Frank rants about Cyberpunk (the ethos, not the game)

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.