a mystical being of pure energy who has no need for clothes and a great rack? is she a holographic beer advertisement?

I mean really the thing is most cyberpunk is a reskin of detective noir

koney-scanlines:

Cmi FAiRLigHT 1982-85

This shit is why “Fairlight” was the cyberpunk equivalent of “mithril”

So just into Just Cause 4 and there’s a settlement created out of shipping containers stuffed into a huge crevasse-spanning bridge

which reminded me of William Gibson’s Bridge trilogy (and the Johnny Mnemonic movie, even though the short story was set in the Sprawl trilogy)

and at first I was wondering “wait, is there a real place these were both based off of? I thought Gibson based the bridge on Kowloon Walled City”

And then I realized that Virtual Light predated the game by 25 goddamn years and is old and famous enough to inspire other artworks in its own right

BONUS: the “setting” paragraph from Virtual Light’s wikipedia page:

The setting is California in 2006,[4] part of a dystopian world where the middle class has essentially evaporated leaving only multinational corporations and their exorbitantly rich elite and the poor who are mostly security officers, couriers, or otherwise work in minor service positions. Many of the poor live illegally and entirely outside the normal economy in places like The Bridge engaged in dubious enterprises such as theft, drugs, weapons, gambling, prostitution, and operation of unlicensed restaurants and doctor’s offices. Others pursue livelihood in innocuous yet unregulated commerce such as by running antique shops and barbershops.

kontextmaschine:

Imagining a world where the style of cyberpunk was married to a form like the epistolary romance and not the noir detective story

Now that I think of it this is literally the 2013 Her

lunaticobscurity:

some gifs from an amazing 1990 promo video for the tabletop rpg shadowrun

One of the things that’s going to stay with me til I die was reading the Shadowrun backstory to corporate sovereignty

(during some one-off urban crisis involving food riots a mob attacked a megacorp trailer truck they thought might have supplies but actually carried infectious medical waste [possibly from an AIDS-analogue, that woulda been a theme at the time], the corp security defended with deadly force and when the city government answerable to those mobs tried to prosecute them for it the Supreme Court used that hard case to make bad law and immunize them, this metastisized)

and in the end it’s like “but the megacorps left the remnant nations in place to take care of petty shit, like who really wants to be in charge of garbage collection?!?”

and I nodded sagely to this at age like 14, and then years later was like THE MAFIA. THE MAFIA WANTS TO BE IN CHARGE OF GARBAGE COLLECTION, THE NEW YORK AND SEVERAL ITALIAN MAFIAS HAVE ATTAINED GREAT POWER BY CONTROLLING THAT NECESSARY BOTTLENECK

skeletoncrimes:

studying condottieri is actually useful in the context of writing cyberpunk, as its a highly systemic and historical example of when a primarily economic/cultural polity that lacks manpower but possesses massive wealth/cultural capital as well as political ambition (italian city-states/megacorps) exists parallel to similar rivals and/or traditional state power and thus needs to bring mercenaries under routine contract 

rosemarys-baby-daddy:

Rinko Kikuchi

Been playing the new Shadowrun game. They’re right, the Dragonfall DLC campaign is a lot better. Better writing, feels truer to the feel and the mythology (where Dead Man’s Switch seemed more generically cyberpunk slash SNES-Shadowrun [which I loved and still own on cartridge]). Also the mission flow and NPC personalities feel a lot closer to the old Bioware classics in terms of fleshed-out-ness.

So that got me looking at the Shadowrun Wiki, because I was like “oh yeah, what did happen at Dunkelzahn’s inauguration?” and it was fun to notice how the mythology’s been updated to keep up with whatever the future looked like, like in 2005/“2064” the main BBS got replaced with a p2p system

Also that wiki had, as advertising, an autoplay news channel with geekbait anchors - busty in tight nerd-reference shirts, (actually isn’t that 3 or 4 years behind the curve now, I haven’t seen a Snorgtees ad in a while) that I think might have been the selfsame “very cyberpunk” channel I mentioned being disoriented by a while ago, so full circle I guess.

So as far as -punks go we’ve got steam, (mana,) diesel, atom, cyber, what’s the version riffing off of today?

I nominate “dronepunk”.

I just walked into 7-11 and they have their own in-house TV channel playing and there was a foreign affairs news segment presented by a woman in a “sexy schoolgirl” outfit and it was all very cyberpunk.

Went to Ground Kontrol for pinball yesterday. Before Rock Band karaoke started they were playing Total Recall on the projector screen. I’d never actually seen it, it looked better than I expected. I read the story, though. It’s funny, none of the great cyberpunk books ever got made into movies, but a few 12-page stories did. Johnny Mnemonic was based on a pretty good story, though the movie was ridiculous.

(The girl in that was supposed to be Molly, the mirrorshade-implanted, ex-meat puppet razorgirl that ties Gibson’s universe together, but she was tied up in the unproduced film rights to Neuromancer)

Its known and accepted that science fiction is always just a projection of the present, and we’re far enough away from cyberpunk to appreciate that. Gibson, famously, had never used a computer when he wrote Neuromancer and based his impressions off of video arcades, that’s something that definitely shows up in the “cyberspace as VR file directory” of the ‘90s.

Snow Crash now rings clearly as a dream of early '90s Southern California. The opening inciting incident a riff on “your pizza in 30 minutes or it’s free”, the burbclaves of housing developments, the Metaverse of text MUDs (note the way users can program their own locations and appearance but many just buy premade - I guess that accurately predicted Second Life, but not its eclipse by, say, WoW), the Raft is a mashup of the boat people and the Mexican overland wave that swamped the region in the '70s-'80s. The whole nam-shub of Enki thing is kind of a distillation of California technomysticism - post-Leary circuit theory, neurolinguistic programming, the Mondo 2000 shamanic magik, all rolled together.

I mentioned Jews for the Protection of Firearms Ownership a bit ago, that was the milieu the HEAP guns in Cryptonomicon came from, and today’s Defense Distributed and the printable firearms movement is the pretty damn cyberpunky endpoint.

Someone lent me a book of Philip K. Dick’s early short stories a year or so ago. They’re not nearly as drug-psychotic as his later work, a lot of them are post-nuclear-apocalypse tales. And it’s really interesting and makes you notice how much of later postapocalyptic fiction is really just a retelling of narratives about the settling of the savage frontier. Because these ones aren’t at all, instead they’re riffing off the reconstruction of Europe after WWII - the Marshall plan, the struggle for dominance between two spheres of influence, the rebuilders’ attempts to purge the defeated prewar regimes and establish their ideology by force, the locals’ subtle resistance. It’s all quite fascinating.

Com Truise - Fairlight