A good friend of mine posted a rant the other day about how “cyberpunk is dead” and I can’t stop thinking about that post. I don’t believe that my friend was saying that cyberpunk as an ethos is dead, just more like the “cyberpunk subculture as we have known it is dead”. I don’t think that any subculture has an infinite lifespan — at some point, it gets co-opted, appropriated, or monetized in such a way that it no longer resembles the original “manifesto” of the movement, if you will.
I’ve written about my feelings and definitions on how I define cyberpunk and have already even gone back and revisted that original definition after the fact, so I’m not going to rehash all that because I think the ethos is still strong and still has many adherents. All that being said, I do agree with my friend that the “cyberpunk” terminology and subculture has entered that death-knell phase due to being co-opted by mainstream culture based on the aesthetics and vibes alone — due in large part to the Cyberpunk 2077 franchise and the toxic poser culture that comes with a video game of that magnitude.
But would I go so far to say that cyberpunk, as a whole, is well and truly dead?
The Dystopia Is Already Here
The thing is, we’re already smackdab in the middle of the digital dystopia already; it’s just that most people don’t recognize that fact because it didn’t come with the neon and chrome from all the stories. Even many self-professed “cyberpunks” don’t realize that we’re already in it and have been for some time.
Cereal Killer, Hackers (1995)
FYI man, alright. You could sit at home, and do like absolutely nothing, and your name goes through like 17 computers a day. 1984? Yeah right, man. That’s a typo. Orwell is here now. He’s livin’ large. We have no names, man. No names. We are nameless!
Remember that most of the original cyberpunk authors actually weren’t technical and didn’t even really know how computers worked (William Gibson has even admitted as much, many times); all they were doing was imagining “what would happen if…” computers started thinking, corporations ran society, and what would all society look like if the Japanese took over the world? As I say all the time, these were dystopian warning stories of the evils of technology run amok, not playbooks for what society should look like.
But think about today’s society: AI is both displacing humans from work as well as barring them from getting future work; corporations infect every single facet of our lives; people are forced to work as wageslaves because that’s the only way that they can get healthcare or afford basic living expenses when the shit hits the fan; people just want to be who they are inside but oftentimes have to break the law and visit an off-the-books doctor to get the treatment they need; a few corporations control the vast majority of the world’s digital presence and sovereignty; nobody owns anything; personal, in-person communication and connection is at an all-time low.
All of these concepts are hallmarks of cyberpunk literature that could be applied to just about any society we have today to varying degrees, particularly in capitalist and specifically American society models where literally everything has a price. But since it didn’t come wrapped in neon, include chrome augmentation and body modification, and governments still mostly exist as the primary power structure rather than megacorps, people who are just into cyberpunk for the aesthetics (read: vibe) don’t realize that all those warnings have already come to pass. Even way back in 1995, the warnings that the dystopia was here was appearing in movies and Cereal Killer’s quote from above is even more relevant today than it was 30 years ago. We’ve been here for a long time already, people.
When Does A Subculture Die?
Every subculture comes to an end, or at best must endure changes that are extreme enough to slip back under the radar of the current mainstream culture. It happened with the hippies, hackers, yuppies, punks, cyberpunks, mods, freaks, geeks, metalheads, new wavers… the list is literally endless. No subculture that I can think of survives contact with “outsiders” and lives to tell the tale - at least, not in the form in which it originally coalesced.
It could be the moment it is first discovered by the mainstream. Or maybe it’s the first time it is monetized. Or maybe the first time it is appropriated by the mainstream and then monetized. A lot of times, it has to do with foundational suppositions and tenets of the basic ethos becoming no longer relevant as society and the world changes over time.
Cyberpunk has always been driven, at its core, by standard punk ethos and standards — it just came wrapped in technology as a sociological driver of and stand-in for The System against which the punks were fighting. It was originally written long before there was a computer in every household, the Internet was a global utility, and every human on the planet was (or could be) constantly connected.
Let us not forget that a lot of the mainstays of cyberpunk aesthetics were driven by the height of the anti-Asian panic years (especially from American authors) where the fear was that Japan was going to take over the world through technology. Everything in those early cyberpunk works was imbued with Asian symbolism, from the names of the megacorps and cyberdeck hardware right down to the ever-present and excessive use of neon and noddle stands. In the early days, some authors put a lot of that symbolism into their stories due to fascination with that culture (again, as William Gibson readily admits) but the fact that it was so pervasive in stories where the environment itself could be considered as an antagonist, and it becomes quite problematic. It became an ingrained part of the aesthetic without much thought as to what it was actually communicating and the images of real societies that it was actually hurting or denigrating (however unintentional the original intent may have been), and people that only really like those stories for “cyberpunk aesthetics” rather than the underlying ethos are just subconsciously promoting this unwarranted paranoia to this very day.
I think a subculture dies the moment it’s aesthetics without substance become part of the mainstream (ironically or not) such that the culture is misrepresented in the minds of the majority of the public based solely on the popularization of the “look” without the “feel”. Of course, this is usually brought about in a capitalist society by someone trying to make a buck and profit on a movement they don’t understand (or even want to understand).
Think about punk rock, which started out as a community of misfits playing music that they wanted to hear, being co-opted by neo-nazis and skinheads who were all about hate. Think about people that wear Misfits t-shirts but have never even heard their music. Think of “bikers” that only ride and dress like “1 percenters” on the weekends. Think of the hackers that don’t want to learn how things work or exploit the broken system but only use scripts created by others to steal and make life miserable for everybody. Think of people that wear tie-dye, Birkenstocks, and espouse “free love” just because they want to smoke pot and/or get laid. Think of people that say “All lives matter”. Think about Hot Topic stores popping up in every mall in America. Think about self-professed “cyberpunks” who will willingly use what passes for “artificial intelligence” these days without a second thought and no personal qualms without being forced to do so.
A subculture dies when the aesthetics drive the ethos instead of the other way around. When merely subscribing to the aesthetics allows “membership” into the group, that subculture is dead. When a subculture appears as a “profit center” on some megacorp’s balance sheet, that subculture is (likely) dead (or dying). And worst of all, when merely “vibing with” the aesthetics of a subculture gives people a sense of entitlement to define and gatekeep what that subculture is really about and who can be in or out, that subculture is most definitely dead. It’s okay to like the aesthetics and emulate them, I think, as long as one recognizes the problematic areas of them and doesn’t let the aesthetics define their sense of ethos or self. That weird reversal is how we got the current techno-dystopia that we have — people that were too focused on the aesthetics forgot the ethos and now here we are.
RIP “Cyberpunk”
So yeah, given all that, I think I would say that the “cyberpunk” genre/subculture (as we now know it or have known it) is, indeed, dead. The world has changed and grown beyond those original visions of digital doom and global politics, and it is now more often than not defined in the public consciousness based on aesthetics alone. I feel that it’s time for “cyberpunk” to get a new name and maybe a new definition that reflects the current realities and ethos of today’s “punks” on the digital edges of society. The hackers had to go through this (maybe several times) and reclaim their original definition from the minds of the public. Maybe it’s time for the cyberpunks to do the same.
And I’m also going to go out on a limb here and say that “real” cyberpunks don’t need to be labeled as such. They live it; that label is just a convenient way to refer to the overall grouping of related topics. But if that label is no longer understood nor agreed upon by either the members of the group themselves or the general public, it’s time for a new label or term.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a good suggestion or idea of what this new term should be. I kind of feel that both the terms “cyber” and “punk” are played out and overused, and wouldn’t mind getting away from both of them, and I really feel that a lot of adherents are maybe a little bit too precious about this particular label as a definition of our subculture. All I know is that I long for a return to the days when the aesthetics were merely an expression of the cyberpunk ethos of “high tech, low life” and “breaking the systems that break people” rather than the defining factor and blueprint.
What label would you use to describe this culture?
