so. ok. cyberpunk!! where do we start?

i guess with this: when i was little (like, 8 or 9) i had a deep fascination with, like, sentient machines, and machines that could mesh, merge with, or somehow consume organic animals — including humans. this fascination culminated in a specific story about a semi-sentient vivisecting machine that...idk, i guess it just. did exactly that? vivisected people, me included.

which, i concede, is kind of weird — but i guess find me a little kid who isnt weird about their fascinations at 8 or 9 years old.

i definitely didnt know what cyberpunk was at that age. i just really liked robots. and i think prior to you asking me this question, i had a very specific definition and intense understanding in my mind when i think of ‘cyberpunk’ but i realized don’t actually know what other people mean when they say “cyberpunk”! which was surprising. it’s like picking something up exclusively through cultural osmosis or something.

like for example: like many trans children, i spent most of my adolescence wishing i would unmake my body in favor of replacing it with blood-filled pneumatic tubes and a steel spinal cord and the modular plating of some kind of mecha-esque carapace in the shape of something like a wet and bleeding android. in the tradition of many trans children, i wished this so hard that it became a prominent sense of my identity and has persisted into adulthood. "transitioning" did not dissolve this cybernetic sense of self, even if it relieved some other psychic pains.

but in all honesty? i had to go look up the formal literary definition of Cyberpunk (see my sources: wikipedia and tvtropes lmao) to actually dig into your prompt while still like acknowledging herstory or whtver.

so with history acknowledged, i want to say that what grips me most about cyberpunk in the present is that in 2022 i think cyberpunk has become too many things to just be whatever gibson and his cohort envisioned — and i generally find this enlivening.

transcended descendants

cyberpunk-by-osmosis to me kinda implies that there are descendants of cyberpunk that transcended the original sub-genre and basically helped shape the creative outlooks of myself and (i assume) probably other artists my age and younger.

i also think it's cool to ask what these transcended descendants of cyberpunk can be ('transcended' as in: to become more than one's origins, not to "become transcendent" in a way that implies some kind of apotheosis) bc without that transcendence, the thing in question (cyberpunk the sub-genre, the mode of thinking or creating) greys out and ages into pure Aesthetics. and in general i feel comfortable arguing that “pure aesthetics” is

1. bad
2. a much beloved feature of our present world's capitalist-and-possibly-soon-to-be-fascist market

like, to rehash an already-very-hashed argument surrounding anything to do with any kind of punk culture: a mode of artmaking that's v aesthetic-heavy (from cyberpunk to punk-punk) is easy to recuperate, repackage, and sell back to people in exchange for the feeling of being subaltern without confronting anything especially subversive, difficult, or abject.

this isnt to say that Real Cyberpunk Is A Revolutionary Act or even that the origins of cyberpunk were intrinsically subversive by nature — just that the subgenre permits for the exploration of weirdness, horror, existentialism, ugliness, violence, grief, pleasure, and power, if we choose to use it that way.

the transcended descendants of cyberpunk can offer us feelings that are so true they're nauseating, but, y'know. only if we want them to.

i hope i dont sound too bright-eyed abt it. cyberpunk's capacity for delivering either erotic pleasure or a psychosomatic gutting is just one use of cyberpunk as a tool — and i guess the first point of this...manifesto...is me arguing that cyberpunk and its descendants are tools.

so.

what are the other uses of this tool? propaganda seems like the big one. propaganda in defense of capitalism in general, or neoliberal capitalism in specific, or even technocratic fascism. i know that sounds kinda contradictory, considering that cyberpunk is generally regarded as a critique of capitalism, but bear with me. im willing to assert here that all propaganda is a matter of aesthetics.

that isn't to say that all propaganda is intrinsically hollow or evil, but for something to be successful propaganda (as in: persuasive, stirring up feelings), i do rly believe it has to rely on aesthetics and on a particular, consistent aesthetic language to achieve its aim. to go a step further, i would make the case that for something to be fascist propaganda, it has to be nothing but aesthetics (to paraphrase someone like mark fisher who...i'm pretty sure put that to words better than me).

for cyberpunk to function as fascist propaganda, it has to be this nothing-but-aesthetics tool that stirs up feelings of intense nostalgia and that fetishizes power, domination, and ""rationalism"" (this last thing being maybe more specific to a technocrat's fever dream of fascism more than the other three). obvs fascism itself is broader than that and has more mystical attitudes than just what cyberpunk can deliver but im not here to argue that cyberpunk gives rise to fascism. just that it can help prop it up.

and i do think cyberpunk is especially susceptible to becoming Nothing But Aesthetic, and therefore slip-sliding right into capitalist and/or fascist propaganda. i think the nature of its subject matter is why this is the case. if someone chooses to privilege cyberpunk's aesthetic above all else, i think it's possible to imply that the 80s, however much they sucked, were the last bastion of 'the good old days' before everything went to shit. that, maybe, if we'd played our cards differently, we would have really achieved francis fukuyama's 'end of history' or whatever garbage.

so in this way, cyberpunk could be used to let us return, eternally, to this fantasy version of the 80s (without AIDS; without explicit mention of the US destroying the livelihoods of people in other countries in a crusade against the USSR; without reagan's expansion of the war on drugs; etc...), where it feels like the historical moment is loaded with the potential for radical change. cyberpunk aesthetics can offer the dreamy promise that the past is electric and neon and bright, even if the future’s kind of dark.

of course this kind of promise/nostalgia is a lie. the past was not bright, there was no "tipping point" between the empire being good and the empire being bad. it's always bad. and the future of imperial states is always a terminal one lbr. the US and its genocidal cohorts have been cancelling futures since they first emerged on the world stage and even the OG cyberpunkists (in the west at least) deal in their own bizarre sentimentalisms about the past.

like. at least some of that first cohort of writers were looking backwards just as much as they were projecting all their own specific neuroses into the future. the misogyny-orientalism-sinophobia melange of blade runner stands out as like ?maybe? one of the most cogent examples of that neuroticism layered on top of a narrative structure that was quite literally and deliberately recycling the noir "genre"/aesthetic that writers/filmmakers like gibson, dick, and scott would have (im guessing) grown up with as kids. even their dismal future-facing fictions offered up an attachment to an aesthetic past. nostalgia and her lies spring eternal.

dont sip from the spring, however tempting.

all this to say: if cyberpunk exists only as a vessel for the vibes, the Affectation, the blend of neon-and-rain-and-1980s-future-dreams then like. it's very easy to see (imho) how all someone like elon musk has to do is make his product meet the Minimum Viable Product Aesthetics of something "cyberpunky" to trigger that anesthetizing sense-memory for a place we've never been and that has never existed in order to summon his like slavering cohort of fanboys to sell the masses on the feeling of a being the Last Protagonists at the end of the world.

you really do hate to see it.

i’d add also that the value of considering cyberpunk's descendants beyond the bounds of Cyberpunk itself lies in the fact that at least a few of the original texts were concerned with questions that i just dont think are that interesting.

"what distinguishes a human from AI/machines/cyborgs/whatever", whether intended this way or not, strikes me as having its origins in a tradition of phrenologic preoccupations on a high level. like what's the difference between perseverating over the interiority of a mechanized Other and writing treatises on race science describing all the ways that the Other is farther down on the great chain of being bc of features of their skin, eye shape, height, self-expression, or, yeah, their skulls?

i know that's kind of like the rhetorical critique that, without a lot of historical and literary knowledge to back it up, feels vaguely like an irritating twitter thread designed to instigate incendiary conversations. like i do think i’m right in my asserting those parallels, but those parallels arent things i can speak on very deeply beyond the fact that they feel related to me. and if im being honest, the core of this feeling isn't motivated by especially deep or smart sensitivity; it's rooted in the plain fact that 'what makes a human' just isn't a question i care about all that much, the origins of my self-concept being (as mentioned) forged and enmeshed in the desire to become more cybernetic.

so anyway.

that's a lot of critiquing of the genre (and im 110% sure other, smarter people have critiqued the genre better and more eloquently than im doing here). thank u for sticking with it. maybe the critiques are worthwhile; maybe not. the fact remains tho that i am compelled by these transcendent descendants of cyberpunk that i keep alluding to more than almost any other artistic tradition in modernity and i mean that both as an audience member and as an artist. so i guess the real question is: what actually is interesting about cyberpunk? what has cyberpunk given us that feels meaningful or worthwhile? what sets latter-wave cyberpunk descendants apart from their late-70s-into-80s predecessors (if anything)? im not trying to necessarily codify a taxonomy of what cyberpunk is Actually in the new 20s and im not interested in making a case for What Cyberpunk Should Aspire To in this era.

however many words into this we are, my goal is to explain what i'm referring to when i say "the transcended descendants of cyberpunk" and to explain why the works i present here fit into that tradition for me.

i said before that i think cyberpunk and its offspring are tools that can let us look at the weird, the bleak, and the violent — and in doing so allow us to access nauseatingly true, sometimes good, and sometimes miserable feelings. for me the descendants that do this are most typically concerned with:

1. ruptured or delimited bodies
2. classes of silicon-based technology
3. the collapsed boundary between "cyberspace" and "meatspace" (as opposed to a preoccupation with the idea that somehow there's presently a "real world" that's realer/better/inherently less poisonous and also entirely separate from the metaverse or whatever)
4. systemic power
5. and finally, fetishism.

so, if we’re dispensing with aesthetics and focusing instead on these thematic investigations, what works deal in these things? what are these five considerations even about or what do they allow us to access? how do we recognize a 'transcended descendant' of cyberpunk in this framework? i guess thats what im going to try to detail or work out for....the rest of this mess.

ok.

to start.