Cyberpunk is dead?

http://w3.cultdeadcow.com/cms/2011/03/cyberpunk-is-dead.html

by rl1987 • 15 years ago

60 65 15 years ago

w3.cultdeadcow.com

wladimir4• 15 years ago

The problem with cyberpunk is that it's no longer the future, it's the present. Sometimes when I read the news I've got the idea we're kind of living in a dystopian 90's cyberpunk future...

When it's the new normal it makes sense that the word is "dead" as a denominator.

daeken9• 15 years ago

My thoughts exactly. I don't mean to threadjack, but I'm running a new startup where I'm building augmented reality displays ( http://gothameyewear.com/ if anyone is interested -- haven't posted it here before, simply because there's not much there), and I occasionally have that "well shit, it's the future" realization in working on it. We may not be in the 2011 of Shadowrun, but we'll have decks soon -- they'll be our smartphones.

vetler• 15 years ago

I've convinced myself that augmented reality displays are right around the corner. Don't we have the technology to to do this now? I suppose the challenge might be to make everything light and compact enough.

The future is so close I can smell it.

Rhapso4• 15 years ago

I am a college student looking to do research on wearable computers and interface designs for this kind of device. Looking for interns?

bootload2• 15 years ago

"... 'm running a new startup where I'm building augmented reality displays ..."

Are they as good as or approach EyeTap (Steve Mann)? ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EyeTap

ThomPete2• 15 years ago

That's exactly Gibsons take on it which is why he wrote a book like Pattern Recognition which interestingly enough is much less dystopian than his first three books.

These days cyberpunk seems to be more about transhumanism and posthumanism ala Charles Stross books "Accellerando" & "Singularity Sky".

cstross• 15 years ago

Er, no.

Cyberpunk (in written SF) died around the time "Vincent Omniaveritas" folded his zine Cheap Truth in 1986 (which you can find an archive of here: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~erich/cheaptruth/ ) ... by 1992, when Bantam Spectra published Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" it had descended into self-parody (hint: a heroic central character called Hiro Protagonist? Try saying that aloud).

Transhumanism/posthumanism was big in the 1990s -- Vernor Vinge coughed up the hairball that is the singularity in the mid-1980s and Hans Moravec of CMU popularized it and spread the fertile soil for the early 1990s transhumanists, who also hybridized with libertarians and cypherpunks by way of the extropians mailing list circa 1990-95. But again, by the time you get to the late 1990s folks like Ray Kurzweil were bandwagoning on it, and these days that, too, is ancient history.

"Accelerando" was written circa 1998-2003, and "Singularity Sky" -- not its original title, but one dropped on it by the publisher in search of teh sexxy -- in 1996-98. If you're pointing to them as signs of where SF is at, I'll just get my coat -- because SF is dead.

mrcharles3• 15 years ago

Yes, the only thing truly missing is the idea of a direct neural interface and some kind of virtual world... but in reality that virtual world will likely never exist outside games.

Why, you ask? Because the main conceit of the cyberpunk virtual world is that it's entirely like reality with the exception that it's more fantastic. But an amazon/itunes search with a quick click to buy is infinitely faster and more convenient than jumping in to a virtual world and 'physically' trying to find something.

Alternate reality is the new future, not virtual reality. We already have a perfectly good reality, so we'll just spice it up.

demosthenes6• 15 years ago

What is the difference, if any, between alternate reality and augmented reality?

wladimir4• 15 years ago

Given the advances in EEG and other brain scan techs, I believe direct neural interfaces aren't that far away anymore. One step at a time, we'll first have to get used to motion-based interfaces. Neural interfaces will probably be like moving a limb but not actually moving. With such interfaces, there is no reason anymore to restrict to planar screens. Everything can be 3D.

For buying stuff you're right -- just clicking and using an efficient search system is much more efficient. But the market for experiences is another thing.

Many people will disagree with you that we already have a "perfectly good reality". They might desire things they cannot have in life, for example, or want to do things that physics makes impossible in real life (teleportation?). Just imagine the possibilities. As soon as the tech is there, there will be a huge market for it.

And don't forget collaboration over a distance. "telepresence". It's not just for games and fun.

dublinclontarf• 15 years ago

Not dead, just moved. I think the whole bitcoin thing is very cyberpunk-ish. A digital crypto-currency.

demosthenes6• 15 years ago

Spot on.

Also, browsing pages on Tor and similar networks reminds me a lot of exploring the internet in the early '90s. It's messy, there are lots of abandoned, hastily put together pages. There are weird rants.

The internet that the author misses is still out there. It's just not as close to the surface as it was in the early days of the internet or BBS.

lloeki• 15 years ago

"It's just not as close to the surface as it was in the early days of the internet or BBS."

Precisely. I'll add that today that 'underground' is a very small (yet important, if not critical to its future) part of the whole internet whereas in the early days it was most of it; hence the appearance of it being farther from the surface.

No need to reach for Tor, take HN whose volume is certainly much lower than those Facebook streams and various LOLcats, yet it is certainly pivotal to what's actually built on the internet. The next Facebook won't come from its users, it will come from one of you.

Human-Computer interaction as envisioned is at its peak. Dare you tell me that Second Life, World of Warcraft, or Eve Online are not quite akin to the metaverse that was envisioned in Snowcrash. Tell me that those robotic prosthetic limbs are not close to what you see in Gunnm (Battle Angel Alita in the US). All those eyes, ears, and even memory prosthetic devices (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6574) seen in Ghost in the Shell and Johnny Mnemonic are not dreamt of anymore, they are very real and useful to many (although admittedly they did not reach such levels of advancement, but that's a matter of time). Tell me those efforts to control and monitor everything including the internet "for the safety of everyone and his dog" are not dystopian in many ways, and get a look at how the third and fourth world are manipulating technology in ad-hoc, cheap, creative and dangerous ways to try and follow us in our first-world countries steps.

Of course there is some error correction to apply with regard to what was envisioned before all of that was even remotely possible; it is no wonder that fiction varies from reality.

Cyberpunk lives, for the best and the worst, today.

kragen2• 15 years ago

Cypherpunkish, more than Neuromancerish. Also, I know a guy who left the US in order to be able to keep gambling online, and a Google executive recently coordinated a peaceful revolution that toppled a 30-year-old dictatorship in Egypt, in 18 days. And there's some debate as to whether or not Iran's efforts to enrich uranium were stymied by a computer worm that destroyed its centrifuges or not, and the world's biggest distributed computers are operated either by the Russian Mafia or by Google, depending on how you measure.

I still see more Rainbows End than Neuromancer in today's internet, but that's hardly surprising; Vinge wrote it considerably later.

locopati• 15 years ago

"If I write something set 60 years in the future I am going to have to explain how humanity got there and that's becoming quite a big job," [Gibson] said.

"Compared to that further investigation of our alien present seems actually way more doable and it may be more fun to do because it shakes all sorts of people out of the woodwork that want to talk to me," [Gibson added].

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11502715

Also, http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/09/william-gibson-interv...

demosthenes6• 15 years ago

Interestingly, Gibson's latest book - Pattern Recognition - is set in the present. It's very good.

http://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Recognition-William-Gibson/dp/...

It's not the same dystopian future he envisioned in the 1990s. But his keen eye draws out the darker sides.

spacemanaki• 15 years ago

He's written two books since then, Spook Country and Zero History which are also set in the present. I haven't read them but supposedly they constitute a sort of informal trilogy.

I agree that Pattern Recognition is very good. Although I will always have a soft spot for Neuromancer and his related books and stories.

bricestacey• 15 years ago

I thought the last two paragraphs were delightful and might help explain the recent trend for people to leave HN.

Otherwise, the piece is barely legible.

demosthenes6• 15 years ago

This piece reads awfully. I haven't seen anything like this since trying to understand inscrutable postmodernist literary criticism at college.

I am very interested in this, but I'm having a lot of trouble understanding it. What's he trying to say?

Todays market of representations means that we exchange images that are valued by statements without consequence, statements whose only value is the one of attention, something we have learned from the advertising process, which has become the key process of culture. This cultural praxis fails to find a history of the human faces. The faces tried to break the boundaries of word and image, they were processes of conscious creation of speaking images for the feelings that words fail to describe.

Dickdavis• 15 years ago

I have a hunch this was written by a non-native English speaker (see the quote usage near the beginning).

Anyway, I think he's saying that our faces, which allow us to communicate without words (the last sentence of your quote), are now nothing more than static images/advertisements (e.g., profile pictures). Communication on social networks has been reduced to using advertising techniques to gain attention.

schrototo• 15 years ago

I have to confess, I've got a sort of fondness for this writing style. It's got a certain rythm that makes everything seem more... impactful than it really is.

edit: of course, what I meant to say was:

While aesthetically confusing on a surface level, the subcurrent of ryhtmic tonality in these disquisitions impacts the reader's thought process in subliminal ways. Hitherto the paragon of collegiate studies, these textual discourses nowadays propagate freely in the super-plebeian fantasy-made-reality cyber-utopia that is the infosphere. The parentally linked-to hypertext is a two-fold example of not only the skillfull mastery of the avant-poetic style, but also the post-print arrangement common in todays socioeconomic conditions.

epochwolf2• 15 years ago

Congratulations, I have not read text like that since my philosophy courses in college.

EdiX• 15 years ago

I interpret it as "kids this days like them lolcats".

gaius• 15 years ago

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

epochwolf2• 15 years ago

You need to break apart the statements and translate it into normal english. If you enjoy this stuff, I recommend reading some philosophy texts from your local university.

> Todays market of representations means that we exchange images that are valued by statements without consequence, statements whose only value is the one of attention, something we have learned from the advertising process, which has become the key process of culture.

Our current culture communicates and understands ideas in the form of sound bites. This is because advertisements have become important in shaping our culture.

> This cultural praxis fails to find a history of the human faces. The faces tried to break the boundaries of word and image, they were processes of conscious creation of speaking images for the feelings that words fail to describe.

We are trying to find a new way to communicate but we are failing at it and becoming irrelevant. (I might be losing something in the translation here.)

EdiX's comment "I interpret it as 'kids this days like them lolcats'" is right on target. It captures the angst of the writer bemoaning the loss of culture of our current generation.

On another note, I find this snippet to be strangely ironic. It complains about a failure to redefine the way we communicate. The writer is attempting to precisely define their ideas in language that reminds me of a lawyer trying to write a bulletproof contract. The end result is nearly impenetrable and risks losing the entire message because no one can understand it.

DanI-S2• 15 years ago

The article defines punk (in general) as a deviant subculture that parents are afraid of.

Perhaps the general decline of punk can be attributed to modern parents being much less afraid than parents in the 70s. Cyberpunk isn't really exciting when your parents all have iPhones.

demosthenes6• 15 years ago

I'm not sure why Anonymous does not fit the article's definition.

kragen2• 15 years ago

They do, explicitly:

Contrary to this, CHAN-culture (imageboards, fast communication channels) and the ANON-meme (crowd orientated cyber actions) try different ways in waging real mass-based cyberwars, they reach this point by being more punk again, punk as in: deviant subculture that parents are afraid of.

I read this as saying that Anonymous and 4chan (and friends) have reached the point of being punk again, in that sense.

jokermatt999• 15 years ago

Between Anonymous and Wikileaks, I feel like we're practically living in a cyberpunk story. We're just the blissfully uninvolved citizens who don't live in the seedy underbelly.

pnathan• 15 years ago

Cyberpunk got somehow stuck in mirror shades and virtual reality worlds, and then wandered off into the artistic fringe.

There was also very little grasp of programming by the cyberpunk writers that I've read. No understanding of the Cyber part of the Punk. That would have increased its ability to stay relevant.

Cyberpunk is dead?

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