I hear you RUR
but as the main wave of electro hype has already broke and washed into cul de sac.
Whatever those corps. like Viacom or Fox
throw up as electroclash will be as deadended as 'cyberpunk' became .
Like the shell of a used lipstick.

DJ Hell's Gigolo label has some artists that are good and who were there before, during and after the hype .
Check Vitalic & Fixmer if you like it hard.
Even FSpooner had an OK track or 2
(even if one was a Wire cover- they did it well)

and there is some other good electro out there,
and the original electro was pretty great in it's day tooo
("HipHop Be Bop" by Man Parrish, anyone ?)
But you had to have been there ...

But 'scenester' Larry Tee's Williamsburg 'Berliniamsburg' 'electroclash' thingee
hasn't spawned a decent record yet and is now routinely dissed around town as 'electrotrash'.
Wearing a thin Patti Smith tie and a torn plastic jacket only gets you so far.
Especially this winter .
'Williamsburg the new Manhattan' got quickly followed by next mag cover reading
'Manhattan , the new Manhattan'

electro is some kind of 'cyberpunk' ,
depending on where your borders are
But like cpunk , alot of the originals don't want to be lumped in with the hype.

Reminds me of the UK mags last couple years spewing about 'Disco Punk'.
Yeah, right !

they just goto message boards to re-group.

---------------------------
Where is the Disneyland?

SA: you've obviously been stalking me for a long, long time.
; . )

With all of love,
A.

To my mind, cyberpunk committed suicide by proclaiming itself (even if its only spokesperson by then was Sterling) quintessentially postmodern nineteen eighties. The aesthetic might survive and prosper (or am I imagining all the Matrices of hype(r)fashion) but the Movement was disowned by its own literary parents long before nineteen ninety reared its angest-ridden millenial head!

Hmmm,
come again Adam ?
Cheers
}

Maybe I should just keep my big mouth shut, but what exactely do you deem dead?

The 'vision' of Cyberpunk?
In that case, humanity could give itself a big pat on its back - Cyberpunk, I feel, was written to prevent itself.

The aesthetics?
Taking a look at the Matrix, Ghost in the Shell, & co., I'd like to doubt that.

The literary movement?
Possibly - I really can't compare.

Punk itself?
Punk has died and was revived so often by now that it isn't even undead anymore - it's a kind of restless wanderer happily coming and leaving as it pleases.

One good thing about life - it's temporary.

I agree with the original post ... Gibson more or less invented the cyberpunk scene, or milieu, or whatever you want to call it. He wasn't describing anything that already existed. Kind of like cyberspace - he wrote about it, people thought "hey, this is cool!" and then set about trying to invent it. Which always struck me as a little odd, given that Gibson was writing about a dystopia, but whatever ...

I lived in Vancouver in the early 80s, and knew a bunch of punks, including the girl who was the original of Nikki in Burning Chrome, and I can say with absolutely certainty that electric guitars were the closest those people ever got to technology. Computer geeks and punks did not mix.

Gibson's genius was in combining two radically unrelated lifestyles into a believable package. The geeks liked it, because it made them look cool, and the punks liked it, because it made them look smart.

And because they liked it, some of them tried to create it for real, but it was always more convincing as science fiction.

Unless, that is, you happen to be a cool geek.

I'm not convinced, for example, that the redefinition of business as an acceptable activity for cool people (and the converse acceptance of people with visible piercings, etc. at boardroom tables) that fueled the dot-com expansion of '97-'99 would have been possible without the preconfiguratory imagination that took place in "cyberpunk."

I don't know if you can claim Gibson as the definitive progenitor of Cyberpunk. What you can say, however, is that the stories in Burning Chrome set the agenda for what is now thought of as "cyberpunk". The definitive collection of stories, in my view, and the one that really set the standard, was Bruce Sterling's "Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology". There's a story in there by (IIRC) Greg Bear about the death of god set inside a church in which all the figures in the stained glass windows come to life. That was an interesting SF/fantasy take on "cyberpunk" and had nothing to do with the list of clichés set out at the beginning of this thread. Unfortunately, while many of the things Cyberpunk did or didn't do, predicted or missed are an interesting debate, the sub genre considered to be dead because it became too straight jacketed by its own limitations. And as Clint Eastwood so wisely pointed out "a man's got to know his limitations."

Ah, but were the cool geeks really cyberpunks? A lot of them thought they were, but mostly they were way too legitimate. Gibson posits a whole shadowy underground economy of highly skilled crackers for hire, which seems to me a fair stretch from a bunch of pierced hipsters designing flash graphics for BuyYourPetFoodOnLine.com. Not that the latter wasn't a great gig while it lasted.

The real crackers never cut it either; they were and remain mostly a bunch of script-kiddies, hardly the elite (if somewhat twisted) bunch that roam the Matrix in Gibson's early work.

So what does all this have to do with the original post, the one that said cyberpunk was dead? Only that it can't be dead, because it never existed, except (as others here have pointed out) as a meme that infected a whole generation of geeks, musicians, artists, suburban teenagers ... etc.

And as a meme, it shows no sign of dying out just yet, although its diffusion into mainstream culture has no doubted blunted the appeal for those who their take coolness straight up.

quote:

---

Originally posted by LoFat:
Gibson posits a whole shadowy underground economy of highly skilled crackers for hire, which seems to me a fair stretch from a bunch of pierced hipsters designing flash graphics for BuyYourPetFoodOnLine.com.

---

Then Cyberpunk is alive and well in Hong Kong. Its a haven for pirated software, hardware and other ripped intellectual property. Cracked DVDs? Modified PS2? There's a boomin grey economy in MongKok and Sam Shui Po, under the supervision of the Triads.

---------------------------
I am addicted to

<em>a bunch of pierced hipsters designing flash graphics for BuyYourPetFoodOnLine.com. Not that the latter wasn't a great gig while it lasted.</em>

Well, it wasn't quite that. But I did whore myself out; click through and you'll see what I mean.

Forgive me.

http://www.frontage.jp/site/en/believe/CTT/street

...its just changing.

cyberpunk as a genre/style/subculture is appearing to dissolve, because it was originally a prospective idea. but that isn't possible now that the technology is starting to become reality.

in neuromancer: case did drugs using derms. now you can go down to any drug store and buy nicotine patches. you can get a prescription for birth control patches. how long till somebody laces one with heroin? any medicinal medium will eventually be used illegally.

in virtual light: augmented reality glasses were a central plot element. now they are being developed for use in architecture, construction, stuff like that.

in the sprawl series: people use external electrodes to tap into the visual signals representing a matrix of data. now they have implanted internal electrodes in a blind mans brain, and used a converted video feed to produce visual signals of the real world, infinitely more complicated than what is described in neuromancer. could be done the same for other senses. can we say simstim?

not to mention the widespread use of wireless communication and artificial superstars(but whats new about that, haha...). the technology is here. its just waiting for society to catch up.

Someday, when this is all over, you can buy the book at a 30% markup.