The Punk in Cyberpunk: a cyberpunk manifesto

Well, more a set of guidelines than a manifesto. It wouldn’t be particularly punk to tell others how to think and how to be.

We should begin this story with the question: what is the ‘punk’ in cyberpunk? It’s an answer I should probably know, given I live, breathe, write, and even have a doctorate in cyberpunk.

Beyond the sleek, bleak, sexy, and neon-drenched aesthetic, there a philosophical core to this subgenre. But this core, as such, is not clear: cyberpunk is, after all, where the phrases ‘morally grey’ and ‘anti-heroic’ get thrown around by anyone who has a crack at a definition. We know where punk began – and more on that later – but where is it now? What form does the rebelliousness of punk take in 2021 – in art and in real life – and does punk stand for anything? Is it merely an attitude and an aesthetic, or is there more?

(Click the sun/moon icon, upper right, if you prefer reading a black-on-white script)

As a first principle, to be punk is to be defiant. Surely it means to be the outsider. More than anything, punk means to be counter-cultural. This was the punk of the 70s and 80s, where punk began. Punk of this era had anti-establishment views, was anti-authoritarian, anti-corporate greed, and anti-consumerist. And herein lies part of the problem of definition: punk was ‘anti’ a lot of things, and perhaps not entirely sure what it was for, which is why both right and left wing groups and individuals have called themselves punk over time. Punk was anarchistic and non-conformist, with wild fashion, sex, and sexuality.

I associate punk culture with the United Kingdom, exemplified by the band the Sex Pistols’ and their hit, ‘No Future’:

God Save the Queen / the fascist regime

…

Don’t be told what you want / don’t be told what you need

There’s no future / no future / no future for you

…

Oh when there’s no future / how can there be sin

We’re the flowers / the dustbin

We’re the poison / in your human machine

We’re the future / your future

It is worth reflecting on the politics of Johnny Rotten* (John Lyndon), lead singer of the Sex Pistols and one of the unofficial founders of punk. He was working class, detesting the rich and the private school system in the UK; he said the banking industry would never be held to account after the global financial crisis, because both the left and the right were complicit in the overarching economic system (he’s right about that); he is a pacifist. He hated President Bush, loved Obama, and yet he supported Brexit and went and voted for Trump (Rotten became a US citizen in 2013).

Which all seems contradictory, unless you frame it with the punk principle being anti-elite and in favour of the downtrodden. Now, to clarify – in case any reader has just had an embolism – Trump was not in favour of the downtrodden. He was born into the ruling elite, lived a life of enormous privilege, and oversaw the worsening of inequality as president. But rhetorically Trump claimed to be on the side of those excluded by the system. Trump rallied the downtrodden to his cause, and voting analysis show that for the first time in about five decades, the rich swung in favour of the Democrats.

Johnny Rotten voting for Trump reminds me of an interview with one of the South Park writers, Matt Stone, where he discussed starting out with his writing partner, Trey Parker:

When we met we were Python fans and we were punk rockers. We wanted to do a punk rock TV show. And when we were growing up the way to be punk rock was to be really liberal, because we grew up with Reagan in high school, and all of that. The problem was we moved to LA… the only way to be punk rock in LA is to be a Republican… where we live, is the liberalist most liberal part of the world.

I found this an interesting argument, not the least because it has some basis in reality. It’s true insofar as the entertainment industry in the United States (though this is applicable to Australia) appears to be almost exclusively left-wing. To take just one example: look at the difference between the Trump and the Biden inauguration. Biden had Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, J. Lo, John Legend, Bon Jovi, Springsteen, and more. He had, in sum, the sparkling firmament of the US entertainment industry. I looked up the Trump inauguration bands and I didn’t recognise any of them. Who the fuck are Three Doors Down?

So, to the point raised by the South Park** boys: is to be Republican to be punk? Well no, fuck off. The conservative elite, in the US and elsewhere, still wield enormous power through their wealth. They may not be in Hollywood, but there are commonplace in the finance and energy industries, and throughout big business in general.

The problem with Matt Stone’s argument, and the problem with some old punk types placing a bet on Trump, is this: they are merely replacing one type of elite with another. Which brings us to an essay by influential French Economist Thomas Piketty – titled ‘The Brahmin Left Versus the Merchant Right’. This paper helped provide me with the intellectual framework to properly understand the modern political landscape. The paper is long; I will make my explanation short:

In it, Piketty advances an observation of the bleeding obvious: the educated left (the Brahmins) and the business right (the Merchants) now dominate political parties, and this has resulted in the working class (and the lower-middle class, and increasingly even the middle) being disenfranchised. He calls this a ‘multi-elite party system’. The gist of his essay: the left-wing Brahmin elite are private-school and then university educated; they mostly live in the cities, and consider themselves to be cosmopolitan and enlightened. The Merchant right attended the same schools and universities, and live in the same cities; both groups put their faith in the same economic system: neo-liberal globalisation. Both sides, for several decades, presided over growing inequality, declining rights and conditions for low-paid workers, outsourcing, neglect of the public education and health systems, and (in the US, today) waving Silicon Valley on through as it expands the surveillance state and helps replace the last vestiges of decent working class jobs with automation. It means the rise of professional lobbyists and the decline of the individual voter in democratic systems.

Punk supports neither the Brahmin nor the Merchant. Thus, the first rule of modern punk:

Punk is anti-elite. This means acknowledging the enormous cultural and economic power of the elite of both sides of politics (no, this isn’t ‘both sides-ism’; shhh, listen). It means understanding that very few of the elite have any connection or real interest in regular people, or that they govern in their interests. It means understanding that while the elite have internecine political conflict, the real war is the war being waged on the regular person. Through surveillance capitalism, through undermining the democratic franchise, through staggering inequality.

In the artistic sense it means a television show like Black Mirror, which focused, more often than not, on regular people being crushed by surveillance capitalism. Episodes like “The Entire History of You,” “Nose Dive,” “White Christmas”, and “Fifteen Million Merits”, explore this theme. The latter, for example, critiques a key mechanism through which the general population is controlled: the commodification of dissent. It features a society where people are trapped by their screens (literally, in a cage of screens) desperate to gain celebrity and find themselves on the screen. The main character (played by Daniel Kaluuya) works his way onto a talent show and there, threatens to kill himself with a shard of glass, in protest at the dehumanising system he lives in. The judges love the speech and give him his own show and a place in the elite.

This is the commodification of dissent – how our current system takes our desire for meaningful change in society, monetizes it, and only strengthens the system we wish to change. Let’s take Black Mirror, the show itself. It made it out of the UK, went large in the US, and ended season five with a cutesy caper episode starring Miley Cyrus. An episode that happen to coincide with a new EP release from the singer. The dissent of Black Mirror was commodified. The creator, Charlie Booker, ends the series as the protagonist from Fifteen Million Merits. In a mansion, overlooking his estate, while the glass shard of his trenchant critiques sits safely put away its ornate box.

Flowing logically from the first point is this: Punk takes the side of the downtrodden. Where do the narrative sympathies lie in Blade Runner? The replicants of the film are not morally easy to digest, by any means, but they are they most human, the most vivid, and most alive. They are also slaves. They are labour slaves and sex slaves. They work until they die. They are given a four-year life span so they may not evolve complex human emotion.

Deckard (Harrison Ford) is technically the protagonist of the story, but it is his antagonist, Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), who dominates the film. Batty is charming, charismatic, brilliant, psychically imposing and attractive. He rails against the cruelty of the established order, he’s smarter than the rest of them, and his character is richer and more complex than any other in the cast. But he is also cruel, manipulative, and brutally violent. He is the most intensely human of any of the characters (which is sort of the point).

The rebel Replicants believe furiously, desperately, in their own existence, and so the horrifying ethical implications of what have been done to these beings, as commodities, slowly dawns. As Replicant leader Roy Batty says to Deckard, after terrorising and chasing him through an abandoned building: “Quite an experience to live in fear isn’t it? That’s what it’s like to be a slave.”

I hesitate to refer to my own work here, but I do think the blurb for my collection, Neon Leviathan, illustrates this focus on the downtrodden:

“A collection of stories about the outsiders – the criminals, the soldiers, the addicts, the mathematicians, the gamblers and the cage fighters, the refugees and the rebels. From the battlefield to alternate realities to the mean streets of the dark city, we walk in the shoes of those who struggle to survive in a neon-saturated, tech-noir future.”

We (cyberpunk writers like me) don’t romanticise the downtrodden, thinking them innocent only and victims only – they are neither. But (mathematicians aside) the stories almost always are from the perspective of those chewed up and spat out by the system.

Punk is anti-totalitarian. Totalizing ideologies have spread through nations like wildfire. They can be ideologies of religious absolutism (in parts of the Middle East), totalitarian personality cults (China or Russia), purity politics (as is played out in the United States, where each side looks for its politicians and indeed all figures, public and private, to adhere to a rigid political line). Totalizing ideologies can sometimes take the shape of conspiracy theories, which necessitate all-encompassing explanations of the world. Somehow finding a way to blame all society’s ills on lizard people, and satanic cults, or the Jews. Petrol is merrily poured on the ideological wildfire by the social media companies, who have found profit in division, and power through polarisation.

But the other totalitarian facet of our lives is the surveillance we are all subjected to every single day. The sacred, dark corners of your life (as well as the ones you brag openly about) are monetized by giant corporations and onsold, onsold, onsold. In your pocket is a mass surveillance device that tracks your movements online and live, and harvests such an inordinate amount of personal information it can predict – and shape – your future behaviour. Surveillance capitalism is, as Shoshana Zuboff puts in her acclaimed book of the same name: “A new economic order than claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales,” something that, “Aims to impose a collective order based on total certainty,” and “An expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above: an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty.”

To be punk is to reject the ideologies of absolutism. To be punk is to hide parts of ourselves from the Eye of Sauron we carry in our pockets, the smart phone. To be punk is to switch off the phone and go out into the world and listen to live music, or drink and talk with friends. It’s to buy products with cash (or to not buy anything, if we can help it), to keep secrets, to find beauty in un-re-posted solitude. Privacy is punk. To be punk is to question those who come to us with absolute certitude, with all-encompassing solutions. To be punk is to rebel against the growing and powerful forces that restrict human thought and freedom.

Punk is counter-cultural. The Beatniks (1950s), Hippies (60s), and Punk Subculture (Mid-70s-80s) were all counter-cultural. The point of all of these movements was, in part, to rebel against a dominant culture that was conformist and materialistic. They offered alternate views of how to form a society, and often expressed it through art.

The dominant culture, world-wide today, is American and, as always, materialistic. If we are talking film, book, streaming service, television, American culture dominates the West, and has an outsized influence on the rest. Within this dominant culture Hollywood, the streaming services, and Silicon Valley are the god-kings.

The political economy of this dominant culture is woke neo-liberalism. Where, for example the Disney Corporation will mouth platitudes for every progressive cause they can find. Where the Disney Corporation roundly condemns those who express the incorrect public moral posture. The same Disney Corporation whose (non-celebrity) employees are so poorly paid many need food stamps. The same Disney Corporation that abases itself before the Communist Party of China in order to get better access to its market. The same CCCP that currently runs a vast gulag of internment camps for an ethnic minority in Xinjiang, a place where Uygur women are being forcibly sterilised; the same province where Disney’s Mulan was filmed, a picture supposedly about female empowerment. And do not forget that Disney thanked the Xinjiang internal security forces in the credits of Mulan.

Let us be clear: a powerful, utterly amoral corporation, dictating morality to a credulous public is pure cyberpunk. As a creator, to be punk is to reject this. The stinking amorality and hypocrisy of it all, and the ease of it all. It is much easier to allow our dissent to be commodified, it is much easier to talk of Mulan than Xinjiang, it is much easier to repost a political meme than to work in a soup kitchen. To be punk is to not buy in to the endless social media debates about this Hollywood film or that, but to see the bigger picture of an industry that largely serves the sensibilities of the elite, performed by the the uber-rich, employed by some of the most powerful corporations on Earth.

I would argue that to look outside the US for your diet of literature and film is one way to be punk. Or at the least, a starting point. I would challenge you to try two weeks without American entertainment. I do it from time to time, and it isn’t easy with young children (we end up watching a lot of Japanese anime). It’s hard because America is the oxygen of popular culture, and, quite frankly, they produce some of the best stuff.

So I’m not suggesting a boycott of American culture. I mean: I’m waiting for season three of The Boys***, for fuck’s sake. To be counter cultural for me, is remembering to look to Australian creators, and to creators in my region (Southeast Asia and Oceania) first. It means refusing to be drawn into the commodified dissent of Hollywood, and the interminable and trivial debates they institute as part of a marketing campaign for this franchise or that. Rather, it means listening to new voices and hard-to-find voices, consuming independent works from across the world, and through supporting ground-breaking creative work.

Nuance is Punk

Nuance is anti-totalitarian. If offense is part of punk, then the best way to offend the mob these days, is this: offer nuance. Profess not to have all the answers. Be a heretic and question your own political side. Political polarization is a powerful modern phenomenon, and it has radicalised a lot of people. I’ve noticed more and more the type of person who has spent too much time on social media, who, in real life, speaks twitter talking points; who converses not as if to another human being but to an imagined audience (maybe they are planning to recount the conversation, later, on social media). There’s not much in the way of independent thought with these people. Indeed, their thinking is totalitarian insofar as they are unable to listen to others. They are unable to accept someone may disagree in good faith, or that another might have an alternate perspective worth listening to. Across the political spectrum, these people imagine themselves to be radical and defiant, when in reality they are the praetorian guard for conformism.

Some of you will be reading this and thinking: hey, we can’t sit on the fence on important issues, we must take a stand for the things we believe in. I agree. I do this by adhering to a principle most of us learn in primary school: actions speak louder than words. Words are easy, it is what we do defines us. For over a decade I was an aid worker in some of the poorest communities in southeast Asia. That’s what I believe in. Today I run dungeons and dragons for autistic people. That’s who I am. I write every day. I write cyberpunk.

Christopher Hitchens said.  “It’s quite a task to combat the absolutists and the relativists at the same time: to maintain that there is no totalitarian solution while also insisting that, yes, we on our side also have unalterable convictions and are willing to fight for them.” He’s someone I didn’t agree with on every issue, but the position he outlines above is salient. To be both nuanced and defiant, to be both contemplative and punk. Not an easy thing.

Cyberpunk is Humanist

To Hitchens’ point, my unalterable conviction is the humanism of cyberpunk, and this where I want to end this story. Humanism is at the heart of Cyberpunk. It speaks of dignity in the face of dehumanising technological progress. Cyberpunk tells the story of those who fight the powerful, despite knowing it is a battle that cannot be won. Its stories show us that thin sliver of humanity – the humour, the resilience, the self-sacrifice – that struggles to stay alight in the dark. It is the thirst for life of the Replicants, it is the soul in Major Motoko’s shell.

Sometimes the fatalism of cyberpunk is confused with nihilism. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The cynicism comes from a place of passion; and no matter how bleak and dark and gritty, at the end of it all is a deep concern for the human condition.

Conclusion

We end not far from where we began. If the punk of old was anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian, and counter-cultural, and then cyberpunk has not strayed far from its roots. It emerged in response to the stifling conformity of the cultural and economic times. As such, punk speaks to us now more than ever. The science fiction version of punk is perhaps even more relevant.

It matters because we live in a cyberpunk present. We live in a world where China has unfurled a system of high tech mass surveillance across the country – a so-called ‘social credit scheme’ – that rates 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 workforces while the owners simultaneously become the richest people in human history.

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. Covid-19 only accelerated these and other trends, solidifying our cyberpunk present and propelling us into a dark, cynical, neon-lit future.

The cyberpunk subgenre is a raised fist of defiance against all of this. It stands with those fumbling for dignity against the cold hard certitudes of technological progress. It sounds a clarion cry for human meaning in the face of a remorseless and soulless economic system.

* My favourite Johnny Rotten story is him sacking the original bassist for the Sex Pistols, Malcolm McLaren, because because he liked the Beatles.

** I should point out here that I am an Australian using American examples to explain to you, the readers, what I think punk is. The ubiquity and dominance of American culture is the lingua franca of an explanation like this, because I know if I used only Australian examples, much of the audience will be lost.

*** The Boys is brilliant, and a perfect example of commodified dissent. I mean: the most trenchant critique of corporate amorality on television is owned by Jeff Bezos.