2010/02/05

Punkitypunkitypunk

Ah, cyberpunk. What a world-ruiner that one was, huh? Oh, sure, it had style for miles, but its intellectual pretensions...are pretensions, I kinda included my conclusions in my premises. At least the British New Wave writers largely limited themselves to writing about things they knew—that's why all their stories are about unlikeable people living in totalitarian squalor. Zing!

But cyberpunk...Gibson and Sterling know what, exactly, about the sociology of the Information Age? Actually, we as a species know what, exactly, about it?—since so many of our sociologists who study it seem to take cyberpunk's assumptions as given. I wish I could write stories about a field before it really exists, and color the way people study it for a generation—Roddenberry did it to space exploration, you know? Maybe I'm overestimating cyberpunk's influence; maybe cyberpunk, as a soft SF venue, just assumes the same things as sociologists, and I'm making a cum hoc ergo propter hoc error. But it's much cooler if cyberpunk managed to skew a whole field of social science, so I'm gonna assume that.

Seriously, cyberpunk's take on punk...guys, y'all do know "punk" is actually Libertarian bordering on the Anarchist, right? 'Cause everything in cyberpunk is pretty much standard American-leftist boiler-plate—the megacorps aren't evil 'cause they're The Man, they're evil because of greed; the governments aren't evil 'cause they're The Man, they're evil because they're corrupt.

See, that's not how punk is supposed to work. In punk, it doesn't matter if The Man is quite altruistic, it doesn't even really matter if he's right, it matters that he's The Man and he's trying to control us, i.e. Keep Us Down, Man. People don't like to be meddled with, as River put it: when Joss Whedon is more punk than you, you're officially not punk. Yes, that undoubtedly makes you a smarter, more thoughtful person, but the trade-off for that is you don't get to call yourself punk.

The politics of cyberpunk are not the worst part, though. That laurel is for the brows of the philosophy. The whole mind-uploading, cyber-clones, contempt for the "meat", thing? Platonist body-self dualism, with shades of Puritanical angelism—the really smutty elements, characteristic of the genre, are just Albigensianism (the body being contemptible, nothing you do with it matters).

But wait, it gets worse. Does cyberpunk posit that the Net, the Web, the Grid, is somehow akin to the Realm of Form, that it will allow the apprehension of pure Ideas? You should be so lucky. No, cyberpunk has given the world the most epic intellectual Fail since...no, actually, this is one of the top 3. I mean, of course, cyberspace. Cyberspace is a VR game that hackers use to interact with data—because Gibson is not (by his own admission) knowledgeable enough about computers or (probably also by his own admission, to be fair) talented enough as a writer, to present scenes of realistic hacking that are remotely interesting. Only, see, "cyberspace" has been done before. It's called Manichean cosmology, and it's the source of some of the smartest-assed smartass parts in Augustine (second only to "What was God doing before he created the Universe?"—the answer being, "Time is a part of the Universe, 'before the Universe' is a contradiction in terms, but thank you for playing.")

The Manicheans believed the cosmos was made up (essentially) of two infinite spaces on top of one another, sharing a whole side, the spiritual one on top and the material one on the bottom. Only, as Augustine said (not without a sneer—which he earned, he used to be one), "How can spirits be above anything? 'Location' is a physical trait, geniuses." Cyberspace, same thing—except that, admittedly, it is just a user interface...the worst one possible, according to many experts. Which is user-friendlier—point and click, occasionally type, or run around a VR game punching viruses?

Fortunately, cyberpunk is essentially dead; it's been reborn as one bad thing and a few good ones. The bad thing, is post-cyberpunk—just as philosophically crappy, but at least it's abandoned its "countercultural" pretensions (that's why it's sometimes called "cyberprep"). The good things are the style it's passed on, just vastly improving the way we imagine future computer science—except for that damn "cyberspace" nonsense, but actually people don't even do that as much anymore. And then there's steampunk and its variations, on which this person can be of far more help to you than I.

2 comments:

penny farthing said...

"Punkitypunkitypunk"

I'd get that title looked at - might need to adjust its ignition timing or something.

And thanks for the plug.

I've wondered too, what makes cyberpunk punk, since, as you point out, they are kinda OK with government and corporations and all that stuff. Maybe they are the kind of "punks" who buy $50 pants at Hot Topic. If they were really punk they'd sew their own pants they found at a thrift shop until they fit right (wrong) and safety pin/ duct tape on any pieces they saw fit to add. Metaphorically speaking. Or maybe they are the well-to-do children of suburban parents who buy shirts of the greatest-ever mass-marketing icon, Che.

Incidentally, I hate when people ask me what's punk about steampunk. Then it gets into the whole cyberpunk thing, even though almost no steampunk resembles cyberpunk anymore. Besides most people don't want an in-depth explanation anyway. I usually mention cyberpunk and then explain that now it's probably got more to do with the DIY aspect.

Sophia's Favorite said...

What ticks me off about their "punk" is not that they're okay with government and corporations, it's that they criticize governments and corporations as being abusive. That's legitimate, if overdone (and somewhat misguided in the specifics, in this case), but the thing is, it's not punk. Punk denies that government or business can be abused, because it denies that they have uses.

Punk may be idiotic—all knee-jerk anti-authoritarianism is—but it does at least have a sort of half-witted purity.