Flogging a Dead Android
Blade Runner 2049
IT COULD just as easily come from the world outside our window as it could the screen of our computer. By now cyberspace and meatspace are inextricable, intertwined and mutually dependent. Where just a few decades ago we would look at the Los Angeles of Blade Runner or the Detroit of RoboCop as cautionary tales, today they are cousins of the present. The sight, the sounds, the smell, the structure of feeling of uneven and combined apocalypse – high tech, low life – these are with us right now, staring us in the face.
It has been forty years since the term “cyberpunk” began to worm its way into the cultural zeitgeist, spurred on not just by Blade Runner but by William Gibson’s Neuromancer, along with a small host of other upstart writers carving out a space in pulp sci-fi and alternative media. The genre’s aesthetic ethos is very much in vogue. Indeed, it has never been more popular. Augmented human beings dreaming under red, carbon-choked skies are common fare in film, television, and other media, and in real life. Some of the highest-rated series and films on streaming services are described – sometimes credibly, sometimes by dint of stretched meaning – as cyberpunk.
Perhaps it is just a matter of familiarity. The future we got looks a lot like what cyberpunk thought we might get. Let’s consider what kind of world it is in which the purported miracles of artificial intelligence and automation obscure the brutal realities of lithium extraction, or of crowdworkers in the Global South moderating content. Or one where cryptocurrency – and the millions of tons of carbon pushed into the atmosphere every year mining it – helps conservatives in El Salvador win elections. Or where algorithms monitor every movement of employees at Amazon fulfillment centers. Where Elon Musk can openly talk about relocating people to Mars as indentured servants.
This symmetry cannot even be remotely called accidental either. Mark Zuckerberg famously handed out copies of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One at the launch of Facebook’s Oculus division, throwing up the dismal specter of a world based not just on fiction, but bad fiction, hackneyed fiction. Fanboy fiction.
Even the term “metaverse,” which Zuckerberg and company are hoping will become intimately intermeshed into daily life, comes not from his own mind, but from the pages of Neal Stephenson’s “postcyberpunk” novel Snow Crash. This, again, is a testament to how dulled the modern tech bro’s imagination is; clearly nobody touting the metaverse has bothered to read Snow Crash. Or if they have, they are oblivious to the fact that, in the universe of Stephenson’s book, the metaverse is a consummately destructive presence.
If these films, books, games, and other cultural artifacts were intended to show a world of attenuated autonomy and false freedom, then our own moment – in which obsolescence is experienced not just by things but by places and people – has “caught up” with the predictions.
Has cyberpunk itself become obsolete then? Some critics, like John Semley, have been saying so for years. In his 2019 article for The Baffler, Semley bluntly declares it dead. He writes:
Where early cyberpunk offerings rooted through the scrap heap of genre, history, and futurist prognostication to cobble together a genre that felt vital and original, its modern iterations have recourse only to the canon of cyberpunk itself, smashing together tropes, clichés, and old-hat ideas that… feel pathetically unoriginal.
Semley’s diagnosis, withering though it is, is both on point and frustratingly familiar. In one sense, this reification is inevitable. Its processes are a necessary part of the cycles and rhythms of commodification. Capital cannot mass produce or mass market an aesthetic that won’t stand still. Thus the movement’s most obvious and easily identifiable markers are frozen in time and emptied of their critical potentials. In this case it keeps the understanding of cyberpunk very surface level, and ultimately ahistorical. Which, of course, is both the goal and natural outcome of reification.
The prognosis, however, leaves us in a unique teleological quandary. Non-realist and irrealist genres carry with them the capability – regardless of their setting in past or future – to throw open the contradictions of the present and where it is pointing us. But if our current moment is one of futurelessness – as many writers and commentators rightly insist – then the metabolization of cyberpunk into a forever decaying present severs a dialectic of critique. It used to be that we had trouble identifying what we might fight for. Now even what we are fighting against has become obscured by grain and static.
It is easy, for those of us predisposed to pessimistic doomerism (and make no mistake, we are legion) to be at once triumphant and defeatist about this cultural moment (in that ironically un-ironic manner we wear so effortlessly). Plenty of us are already instinctually there. “We told you so,” reads our script. “And now that the world is burning, I retreat into the refuge of smugness, the knowledge that I was right about the worst.”
Alluring though it is, this nihilistic posture is always a mistake. Particularly for anyone preoccupied with, who still believes in, any kind of substantive liberation. Contra Semley, who reads heuristic exhaustion in cyberpunk’s death, its death is precisely what allows us to reappropriate it. For if cyberpunk is in fact dead, then does that make it any different from any other physical, economic, political, or cultural artifact in post-recession-post-Covid-post-truth-late-late-later-capitalism? Haven’t we had our fill by now of neoliberalism declared “zombie,” of hip-hop or punk rock’s post-mortem extending on and on, as yet more artists wrap themselves in the monikers? Since when does being dead mean being devoid of any prescient critical charge?
Nowadays, a deceased genre is just getting started. The question is whether its undead life will be one of stagnation or creative reinvention. For as every hacker knows, when a machine dies, many if not all its parts can be taken apart and re-jiggered for a new, perhaps entirely different use.
Your Love is Not Enough: Blade Runner 2049
LET’S START the with the good, before turning to the bad, and finally the ugly. Yes, the sighs of exasperation and disappointment that surrounded both The Matrix Resurrections were loud enough to just about everyone to hear the first time around, but contrasting it with the far stronger (though still quite flawed) entry into the cyberpunk pantheon can help us pick out precisely what’s spent and what’s unspent in the genre.
Considering its faults, Blade Runner 2049 constructed an expansive and effective story, proving itself worthy of Ridley Scott’s original. The harshness of life on a dying planet is unmistakable, but the aestheticization of doom is nonetheless strangely enticing. Like the original Blade Runner, the audience is unsettled then tantalized, then unsettled by their own tantalization even as they are tantalized again. This sets the scene for what Blade Runner has ultimately always asked us to do: interrogate the meaning of human subjectivity in a world where it is increasingly supplanted by the dead labor of the machine.
The difference in approach, however, comes in what has happened since the first Blade Runner was released in 1982. The film was not the first to explore the deep, existential crises of humanity in the context of automation. But it did swing the door wider than ever for other pop culture to continue where we left off when Gaff’s words echoed in Deckard’s head: “It’s too bad she won’t live. But then again, who does?”
In his 2017 assessment of Blade Runner 2049 for Red Wedge, Matthew Flisfeder frames his own analysis of the film using the android character Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation, which premiered five years after the original Blade Runner was released. But as the questions posed by Data show, the philosophical cul-de-sac that Blade Runner attempted to open up remains closed. As Flisfeder writes:
Star Trek typically draws from and responds to these questions from a particularly liberal humanist perspective, of the dualism between mind and body, and attends to them generally in Western legalese. One question that seems to be left unattended when the series questions personhood is the one about desire. Does Data desire? Does he “dream of electric sheep,” so to speak? Does he, in other words, have an unconscious? Here, Blade Runner is more precise.
What’s more, prior to 2049’s release, there had also already been shows like Westworld, films like Ex Machina and, of course, The Matrix. With a few slim exceptions, all have stepped back from the ledge of possibility Blade Runner inched us toward, succumbing to the same liberal humanism Flisfeder describes. None have been able to sufficiently push their way beyond the impasse, even as consumer technology has wormed its way into the crevices of our lives, as more and more bosses are replaced by algorithms, as the atmosphere slowly cooks.
That these films and television shows have been unable to pose a fuller and more vibrant human subject in the face of all this is not their fault. No alternative way of living and structuring society has been viably on offer, and an artist can only work with what they can reach. Nonetheless, it speaks volumes that after all of the events of Blade Runner 2049, its vivid portrayals of a society whose decline has become irreversible, through some brilliant performances, the characters’ redemption arc results in something so straightforward as Harrison Ford’s Deckard being reunited with his replicant daughter – a daughter whose own life has been confined to a sterile, airtight chamber thanks to her own compromised immune system.
Does Deckard’s love free his daughter? The sensible reply would be to point out that that isn’t the point, but why not? More specifically, why, after everything, are we winding up right back where the original Blade Runner left us? Is love, for as crucial as it is to the human experience, really the only answer we can grasp as the world crumbles around us?
The problem here is that such an insistence is too universal, eschewing the specificities of this same atomized world. It is worth remembering that Blade Runner 2049 was released just at the beginning of the world’s tip toward the far-right, accompanied by a climate nihilism and techno-fetishization that are now affirmed as the flip-side the fascist coin. This was when the supposed “resistance,” in the form of a mealy-mouthed liberalism that traded action for sanctimony, was waxing furiously about how the main difference between us and the enemy was indeed merely a question of decency, and ultimately, of love. Not a commitment to systemic anti-racism, nor an opposition to the ever-sharpening inequality that has given fascism a new lease on life. No. The real problem is we don’t hug each other enough.
Your Love is Bad, and You Should Feel Bad: The Matrix Resurrections
WHEREAS RELIANCE on the vague and wishy-washy merely blemished an otherwise brilliant film like Blade Runner 2049, four years later, such a contrived assertion absolutely hobbled a lesser film like The Matrix Resurrections. After all, by this time we had lived through several years of watching the amount of havoc that could be wrought by a late capitalism unafraid to let its barbarity run free.
Again, and to be fair, this is not so much director Lana Wachowski’s fault as it is an expression of how unimaginable an alternative way of living currently is. To declare reality false when The Matrix was first released, to declare war against it, drummed up very specific associations then: images of the Battle in Seattle and the Zapatistas, rebellions against corporate globalization and the very literal architects of a profoundly unequal system.
Today something entirely opposite is conjured. The lingo of “redpilling” is used by the far-right, normally followed by shrill gobbledygook about Hollywood Satanists kidnapping you children, or how Covid vaccines will make us all infertile. The centrist and liberal response, meanwhile, is to dig their heels in on behalf of a prosaic realism. Reality is just fine, and anyone who says otherwise is both a communist in league with Moscow and a member of Q Anon.
This explains Resurrections’ heavy reliance on a quintessential liberal gesture of the 2020s: grating meta-commentary. Neo is no longer a hacker, but developing a video game based around the idea of the Matrix. He and his co-workers tout their self-awareness by making annoying jokes about Warner Bros. – both the owner of the fictional development company and the real-life distributor of The Matrix Resurrections. That this came off as smug is no surprise.
The first Matrix movie posited something of a starting point for a generation that had been glutted on post-Cold War triumphalism and empty consumerism: step out as much as you can, and when you find you cannot anymore, oppose that which restricts you. The Hong Kong-style fight choreo (still relatively new to western audiences) and slow-motion bullets felt like more than just neat visuals in this context; they felt urgent and connected to the vitality of the plot. Now, with no further elaboration or vision on offer, and with more than two further decades of further subjugation in our rearview mirror, such devices are both far more impressive and come off as little more than spectacle.
The same can be easily said for Resurrections’ thematic reliance on a mind-wiped Neo and Trinity rekindling their storied romance. Unlike Blade Runner 2049, love ultimately does free the prisoner denizens of the Matrix, but by now its constant refrain has become cheap. Once again, John Semley:
That we should all invest not in our virtual existences, but the fleshy, loving, contingent relationships of real life, is a perfectly decent message. That the Wachowskis have been repeating this tired line for two decades speaks despairingly to the conditions of our own, present-day dystopia. Resurrections is suspended between cyberpunk trappings that were already shopworn circa 1999 and the intellectual prison of high-concept meta-mongering. It is a movie of the interregnum, one that could have been auto-generated by it.
That said, there is no reason that some kind of love – or at least desire as it relates to the body – couldn’t have been part of a better Resurrections. In the run-up to the film’s release, some speculated, given both Wachowskis’ exploration and embrace of a different gender identity (Lana and Lilly, formerly known respectively as Larry and Andy, both transitioned in the early-to-mid 2010’s), that Resurrections would lean into trans allegory.
It would have been welcome, particularly in such a transphobic time as ours. To portray human beings reclaiming – and thus also transforming! – their humanity, deciding which parts of their augmented selves they wish to part with and which ones to keep, would have provided some hitherto unexplored thematic depth to the franchise. It would have given this sequel a reason to exist other than a craven cash-grab. It also would have been more in tune with cyberpunk’s longest-standing philosophical concerns. Alas, all we got in the end was paint-by-numbers action and a bog-standard romance, cis-hetero-centrism and all.
Static Emptiness: Cyberpunk 2077
IF THE Matrix Resurrections and Blade Runner 2049 accidentally reinforce the society they seek to critique by dint of their failed subtleties, then Cyberpunk 2077 does so through its complete lack of subtlety. Even before its release, stories had come out that fit perfectly with what we have already come to know about working conditions in video game development. Hellishly long hours, unreasonable deadlines, on-the-clock harassment, and an overall prioritization of profit over quality story or artistic coherence all played a role in an absolute omnishambles of a final product.
Cyberpunk 2077 certainly had all the aesthetic markers of cyberpunk film and literature. Thermonuclear war and a toxifying ecology loom in the not-so-distant past of the game’s universe. Night City is at once highly advanced technologically and yet extremely stratified by class; the advantages of tech are never experienced the same way by all. This is consummate dystopia: glittering skyscrapers and digitized slums, rampant deprivation and decay under unimaginable wealth, all mediated by technologies that monetize, atomize and dehumanize in the same stroke.
But whither this dystopia? The game’s plot sees its protagonist V, a private street mercenary, attempting to dislodge an implanted AI from his brain, but there isn’t much in the way of inquiry into what this means. As Lapo Lappin writes for Blood Knife:
The main character, “V”, is a blank slate without name or history, one whom can be molded according to one of three equally insipid prefabricated archetypes. The demeanor and characteristics of this ill-defined creature can be further altered through surgical implants and bio-hacking. His (or her, or their) entire being is an appendage: it has no essence, only loosely connected accidents.
What’s more, as we learn at the game’s end, there’s no way to remove the AI, and his final choice is to either let another person’s (a rich dead rockstar by the name of Johnny Silverhand played, of course, by Keanu Reeves) memories and personality overtake his own, or commit suicide.
This kind of fatalism accounts for a real lack of any kind of reflection or self-awareness in the game. For example, Night City’s police force is privatized; only those who can afford it are able to call in protection. But very little is done with this device, leading to nothing in the way of what it means for the police to so nakedly serve the interests of the rich. That some private policing firms, who operate in an almost identical way to those in the game, were beginning to crop up right after the game’s release points to the very real need for such a critique. At its worst, the existence of such a plot device without any investigation into its consequence results in the player watching the game and saying “hey, neat!” A bland and cynical technophilia.
As fellow Locust Arts & Letter Collective member Drew Franzblau (himself a gamer) points out, the most cyberpunk parts of Cyberpunk 2077 were the many glitches that gamers encountered thanks to its rushed release. These accidents, these glimpses into gaps that technology couldn’t or hadn’t managed to paper over, forced players to ask questions about the game and the world they were entering that the developers hadn’t intended.
Or maybe they did? Post-release patches notwithstanding, one wonders if, to a company like CD Projekt Red, the company that developed Cyberpunk 2077 from the outset, there is much in the way of intent. There isn’t much difference between a mindset of “we must produce this game well so that lots of people buy it” and “we must produce this game fast so that people start buying it sooner.” Indeed, they’re the same mindset.
Lappin ponders just this in their essay, writing of the way in which V flaneurs around Night City surrounded by a gaggle of NPCs whose whole existence is one of overstimulated aimlessness. “Now and then they will blurt out the same hebetic sound-bite over and over,” Lappin writes. “Occasionally, in glitches of poetic justice, their entire faces are completely erased. The question is whether this is in fact a bug or an actual feature of the game – or perhaps it is simply part of how the creators, and the cyberpunk genre, imagine the people of the future to be.”
Enchanted Determinism and the R&D of Doom
BY NOW it has become almost trite to point out that many of cyberpunk’s aesthetic visions aren’t so much of the future but of a future that never came to pass. There is more than a hint of “raygun gothic” here, that accidental aesthetic borne from watching the futuristic optimism of the atomic 1950s and 60s rust and fall apart. This kind of sorry-not-sorry nostalgia is cut from the same cloth as the technophilia cultivated in Cyberpunk 2077. Nostalgia always simplifies, lionizing an era’s most desirable aspects while flattening the contradictions.
On the one hand, we are right to feel bilked of a future, even if the past we pine for in its place was never all that great. On the other, who in their right mind would pine for the future – deflected or not – that cyberpunk shows us?
To some extent, it is symptomatic of the cultural strategies of capital inherent in properties like The Matrix and Cyberpunk 2077. As Kodwo Eshun argues in his “Further Considerations On Afrofuturism,”
In the colonial era of the early to middle twentieth century, avantgardists from Walter Benjamin to Frantz Fanon revolted in the name of the future against a power structure that relied on control and representation of the historical archive. Today, the situation is reversed. The powerful employ futurists and draw power from the futures they endorse, thereby condemning the disempowered to live in the past. The present moment is stretching, slipping for some into yesterday, reaching for others into tomorrow.
Eshun goes so far, in his 2003 paper, to insist that science fiction essentially plays the role of “a research and development department within a futures industry that dreams of the prediction and control of tomorrow.”
It is also an expression of defeat, particularly the defeat of the utopian imagination, the malaise that followed the end of the Cold War and neoliberal consolidation. Our abilities to imagine anything outside of the present order is cut off at the knees. What was once a warning becomes a way to discipline and keep us in line. If machines cannot make our society better, then at the very least they can provide us with some creature comforts, a quick way to forget just how fucking bleak it’s gotten.
Of course, machines don’t really “make” anything. Therein lies the rub. The nostalgic pine for automated convenience is essentially a surrender of subjectivity from human to machine. But there is no machine without the intervention of some human somewhere. Even the algorithm, still regarded as the magic, ever-improving code of modern computing, is far from automatic. Most algorithms are “trained” by micro-workers: precarious freelancers paid pennies per task, most often in the Global South, frequently subject to wage theft and other humiliations.
The micro-worker is almost entirely absent from any mainstream discussion about algorithm and how tech functions. According to Phil Jones, author of Work Without the Worker: Labour In the Age of Platform Capitalism, they are “disempowered to a degree previously unseen in capitalist history.”
This invisibility is intentional on the part of Big Tech. It is part of what Kate Crawford and Alexander Campolo call “enchanted determinism.” For Crawford and Campolo, the rhetorical imbuement of almost magical powers to technology is a method of “shield[ing] the creators of these systems from accountability while its deterministic, calculative power intensifies social processes of classification and control.”
Extrapolating both ends of this contradiction to their logical endpoints, we see two things. The first confirms what Fredric Jameson observed about late capitalism: flattened narratives, in which nobody is ultimately in control of how society operates, inevitably cover up for very real power structures with very real human beings at the helm. Second, the process described by the authors as “calculative power” – the isolation and fragmentation of subaltern lives and experiences – is one that, thanks in part to the absence of the powerful from the same narrative, can continue unabated.
It is not difficult to imagine the endgame of all this as being very much in line with the worldview of the neo-reactionaries: Nick Land and other proponents of the “dark enlightenment.” These are thinkers whose celebration of technology and its potentials are combined with a pronounced disdain for democracy and anything vaguely smacking of equality. In their view the cybernetic extension of humanity’s reach is only really deserved by an elite and should openly and proudly come at the expense of the vast majority.
It’s in this context that we should understand the integration of a denuded cyberpunk into the cultural zeitgeist. To put us at ease with this future isn’t merely to threaten or discipline; it is to put us at ease with that discipline. Perhaps even to condition us to crave it. When we indulge in “relaxing cyberpunk” music channels on YouTube, or “relaxing synthwave” mixes on Spotify, we would do well to question how it is that a genre which once disquieted us can now put us to sleep.
Cyberpunk as History
IT IS, once again, understandable amid all this that we should think this genre spent and ready for the trash heap. What is left then? Jump to another subgenre? Start from scratch? Is starting from scratch possible? Or even desirable? Is there anything to stop any aesthetic – no matter how novel – from being similarly stripped for parts by the culture of futurelessness?
At stake in these questions isn’t so much the fate of any particular subgenre or style as it is the fate of a lithe and supple understanding of art as ideological intervention, and along with it the potentials of our imaginary to stretch beyond the tightening circles of history that get closer and closer to the drain each time around. The cycles through nostalgia and (ostensibly) forward-looking technophilia have become so entwined that it is difficult to imagine one without the other. The difference between where we’ve been and where we’re headed blurs. The possibility for rupture, for an alternative path, narrows.
In January of 2021, during the online Association for the Design of History Conference, Matt Colquhoun delivered a talk titled “Salvagepunk and Acid Communism.” Colquhoun, whose blogger name “Xenogothic” reflects his own preoccupation with the frictions between past and future, in essence tries – successfully – to supplement the work of Acid Communism left unfinished by his mentor Mark Fisher with the dead/not-dead concepts of “salvagepunk,” first argued by China Mieville and Evan Calder Williams in 2012 and continued today in the Marxist journal Salvage (whose editorial board includes Mieville).
Colquhoun’s presentation doesn’t spend much time at all examining cyberpunk, but at the heart of his argument is an attempt to break out of the temporal cul-de-sac that hems in political and cultural expression. He does this by reconciling two trends on the left that have seemingly been at odds: hauntology and accelerationism. Hauntology: the backward-looking, the mournful and gothic continuing to stalk the present. Accelerationism: the future-oriented attempts on the left to leave a parochial past in the dust, preoccupied with technological progress and its role in liberation. While the two appear to be at odds, Colquhoun argues that neither are complete or meaningful radical cultural frameworks without the other.
The thrust of the argument is prescient. Caricatures of accelerationism conflate the left-wing and neofascist varieties, often lumping both into a standpoint that views all human beings – in particular non-white, non-straight, non-male or non-binary – as expendable pawns in the movement toward history’s final stages. Likewise, the slippage of hauntological-gothic-romantic gestures toward vicious reaction is easy to see. What each are missing are a fulsome view of their own place in history, particularly in regard to the role of the oppressed and anachronized in constructing something like a future.
One cannot have accelerationism that provides true liberation unless the left-behind and forgotten occupy the central place in accelerating the contradictions of technological innovation. By that same token, the valorization of lost ways of life and more harmonious modes of existence can only be progressive if the impulse seeks to reckon with how human systems have been evolved and reshaped by human beings, how the past becomes the present and the present becomes the future.
In traversing between the two ontologies, one necessarily encounters salvagepunk. This is an acknowledgement that while we are in a time of wreckage, of demolished futures, but that there nonetheless exists in the wreckage something of a liberatory kernel: the utopian visions of those vanquished by history which can be repurposed, reshaped and reinvented for the sake of a future worthy of the name. Not only fixing the future but redeeming what’s come before through what Walter Benjamin called “the tiger’s leap into the past.”
What distinguishes this outlook from the one that dominates so much of “pop cyberpunk” is that it is, in true Marxist fashion, a system that aims for universality and metanarrative. It doesn’t just put two seemingly opposite gestures together, it asks what happens when they interact, and what new potentialities become reality through that interaction.
This approach is something that sets apart earlier, more successful iterations of cyberpunk. When casting RoboCop, Paul Verhoeven made a conscious choice to cast the role of the villainous Clarence Boddicker not as a lunk-headed tough-guy, but the bespectacled, bookish Kurtwood Smith. Not only did this highlight the intelligence of RoboCop/Alex Murphy’s nemesis, it dodged the expectations of the audience, making Boddicker seem even more unpredictable and dangerous. To put cunning and intelligence next to sociopathic violence creates, once again, new meaning.
It’s not unlike what the original surrealists did. More than merely reveling in the weirdness of the chance encounter between the sewing machine and umbrella on the operating table, they asked what new meanings emerged from the encounter. Indeed, it’s worth remembering that William Gibson himself, when asked in the 1980s his opinion of the cyberpunk aesthetic, referred to himself more as a surrealist, who used science fiction as a gateway to explore the more hallucinatory, psychedelic and heightened emotional states that come from these kinds of collisions of the possible. Euphoria, hallucination, even panic and paranoia.
If these psychological irruptions are the product of encounter, then it is important to emphasize that it is the encounter as illustrated by Marxist philosopher Alain Badiou, as “a contingent, chance element of existence. Something happens to you that nothing among your existing world’s points of reference made likely or necessary.”
Funnily enough, Badiou is speaking here of the encounter specifically as it pertains to love. Not the hackneyed, pre-packaged love that hobbled The Matrix Resurrections, but love defined within the context of a more fully realized human being. Distinct from an ordinary experience, the encounter is a rupture, and in two key ways. First, it presents the subject with risk, of a stark choice between refusal or acceptance, sometimes both intertwined. Second, the encounter requires some form of construction, of the encounter forcing the person to whom it is happening to change themselves or the world around them or both. After the encounter, the human being is never the same again. New dimensions of potential emerge, indeed must emerge, through the encounter. New meaning gives way to new action, new action to new human actors.
This structure of feeling – of a dramatic before-and-after, that the horizon of possibility (for better or worse or a combination of the two) is irrevocably and radically different – is also present in a great many other earlier iterations of cyberpunk. It’s not only present in the works of William Gibson and others of the very first generation of cyberpunk authors, not just in RoboCop or Blade Runner, but in just about every narrative that characterized the expressions that came to be identified with the subgenre from the outset.
It is not that these works have merely produced a world that is strange to us, but that the moving parts of that very same strangeness drive these worlds forward. One might argue that their tension, their juxtaposition, their ambiguity, are far more essential to the subgenre than the presence of androids or privatized neon skylines. For it is these arenas of ambiguity that create the potential for transcendence on the part of new characters amid encounter. Ironically, these same arenas of ambiguity are what also allow cyberpunk to transcend its subgenre trappings, pushing against the strictures of rote technophilia and the domination of neo-nostalgia.
Look, for example, at the tabletop game Shadowrun, one of the key properties in the formation and popularization of cyberpunk. The gameplay revolves around a crime story that isn’t just comprised of augmented humans and megacorporations, chip implants and neural interfaces, but of the supernatural: magic, spirits, mythical creatures, ghost dances. The apparent silliness of this setting very quickly gives way to the realization that, in this new world, human capability manifests itself very differently.
Ergo, the ontological state engendered in the original and best of cyberpunk is that which – as in most of the successful genres – plays fast and loose with its own definitions. This is a genre that isn’t just about science and technology, but of the creation of human subjects that, through their own transformation, also transform the world around them. In this sense, the potential of cyberpunk isn’t just as heuristics of the past or the future, but of history.
The Radical-Democratic Aufhebung
CYBERPUNK AND the modern human are, therefore, faced with the same challenge: that of transcendence. Not in any metaphysical way, but in a profoundly dialectical way, of what Hegel identified as aufhebung, the process by which an element’s contradictions force it to emerge into something at once more itself and something entirely different.
We are beyond the point of no return with technology. There is no stuffing this genie back into the lamp. But the window of opportunity is narrowing on the question of whether it is put to use collectively and for the collective good, or whether it is a tool of and for domination. This has, at least in the abstract, always been the case with technology under capitalism. Today, that question is probably less abstract, and more urgent, than ever before.
The algorithmic tracking of warehouse employees. The atomization of gig workers. The rise of automated technologies that alienate us from the bare reality of labor, let alone the idea of our control over it. The subjugation of even our leisure time to the tightly orchestrated capture of desire. It is admittedly difficult to imagine all of this turned inside out, radically and democratically reshaped, put to work on making life more fair and fulfilling, even making the planet habitable again.
Difficult, yes. But no less urgent. Moreover, it is a task that has been taken up before. Fifty years ago, the democratic socialist experiment of Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government in Chile did just that. It was a task taken up more out of necessity. Making Chile’s economy fairer and more democratic and was made even more pressing by the specter of a bosses’ rebellion. Chile’s capitalists were, after all, innately and outwardly hostile to Allende, which is to say nothing of Yankee imperialism. The threat of lockouts that could cripple whole industries and economies was a real one. Resources of nationalized companies would need to be coordinated, often reallocated on a quick turn.
This was the impetus that gave rise, well before any of us knew of a word like “internet,” to Project CyberSyn. There has been much written about CyberSyn, and speculated given that it was never able to fully get on its feet. The fascist coup of Augusto Pinochet made sure of that. But in its ideal form, this was a network of computers and telex machines that, in the vision of engineer Stafford Beer, would relay near up-to-the-minute information about productivity back to central government offices, then answer with directives regarding the slowing or speeding of production, or whether resources in one factory might need to be allocated elsewhere. But the network was also intended to include and prioritize the input of workers themselves, involving them in the factory’s management and – ultimately, hopefully – running their workplaces democratically.
Rather than capturing autonomy and twisting it into a shallow imitation of itself, CyberSyn was meant to extend the reach of ordinary people’s control over their own lives. Rather than reshaping life into one grand, passive shopping mall, it might have enriched and deepened human connection.
The most salient lesson from Project CyberSyn isn’t that Beer’s hypothesis was bound to be borne out (though there were some stunning successes as the system got on its feet, particularly in thwarting a move by bosses to halt the transport of foodstuffs in October of 1972). It is that an experiment buoyed by such an ethos, in today’s terms a paradigmatic shift in how we frame the human relationship to technology, has yet to be given a real shot. The idea of technology enhancing human subjectivity, rather than blunting it, grinding our desires and intelligence into a kind of depressive frenzy, is one that is still novel. And relatively unexplored.
Naturally, an experiment of this ambition and scale cannot happen in isolation. Nor can it be spurred on merely through an aesthetic like cyberpunk. Big tech won’t allow it. Rather it would have to come in the context of a reassessment of all forms of human relations, the very shape and fabrics of society. The kind of radical rethinking that can only come from mass struggle.
What, therefore, might artists and writers and filmmakers and others working within the cyberpunk milieu do to work in concert with this? Is there anything? Maybe. But maybe not. But maybe. Much of it has to do with whether cyberpunk is willing to become more itself and something else entirely.
Dead Internet, still, Omnia Sol (2022)
All Hail, The Blood Machines
AND SO, by way of suggesting a way forward, of citing a work that grasps in that direction, it is worth refencing the 2019 French work Blood Machines. Either a fifty-minute short film or a three-part short miniseries (depending on which streaming service it’s on), Blood Machines is written and directed by Rafael Hernandez and Savitri Joly-Gonfard, under the collective name of Seth Ickerman. Its special effects are highly stylized, convincingly portraying a future in which everything advanced is inevitably also worn down, instilling a psychological-emotional state in the viewer that is at once dazzled by a possible future and haunted by some force that might be well beyond our control. And, to hit that home, it is soundtracked by Carpenter Brut, perhaps the past artist to emerge from the expansive explosion in that mutant genre known as synthwave.
Its plot can be summed up, briefly, as such. Two intergalactic hunters – they are, in fact, referred to as “blade runners” in some materials – land on a planet searching for a ship that has gone rogue. There, a tribe or spiritual order, all female-presenting, who stand between the all-male crew and their quarry. “The ship comes with us,” demands the lead blade runner, an inveterate violent misogynist. “She stays right here,” reply the priestesses. In this world, then, the ships are sentient, something not quite electronic and not quite organic but both at the same time. They bleed, they feel pain, they cry. And in the great cosmic order, it would appear, they are also answerable to something far grander in scope, a kind of subjective power that seems beyond death, beyond life, but embodying creation.
Blood Machines is by no means a perfect film. The acting leaves a bit to be desired, and there’s a worthwhile conversation to be had about the male gaze and how the female form is represented. But its feminism, though flawed, is certainly sincere, and its cyberpunk structure of feeling is one that very eagerly looks for something to salvage in the scrap. Though there’s no mistaking that the numinosity we’re seeing is other-worldly, we’re not always sure whether it’s scientific or cosmic-paranormal in nature. Or both maybe, with each slipping into the other. Those of who are acquainted with the socialist feminism of Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” or of the Laboria Cuboniks collective’s Xenofeminist Manifesto, will have by now had their familiarity piqued. And even those who haven’t can probably get the gist from the titles.
In the end, what Blood Machines leaves us with is the insistence that new subjectivities require new solidarities. Both need to be made possible. Which perhaps they only will when we accept that they already are. One of the assertions of the sometimes-silly, sometimes-poignant milieus of radical ufology is that no civilization can achieve intergalactic space travel without having reached something like full communism. It is more than simply a heart-warming sentiment. To harness such hitherto unimaginable power would – should it be achievable at all – require an unleashing of collective genius and creativity that history has yet to fully see. The kind of process by which every single human being, excepting absolute nobody, was given not only enough to eat, a roof over their head, and the best healthcare resources can provide, but the time and space to truly thrive and become the best version of their intellectual and ontological selves they possibly can.
This, it bears stressing, is a fundamentally different approach to life, technology, and the future than what the Elon Musks, Mark Zuckerbergs, and other frat-boys now styling themselves as futurists. Which is to say nothing of the fascist transhumanism of Nick Land and the dark enlightenment. If one of their problems is that they believe science fiction can be made reality, then our response cannot be “no it can’t.” It must be, rather, “yes, but not your vision of it.” Their utopia is, as we can already see, is a dystopia for the rest of us. But if theirs has already proven possible, why not ours?
Why not indeed? At first glance, it seems far-fetched, what with climate crisis and inequality bringing the very infrastructure of our society to the brink of collapse. But then again, many of us spent several weeks in the summer of 2022 debating whether an artificial intelligence designed by Google might have achieved sentience, whether it was able to demand respect and rights as a laboring being. Are we certain that our liberation is not also contingent on that of other subjective beings we have yet to fully introduce ourselves to?
The point here is not to offer a rushed-but-ironclad answer, but rather to push against the certainties that already block our egress into a future worth living. The necessary questions are, as always, subversive, even revolutionary in spirit.
Alexander Billet is a writer, artist, and general layabout based in Los Angeles. His writing has been featured in Los Angeles Review of Books, Salvage, Jacobin, and Radical Art Review. He recently published his first book, Shake the City: Experiments in Space and Time, Music and Crisis (1968 Press, 2022). He is a founding member of the Locust Arts & Letters Collective (LALC) and is a producer at Locust Radio. He screams into the void at alexanderbillet.com.