classes of silicon-based technology

there are some artists like manuel de aguas who proclaim themselves to be “the world’s first cyborgs” (annoying) and who posit their cybernetic self-modification as performance art (maybe true but somehow even more annoying) — and honestly i wish we lived in a world where the decision to join your body to various kinds of technology could be made freely by everyone.

instead we’re in a world where vaccines get hoarded and wasted by the US and where people both within and outside of the west have to live with the collateral damage of data centers and e-waste graveyards. it's also not a big secret that the united states' healthcare system does very little to support people in need of assistive medical technologies or life-saving medications.

similarly the digital divide in terms of "everyday" digital tech (smartphones, personal computers, internet service, etc) is quite vast. these disparities only increase for countries outside the west.

and as supply chains erode, as the climate becomes more hostile and the production of new tools/technologies becomes more difficult, it seems like the general quality (and quantity) of digital and medical devices will only become more varied for more people. like it's probably not super controversial to say that even if we get to actual bodymodding with cybernetics, not everyone will get to augment or alter themselves in the same ways or for the same reasons.

all this to say: it strikes me as pretty unlikely that de aguas’ application of cybernetic intervention or augmentation will be available to everyone. and there are some creative works that at least acknowledge that.

not to cite her repeatedly (but i will), but porpentine's revery palimpsest presents this inequity through the perspective of a discarded living weapon who is left like. bartering for shitty prostheses while her clone-twin becomes ever-more-elegantly-honed through all kinds of biotech. the weapon in question, revery, finds herself unable to keep up with the improvements of her twin specifically because she is the discarded one.

her psychological state decays thanks to her twin hijacking the technomagic used to both join and split them. because she is no longer of use to the military regents who created her, she also has no access to the means to repair her body, which has been attacked, wounded, and scavenged of its augmented parts. i wouldnt go so far as to say that the story is about the relationship between technological access and power (it’s not), but that relationship is certainly a core aspect of the world in which the narrative exists. an avenue through which the rest of the story plays out, if u will.

in chapter 3, close to the end of the narrative, revery recalls how she came to be in her line of work in the first place. she states that she was born on a backwater planet and that she became an amputee bc she and her family couldnt afford any other treatment for a wounded limb, and that the military regents came along and promised her “a leg and a future”.

that promise of both body parts and futurity i think sums up the cyberpunkian aspect of the story. revery understands the stakes; a future is afforded through people with power and people with power afford futures, in this world, through technology embedded in the body.

in a similar vein, julian k jarboe's self care considers how and why impoverished people might seek to augment their bodies not with cybernetics for self-expression, but with cybernetics for the sake of labor. like revery palimpsest, the story isn’t really about the cybernetics; theyre just part of the texture of everything. an inextricable aspect of the characters’ lives.

while the environment decays violently around the characters, bert, an ex-trucker and friend of the narrator, remarks that machines themselves have never done anything bad to her. despite losing her job to automation, she explains:

No self-driving semi ever called me a he-she or pulled a knife out to 'show me' at a rest stop. My navigator was good at getting us where we needed to go and had a no-bullshit attitude built right into her. Nah, I like computers.

she says that the real reason she’s out of work is because she couldnt afford cybernetic augmentation in her ankles so she could compete with the self-driving trucks in terms of hour-for-hour amount of work put in. she had been forced to finance her own semi-automated truck herself and suffered having it repossessed when she couldnt afford a necessary repair.

she elaborates: “It don't matter if they replaced me with a living spaceship or a fleet of oxen. A person set it up that way and a person followed through so it was people that did that to me.”

both statements highlight the simple reality that she and the narrator live in a system designed to exterminate them — and part of that extermination includes barring them from access to different kinds of cybernetic augmentations, and also from access to certain kinds of work because the workers can be replaced with automated tech that need no rest (but i appreciate that bert, and by extension jarboe, understands that the robots themselves are not the problem; robots are as exploited as humans, they just make less noise about it).

at the end of the story, bert opts for work in an underwater hotel because her home doesnt exist anymore and she (presumably) doesnt have the energy to join the fight for non-augmented people to have shitty jobs that might otherwise be taken away from them by humans whose bodily makeup is more than 50% cybernetic machinery.

these works are such a stark contrast to, say, the bright-eyed optimism of pre-70s scifi. someone like gene roddenberry very hopefully dreamed of a future with technology as a great equalizer lifting people out of poverty and dissolving class strata. in response, self-care and revery palimpsest posit a future where class is solidified by technology.

for this reason, i count these stories among cyberpunk's transcendent descendants. and i think probably they contribute to a broader constellation of cyberpunk offshoots that makes its home in stories of class stratification and technodecay and ecological crises. im sure theres more in the way of these types of works on itch but unfortunately my """"research"""" didnt turn me on to anything. (tl;dr — if you know of anything in this vein, lmk!!)

anyway my point is: i think that you cant consider bodies and the technomodifications of them without considering who has access to those modifications and why. for me, cyberpunk becomes more interesting when it ceases to regard all technomods as intrinsically invasive on their own (a la something like black mirror) and instead looks at and imagines how tech access (& the lack thereof) becomes a violation of living organisms bc of some technocrat-capitalists’ gluttony.

the genre-as-tool lets us investigate the logical conclusions of whats already happening anyway. technology is not the great equalizer. it’s just a tool in the hands of specific people in specific positions of power with specific interests that have nothing to do with building a more equitable world.

i know im kinda repeating myself, but i guess it all feels very dire. there is no future for technology that can produce a net positive as long as the drive towards capitalist expansion exists. ykwim?

like.

while the imperial core deals war weapons to whichever nation state or leader is most likely to protect american interests and facebook executes decisions abt who gets high speed internet and who doesnt (and whose ethnic cleansings will be accelerated) all in favor of Unending Growth — it seems kinda blisteringly obvious that technology's potential for uplifting human life is throttled at the boundaries of the empire.

i think a lot of american self-mythologizing tries to skirt around this. the arc of history is long and bends towards justice or whatever people like to tell themselves so they can go to sleep at night. but i do think theres potential in cyberpunk’s descendants to reject that kind of hollow hope.

i dont think rejecting it will fix anything on its own. i just think it’s worth rejecting and worth confronting things like: what will happen to prisoners as tech access becomes even more stratified? as cybernetics become a non-negotiable requirement to participate in the workforce? what happens when kids cant go to school bc they dont have the protective gear they need to leave their houses because theres like. no ozone or whatever.

im just spitballing here.

there's no justice under capitalism. and i think through these latter-day cyberpunk offshoots we can maybe approach that truth with open eyes by imagining what kind of future awaits us in this history, right now. and maybe we can derive some comfort in knowing other people feel compelled to follow this train of thought to its logical conclusion. we're not alone in our horror.

so.

that brings us to the next point: the collapsed boundary between “meatspace” and “cyberspace.”