all for what?

i guess in a way everything outlined here (as in: all the works of art mentioned) points to something else abt cyberpunk: it's apocalyptic in nature. the art and fiction of cyberpunk's offspring and of cyberpunk itself dont offer a solution to the condition of capitalism or the obliteration of the environment it entails or the corrosive injection of surveillance/extraction into our lives that it imposes. even crash, which doesnt deal so much in the last thing (but i’d argue does deal in the former two through the persistent visuals of a landscape dominated entirely by concrete and though the entire cult's attitude that theres nothing left in the world for them thats sufficiently fulfilling) offers up no real "way out" of capitalist destruction — except maybe to eroticize ones own annihilation. which like sure. that's a pretty bleak way to receive things, but i dont think it's an objectionable one, or even an unreasonable one.

i guess to me cyberpunk and its descendants invite us to just keep following the thread towards all the ways technocratic capital will feed us to the abattoir. in keeping with the slow cancellation of the future, these works (or the interesting ones at least) posit that the end has already been determined for us, circumscribed by glittering fiber optics and google's metastatic killer robots and mechanized warfare and the long needle of facebookian Connectedness threaded through each of us, brainstem to brainstem. all thats left to do is confront it.

and i guess some people would argue that it's fatalistic or a type of "giving up" to focus so much on a bleak horizon when we could instead devote our creative energy to imagining more hopeful or compassionate futures. but i object to this and generally resent that attitude overall. ive been saying throughout this whole thing that cyberpunk is a tool — and i think thats true of art broadly. when people insist that art needs to have a (presumptive narrative) "point" or that an all-consuming nihilism/existentialism/hopelessness in art is purely a function of cynical edgelording, theyve lost me. we have nothing to say to each other. certainly imagining better worlds or kinder futures is one function of art but it's not the only one and sometimes it’s not even a helpful one, depending on the subject matter, the audience, and the artmaker in question.

and maybe more importantly, one thing i think art doesnt do always is function as a persuasive argument. if we imagine art as a disposition or an external expression of interiority, it becomes incoherent to accuse existential art of "giving up" on life in a way that’s substantive or meaningful. the act of giving up on real life happens every day at the behest of corporate and imperial leaders, so much so and with such violence that it's as nauseating as it is heartbreaking. where are those feelings, the nausea and the heartbreak and the horror, supposed to go? why is it 'giving up' to make art that says those feelings are real without offering a specific solution to them?

this isnt to say that art has no political value or impact whatsoever, just that people who handwring about art "offering no hope" have some fundamental disagreement with me about what art's power is and how it suffuses our lives.

to show my hand again: in general i think of art as dreams that have detached from their creators. which, in a way, makes all art pieces persons in their own right (if youre willing to cede that people themselves are just bizarre dreaming-things staggering through the world). the power in art that moves us is therefore similar to the powerful experience of encountering another human being with whom you feel some kind of kindred nature. in both cases the experience is revelatory and occasionally salvific.

the promise inherent in both: youre not all alone; you may not be perfectly seen or understood, but the bizarre mess of existence is a mess experienced by at least one other person out there. you didnt manufacture all your suffering and you are not naive for holding hope in your heart that life isnt just this, the pit and its abyssal cruelty. there’s at least one other person who suffers and hopes in a way that you can recognize and that recognizes you.

i think the best thing that cyberpunkian art and its offspring (or at least the stuff that i find most interesting) can do is walk with us towards the shattered horizon, where climate crisis and capitalist destruction have played out to and through their final logical conclusion. for many people, that reality is already upon us — the horizon already crossed. whether we can get our shit together enough to dissolve the US and its cohort and pull ourselves back from the brink of complete annihilation remains to be seen. right now though, things dont feel so great. if cyberpunk can give us anything, it's just the promise that we as individuals are not the only people caught in the throes of that horror. someone else has seen that horror too and is feeling it and is trying to figure out what to do with it.

cyberpunk may not have any particular solutions or promises about the future — but who cares? we're making it because we're trying to survive the present.