A feature story tracing the origin and the development of cyberpunk

Produced in: December 2020

Original version by: Lucas

Translated and edited by: Lindsay Rui

Included in: POST HUMAN capstone magazine project

Cyberpunk first appeared as a sub-genre within the bigger genre of science fiction (sci-fi). It then developed into a subculture and art movement in the 20th century, which provided its readers with a glimpse of the gloomy and dystopian future. After the counterculture movement in the 1960s, together with the growth of the information technology industry, cyberpunk further turned into a significant social and cultural trend. In the world of cyberpunk, technology functions in two ways. On one hand, its rapid development has strengthened totalitarianism and intensified social inequality, and so fails to build a better life for most people. However, on the other hand, the same technology provides geeks with new weapons to resist, and to be free from the limitations of one’s physical body as well as the external social system. With the support of new technology, minorities, or alternative social groups, are able to establish their owns rules, form their own cultures, and resist the rotting country.

As a brief history of cyberpunk, it was born from the Sci-fi New Wave Movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Comparing to the genre of Space Opera, which emphasized the development of technology, the Sci-fi New Wave no longer merely focused on ideas of new technology, spectacle and adventure. Rather, it started to absorb social science and humanity, and made use of ideas that were popular in contemporary European literature as its way of presentation. Symbolism and the stream of consciousness were some of the examples. In the 1970s and 1980s, there were several significant events going on at the same time – the Cold War, hippie’s counter-culture movement, and the development of information technology including the Internet and personal computer (PC). In 1984, William Gibson brought the world Neuromancer, a novel relocating the story of western cowboys into cyberspace. Since then, there was a growth of the cyberpunk genre and a large number of classics were brought to the audience. At this point, the audience was fascinated by the new identity shining on cyberpunk’s protagonist – a combination of hacker and rock star. It was considered as a symbol standing for rebellion and cutting-edge technology.

However, cyberpunk is losing its edges. In this era of artificial intelligence (AI), or the so-called 4th industrial revolution, it has been blended into today’s popular culture and overly simplified, standardized and popularized. In social media, the aesthetic of cyberpunk has been taken out from its context and history, and simplified into a red-blue colour combo that can be used as a filter on top of any picture. Moreover, in film and TV, there are examples like Steven Spielberg’s 2018 blockbuster Ready Play One, in which we can no longer find the spirits of rebellion and counter-culture that suppose to be the core of cyberpunk. Also, Netflix’s 2018 series Altered Carbon made an effort to explore the preservation of human’s consciousness, but again, the narrative structure is too conventional. This is to say, even though the quantity of cyberpunk images, films and TV in recent years is large, many of them are draining out of creativity.

Thus, to better understand the idea of cyberpunk, including its origin, evolution, and struggle, we need to look into the word itself – the combination of cyber, and punk. The word stem for “cyber” is cybernetics, which is a significant ideological movement in the 20th century opening up the era of quantitative social science and information technology after the Cold War; As for “punk”, it used to be a sub-culture emerging from the working class in the UK after World War II, which stands for a way of resistance to the ruling powers. Hence, both “cyber” and “punk” can be seen as the products of wars and social movements. Consisting of loaded meanings, these two words require us to trace back to the development of economics and politics in the 20th century.

Cybernetics and Governmentality

The word "cybernetics" is coined by Norbert Wiener in his 1948 publication Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine as “the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine”. In How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, Katherine Hayles further elaborates that “cybernetics signals that three powerful actors - information, control, and communication – were now operating jointly to bring about an unprecedented synthesis of the organic and the mechanical”. The word "cybernetics" may no longer be frequently used today, but its idea has a profound impact on areas such as computer science, information technology, AI, robotics, neuroscience, brain science, and cognitive and behavioural science.

In the 20th century, due to the war and the rise of the global market, the US established a new national system. This system integrated funding, factories, research institutions and human resources together to create a joint military-science complex. From the 1930s to 1940s, because of the establishment of this complex and the large demand for weapons from the war, electronic automation and computer science experience rapid development. During the 1940s, Wiener was working at the Bell Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was then hired by the US Department of Defence to research anti-aircraft gun’s automatic targeting and radar’s noise filtering in the period of World War II.

Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine is a collection of Wiener’s experiences in different periods of time, including his weapon research during wartime, the interdisciplinary projects at Macy Conference on cybernetics, as well as his personal interests in neuroscience and prosthetics. In Wiener’s view, society, living organisms, and cybernetic mechanisms can all be seen as the same system – a system that can achieve self-control and self-adjustment through its different parts’ information exchange and feedback loops.

As a methodology, cybernetics breaches the metaphysical boundary between machines and living creatures. At the same time, it challenges the privileged position that human beings were always holding in the past. Thanks to Macy Conference, cybernetics was able to become an interdisciplinary theory standing between humanity and science, and had the chance to circulate around the world. Later on, the theory turned into one of the largest ideological movements in the 20th century, widely applied during the Cold War and the era of information technology.

Looking back to Wiener, he was Bertrand Russell’s student and was influenced by John Dewey’s idea of progressivism. In 1968, he published another book The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, which held an anti-capitalist stance and criticized the US’s automation technology, intellectual property and labour issues. Wiener pointed out the dehumanization deriving from fascism, monopoly, the military-science-industry complex, and assembly-line mass production. He considered it was cybernetics that opened a pandora box - a digital age can lead the evolution of human beings, together with all living creatures, into dangerous automation. In The Human Use of Human Beings, Wiener wrote that “in the chaotic market condition under capitalism, the development of automation will lead to a new industrial revolution, in which people with average intelligence will be degraded and become the extras. This can stripe away their chances to survive”. To solve the problem, Wiener proposed: “the only way out is to build another society, where human life is not evaluated as an object for trading, but as a human life on its own”.

In this sense, Weiner can be seen as a prophet of the AI era. If we say the 2nd Industrial Revolution replaced manual labour with machines, the revolution that we are experiencing now can easily replace most of the mental labours with AI. In this context, Weiner's solution to avoid such an unemployment crisis is the abolishment of the labour system under capitalism.

In Blade Runner 2049, Wallace, the largest manufacturer of replicants (bioengineered human beings), once says that “every leap of civilization was built on the back of a disposable workforce”. In this film world, replicants are the future, but because there is a limitation on its production, reproducible replicants become the ideal option to manufacture salves, or the “disposable workforce”. Standing at the top of the pyramid, both technologically and economically, Wallace is a representation of the core of the Blade Runner films – an entanglement and contradiction between the ruling of the society and the control over human lives.

The art of control, power and ruling was phrased by French philosopher Michel Foucault as “governmentality”, and the society derived from such governmentality is called “surveillance society”. Foucault describes the “surveillance society” as a totality of system, procedure, analysis, reflection, as well as the calculation and technique that enable the operation of such complex form of power. Under this definition, what governmentality rules is not living individual anymore, instead, it is the idea of population in a statistical term. In other words, governmentality only focuses on numbers and indexes such as birth rate, death rate, health level, the potential to be trained and the ability to participate in war and production. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault states that only when a body can be productive and tamed at the same time, it can then become a force for use. The knowledge and technology that enable this process is called biopolitics of the body, or, biotechnology.

French philosopher Gilles Deleuze follows Foucault’s idea and suggests the concept of “disciplinary society”, which is a phrase that can well describe the information era appearing after World War II. In 1990, Deleuze published Postscript on the Societies of Control, in which he specifies that what the disciplinary society consists of is variable digits, and the society functions through the constant adjustment of these digits. In such a society, “individuals have become “dividuals”, and masses (have become) samples, data, markets or banks". Consequently, information technology and computer become the controlling media dominating this disciplinary society.

In short, the 20th century can be understood in two ways: on one hand, each nation state’s superpowers manipulated the bureaucracy with the aim to develop new technologies and upgrade its governmentality. On the other hand, the resisters used different technologies to counter the governmentality and strive for a society with justice, equality and democracy. While being the counterpart for each other, these two groups’ development meanwhile intertwined with each other. Ruling power’s massive investment led to technological revolutions, and later on, the new technologies were obtained and used by resisters. The other way around, resisters’ technological innovations can be absorbed and commercialized. Consequently, the tools for resistance turns into tools for the bureaucracy to upgrade its governmentality. Therefore, to a certain extent, these two groups of power were learning from each other and facilitating each other’s progression.

Cold War and Counterculture Movement

In 1957, Russia launched the first artificial Earth satellite Sputnik 1, which opened up the Space Age for human beings. However, the launching of the satellite also meant that Russian would have the capability to strike down an intercontinental ballistic missile, which worried the American public and resulted in great pressure on the US Defence Department. In order to coordinate expenses and manage between different research projects, President Eisenhower established the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which was later responsible for serval research projects during the Cold War, including supercomputers, nuclear weapons, intercontinental missiles and space engineering.

Specifically, in order to communicate between different departments, the US built up ARPANET, a communication network linking universities laboratories, research corporations and military departments. This was the early version of today’s Internet. After that, represented by John von Neumann, a group of American scientists invented the first computer for the purpose of calculating missile data. This early computer was huge in size because it used vacuum tubes as its main component. Hence, we can see that both the Internet and computer were originally products from the military. Their commercialization and popularization among the public came much later.

In terms of the public, from World War II to Cold War, American people were suffering from three types of pressures – the anti-socialist propaganda facilitated by the US government, the fear of the outbreak of a nuclear war, and the sense of oppression resulting from the rapid expansion of capitalist-technology bureaucracy. Among the young generation and their youth cultures, these pressures turned into a general sense of hatred towards industrialism’s hierarchy, centralization and state system. They viewed that human beings would become mere animals who were passive, purposeless, and manipulated by machinery. People were under constant surveillance, whose function was to meet either the need of machineries, or the need of capitalist and bureaucracy. Thus, young people were afraid of becoming the “one-dimensional men” described by Herbert Marcuse. They were dying to find a utopianism to escape from the reality.

In the winter of 1964, a protest calling for free speech happened at the University of California, Berkeley, which was one of the early events of the New Left Movement located on the West Coast. In the protest, students targeted IBM since it had a collaboration with the Nazis during World War II. It developed the Hollerith Punch Card system for population management, which then became a tool for the Nazis to conduct pedigree certification, asset confiscation, and extermination on the Jewish. The core of the protest was that students rejected the idea of marking human beings as digits that could be governed by bureaucracy and corporations. From 1967 to 1970, a large number of young Americans left the city and relocated to the countryside, which was called the Hippie Movement. The hippies wanted to get rid of mass industrial production and establish their own utopia. They indulged with acid, rock & roll, and beat poet. Books from Norbert Wiener, Richard Buckminster Fuller and Herbert Marshall McLuhan became the most popular among the commune. Meanwhile, they conducted small-scale experiments by using radio, diodes, relays, projectors, magnesium lamps and psychedelics. In this period, Whole World Catalog was a magazine playing a vital role in communicating between the big powers and the hippie commune. Through the Whole World Catalog, hippies were able to access up-to-date technologies developed in university research institutions. They could take these technologies and twisted them with their own experiments. Then the self-made technologies would be applied and popularized locally within the hippie commune. Examples were products such as tents, flashlights, raincoats, compass, climbing tools and micro-generator used by hippies to survive in the wild. They were all borrowed and re-innovated from institutions’ aerospace technology. On the other end, by watching how hippies making use of their innovations, research institutions could have a sense of satisfaction because they felt they were recognized by the hippie commune, the most pioneer and romantic group during that period of time.

In the late 1970s, the New Left Movement was defeated. The counterculture movements, represented by the Commune Movement, were gradually disappearing as well. A number of commune practitioners turned into promoting electronic information technology and the idea of cyberspace. This became the starting point for concepts such as “virtual community”, “independence of cyberspace”, “grassroots democracy”, “openness and diversity” and “decentralization” that are strongly associated with the Internet today.

In 1984, despite Neuromancer, there was also Apple’s Macintosh. In that year’s Super Bowl, Apple launched its advertisement for Macintosh - 1984: a feminist held an axe and smashed a screen that was playing Big Brother’s speech from 1984. Since then, Apple Macintosh enjoyed a dramatic increase in sales, earning over $150 million within 100 days. In a sense, Apple’s 1984 set formula for marketing or branding technology products – they were all framed as tools for achieving its users’ creativity, pioneerness and freedom. The founder of Apple, Steve Job, could also exemplify in the way that he was once a hippie himself too, so while Apple becoming a technology corporation, its corporate culture was rooted in the idea of counter-culture. Therefore, there was a convergence. The advertising and fashion industries successfully absorbed and incorporated the spirit of the counter-culture movement.

The 1980s was an era when electronics became available, affordable and popularized for the general public. There were famous products such as Apple II PC, Jakarta Game, and MTV music products. In this period, hippies turned into “yuppies” and they were leading the new Internet economy. Although their taste and culture inherited the freedom and romance from the 1960s, as the business elites operating the technology giants, they no longer called for radical revolutions. They dived into the gold rush in Silicon Valley, returned to their middle-class families, and became advocates for neoliberalism. The cyberpunk sci-fi culture was born in such an environment, when psychedelic, New Left, commune movement, and West Coast art group were all collapsing, and the new generation embraced the Internet and new technology. As for people who had come through the unsettling period of the 1960s and 1970s, writing and reading cyberpunk became their vision for the future as well as their way of self-indulging.

The Reality and Struggle of Cyberpunk

In the cyberpunk section on Reddit, it says “high tech, low life”. If “cyber” refers to the era of cybernetic, we can say “punk” implies the rebellion towards, and liberation from, biopolitics and digital totalitarianism. The conflicting relationship between cybernetics and freedom deeply embeds in the information technology revolution. In this context, cyberpunk is a genre particularly looking into the disruption caused by totalitarianism and unequal distribution. It exposes how technology giants and big governments control and exploit the everyday life of their citizens. However, at the same time, cyberpunk also tries to tell stories of marginalized groups, and show how they make use of technologies and perform their resistance.

In the reality, the idea of neoliberalism has circulated and expanded around the globe since the 1980s. Meanwhile, technological capital has flowed and accumulated freely in the market. As a result, we have entered a world dominated by international technology giants. They exceed the boundary between countries, so the capital behind such multinational corporations no longer represents the interest of any nation-state. The existing global capitalist system and nation-state structure continue to create global crises – global warming, inequal distribution, economic depression, social division, and far-right populism. To a certain extent, we have entered that world predicted by cyberpunk - the technology giants have the power to control and monitor their citizens, and the mobile phone becomes an extension of one’s body, like an organ, with the function to collect data from individuals and feed the servers in each Internet company. Human beings have become cyborgs, and our bodies are like vessels feeding the Matrix.

Looking back at the creation of the World Wide Web (www), it was built on the foundation of openness and accessibility. Nevertheless, technology giants today are violating this core of www by their monopoly of data and platforms. For example, Facebook’s data leak and connection with the US election, Google’s collaboration with the Defense Department for AI weapon development, Amazon’s unethical use of surveillance and labour exploitation and WeChat and Weibo’s content monitoring and censorship. 1984 may not be a nightmare. What is more terrifying is the Brave New World, or maybe, we have lived in the Brave New World already.

Therefore, cyberpunk is no longer a fiction out of reach, rather, it tells the struggle that we are facing right now in the reality. We criticize that cyberpunk today is the lack of creativity. That is probably because 1. the reality is more miserable than the sci-fi world; 2. cyberpunk has not yet come to a solution, as in the real world, we cannot find a way to resist the technology giants either.