Cyberpunk: The bleak view of our encroaching reality

This blog isn't history related at all so feel free to skip right on by it. I just wanted to write a blog post about something I liked. I'm by no means some sort of expert on this topic though, so feel free to add your own interpretations. (Inspired by Will and Natalie)

Art by Daniel Liang

So, what exactly is cyberpunk? For starters, its a genre of fiction. Many movies, books, TV shows, and game story lines all employ the use of this concept. You may even already know the cyberpunk aesthetic from TV shows such as Black Mirror or Love, Death & Robots or even from books like Altered Carbon or Ready Player one. However, for a formal definition of cyberpunk let's turn to Wikipedia. There it's defined as "a subgenre of science fiction in a futuristic setting that tends to focus on a 'combination of lowlife and high tech.'" That's to say that where cyberpunk differs from other science fiction genres is that rather than focusing on the advancements science has caused it focuses on what happens to the people unable to benefit from the new tech and the subsequent collapse of social order. The nuance that exists in this genre is what makes it both fun to watch and write about, and creating worlds in this genre is very fun to do as a writer.

Screencap from popular Cyberpunk TV show Altered Carbon

However, I didn't just want to talk about the genre of Cyberpunk because I liked to write about it. I feel like modern works of fiction that employ Cyberpunk in their writing, or just works of science fiction in general, are acting like a sort of warning to society as a whole about our use and reliance on technology. Take Black Mirror, one of the more prominent modern sci-fi shows, as an example. When people first began watching it, many were terrified of the way technology was used. There were episodes where people forced to bike endlessly to presumably produce electricity, ones where people's consciousness were cloned and exploited as smart home devices, and even episodes where rogue autonomous robots hunt down the last vestiges of humanity. My favorite episode of Black Mirror, Hated in the Nation, confronted something that I feel is closer than we think, the use of drone insects to pollinate crops. (SPOILERS HERE) In the episode, it is revealed that even though the drone insects were being used to pollinate crops initially, the project was only funded by the government because the bees had built in facial recognition that was being used for nationwide surveillance of England. However, the use of this surveillance tech eventually backfired on the government, and through the use of an online campaign a hacker was able to use the drones to murder 300,00 people across all of England. (SPOILERS END) With out growing reliance on technology, we must also confront the reality that that technology can be used against us just as easily as it can help us. 

This post isn't meant to be something super dark though, as even if the reality created in these Cyberpunk works seems close to our reality they are still only fiction. These works only critique possible repercussions to our total trust and reliance on technology, and are only meant to warn against letting those fictional world becoming our reality. So as our world moves further and further in the future, lets keep Cyberpunk firmly in the realm of fiction and never let innovation be our society's downfall.