Cyberpunk is now.
The iconic opening of Blade Runner (1982) is stamped with the date November 2019. This has inspired several mainstream publications to ask: what did Blade Runner get right about the future?
As we’ll see, these articles almost always miss the point. There are two main reasons. The first is that these think-pieces focus on gadgets. Where’s my flying cars? They ask, clever grin on their faces, rather like George Costanza suggesting the jerk store called.
(Click the PDF icon, upper right, if you prefer reading a black-on-white script)
The second is these pieces begin from the wrong premise. The question should not be ‘what did the film get right about the future?’ but rather, ‘what did it get right about the present?’ As Ursula le Guin, one of the finest writers of all time said: “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.” That is, science fiction explores the DNA strands of the future that exist in the contemporary.
Not all science fiction does this, of course, some is pure escapism (such as Star Wars), while others try to be predictive and get it laughably wrong (like Logan’s Run – released the same year as Blade Runner). However, the best science fiction takes the trends and warning signs of the now and extrapolates them into a credible vision of the future.
I’ll get to what Blade Runner got right in a moment, but first I think it worth looking at how this question has been answered by the biggest sites. This is useful insofar as it shows how misguided the general understanding continues to be about science fiction as literature.
News dot com merely lists seven pieces of technology – A.I. flying cars, digital billboards, video calls, tech with a lifespan, voice command, and climate change (the last is not tech, obviously, and the one point the article gets right) – and interviews a ‘futurologist’ to discuss each. It’s worth noting that the next line in the Le Guin quote 
from above, is: “Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge), by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honoured in their day than prophets), and by futurologists (salaried).” She puts the futurologist in the same category as the other two because she believes they all have something in common: they are charlatans. As a rule of thumb, if you come across an article purporting to discuss the future, wherein they interview a futurologist for an expert opinion, you are not reading a serious article.
The BBC is not much better in in its discussion. It starts with two simple errors, first by explaining to the reader that Blade Runner opens with a replicant (Leon) being interviewed by his ‘supervisor’ at work. It isn’t his supervisor, it is a blade runner testing whether Leon is a replicant. Secondly, it refers to a huge billboard as showing an ‘Asian woman advertising snack foods’ (it’s actually an advertisement for the Pill). Then it pursues many of the inanities of numerous other hot-takes (there’s no flying cars! Pan-Am went bankrupt!).
However, it almost (almost) redeems itself by finding some credible subjects to interview: science fiction writers. Some of the thematic concerns of Blade Runner are discussed – which I go into more detail below – and some of 
these are even correct. The discussion in general, however, is strange. For example, the BBC asks Mary Robinette Kowal (a US writer) whether Beijing is like the future predicted in Blade Runner.
While I very much agree that thinking about the global application of Blade Runner is worthwhile, it’s weird that the BBC would ask the opinion of someone who has merely visited Beijing briefly, and not someone, say, who is resident in this metropolis (or, more pointedly, in Hong Kong, which the aesthetic of Blade Runner was based on). Or why the British Broadcasting Corporation would only ask American writers their opinion of the film throughout the article, if they are indeed wishing to explore whether the vision of Blade Runner is a universal one.
One of the interviewed writers makes another strange claim: that Blade Runner ‘fetishized’ dystopia, and that therefore our cyberpunk present was in part ushered in by the neon cool aesthetics of the film. ‘Hey everyone: dystopia is sexy. Everyone, thirty-seven years later: let’s do it then!’
I won’t waste time here refuting the self-evidently refutable. I will say that the aesthetic of Blade Runner is worth discussing because it is not new at all. While Blade Runner did set a visual template for a generation of science 
fiction film makers that followed, Ridley Scott stated quite clearly he was heavily influenced by the film noir of the past. Blade Runner took the noir aesthetic and projected it onto the future. This works because the noir aesthetic was born from the alienation of modern society, which in part could be reflected in the dark city.
Thematically, as well, Blade Runner is also about the past. The hardboiled traditions embodied in the film – the cynical detective, the femme fatale, the neon-drenched city at night, the perpetual rain, moral ambiguity, corruption, and alienation – hark back to the cinema of the 1940s and the literature of the 1930s. The literature of this era, and all noir that followed, in the US and overseas, was concerned with the trauma of modernity.
Rapid urbanisation, the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the horrors of fascist Europe are the foundation stones of the noir cosmology. The creator of the hardboiled style – Dashiell Hammett – was a private eye before he was a writer, working for the Pinkerton Agency during a time when were known for thuggish union-busting. He saw first-hand the corruption of the elite, and according to James Ellroy, “observed how crime seamlessly pervades the body politics and defines a whole culture”. In film, many of the seminal directors of noir – Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger and Edward G Ulmer – were Jewish refugees driven from Europe by Hitler in the 1930s and early 40s.
Globally, the noir discourse has been thematically consistent to these origins. I studied global noir for my PhD, 
and found a connecting line between the four very different cultural contexts of Australia, Japan, Vietnam, and Hong Kong. This was an unease with modernity; with the capacity of economic and technological progress to dehumanise and alienate, and be a vehicle for the empowerment of the elite at the expense of the poor and the marginalised. In Hong Kong film and literature, noir has been used to critique the growing influence of a powerful China, while in Japan, it has explored how the introduction of savage capitalism has undermined traditional culture, and waves of top-down technological change have threatened 
individual identity. In Vietnam, noir discourse reveals the extent to which colonialism and modern warfare have traumatised the psyche of a generation, and in Australia, it tells the stories of the excluded: the working class and the Indigenous population.
Blade Runner, as with the best noir, nailed not only the past and the future, but also the eternal present of modernity. While modernity is not something I am against: I’m not opposed to secularisation, modern medicine, and scientific reason, for example. I’m not explicitly for it, either, if modernity also means industrialised warfare, climate change, mass surveillance, the spectacle of ceaseless change, of existential anxiety, of a world seemingly no longer moored in a fixed place. At the heart of noir is this ambiguity over the modern.
The point, here, is that the DNA strands of dystopia thrive alongside the strands that may bequeath us human justice and dignity. The point is that we, over several decades as a global society, have chosen some of the worst of these strands, and found ourselves in a potentially dystopic timeline.
Science fiction does not mean flying cars, and the failure of the world today to have flying cars is not a failure of the movie Blade Runner in imagining them in 1982. Rather, science fiction is the revelatory power of a film like Blade Runner, of it being able to capture a mood, tone, and aesthetic that feels contemporary more than thirty years later. Blade Runner described a future history of urban decay, multiculturalism, corporate greed and corruption, boundless commodification and existential alienation, and was unerringly right on all counts.
Blade Runner imagined a future of staggering inequality, environmental degradation, and the dehumanising effects of technological progress, and was right about that, as well. In 1982, Blade Runner said: this who we are now; who we could be in the future.
Now 2019 has come and we are living in a cyberpunk present.
We live in a world where China has unfurled a system of mass surveillance using facial recognition technologies, 
among others, across the country. It is testing ‘social credit schemes’ that rate the social and political rectitude of citizens, and punishes them if they diverge from the party line. In the US and elsewhere, giant corporations have more power than ever before, impoverishing their work forces while the owners simultaneously become the richest people in human history. In an acutely cyberpunk moment, giant corporations like Disney and Nike try to dictate morality to us, pushing their brand as a moral imperative, while allowing half their US workforce to languish on food stamps, or while making their products in sweatshops elsewhere in the world. Russia meanwhile prosecutes psyops against democracies through cyber warfare, using personal data harvested by western social media companies. Deepfakes, fake news, and server hacks; high-tech disinformation campaigns from a rogue mafia state led by a former KGB colonel.
Blade Runner was right. It warned us about who we were, and where we could go.
And yet we went there anyway.
