CW: alienation, body horror, violence, capitalism, any of the other frightening stuff Cyberpunk weighs and deals with.
“We never see the face of power in Blade Runner. Instead, we see an errand boy, Gaff, but we never see the top level. And Deckard doesn’t think about what he’s doing, he doesn’t really question it. Some power that is tells him to kill replicants, who might well essentially be people, but the whole point when he leaves with Rachel is that he doesn’t save the replicants. He saves Rachel and goes away. That’s not a hero’s tale. That’s somebody saving his skin and the skin of someone he cares about, but it’s very cyberpunk. That idea of feeling that the chance that we have with each other, and the chance of a better life, is worth incurring the wrath of these unseen and mighty powers.”
Reading an interview with Pondsmith and I’d like to hear him elaborate on this. Because Deckard is the villian, the ruthless cop assassin hunting down the former slaves who are fighting to claim a life they were never supposed to have. Deckard doesn’t save the replicants, the replicants save him. Roy has Deckard in his grasp, but at the end of his life he decides he’s done killing, he doesn’t need revenge, and lets Deckard go. Roy gives Deckard his freedom, gives Deckard his chance to stop being a cop, stop being a murderer, go be a human being for the first time in his life. So, I’d like to hear Pondsmith elaborate this because I’d like to know how he views Roy’s role in the Drama.
Look at what’s been going on in Russia right now and tell me the Soviet State isn’t still around. They just changed the paint and got a new symbol.
Oh no he’s a lib. : (
Still reading various takes (not just Pondsmith’s). It’s extremely weird to me that people think Deckard is the, idk, most important character in Blade Runner. He’s mostly passive. He follows his orders like a good dog. He has no real agency. It’s the replicants who have goals, agency, dreams, a future. Rick just exists.
OMG people whose opinions I’m reading, cyberpunk is about the alienation we experience due to our reliance on technology that is hostile to us. It’s not about metal arms or cool hair, it’s about how our increasingly high tech world is driving us all further and further apart, turning us in to machines ourselves, cogs in the corporate profit machine. Most of Gibson’s stories are about a band of freaks and losers coming together, finding something like family, and briefly escaping that alienation while punching someone much bigger than them in the jaw. That is the core theme; Technology hasn’t liberated us, it’s both subjugated us and atomized us. It’s not just about megacorps, it’s about corporations, which is to say large power blocs that aren’t accountable to anyone, which is to say capitalism, using tech to control us; by using violence against us, by controlling our labor, by stealing, hacking, subverting our attention. The central warning that the movement was screaming is that the furturist, positivist vision of a world where technology makes life free and easy wasn’t coming, that our machines were becoming our jailers. The “punk” isn’t about literal studded jackets and chelsea cuts and big black shitkickers, it’s about an ethos of defiance, of indifference to authority, of viewing the system as something that exists outside you, that you’re not part of and that cannot compel your obedience by any means but violence. The punk is being an outsider, a low life, a criminal, or just unemployed, in a world where the only way you get rights, healthcare, protection, real food, is selling you body and soul to a corporation. It’s that “eat trash be free” meme with the racoon. In so far as there ever was an authentic punk, which is a subject of constant debate, the hand-made, ripped out, outlandish and offensive clothes were a symbolic refusal to participate, to be part of the machine. Most of them were never really outside, but that was what was desired, what was trying however ineptly to be accomplished. The individualistic helplessness of the punks, their inability to conceptualize revolution or take meaningful action against their society, was a reflection of the “what no theory does to a mf” of the desolate ideological wasteland of 80s suburbia.
V’s fucking thrilled about her cyberware. You never see her saying “man I fucking hate these immune suppressants I’ve been shitting water since I got my first network implant”. You never see her startle when she looks in the mirror and sees something that isn’t her staring back. She never wakes up with bruises because she had a nightmare and hit herself with her own chromed up arms hard enough to leave marks. You don’t see her cussing as she limps around trying to find her toolkit because the joints in her leg seized. you don’t see her suffer.
Very enjoyable read. I loved that particular Rick Roderick lecture myself- he’s fun to watch. I think there’s one thing here that helps tie together several of the themes and tropes associated with Cyberpunk- whether machines/cyborgs/androids, virtual realities and the internet, postmodernism, etc, and that’s the post-Marxist tradition of thought in which several of these themes originate. Marx was the one who tied together ideas about productive power, technology (automatons and proto-cybernetics specifically, too, which also manifested in the later Communist obsessions with cybernetics) qualitatively changing human experience, machines dominating humans, alienation in both the technical and mundane sense, vast income inequality (arguably a feature of all major cyberpunk to date,) due to runaway capitalism, and fears of oligopolies and megacorporations, all in that particular form that cyberpunk authors repeated, even if they weren’t citing him specifically. Baudrillard and Lyotard are both working within a post-Marxian tradition as well, as their writings on postmodernism attest. Marxism always had an inherent connection to sci-fi (also see Star Trek, which has more than a little Marx in its DNA, too, but on the utopian end,) but I think Cyberpunk is specifically where Marxian themes can be found most directly in popular culture (which is of course not to suggest that these authors or works are Marxist themselves.)
I also bring this up more generally because a lot of people love Cyberpunk aesthetics and the anarchic, labyrinthine, high-tech and high-speed vision associated with a lot of it, and of course that stuff is cool in many ways, but it’s also important to remember that Neuromancer, for example, is explicitly a dystopian novel, as that Rick Roderick lecture so wonderfully explains. That future, at least for several of the main authors, is supposed to be disturbing and not simply exciting, which is key to a lot of the philosophical discussions it generates.
This post from ten years ago fucking nails it and is very different from a lot of modern discussions that view cyberpunk as casual entertainment and aesthetic.
Oh no he’s a lib.
Yeah Mike Pondsmith is a professional bad take haver and always has been. I remember one of the Mekton settings was basically like the start to Lancer, except the first post-apocalyptic world/space government was bad because it was too environmentalist in reaction to the literal world being rendered almost uninhabitable, just peak lib brainrot poisoning what was otherwise a decent setting IIRC. I still find him weirdly endearing anyways, like he comes across as earnest and well meaning in general despite the brain worms.
V’s fucking thrilled about her cyberware. You never see her saying “man I fucking hate these immune suppressants I’ve been shitting water since I got my first network implant”. You never see her startle when she looks in the mirror and sees something that isn’t her staring back. She never wakes up with bruises because she had a nightmare and hit herself with her own chromed up arms hard enough to leave marks. You don’t see her cussing as she limps around trying to find her toolkit because the joints in her leg seized. you don’t see her suffer.
I think that’s part of the evolution of how cyberware gets treated I talked about in the other thread, where it’s dropped the alienating body horror and dehumanization aspect as something innate to it and instead shifted those into things that are more analogous to bad medical outcomes and the intersection of poverty, both in response to criticisms like your own from the other thread and due to younger authors growing up with the perspective that prostheses are something restorative and that technology and augmentation are more normal things that give you agency and comfort instead of the other way around.
Like in Cyberpunk 2077, one does see all of those sorts of complications and alienating problems but they’re the result of crushing poverty, violent trauma, and social pressure, the problems are intersectional rather than some inevitable result of infernal machinery polluting flesh. Meanwhile V is a lumpen petty bourgeoisie killer for hire whose cyberware is all fresh and high end and directly linked with her personal agency, income, and ability to survive, experiencing only the best side of it personally despite being aware of and constantly encountering all the ways it can break and go wrong. On top of that, her story beat is basically meant to be happening in the narrative overlap between “fucking around” and “finding out” that seems almost a cliche of punk-focused media, this moment of euphoric liberation that can’t possibly last and must inevitably be crushed by either the consequences of the characters’ actions or the cruelty and injustice of the system itself, depending on the writer’s perspective.
To circle back around to the shift in cyberpunk-genre-writers’ perspective on technology, I feel like the genre has moved away from its roots in the anxieties of the 80s (multinational corporate expansion, obsessive fears over crime, getting confused and angry trying to program a VCR, what the fuck is the internet, jingoist worries over periphery countries rising and surpassing the imperial core economically, etc) into something that’s more just a sort of vapid escapist “what if real world (bad), but retrofuturist/punk aesthetics and neon lights (comfy and pretty), and personal agency (wow cool robot arm!)” thing that only gains depth when its used as a medium for a story that has depth anyways.
Edit: I just realized another point to that last bit, that when Cyberpunk as a genre was forming all the mixing in of Japanese aesthetics and language was meant to be alienating and reflected/played off American fears of Japanese tech industry surpassing American industry, whereas now it’s like just more comfy/pretty aesthetics for generations that have grown up consuming anime.
Edit: I just realized another point to that last bit, that when Cyberpunk as a genre was forming all the mixing in of Japanese aesthetics and language was meant to be alienating and reflected/played off American fears of Japanese tech industry surpassing American industry, whereas now it’s like just more comfy/pretty aesthetics for generations that have grown up consuming anime.
I mean, a lot of the visual identity of modern cyberpunk has been heavily influenced by anime (Akira, GiTS).
It’s sorta come full circle as a visual shorthand for the kind of cultural flattening effect neoliberalism has, although I’d wish they’d kinda move past some of the orientalist connotations into something more interesting.
I just realized it was kind of ironic that an aesthetic choice that in western cyberpunk was originally meant to be jarring and alien, playing off jingoism and orientalism, is now just part of the way cyberpunk aesthetics are just sort of comfy and pretty and nostalgic for modern audiences. The genre’s gone from being harsh and transgressive and edgy to just escapist comfort food, and the way Japanese cultural exports have gone from “scary foreign thing that mainstream American adults cry and piss themselves over seeing” to “normal and established thing that even weirdo racist chuds embrace (for gross and bad reasons, but still)” is one particularly stark example of that.
Like I remember South Park doing “anime is an insidious foreign plot to establish a fifth column of sleeper agents and enable a Japanese attack against America” as a plot in its trademark “irony is when you just do the bad thing unironically and if anyone calls you out you call them a slur for caring about anything” style, and at the time that was only a slightly exaggerated version of mainstream American jingoism and cynicism towards cultural imports from a country that wasn’t Anglo. And that was in the late 90s/early 2000s, while cyberpunk came about when “owning Japanese electronics is a hairsbreadth from literal treason against America” was mainstream in the chud zeitgeist. Now the orientalist elements of cyberpunk just scan as something familiar and even nostalgic for audiences who’ve grown up seeing these things in a lot of the media they consume.
Oh god, wasn’t there a whole episode where the whole plot was that Japan was taking over the US, but whenever anyone called them on it the Japanese guys would lliterally just whip it out and say “Oh yeah, we have small penises, but American’s have big penises” and then the characters would forget why they were upset? God that show is gross. And I think they were malding about Pokemon, too, but I haven’t watched any southpark in probably 20 years.
all the mixing in of Japanese aesthetics and language was meant to be alienating
Yeah, I never saw it like that. Idk if I was just a naive kid, but I saw the Chinese, Japanese, German, traveling all over the world to assemble your team, picking up hardware in Chiba City then overnighting to Zurich to pick up the stolen software you’re going to run with it, was meant to reflect that the old world of hard national borders and static cultures was breaking down and what was coming was a world where the boundaries between peoples and places was coming unfixed. Like yeah, the Orientalism and the fear that Japan was conquering the world with VCRs was there, but the way I remember is was that the companies being Japanese wasn’t because Japan was a problem, but rather a way to make the corporations seem more remote, more alien. Your company wasn’t the town factory or the firm that had occupied the same building since the stone age, it was now a faceless multinational with headquarters in a city your 80s education never mentioned. Japan was the face of that because that was the zeitgeist of the time, but the point was that the economy was being alienated from any particular place, that businesses and capitalists have no nation. Also, Japan in the 80s, at least the cool parts of the big cities, was legit cool as fuck. NYC was a miserable dirty sad place. Time Square was mostly cheap porn shops. There weren’t many “Cool” American cities. If you’re looking out your window at choking LA smog or urban decay in Cincinnati, then looking at a magazine and seeing clean streets, bright neon lights, and kids with cool innovative fashion in Tokyo, while all the old white people on the news are wringing their hands abut being overrun by cheap Japanese electronics, It seems like a natural place for a writer to set “The Future”. Staid, reactionary, piggishly anti-intellectual America wasn’t going to be part of that future. You can see that in The Sprawl stories - All the cool shit happens somewhere else. In the US there’s just the sprawl, a vast, decayed urban expanse covering the US east coast that just spreads despondency.
Does that track? Am I just nostalgic about it and not remember the overt racism? that happens to me a lot, I was oblivious to a lot of the racism around me as a kid and just didn’t notice it among other themes. going back and reading a lot of old favorites has been legit shocking.
It’s not overt racism that’s the problem (in fact, I would say Gibson as a author is someone who is very careful to avoid racist caricature in his work, unlike say Neal Stephenson); rather, the orientalism comes from who is being written about, and who is left out. Like, this blog post puts it really succinctly:
But in a setting that draws so heavily on East Asian culture, why are all the characters white?
Here’s a polygon article that’ll do the topic more justice than I ever could, but to summarize the crux of the problem: that picture of “The Future” that’s “Cool Japan”… that was never real in the first place. That’s the tourist brochure version- reality is that the other side of the world’s covered in The Sprawl too.
And it’s hard to really blame Gibson- as far as he was concerned he’s just writing some silly sci-fi story, he didn’t ask to define an entire sub-genre- but the fact of the matter is that without really doing the necessary research to accurately portray things from the perspectives of those he’s accidentally othering with his aesthetics, he just left the doors open for a kinda “Yellow Peril 2.0” to remain embedded within.
you don’t see her suffer.
going back to this; I really, strongly dislike CP2020/2030/RED/77s “Cyberpsychosis” concept. It’s always just “Wheelchairs make you evil”. And it does that crappy “Do not do the cool thing!”. “Getting chromed up will dangerously alienate you from humanity because using a mobility aid invests you with the dark power of satan! This is an important moral choice that will define you! But, like, you’ll look cool as fuck and it will give you massive gameplay advantages.”
Like peak “Don’t do the cool thing”. They don’t make it a pain in the ass to keep high end gear in spec, they don’t give you shitty commercial ware that malfunctions at bad moments, The don’t give you super clunky military kit where you’re constantly knocking shit over becuase your feet are size 37 all terrain armored spider feet. It’s just “All these super cool toys that let you do cool things are bad and will make you in to a monster! Which isn’t represented in game! Because this is really just unexamined ableism!”
RED at least made the conscious decision to change that a little bit, in that cyberware done for cosmetics, for gender affirmation, for amputation replacement, etc, don’t turn your character into a cyberpsycho and don’t affect them negatively (gameplay wise)
It’s usually only once you start taking on cyberware that makes your character more than human that cyberpsychosis becomes a concern
Which is far better than how Shadowrun handles it, which is that any cyberware begins to negatively affect your character’s maximum charisma, humanity, and magic stats, even something as simple as a single replaced limb or a pair of replaced eyes
I really, strongly dislike CP2020/2030/RED/77s “Cyberpsychosis” concept.
Pretty sure this was ripped out of Shadowrun, where if you zero out on “essence”/have too much chrome, you lose control of your PC and they become a cyber-roided ghoul for the rest of the party to put down. Always considered that a lame rule.
Also, why does everyone in the Cyberpunk 2077 have all the ports FOR THEIR BRAIN open and their wifi turned on? The quickhacking thing just bugs me, it doesn’t make any diegetic sense.
Like I see a few options
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No one has any encryption on their cyberware and they just keep all their ports open and their wifi on and discoverable at all times
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Somehow a little nobody rookie has backdoors for alll of the cyberware, including both commercial stuff and heavy-hitter military and security cyberware, and can execute them on the fly with no resistance
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Somehow V has a deck that can cut through all enemy encryption in seconds, suggestion that they have, like, 2 bit encryption and their passwords are stored as plaintext.
It took me a while to figure it out but the whole quickhack system in the game is a magic spell system with a tech veneer. Like you can set people on fire with a hack? How? Like literally how does that work? People’s cybernetics should blow physical fuses before something like that is possible. There are lots of things you could do that would make diegetic sense - get in to their eyes and ears and spin their sensory environment around until they fall over and puke, spoof random sensory input to induce some kind of seizure, flip their contrast and saturation from 0 to 100 so they effectively can’t see anything, spoof their visual input so they walk in to wall. Trigger emergency fail-safes to force their systems to eject batteries or coolant, or other safety features that would render them incapacitated. Just blast really loud music at them from their own augments. But setting them on fire? How? What is even happening there? There should be built in firmware or even hardware limiters to prevent most things that could be really dangerous to the user from happening. And then things like hijacking someone’s entire motor system to make them grab and ready one of hteir own grenades, then set it off while they’re holding it? How does that work? Taking over another person’s entire motor system, their prioception, that does not seem trivial. Like it’s not just moving the hand, it’s know there is a grenade or whatever, knowing where it is in relation to their hands, maneuvering the hands there while the victim probably doesn’t want you to do that, going through the whole multi-step process of arming a grenade, and then preventing them from doing anything aboutit for the next five seconds.
Like none of htat is trivial, that’s all a very complicated operation. Like setting aside why would people even have their motor neurons open to the internet, you’re doing a lot of complex stuff on the fly. and you’d think pretty much anyone who shoots people for a living would very specifically have hardware, software, and firmware level protections against someone doing that exact very precise thing.
I can kind of accept that every single thing in the future has built in internet-of-things bullshit with no security so you can glitch TVs and make soda machines dispense junk, but as a proud, dedicated pedantic grognard asshole I really struggled to suspend my disbelief with the quickhacks, especially when I was able to instantly run hacks on heavily borged out gang hitters or US army combat mechs.
Idk, it’s just like, you’re this nobody, and six months later yo should still be a nobody, and as a nobody you should have to be clever. Like find a node for a network, access it, overcome it’s security, then you can control device on that network specifically. Being able to brute-force smash your way in to other people’s cyberbrains should be high end stuff, something you work towards and unlock gradually. like, congratulations, you did a job for a corp and as a bonus to your pay they gave you some zero-day exploits for eyes manufactured by one of their competitors, so now when you encounter dumbass cops or street level shooters who don’t keep their firmware up to date you can mess up their vision if they use that brand of hardware.
But it’s not that at all, it’s just magic spells that inflict status effects. It didn’t make me feel like a cool wizard hacker, or any kind of hacker. It made me feel like i was playing an action RPGFPS.
Like, hell, if I was going to do it, the only way to get in to a military cyberbrain would be if you had some fancy sci-fi bullshit single use quantum cryptography sledgehammer you could use to smash through their encryption, and those would be expensive, hard to come by, extremely illegal, and would still have limits - They’d have to have their radios on, and you’d only have a short amount of time to fuck around in their head before whoever was running the squad’s network security booted you.,
Idk, I clearly want very different things from teh game, or any game that’s trying to reflect the genre, than the vast majority of people playing it.
The disconnect here is that you’re thinking of this from a technology perspective and working forwards, while the game is thinking about it from a gameplay perspective and working backwards. This is exacerbated by the game being a power fantasy first and foremost. In such a game, where you regularly gun down dozens of corporate security or gang members without having to worry about the hammer of MAXTAC ever being brought down on you, if “hacking” is going to be part of the gameplay loop, it has to be a viable alternative to a gun. Which means it has to be fast, lethal, and freely available.
As for safety devices, cyberware all lacking any sort of security because that would cost money (see: the $11 part that would have stopped the Ford Pinto’s fuel tank from being punctured) is at least in-genre.
That’s a good point. It is wacky how how ridiculously OP V becomes very quickly. In most Cyberpunk stories it’s very, very important not to draw notice from the corps or the cops because no matter how bad ass you are you’re not more badass than a wired up Knight or Direct Action kill team, and if you really cause a problem Ares or Aztechnology can and will hit you with attack helos, air strikes, or if you’re really annoying orbital bombardment. CP2077 wants you to play loud, flashy, and dumb in a way that’s usually not typical
Shit that’s not even the worst thing Aztechnology could do to you if I’m remembering right; I’d rather have Ares or Knight Errant pissed off at me before AZT
Also, why does everyone in the Cyberpunk 2077 have all the ports FOR THEIR BRAIN open and their wifi turned on? The quickhacking thing just bugs me, it doesn’t make any diegetic sense.
The original design entailed getting physical connections to local networks, like grabbing someone and jamming a cable into their skull or later making physical contact with a monowire whip that could deliver payloads while literally cutting through the wiring of their implants.
That all got scrapped for gameplay and development reasons to create the paradigm of like “hackers are RPG backline mages who toss out debuffs and dots, dialed up to make them viable for solo play since that’s all there is” alongside the muddier “berserk users are DPS tanks with big guns” and “sandevistan users are melee glass cannons that have to dodge tank” paradigms.
Yeah come to think of it it is pretty weird that you have an implant that makes you immune to bullet and then heals you when you stop killing people. : p
Idk where but I say some vids from someone working on a biopunk game where one of the mechanics was you could take organs from defeated enemies and stick htem in yourself to change your stats. no compatibility worries, no stats, you’d just be like “Damn, that’s a nice spleen. Shame to just leave it for the racoons” and stuff it in your chest cavity. Seemed like a fun gross take on cybernetics.
William Gibson was one of the creators of cyberpunk and he’s a total , I’m not surprised most people don’t get it.
That is why The Diamond Age has the Cyberpunk character die in the first chapter, where the possibility of even a dystopic freedom in the collapsing individualistic freefall of Social Democracy is crushed by the all-encompassing grasp of Capitalist society, which abhors the power Vacuum of 80s underground hacking.
Yeah, that was fun. I do want to know what story Stephenson was spoofing with the head gun. It’s a throw-away in the OG Deus Ex that Gunther ordered a head gun and was really excited about it.
