Lawrence Person positions postcyberpunk as the natural and perhaps even rightful successor to cyberpunk, the thing that not only is replacing it, but deserves to replace it and should be celebrated in doing so, primarily because it is more mature in some sense — more calm and staid and optimistic, less alienated and angry and nihilistic:
Postcyberpunk uses the same immersive world-building technique, but features different characters, settings, and, most importantly, makes fundamentally different assumptions about the future. Far from being alienated loners, postcyberpunk characters are frequently integral members of society (i.e., they have jobs). They live in futures that are not necessarily dystopic (indeed, they are often suffused with an optimism that ranges from cautious to exuberant), but their everyday lives are still impacted by rapid technological change and an omnipresent computerized infrastructure.
Postcyberpunk characters frequently have families, and sometimes even children… They’re anchored in their society rather than adrift in it. They have careers, friends, obligations, responsibilities, and all the trappings of an “ordinary” life. Or, to put it another way, their social landscape is detailed as detailed and nuanced as the technological one.
Cyberpunk characters frequently seek to topple or exploit corrupt social orders. Postcyberpunk characters tend to seek ways to live in, or even strengthen, an existing social order, or help construct a better one. In cyberpunk, technology facilitates alienation from society. In postcyberpunk, technology is society.
Cyberpunk tended to be cold, detached and alienated. Postcyberpunk tends to be warm, involved, and connected.
The problem is that, looking around at the world we live in today, I don’t think that postcyberpunk is actually more relevant than cyberpunk to the sociopolitical and technological landscapes we’re facing. Maybe, to give Lawrence his due, this wasn’t true in 1999 when he wrote this essay — maybe there was more cause for optimism — but whether that was true or not there’s certainly no cause for optimism now.
For instance, millenials (and soon generation Z as well) have found themselves in a position where it is nearly impossible to get a steady career job, have kids, own a home, and become a part of the middle class like Lawrence talks about. Economic forces beyond our control have made that dream impossible for most of us, and we are doomed to forever remain to some degree on the outside of “the system” compared to the postcyberpunk protagonists that Laurence lauds as more realistic and mature. Likewise, the social isolation and atomization of our times, our lack of community and friends and real social fabric, has been extensively documented in study after study, affecting even the older generations.
Meanwhile, corporations have only extended their control over every aspect of our lives. Nearly everything we do and have is now partially owned and controlled by corporate overlords, to a degree those of the 80s and 90s could only have dreamed of, from subscription services to allow you to use your car’s full capabilities to EULAs and data collection. Not to mention how those same corporations have, with vast reptilian intelligence and depthless patience, bent our entire political and economic system to their monomaniacal will.
Postcyberpunk’s view of technology and social reform seem far less in tune with reality as we’ve experienced it in the last twenty years than cyberpunk’s as well. Postcyberpunk seems like a return to the belief that the inevitable march of technological progress will eventually bring us to a point where society has been changed — or at least can be changed — substantially for the better from within the system, by reform and liberal notions of progress. I would argue that cyberpunk’s view of technology as a fundamentally amoral, neutral force which can just as easily be put to oppressive uses as liberatory ones and which, therefore, will only serve to accentuate and hyperaccelerate whatever hierarchies and systems already exist is a far more realistic one.
Even if, for example, we eventually create the technology to enter a truly post-scarcity fully automated luxury communist world, if the systems and hierarchies that are in place when that happens are capitalist ones, then it is capitalists that will own such technological means, capitalists that will possess the intellectual property that allows you to create them, and capitalists that will own the materials, and so they will view it as just a means of reducing their production costs to nothing, while keeping their prices the same. Nothing will change radically but an increase in the centralization of power. It will take some radical leaking the intellectual property, and then a huge movement of people making such production machines and refusing to stop — even in the face of the police officer’s baton — to break capitalism’s hold. And what does this sound like?
Cyberpunk characters frequently seek to topple or exploit corrupt social orders.
We cannot dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools.
Anyway, those are my thoughts. Cyberpunk as a genre is fundamentally capable of being more radical, and sees the nature of our now more clearly, than postcyberpunk can. Postcyberpunk is a reformist, humanist, optimistic genre that is fundamentally a return to the Asimov philosophy of science fiction with the tools, but not the insight, of cyberpunk. That’s not to say that all cyberpunk is so — only that cyberpunk has more of a capacity to be, that good cyberpunk is. There’s always the derivative fluff.
Seems like Cyberpunk and Post-Cyberpunk have a similar relationship as do Modernism and Postmodernism; at least if I’m understanding the trend here.
Both take the original premise and then invert one of the core concepts. Now, I’m not super educated on art history or art movements, so please correct me if this comparison is way off base or too generalized but: With Modernism, it seems to be a way of framing the world as a series of ideals that are met or not met, universal truths that are respected or not respected. Post-modernism instead took a look at the world and said ‘Yo, what the fuck is true tho?’ and starts from the conceptual opposite side of the spectrum as Modernism, deciding that there are no absolute moralities or ideals.
To extend: It seems ( from your description anyway ) that Post-Cyberpunk is doing the same. “High Tech, Low Life” into “High Tech, High Life”; “High Life” being the expression I’m using to show the inversion of hope, outlook, and connection to the world around them, ya? Is this the overall idea?
Thanks for sharing and starting the conversation!
This is an interesting idea!
Personally, from my study of it, I conceptualize the relationship between modernism and postmodernism a little differently — namely, modernism itself was concerned with questioning assumptions and critically analyzing dogmatic beliefs, trying to find justifications for them and discarding the ones that could not be justified. It was actually a response to the dogmatism and unquestioned assumptions and lack of proper justifications that was common in religiously-influenced philosophy and theology. It was also a revolution in epistemology, in trying to figure out how we could understand the world and justify our beliefs and know what is true in the first place. Postmodernism is thus, in my opinion, not a reversal of a key concept of modernism at all, but an acceleration of modernism — modernism taken to its natural conclusion, by applying modernism’s own desire to critically analyze assumptions and remove unjustified ones to modernism’s own assumptions about empiricism and objectivity and the existence of universal truths itself. And in many ways this was prefigured by Hume; in fact, Stirner, who is considered a proto-postmodernist by most scholars, explicitly cites Hume as a philosopher he respects — a rare thing indeed!
To the degree that postmodernism ends up inverting modernism, and having a completely different methodology than modernism, this is a result of the bringing of one of modernism’s core ideas to its logical fruition. And this naturally results in something far more radical and interesting and capable of bearing new intellectual fruit then modernism itself, because postmodernism’s benefit doesn’t merely come from blindly reversing an aspect of a previous philosophy, but from what it chooses to continue and strengthen and what it reverses as a result.
I think this differs strongly from the relationship between cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk because while post-cyberpunk does invert one of the aspects of cyberpunk, it does not do this as a result of a deeper undercurrent of philosophy or logic or ideas from the cyberpunk ethos that motivates this reversal, and so this reversal doesn’t really bear new fruit at all — it just undoes what cyberpunk did and returns to the science fiction world before cyberpunk came about. It doesn’t take the cyberpunk project and move forward to even more radical and thus fruitful new worlds further on beyond what cyberpunk could discover, which is what postmodernism does to modernism, because there’s no aspect or undercurrent of cyberpunk that it actually takes further. The reversal is actually just a reset.
This is why I have a lot less interest in postcyberpunk than cyberpunk — it feels like a genre created by those who have reached middle age and bought into the system, and so now, being comfortable and benefitting from the system, they willfully blind themselves to the need for radical critique and deconstruction and rage at it, and thus wish to return to a more reformist genre. Postmodernism would be more like postcyberpunk if it had looked at modernism and reversed the assumption that things need critique and critical analysis and decided to just return back to Catholic philosophy!