>>316065Having argued the intersection between language and technology as an important but overlooked aspect of what gives cyberpunk its particular flavor, I think we may have lost some important quality of cyberpunk. I will even go so far as to say that loss does reflect on an important loss in our current society. But if so I do not think that quality is "rebellious struggle against authority" and it is certainly not a matter of righteousness within that struggle. I very strongly doubt it is a matter of modern cyberpunk carrying insufficient vaguely left anarchist sentiments regarding capital and the state.
No, I think it's far worse than that. There are two very important things that I think we've lost.
Firstly, I believe we have lost the linguistic cyberneticization of the phreaker epoch. This is because technology and the way we interact with it has changed course. Legal and social restrictions turned out to matter more than most cyberpunk authors thought they would. The most eerily accurate cyberpunk dystopian vision of the future is "The Right to Read" by Dr. Richard Stallman. Younger generations no longer outpace older ones in terms of adaptation of or aptitude with communications technologies, or the weaponization thereof. All important, technically innovative cybercriminals from 2012 or so onwards are state actors and presumably late-20s through middle aged, like Jia Tan. Exceptions may go to crypto scammers, but those are just financial criminals who happen to have e-mail addresses. Even in adoption of user end technology we do not see the incline or separation of userbase that would suggest a thriving punk scene. TikTok is full of Millennials as their primary demographic base and the millennial generation is now 40 fucking years old. Growing up immersed in next generation technology has not created a lingua technica amongst the next generation, nor granted them the digital agility to outmaneuver a stodgy rigid system. Nick Land may be right, the system may be more flexible, agile, adaptable than its human substrate.
Secondly, and more importantly. What I think we have lost as a society is the concept of a separate and specific cultural and more importantly linguistic boundary reserved for teenagers. Some of you will probably argue this point, but guys. Gen Z doesn't use that stultifying tiktok slang any more than you do. You don't like the indignity inherent in gen-Z's crude anti-slang. That's the point of it, the slang equivalent of peepee poopoo edits of pepe the frog that came about after he became an icon for Facebook normies. "No, this is our space and we'll destroy it for everyone, back off."
Advertisers had already corrupted the punk scene in its entirety when Gibson was writing Neuromancer. That's one of the best reasons why it made perfect sense for Stephenson's Snow Crash to hit us over the head with the fact that every single character in it is a complete sell out. But compared with today, the co-option of old punk was child's play.
Cyberpunk gives us an image and an ideal and a feeling of what it is to be punks, young and cunning. Reckless and ruthless enough to pull back on the strings of high technology that wire us into the system. Even if those strings are our life support systems. I would go so far as to say that if an ostensibly cyberpunk main character lacks the willfullness and irresponsibility of youth then it is not really cyberpunk.
Neo is a young man who leaves his job on a whim, not a middle aged corporate coder with a mortgage and possibly a wife/child/exwife. Neo doesn't even have a dog that has to get killed by the mob. He's not after revenge, he's a young man who wants an existential truth and purpose.
Case and Molly both have some more age to their characters, though they come at it at an angle. Case's organ function is impaired as a result of drug use and medical tampering. He's 24 years old but can be read as significantly older because he has some older man medical issues which are important to understand his motivations. Molly and Case both have enough of a past to make them pass for characters a half decade older than they really are.
Hiro Protagonist is a sellout hitting his 30s and has the receding hairline to prove it. He is hanging onto his self conception of youth with his fingernails if not with his teeth, working as a pizza delivery boy despite having sold out a decade prior. The indignity of having aged and sold out despite desperately needing to be and to live as a younger, more cunning, more athletically capable version of himself provides him with the final raging flare of youthful rage he needs to sustain himself through the story. It's not a story about getting older gracefully and accepting the passing of time, it's about returning to youth by burning up whatever's left in the tank–something thematically reinforced by worldbuilding details like the much discussed hyperinflation.
Blade Runner - Deckard is a cynical noir old man cop with cynical old man cop way about him. Harrison Ford was 40 when the movie premiered and cops have a mandatory retirement age of 60. Ryan Gosling looks younger but was about the same age in the sequel. Both of them spend their movies looking at and contemplating youth from different angles. Blade Runner (original) is much less about Deckard than the sequel is about Kay; Deckard gives perspective, learns to appreciate the value of life etc but the propelling force of the plot is the willfull youthful rage of the replicants at being pulled into an existence denied both the liberty of youth and the dignity of old age. Kay spends much of the movie mourning the youth he never lived, and is confronted over and over again with the fact that since he never had a rebellious youth filled with the lessons of errors, or any youth at all, he never gained wisdom, insight, or self knowledge until it was far past too late. He seems young and innocent to Deckard's weary cynic, but his innocence was a red and bloody handed affair in which he innocently killed strangers for bad reasons to uphold a worse than purposeless system. Because his innocence was not the innocence of youth during which inconsequential sins mount into lessons that grant moral judgment, wisdom bitter and sophrosyne. He does manage to experience the rage, mania, passion and drive of a meaningful adolescent development over the film though. I suspect there will be many more Gen-Z Kays than Deckards, and not for shallow superficial reasons like "AI gfe rp addiction." Instead more to do with the decline of social space and separation, inability to gain mastery over their own circumstances or to exist outside of the career role, and a dramatic reduction in the social space in which one's actions will not be scrutinized and cast in judgment forever, social media playing the role of the robot voice analyzing Kay's psyche through his reaction to and ability to repeat key phrases. An adult man developed in a system with no space to be an anarchic punk exercising rebellion and separation from the order of the world through a slang jargon that reflects his circumstances and not those of his owners/elders.