I am a big fan of both, but I think what's missing in reality, but in their fiction (and cyberpunk fiction in general) is a sense of coolness and caring about aesthetics. For all the evil that the mega corporations do in a Gibson novel, they still have an aesthetic appeal.
Real-world corporations aren't that interesting. Amazon, Facebook, or Google have nothing "culturally" or aesthetically on Hosaka, Arasaka or Sense/Net.
Which is really the tragedy of it all: we are getting the cyberpunk dystopia with none of the aesthetics that have made it a household word.
> we are getting the cyberpunk dystopia with none of the aesthetics that have made it a household word.
Sure we are. The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed. Here's a nighttime walk through Shenzhen.[1] Shenzhen is cyberpunk made real. Giant display screens everywhere. Light shows on major buildings, synchronized between the buildings. Robots on the streets. Drones in the sky. Cameras everywhere. Night markets where you can buy both food and electronics. Self-driving cars. Electric buses and taxis. Women in colorful outfits on motorcycles.
Shenzhen looks more cyberpunk than Cyberpunk 2077, the game.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiXpYbCZyjs
I think what is confusing some people is that those novels and authors are all American and they can’t seem to believe another country beat us to it. It’s like they expected God had made it so that America would be the leader in techno culture evolution. It would be endearing if it weren’t for their impotent rage response to enable fascism for their own ends.
> I think what is confusing some people is that those novels and authors are all American and they can’t seem to believe another country beat us to it.
Gibson's novels predicted Asian ascendency (insomuch as you can have ascendency in a dystopia). Through a quirk of the time period in which they were written they happened to present it as emanating from Japan rather than China.
Asian superpowers feature so heavily in the genre that it's a cliche. Also Ballard was British.
...And he grew up in Shanghai, China
J.G. Ballard was not an American. He grew up in China and spent most of his life in the UK. He has a very subtle British sensibility to a lot of his work.
Isn’t Gibson Canadian?
Nope, he fled the draft there from South Carolina*. He has been there since '67 though.
He appears in an old CBC documentary about the Yorkville neighborhood and the hippies there from then.
https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/1.3202122
*</i>ETA: Whoops I just realized he was born in SC, but he grew up in Virginia. So THAT'S where he fled to Toronto from.
I see it more a reflection of the degree to which America was foundational to programming and internet culture. So in a sense America did beat them to it, even if they might eventually surpass America they are still operating in a technical culture that the US created.
That's an interesting video. If the skyscrapers were flickering just a little faster, the sky would be the color of a television tuned to a dead channel.
That's just a normal night. For special events, the skyscraper lighting is much more dynamic.[1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDNkcKiD2Ow
(For those who did not get it, it’s the first line of Neuromancer).
And from John's parent comment, "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." is a quote attributed to William Gibson.
We're all just quoting authors now.
it just looks like a normal city. If we're declaring things cyberpunk based on LED displays Las Vegas probably wins but China is a horrifying totalitarian dictatorship with a market economy and by that measure sure, guess they beat us to the dystopia! go communism! go China! weeeeee
Well maybe there's something to be said about that when comparing against the decaying and crumbling corrupt US
> cyberpunk
> horrifying totalitarian dictatorship with a market economy
These things are totally compatible, and usually basically synonymous.
The CCP is firmly in control of China. They don't let corporations run the country.
That just means one giant corporate entity runs the country.
And let us not forget that there are about as many billionaires in the chinese parliament as there are millionaires in the US parliament.
China is corrupt, mercantilist, and run like a maffia family, and with the coming demographic hit, their power will soon diminish.
Humans everywhere have those characteristics. Currently, China has substantial control of the supply chain for almost everything. I think you'll find Chinese power remains but the wealth and power distribution internally becomes even more centralized. The US and China are similar in this regard.
Johnny Mneumonic (1995), set in the mid 2020s, depicts Beijing as the global epicentre of power and wealth. Much of the action is set in Newark New Jersey, a dystopian hellscape where civil order has broken down.
Another William Gibson story.
Yes, he wrote the original short story and also the screenplay for the film.
This video does not look cyberpunk to me. I see cyber, but where's the punk? Where's the "lowlife" or the societal collapse? This is high tech and highly controlled by enormous economic actors, but that doesn't make it cyberpunk at all.
I'd argue that currently the closest thing to that is queer culture. The vibe of social rejects reclaiming their own sense of style is very cyberpunk!
china has something like 50million homeless people. You are seeing the Arasaka quarters. There are much dodgier areas in all of the big Chinese cities (though surprisingly safe as the Chinese are quite docile)
> The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed.
One of my favourite Gibson quotes.
I never thought about this before, but you made me realize that Sense/Net sure had a lot of employees considering the in-story world had true AGI, enough employees that the Panther Moderns exploited to cause chaos during the Dixie Flatline run. Or was it that the Turing Police were in the habit of shutting down really smart AI resulting in an aggressive need for white collar workers?
On aesthetics, the way the Hosaka is described is as the experience of touching and using it. The reader doesn't actually know what the aesthetics are, nor does the reader get a taste of what it's like to actually use. In stories, they don't show people having driver problems, or their microphone not working, or having to go to the bathroom (unless it's integral to the plot), which in some sense is similar to talking about lickable/fluid UI widgets and how material design is great and not mentioning that Hosaka moved the setting dialog again, you have to update drivers before jacking in, the sliver of "microsoft" inserted behind your ear makes you watch an ad before giving you access to live prices of antique art, or cyberspace now has a ribbon instead of a toolbar.
> The reader doesn't actually know what the aesthetics are, nor does the reader get a taste of what it's like to actually use.
And this is how it should be. Johnny Mnemonic's 320GBs became the reality in mid 90' and mundane by 2005.
Agreed. My point is that there's the perception of the characters and corporations as having some meaningful/cool aesthetics in these stories and in the genre, but you'd be hard-pressed to identify what they are or how they are different than what we have today. And that's part of what makes good stories timeless.
320GB progressed from amazing, to reality, to mundane, to trivial today, but it would take on different meaning if there was some breakthrough real-life research that indicated the human brain is, in total, say, only 325GB. Which is what Johnny Mnemonic is really about, even if the numbers and units used are dated.
> but you'd be hard-pressed to identify what they are or how
Oh, that's easy! They are cool!
NB in ~50 years cool would change it meaning and things would be no longer cool for a contemporary reader but some other word designating an awesomeness and delight.
Heh, and cool hunting is the setting in Pattern Recognition.
That they are cool is the only thing that needs to be said. The reader fills that in with their own perception, which is how we're ending up with the Torment Nexus, because some people think the Torment Nexus is cool.
> you'd be hard-pressed to identify what they are
Rollerblading in motorcycle gear; duh.
The AIs are supposed to be very expensive, but it's left to the reader to figure out why—maybe it wouldn't work out that way in real life, but if the reader can't explore every part of the economic and technological space of the world (they can't), they become immersed within it, and allow the subconscious to come up with reasons for why such technologies exist in the story.
What's interesting in sci-fi at the time is that, because software wasn't fully solidified as a concept (nowhere near, in the case of Neuromancer) everything acts like a tool. What you buy stays just as it is, until it becomes obsolete. There's something quite appealing in that completeness. As you say, software is jarring in a way firmware isn't, and it lets developers be lazy.
As for toilets:
> Sometimes he resented having to leave the deck to use the chemical toilet they’d set up in a corner of the loft. - Neuromancer
> Sometimes he resented having to leave the deck to use the chemical toilet they’d set up in a corner of the loft. - Neuromancer
This is an interesting call out when it comes to the communication/presentation of aesthetics of technology in the book. There's no narrative about actually relieving himself, just the mention that, of course, he has to and this is how it's being handled; the reader fills that in from these few scant details. The need to relieve himself, and ultimately the mention of the Texas catheter, is used as an indicator of how he's able to remain jacked in for so long, and as foreshadowing of expected jacked-in duration as they approach the final stages of the Villa Straylight run (when he purposely neglects to put it back on). So even in the "advanced" technology of the cyberpunk future of Neuromancer, people still gotta piss and wearing a catheter is still uncomfortable.
> Sense/Net sure had a lot of employees considering the in-story world had true AGI,
I think there's a simple explanation to this one: there must have been an atmosphere that consumer demand for everything is default insatiable and any excess productivity will be used to increase total production, regardless of products.
If a sub-Wintermute AGI equivalent to Claude Opus class of ours could run 12 completely synthetic TV stations with help of one part-time human overseer, a cyberpunk entity like Sense/Net would have 1000 employees each responsible for six AGI units amassing 72000 total TV channels in its relevant company sub-division alone. Same in the real world today would mean 2400 of its 1000 employees including interim CEO got fired at the end of the week when its 3 AGI units went operational, but works like Neuromancer were written in a different time than ours.
> they don't show people having driver problems,
This one is probably because 1980s home computers didn't have much of the software "stack", plus peripherals were more or less hardwired to RAM buses. Apps ran side by side with guys from Nebraska[1] code, and could read or write to memory addresses where it thinks where the card is connected to, without having to call syscalls and have OS figure out device addresses and bus protocol packet constructions. So it likely wasn't obvious that there will be situations in the future where the mcguffin black box unit would ask an outdated binary build of an outdated framework that would be needed to be pulled from someone's Download folder and/or fixed by 16-hour tinkering(but the Chinese ICE in Neuromancer had security potting, so maybe that was it).
1: https://xkcd.com/2347/
I would disagree with that, I've seen people anchor their own identity to that of brands like Apple or Disney.
They may not be aesthetics you find cool, but clearly they appeal to a large number of others.
Anchoring your identity to brands is tragically uncool no matter how you slice it.
This comment feels like it's from the early 90's when people were being critical of bands for selling out.
Reminds me of Tool's reaction to that trend, "Hooker with a Penis"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooker_with_a_Penis
That's a very different situation. An individual "anchoring their identity" to a brand isn't doing so to earn money, which is why bands "sell out". It's just a choice they make about who they are, and I have to agree with GP that that seems tragically uncool.
Is there something wrong with being critical of bands for selling out, though?
the concept of selling out often seems seriously under-specified, and thus, like many things in our society, it becomes a tool for one set of people to improve their own status by attacking another set of people.
It is in the end a moral stance on what are the proper aesthetics, which is the kind of thing that manages to make both morality and aesthetics extremely suspect.
how can someone say morality is suspect and expect to be treated like a human being
Nah, the aesthetics argument is a distraction. Engaging with art is engaging with another human being. Finding out that the other human being is, in fact, a corporation in a trenchcoat sucks. I would go so far as to label it a feeling of betrayal that leaks into everything else the artist touches.
Does anyone think The Rock has anything of substance to say about anything anymore? Do we think Post Malone isn't just trying to make a few more bucks after selling out entire genres?
Seeing Iggy fucking Pop shill insurance is genuinely painful.
Hear, hear! Cadillac using Led Zeppelin broke something in me.
I'm on the fence with the Beastie Boys getting used in movie fight scenes. They said they'd never do ads. Elevates the scenes, but it also elevates the IP of Disney and Paramount.
I think that is because it is a social value. It isn't meant to be a rigid rule; it's meant to be a guideline that can adapt to the needs of the situation. There has to be nuance in social values.
No,
It was a rare magical moment where consumerism receded - flannels were never about brands. Your band had to be "authentic" (and I hate that word) and anti corporate. It's the point in time where we all started hating ticket master.
It was replaced by GAP sweatshirts and Britney Spears, and you can draw a straight line to people waiting on lines for iPhones, your C suite in fleece vests and Taylor Swift.
it didn't recede, this kind of rebellion was what made it thrive (see the book The Rebel Sell, Why Culture can't be Jammed) or Deleuze:
“The death of a social machine has never been heralded by a disharmony or a dysfunction; on the contrary, social machines make a habit of feeding on the contradictions they give rise to, on the crises they provoke, on the anxieties they engender, and on the infernal operations they regenerate. Capitalism has learned this, and has ceased doubting itself [...] No one has ever died from contradictions. And the more it breaks down, the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, the American way.
It wasn't a coicindence or betrayal that punk bands 'sold out', the punk part is exactly what made them sell out. Demand for authenticity, difference and individualism is what drives consumerism. The heart of consumerism is counter-culture.
Except this is being critical of the popularity and fans, not the band.
AKA the good old times when it wasn't as culturally accepted to be openly evil if it made money.
But it wasn't in the early cyberpunk works. When you consume them you can notice how important was the concept of "style", that characters were excited by the specific brands (implants, weapons, shaders, venues), associated them with social status etc. It was the 90s that brought contempt for brands to (paradoxically) mainstream.
Apple is the only big tech company with a decent aesthetic tho.
They might be then only ones. Cult of Mac, Disney Adults, etc. But they’ve aesthetics that resonate with a lot of people. Meta, Google, etc., for whatever reason, don’t.
Product/design-first vs. engineering-first orgs
I don’t think that’s really it. Plenty of engineers care about elegance and functionality. I think calling them engineering-led is a disservice to engineers in general.
Everything out of Google is Rube-Goldberg machines held together with duct tape. It is engineering in a way, but by squirrels on crack. It’s alien to how engineering is done in the real world.
Everything out of Meta is pure evil. It is engineering-led if you could behavioural psychologists designing Skinner boxes as engineers. Actually, I’ll grant the Oculus division, which was mostly about engineering and designed cool products. The exception in the Borg.
Google was also characterized by their infamous data-first 41 shades of blue A/B test. It seems like they went into an extreme where design was informed by user behavior, by empiricism, rather than by the taste of the designer.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/05/why-googl...
> Actually, I’ll grant the Oculus division, which was mostly about engineering and designed cool products.
Oculus was an acquisition, so maybe that's why.
These companies do have an aesthetic, it's just not cool. Mike Merrill calls it "Corporate Memphis"; see https://www.wired.com/story/corporate-memphis-design-tech/.
I think the fact that these kinds of companies were portrayed as such in fiction kind of prevents them from adopting the cool aesthetic. Like they need something to separate them from being the exact image of an evil futuristic corporation that lives in our heads. Or else we might actually recognize what they are.
I mean we've got Anthropic openly advertising that they may be engineering the end of the world, we have an AI that called itself "MechaHitler" after its founder did a couple of Sieg Heils at a Presidential inauguration, we've got a major company that named itself Palantir.
People are reaching pretty hard if they don't see what we're dealing with here.
What a fucking depressing timeline. We could have built such a beautiful world instead
Today's billionaires aren't like yesterday's. They could be doing cool shit but they are just padding their own private real estate and stock portfolios. Yawn.
Why not make an epic bridge or tower with gargoyles on it? Why not a museum or park?
You can walk around Europe and see buildings from centuries ago. Who is building the things and spaces people in 2426 will marvel at?
> Who is building the things and spaces people in 2426 will marvel at?
Maybe they do not believe that there will be a human civilization in 2426.
Isn't it better that Bill Gates instead pumped huge amounts of money into philanthropy? Meanwhile SF has the UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital and Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. A cathedral would be nice to look at but preventing malaria or helping sick kids seems preferable. In the past money couldn't have easily be deployed for good like this and helping fund cathedrals was likely done to increase the donors likelihood of getting into heaven.
But I guess George Lucas is a billionaire who has you covered: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucas_Museum_of_Narrative_Art
My understanding is that represents only a tiny fraction of their wealth. As I understand it, the idea is that it would be better if the billionaire's other frivolous spending was on something that would endure for future generations. (Setting aside the religious question of weather cathedrals are frivolous.)
Did prior generations of billionaires spend a higher percentage of their wealth on charity?
I also genuinely wonder how the ratio of "paper wealth" has changed. How much money would Elon or Jeff have of they actually sold their shares in their companies? How does that compare to John D Rockefeller or the Getties? I also wonder when those created their charities.
Who cares about the past. They should be building public infrastructure and do some things the rest of society enjoys instead of buying castles and islands surrounded by fences they visit once every 2 years
Agreed, our real-life corporations are still trying to convince themselves (by 'them' I mean employees) that they're the good guys and wrap everything in a layer of HR-speak' "We're helping connect the world! Yay!", " We're collaborating with the ministry of War to zero people, but only if they have a signed judicial order", etc.
Their fictional counterparts don't bother.
Building Better Worlds ®
At least with Gibson, I think cyberpunk idolized actual punk culture. The coolness was found, brought, or arranged by these characters.
The scifi backdrop wasn't inherently cool. It was often soulless and dystopian. The crass commercialism and the teeming masses were often depicted as uncool, at least to the narrator's eye.
The coolness was found in the counter culture niches, in the urban underbellies, and in the little noir vignettes where the poets and rebels infiltrated.
There was some coolness in the tech, though. The Ono-Sendai Cyberspace VII deck, the mirror shade digital glasses (cut Gibson some slack, it was the 1980s), artificial limbs finished in onyx or chrome.
Meanwhile in the real world we get Nvidia DGX Spark which has a front finished in beige carpeting, or Meta glasses which make you look like either a dork or a pervert.
These things were cool when coveted or adopted by the cool characters.
The tech devices were also used as markers of uncool rich people. Symbols of excess disposable income, rather than carefully invested aesthetics.
In the seedy areas, the implants and augmentations were depicted across an array of cool and uncool characters. Some character were meant to think they themselves were cool, while the narrator or the main characters saw them as part of the uncool backdrop. Try-too-hards, wannabes, etc.
There are attempts to make stylized "coolness" in tech. That's how you get the Cybertruck, or RGB lights everywhere in custom desktops. Be careful of what you wish for.
You get the Cybertruck because we are far too accomodating of nepobabies.
That was before it was discovered that every single counterculture could be marketed to and commercialized.
It's important to mention that the counterculture "punk" part was simply an totally extraneous embellishment to make the story "cool." The noir part is a perennial pulp crutch to make things seem dark; it's simply a coloring of addiction and betrayal.
Gibson is doing something with that: he's saying that technical culture has ceased to be exclusive and elevated, and has become part of the fabric of human existence. Just like his broken prism-Hemingway prose says something about the nature of identity when there so much of it is virtual and artificial.
But if there hadn't been a "punk rock" substrate in the mid-70s to mid-80s to associate with people who weren't wealthy - if there hadn't ever been garage rock - then he'd probably have had to express the same thing through Steinbeck-style techno-field workers and Upton Sinclair derived techno-socialist plotters. He's inspired by computer criminals, which are really an unimaginable thing right before then - the closest analog might have been counterfeiters. A subculture immersed in high technology. Maybe clandestine LSD chemists are somewhere in there.
He still, as most all vulgar "cyberpunk" derived stuff still lazily does, would have been able to rely on noir tropes. And note how the "Yakuza" is simply a stand in for 1920s Chicago gangster tropes, but given a global edge because of his vision that the virtual future would collapse distances.
The "coolness" was utterly shallow, and instantly became assholes stapling circuit boards to leather jackets. Or "steampunk," which was exclusively a surface aesthetic for people who thought that technology was too hard to reason about, so they just decided that if tech was simply magic, why not just do fantasy at the dawn of the industrial age? Dispose of all of those pesky questions about identity(s) and just ask "wouldn't it be cool if..."
edit: there were people working in the same vein at the time, the Semiotext(e) SF anthology and the Mirrorshades anthology showed what cyberpunk (and cyberpunk-adjacent) thought of itself; questions about identity, reality, and linearity; and their interactions with communication and simulation technology. They were ignored for noir retreads with circuitboards and leather jackets. Almost immediately it was saturated with childish fantasy - actual hackers working on Tolkienesque "cyberpunk" roleplaying scenarios for Steve Jackson Games. Ironically the situation ("E911") around creation of a childish, escapist "cyberpunk" product was a historical expression of the actual themes that the cyberpunks were largely chasing. No wonder Sterling (also fairly pulpy writer) wrote the definitive account.
I agree on the style and influences particularly in the trilogy. Yes, there are pulpy aspects and tropes. To me, there are strong dashes of beat poet and impressionism as well. This shallowness is a style, but I think the themes carry through.
I had the pleasure of reading Neuromancer in a college course on Gothic horror, so we read it alongside the likes of Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Freud. And we looked at it through that lens. To me, the core theme of Gibson's storytelling is that the human condition persists. You'll have this spectrum of personalities and behaviors regardless of the technological backdrop. To me, this is an antidote for the delusional fantasy that one clever plot device is going to bring Utopia and somehow erase our evolved human foibles.
I'm not sure we have any disagreement, except perhaps in the subtext of your latter paragraphs. I don't think the shallowness is a flaw. I am not disappointed to find technology normalized and trivialized as set pieces for stories that could otherwise exist in almost any era. I think that's the whole point...
Those aesthetics are only "cool" in the sense that stylized comic book / military sci-fi conceptions of tech are cool. Also '80s nostalgia, and satire. In reality, none of that could exist practically in the modern day. Real-world high-tech is either consumer-oriented family friendly or hopelessly enterprise beige and gray. LA NIMBYs are not going to let you build a corporate pyramid. The closest we have in reality is the Memphis Bass Pro Shop.
You've never worked for FedEx, have you? We have wearable propietary tech to do a necessary job, scanning 100lbs+ boxes to load into trailers by hand. It's an extremely rough job as belt pick-off, you're no more human than a machine is at that point. They don't advertise their tech, either. It would just draw unnecessary attention.
They had to make it cool to make it palatable and not a slog for entertainment purposes. Without that it's just a depressing read of reality.
Most corporations are boring, but there absolutely are some cool ones, they often aren’t as public as the big consumer ones.
Arasaka types are rare, it’s mostly big blobs like DatAmerica.
https://youtu.be/JJl5UWh-wA8?is=1oX24Nd45lHt99vZ
This video gives a decent explanation why fashion has gotten the way it is, particularly for men. The author ultimately traces it back to the French revolution.
I'm probably just sharing it though because of the line "Big brother is here and he looks like shiiit".
writing often romanticizes everything, reality feels stupid by comparison
The dystopia will be televised in Corporate Memphis.
I disagree. iPhones, EVs, and a lot of architecture is really slick looking.
What are meta camera sunglasses or Apple airpods but aesthetic? It’s here.
I think in Gibson, most people and most corporations are boring. Capitalized and homogenized slop. The plots revolve around individuals and nooks and crannies that are cool, against the grain, hence the pink in cyberpunk. I think that exists in reality, too, but of course you have to go find it.