I think cyberpunk, as a genre, is really interesting in that it created in almost everyone's mind a trend, a social scene that didn't exist. This scene, immensely attractive to geeks, nerds, computer literati and wannabe hackers. It became the ultimate cyberpunk fantasy, tough, concrete-grit characters siphoning yen from secret accounts in seedy techno bars, filled with smoke and pulsing with an electronic beat. Unfortunately, so much of the existence of feasibility of scene relied on it being the gritty, techno-anarchist, ubercapitalist near-future, which doesn't look too likely to ever occur. Yes, I know, there are many well know hacker types who live rockstar lives, but they are in general an exception to the rule. There's not much flash and bang to the life of your average computer geek.

Oh yeah, I find this absolutely hilarious. Anyone remember Billy Idol's brief "Cyberpunk" era? I sure don't. Not that i was probably more than a toddler at the time anyway, but check this stuff out. I think what i'm talking about is a large part of why it flopped. I mean, it's terrible.

http://www.webspace.com.br/perla/discotrack/inter/billy_idol/cyberpunk_05.htm

"I'm the neuromancer - and I'm trancing" - hah

I defer to the venerable Atari Teenage Riot, to quote

"CYBERPUNKS ARE DEAD!"


Any comments, anyone? Agree, disagree? This may or may not be a decent bone of contention. btw, I don't mean to be a spoilsport or anything, I think the literary genre itself is quite alive, and i packed to the gills with some of the best writing I've ever seen.


2xplus

It had to once be alive. I think many aspects of the Cyberpunk culture have been realized. Others not quite yet. Do all aspects of the "idea" need to come to fruition before its considered to be alive and well? I don't think so.
I believe your right though, for the most part it resides in the minds of the nerds, geeks , techno elite. But then again they will be the leaders of tomorrow, so who can really say what tomorrow holds. A generation of computer literate people are waiting to rise and overthrow the baby boomers, what they do may very well be inspired by a "social scene that didn't exist."

"techno anarchist" and "uber-capatlism" would be interesting to discuss.

I think we are headed at a break neck pace to make both those aspects of cyberpunk a reality.

We have recently seen the rise in popularity of "hacktivism", and the increasing control corporations are gaining over governments and the average joe.

I think at this point both extremes are going to need to be realized to have any sort of semblance of normality.

Billy-so-called-idol. That pathetic piece of...sorry. Couldn't help myself.

Is CPunk dead? Is the SF new wave dead? How about
magic realism, surrealism, the french new novel etc...The books are still being read so they are alive and kicking. And dont delude yourself
cyberpunk was/is a literary/artistic movement.
Nothing more, nothing less.

Well, I've shared (rather exhasutively, not to say boringly) my feelings on "cyberpunk" as a literary genre.

But I'm a little more charitable about looking for realworld mappings. It's fairly well-accepted, at least in the circles in which I travel, that "Neuromancer" and "Snow Crash" directly inspired many a career in Web development, VR (remember that?) and shared virtual spaces.

Beyond that, while I am reasonably certain that Prince Michael of Sealand never read any John Shirley, I wouldn't be surprised if the noticeable undercurrent of enthusiasm for "offshore" investments, untraceable digital cash, and strong cryptography among the very wealthy of my generation owes something to a few well-thumbed "cyberpunk" paperbacks.

As for ubercapitalism: the zaibatsu/keiretsu/chaebol model is too fertile a ground for inefficiencies. Trust me, one Honda or Tokyu or LG company frequently doesn't know what another is doing, so for such a structure to agree on the kind of standardization or interoperability they'd require to act truly hegemonically is laughable. To me, anyway.

But having said that...I have just enough Marxist in me to see our present world as little more than a unmonitored playground for capital, capital grown so confident that it barely bothers to disguise this fact anymore.

i may be wandering off topic here but...

quote:

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VR (remember that?) and shared virtual spaces.

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why do people talkabout VR like its something thats been and gone/ instead of something that isn't even close to happening yet

i baught a VR head set back in '95 and at last check they havn't moved on much since/ 3d graphics on the other had has blown up big time/ IMO there have been pre-emtive strikes on VR but we're still a long way off

its gonna happen and when it does it won't be tv only better (to paraphrase "strange days")

Oh, I think there have been some pretty cool applications of virtual space, but the eyegoggle thing is still a bit off. For example, boeing designed the 777 completely in a virtual hangar, accessible by engineers all over the world. It was a nice little postgeographical trick, really.

The light shows that passed for VR some years ago, though, will never really take off I don't think. The technology is too clumsy. It's cool to be able to look around and move your hand and all that, but it isn't culturally accessible to the general public. I don't think we're gonna get true VR until we perfect the cranial jack. That involves heavy brain mapping, and commonly available brain surgery, so this stuff is all pretty far off. But a couple hundred years ago, dentistry was a mystical and little understood thing, available only to the really rich. The technological ramp is getting steeper all the time, so I've gotta think it'll happen in our lifetimes. We'll just be too old to really benefit. How sad.

quote:

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Unfortunately, so much of the existence of feasibility of scene relied on it being the gritty, techno-anarchist, ubercapitalist near-future, which doesn't look too likely to ever occur.

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Well, let's have a look at the list of social and technological changes implicitly or explicitly predicted by most cyberpunk authors:

Absurd increase in the rich/poor gap domestically and abroad, marked by increasing physical segregation between the rich and poor? Check. Before I'm accused of being an anti-capitalist dupe by some Libertarian wing-nut, let me just say that I think it's just spiffy to be rich. What's less spiffy is the fact that the middle class is disappearing and sliding into poverty, according to IRS figures on income distribution.

Absurd increases in corporate size and power, to the point where they become quasi-governmental entities? Check. In the U.S., the RIAA, MPAA, oil and utilities lobbies and others pretty much write their own legislation these days. Deregulation of many industries combined with a toothless SEC has led to ever-larger mergers in key industries, including and especially in the mass media. Other parts of the world are seeing similar phenomena, if at a slightly slower pace.

Pervasiveness of heavily miniaturized communication and information technology? Check. This is happening to an extent that many of us weren't thinking about even five years ago. And it's not just Palm Pilots and tiny phones with cameras - wearable computers and implants are coming along as well.

Broad access to an immersive information medium? Not exactly. The Internet is not yet what anyone would call immersive (though projects like there.com are working on it), and access is still only as broad as North America, Europe, and the richer parts of Asia. There are any number of trends moving in this direction, though.

So from where I sit, just because the costumes aren't as outlandish as in Johnny Mnemonic (and most of us involved in technology don't look like Keanu Reeves or Ice-T), or the social scene isn't what you imagined, doesn't mean that the cyberpunk dream/nightmare is dead. The near-future extrapolations that define the common thread of cyberpunk are showing disturbing validity in the real world, even if the set-dressing seems mundane to those of us immersed in it.

And frankly, I'm glad about the costumes. I much prefer writing code in my pajamas.

OK,
- B

--
http://www.bradheintz.com/
updated daily

I agree with that Cyberpunk may never really existed at all. "Punk" was a cool addon word for a while. Anyone remember the Splatterpunks? Two collections of Splatterpunk short stories were put out. One contained a piece from Martin Amis. Last year...or maybe the year before...I remember reading a quote from James Camoron about the series Dark Angel. He said that the new season (that also turned out to be its last season)was going to be more "biopunk". If this was said five years ago it might have sounded really hip and cool (maybe). Now it sounded sort of antiquated.

"Cyberpunk? Oh my gawd that is sooo late 80's! Like whatever."

I think that that concept of ___-punk, and punk itself, has just grown up and gotten a dayjob. Lamentable to some, but not really avoidable. Here on the west coast, at least, there is something of a "punk revival" going on in music (tangentially related to the lamentable electroclash hiccup, but I digress). However, 'punk' and 'revival' are two words not meant for each other. Punk as a movement is dead and gone in all its forms, and not likely to return. (Or maybe rather on life support, still technically breathing, but not on its own)

As for:

quote:

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I think cyberpunk, as a genre, is really interesting in that it created in almost everyone's mind a trend, a social scene that didn't exist...There's not much flash and bang to the life of your average computer geek.

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That how most trends are started. Note the passive voice. I'm not railing against the Machine or preaching against the Man, but trends in clothing, games, hairstyles, cars _are started_. Whether they spontaneously arise from the chaos or are planned and marketed by billion dollar executives, it's always about revising and conceiving our self images, individually and collectively. Those cybergeeks were no more misled than the Manhattan fashionista...

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Euphrosyne:
I think that that concept of ___-punk, and punk itself, has just grown up and gotten a dayjob. Lamentable to some, but not really avoidable. Here on the west coast, at least, there is something of a "punk revival" going on in music (tangentially related to the lamentable electroclash hiccup, but I digress). However, 'punk' and 'revival' are two words not meant for each other. Punk as a movement is dead and gone in all its forms, and not likely to return. (Or maybe rather on life support, still technically breathing, but not on its own)
[QUOTE]

I think we need to define some numbers for the percentage of people it takes to start a trend, the percentage of people it takes for something to be considered "popular" and the percentage of people lost it takes to for a trend to die.
If you goto new york, you can find punk in its all its forms. You can goto neighborhoods and venues where it just teaming...When you are there in the middle of it, its a huge amount of people...when you compare it to the rest of society (hell, lets just say new york itself) that "giant" group is just a blip. Staticians fart more significant things then that population.

I fear if we don't come up with a universally acceptable definition for trend/culture death, this thread will still be active years from now :P


Thanks,
Tinesthai

it only smells that way

nuf said

quote:

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Originally posted by Tinesthai:
I think we need to define some numbers for the percentage of people it takes to start a trend

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when i lived in cape town/ south africa the "cyberpunk" scene was like 5 people/ so we had to hang with the goths which where a core group of ~20 max ~75/ but what a group of die hards/ in some ways stonger and more into "it" that over here in the UK

sad i know but for the few involved it was a ray of sanity in a crazy place

Oh, in my little community the cpunk crowd was me and two other guys. One of them wrote Marathon (for you mac people out there) and the other sat in his room all day, playing with his nervous system. He would hook two straight pins to the leads of a (generator, or low-level transform...can't remember) power source, stick the needles into his arm and throw the switch. His arm would twitch and shake, he'd cut the power, mark the two locations with a pen, number them, make notes on which muscles fired, and then stick the pins in two new locations. I don't know where he is, these days...

Tinesthai, one "key communicator" can start a trend, if they happen to be at the right nexus of esteem and opportunity in their local community.

Long before marketing drones nattered on about "tipping points" and other barely-digested bits of network-theory jargon, kids all over the world knew that in any crowd, there's a Face.

And whatever the Face did acquired the instant imprimatur of cool. It could be arbitrary ("Scrawl Xs on the backs of your hands with magic markers!"), obscurely symbolic ("Fold your jeans into eight-inch cuffs!"), even borderline-sacriligeous ("Wear the Union Jack as a shirt!"), but if the Face did it, the next day everyone was doing it.

Now some trends die. And others settle into a pattern of alternating peaks and troughs, down through the years. But still others become standing waves in the medium of our shared culture, helped along by shifts in technology or demographics.

And yet others - the most mysterious of all - paradoxically influence everything without leaving much of a trace, comparatively. Brian Eno is supposed to have said, once upon a time, that only 100 people ever bought a Velvet Underground record, but every last one of them went out and started a band.

Were they "trendy"? I doubt it; I doubt there's any way you could argue that a band that obscure, with such a sharply circumscribed audience, ever had a tipping point.

And yet, and yet. They crop up *everywhere*: namechecked in interviews with Czeck presidents, covered by awful Tokyo basement noise bands, hey, even as the subject of sly references in William Gibson novels.

It is my contention that most things worth caring about travel through the world in just this manner.

It's interesting to see that some of the founding fathers of Cyberpunk were busy writing obituaries for "the movement" only a few years after it came into existence.
"I hereby declare the revolution over. Long live the provisional government," Vincent Omniaveritas (= Bruce Sterling) wrote in 1986 in Cheap Truth.
If this were true, the genre would have been as shortlived as the ever emerging and fading fashion trends among Japanese teenagers that have inspired many a cyberpunk milieu.
Like those trends, however, it seems that cyberpunk has mutated and merged with regional phenomena. In Denmark, where I live, distinct cyberpunk traits sometimes permeate more recent fiction, such as Gordon Inc.s "Harddisken - 7 dage i 90'erne" ("The Harddrive - 7 days in the nineties"), a novel which is realistic and set in the present.

quote:

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It's interesting to see that some of the founding fathers of Cyberpunk were busy writing obituaries for "the movement" only a few years after it came into existence.

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I think the primary reason some of the so-called 'founding fathers' wrote obituaries (I think Shiner or Lewis also did one) was because by the time the media copped onto the type of fiction these guys were writing, it was already old. It had been fresh and exciting, but then the media embraced it and expolited it and milked it for all it was worth... not to mention slapping a label on it.

Well, when I read all the entries on this topic -I couldn't resist adding :

re: cyberpunk .
*if you are one of these who thinks that it was a scene that popped up , full grown and looking like a book you read -
you would have had to just keep on looking -
or gotten some tooth buds.

*the authors had quite good reason to write obits.
Ever done days of interviews ?
being asked crap like 'how did it feel to be there at the beginning of cpunk? gets tired before you know it.
Kill it and get on

i can remember an ad guy in Tokyo telling me that there was no sense in doing a cpunk event there-because a car Co. there had ALREADY used the words 'cyberpunk' in an advert.
And that made it so over, past dead and gone .
Oh my ...
This was 1987

* it's easy to
point to the bad career moves of one Billy Idol-
and that Album of which some have spoke was indeed an unfortunate ,out of touch grab.
But if people's flash memories can go bk as far as 1977 , there was his Generation X.

It's also easy to remember Stellarc stringing himself up over Ave.B in a fit of Research mag style 'cyberart'.
Nowhere near as exciting as a stroll down Ave. B could be in those days & nights.

* as some have wrote (knowingly) in this thread,
sometimes it was 2 or 3 people in towns and cities who were living lives that 21st c observers could term 'cyberpunk'.
Some of them ate, drank, ingested -
in one end and out the other ,
came from families that had one or more members in the Gov. or Military industrial complex,
and some did 'get day jobs' eventually .
Others (humans too) scrabbled and
made punk rock ,
developed electronic musiks,
were in clubs every night mixing it up ,
had absorbed the lessons of Burroughs & Ballard,
were 'future mutants',
did gigs with Max Headroom ,
got together with authors & editors and went out to the Biosphere to ck 'the bathtub ring',
flew to Tokyo Bay to sniff the breeze and
tour Number 13 island with new directors and authors ,
worked to get Mark Pauline and SRL hooked up with
smash cars & giant robots that breathed fire circuit ,
engaged porn star to make records,
and did sdtks for IBM's CG Division.
Jeez, some even where there @ 1989's SIGGRAPH in Boston when one Jaron Lanier brought out his dataglove.

Others reviewed ,
armchairs critics declared movements 'on' or
'over',
and at some point along the line ('89'/'90) ,
alot of subculture meaning / content
divorced from image.
Suddenly Everyone 'wore black',
had a 'tribal tattoo'
(and a boxer/pitbull on a leash)
People got ENB symbol tattoos on their neck
because they saw one on Henry Rollins -
but they didn't know what the symbol stood for.
Aluminum foil cyberpunk ,
the SS Sputnick's , electrotrash,
future visionaries and the hot 'idea' that the internet was there to make money on took over and here we are .

You won't find it on VH1 or MTV ,
but it was fun while it lasted

Cheers all

Electroclash seems to be the next "pop" thing for the masses, so in a few months video channels may look like 1985.