-- Please feel free to ask about any of the topics below at any time --

ELEMENTS OF CYBERPUNK: An Outline for Exposition

I've tried to come up with a categorization of the elements that are found in Cyberpunk writing, and in its predecessors. The list seems to have become lengthy, but every time I look at it, I find more to add.

No cyberpunk story or novel contains all of these elements, but certain combinations produce cyberpunk.

How do you know when you have found cyberpunk? You must invoke the method of Potter Stewart: "I know [cyberpunk] when I see it."

Here are the topics I will cover - but not all today.

• AVATARS; anonymity/loss of person; blurring of human and online identity; remote presence; remote action


• THE NET; sensory experience/manifestation of an alternate/virtual computer reality; visualization of cybernetic environment; being "in the system"; can't get out; physical reality tied to virtual reality


• SEMI-INTELLIGENT/intelligent/anthropomorphized AGENTS; intelligent computers; where machine intelligence resides; aid to remote presence


• PARANOIA; surveillance; tracers; persecution; simulation; conspiracy; The System; coincidence or not?; constant danger; deception; "taking over"/subrogation/possession ("pod people"); East German-like paranoia about people, acquaintances, friends


• PROTAGONISTS (and enemies): Brash/youthful/foolish/clever behavior; hypomania; individualism; antisocial/marginalized/criminal behavior; alienation; exaggerated personality traits; shallow/extreme characterizations; personalization/anthropomorphism of equipment


• PROGRAMMATIC WEAPONRY; infection; warfare; programming by thought; programming on the fly; hacking; shields; mazes; memes; viruses; cracking systems; backdoors


• CYBERNETIC AUGMENTATION; plug-in enhancements/modules; "jacks"; electronic "drugs" and abuse ("wireheads"); engineered organic infections that alter behavior; genetic alteration for specialization/aesthetics


• SHARED CONSCIOUSNESS; mindlinks; experience recording and playback; virtual contact/fusion/lovemaking; experience junkies


• TRANSFERRAL OF CONSCIOUSNESS: the Immense Rathole of Personal Identity, Duplication, Continuity (Criterion)


• SIMULACRA/androids/robots/material agents; animatronics; intelligence merged with equipment, spaceships, et cetera


• PRIVACY/theft/control of data; database searching and correlation; identity erasure; identity change; ubiquitous identity codes (identity cards, numbers, bar codes, implants...)


• NANOTECHNOLOGY; nanites; control of nanites; "Unobtainium"; self-reshaping equipment and structures; nano infections; nano augmentation (organs, neural linkages); grotesque malfunction; gray goo

[Edited on Dec 01, 2004]

Let the fun begin, I guess.

PREFACE

Cyberpunk is a genre of science fiction writing that is characterized by high technology, global internetworking, electronic virtual reality, and counterculture rebellion. There are many other themes that accompany cyberpunk fiction, and it is not necessarily true that a story that embodies the four themes above is cyberpunk. But this is a good start.

Cyberpunk can be technologically literate, but may not be. William Gibson is said to have been thoroughly illiterate with regard to the required technology when he wrote Neuromancer. He created a fantasy world with technological trappings. In a way, this is what cyberpunk is - old stories recycled, dressed in circuit boards and flashing lights, told by hyperactive young rebels. For this reason, naive cyberpunk is often dismissed by real technologists as a waste of time and imagination - and the horrid portrayals of computer wizardry in the media lend a lot of credence to that viewpoint.

The futuristic style embodied in cyberpunk, however, is not so ignorant. To a point, it is self-fulfilling, because people who experience cyberpunk viewpoints sometimes begin to adopt them. There are also writers genuinely educated in relevant technology who produce interesting quasi-realistic extrapolations of the present [Vernor Vinge, Alistair Reynolds, and others].

Cyberpunk is an interesting genre, or mode, that began slowly, but gathered steam in the early 1990s. Now, elements of it pervade science fiction. New cyberpunk books litter the shelves, having melded with virtually all science fiction and fantasy themes. (I haven't seen a cyberpunk unicorn novel yet, but maybe I am not looking hard enough.) The genre is tired and worn, like fantasy in the years immediately following the popularization of Lord of the Rings. Yet, for its all its triteness, it rings true and inevitable in many ways.

So, now, with that introduction out of the way, I'm going to write your ears off as I cover the themes of cyberpunk and their origins. I'm also going to throw in a few brief book and movie summaries.

PART I

AVATARS; anonymity/loss of person; blurring of human and online identity; remote presence; remote action
THE NET; sensory experience/manifestation of an alternate/virtual computer reality; visualization of cybernetic environment; being "in the system"; can't get out; physical reality tied to virtual reality

Avatars are one of the nearly ubiquitous elements of cyberpunk. The word "avatar" derives from Sanskrit and the Hindu religion: it is a physical realization of a deity. In cyberpunk, humans often become presences in an alternate reality: a cybernetic substrate. Occasionally, cybernetic entities acquire a physical presence. HAL 9000 talks. [2001: A Space Odyssey] The doctor on Star Trek: Voyager is a holographic projection.

Along lines more like present experience, humans may acquire telepresence - the transference of some or all abilities and identity to a remote location. (The Soviets and CIA apparently maintained psychic "remote viewing" programs for most of the Cold War.) Telepresence of a sort goes back many years. Artists, mapmakers, and the like have long used pantographs to reproduce works, often at different scales - a kind of remote drawing. Telephones move our hearing from one location to another. Televisions and cameras displace our sight. Remotely-controlled manipulators enable people to safely "handle" radioactive substances behind leaded windows. (Robert Heinlein described remote manipulators years before they were built - he called them "waldos.") Suppose you strap on goggles, headphones, and a pair of manipulator gloves. What then? Where are you? Suppose you are on the Earth and your surrogate hands are on the Moon.

Meditation, self-hypnosis, and near-death experiences aside, people perceive their consciousness as radiating from a point low on and somewhat behind their forehead. It seems unlikely this "spot" will be easily relocated (can you imagine seeing the world from the small of your back?), so the world must come to the cybernaut, not the other way 'round. The consensus view among writers - not yet achieved - is that if the body is embedded thoroughly enough within surrogate senses, the mind will perceive that it is embedded in the reality evidenced by those senses. This seems reasonable, but we have no idea what fidelity of experience is required to make this kind of immersion feel realistic. (I should note that some dedicated systems do work very well: commercial flight simulators provide tremendous fidelity and realism for their intended purpose.) What is required to embody a person's mind in a different, computer-generated reality?

Cyberpunk stories generally accept the existence of a mechanism for transferring consciousness and perception into an alternate (virtual) reality, wherein the structure of computers and networks are represented visually and physically, as lines, blocks, nebular clusters of components, tunnels, shells and barriers, various other mechanically-inspired visualizations, and even astronomical coruscations. You have seen the movies - both good and bad! The cybernaut may also appear in an Earth-like environment, where conventional reality is corrupted in subtle and/or overt ways. [The Matrix]

The cyber-world is electronic. Organic elements are rarely melded with it, excluding, of course, human or computer presences embodied in it.

Presence in alternate worlds creeps up on us today, but only one or two senses at a time. People lead lives of a sort in EverQuest and other online games, developing a fully detailed social hierarchy. Online chat places us in rooms or private conversations that have no physical reality, but that are nonetheless perfectly functional. As we are not fully there, we are somewhat anonymous and are free to play roles. "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog." Cyberpunk writing encourages and extends this notion - you aren't "you," but who you choose to be, or who you *can* be. Meanwhile, your mundane physical identity is of little or no importance.

Essentially uniform within the cyberpunk genre is the idea that once you are relocated into a solid cybernetic alternative reality, you are THERE. It sticks to you as firmly as physical reality, no matter how ridiculous this seems on its surface. Existence there is fast and desperate. Often it is difficult to leave - you can become trapped within. [Tron, The Matrix] Equally often, bodily harm in virtual reality translates to bodily harm in physical reality - a deadly placebo effect!

Often called "The Net" or something similar, virtual reality provides pathways for travel. Physical networks (transmission lines, radio/optical links, etc.) translate into equally realistic cyber-thoroughfares - sometimes literally roadways. (The "Information Superhighway.") As inhabitants translate from one location to another via networks, *their seat of consciousness follows them*. This has interesting implications should you contemplate how this could be implemented, because information travels at lightspeed, more or less. Presumably there is a point at which in reality the temporal lag from being "remote" far away from one's actual location will cause disorientation, reduced fidelity, or complete detachment. Neural transmission occurs on the scale of a tenth of a second; the time it takes for a signal to travel halfway around the surface of the Earth and back is on that same scale, so the speed of light can no longer be ignored at that distance. Some writers acknowledge this and think of ways around it. Cybernauts learn to work with "lag," or allow the entirety of consciousness to be transported to a remote location as a blob of data or a "program." (See Personal Identity, etc., later.) Another possibility is the use of an agent (see below) as a proxy.

Ultimately, in cyberpunk, virtual reality often completely supplants physical reality. The physical form of the cybernaut becomes irrelevant, at least when she is in The Net. The body needs to be fed, and maybe shaved. That is all.

SEMI-INTELLIGENT/intelligent/anthropomorphized AGENTS; intelligent computers; where machine intelligence resides; aid to remote presence

Agents are entities - generally computer programs - that serve as proxies for the needs of humans (and sometimes machine intelligences). Many simple agents exist today and papers have been written about them for years. IRC and other chat "bots" are excellent examples. Simple "infobots" that record and regurgitate quips and factoids are known to appear to take on human characteristics as time goes by. They become useful entities with whom communication is entertaining and often unpredictable (because their behavior is defined by a community, not a single individual). They are readily anthropomorphized and treated as smart pets. They may actually be stupid pets, but they are clever enough to "talk." Infobots and similar creations are also readily extended to do useful chores, like retrieve weather data, stock quotes, new headlines, spellings, definitions, "fortunes" and other sayings, and so on.

It is important to draw a distinction between apparently intelligent agents and truly intelligent agents. It is not so difficult today to produce agents that people come to consider "human-like" despite blindingly obvious shortcomings. The agents' *users* imbue a perceived veneer of humanity. The agent isn't human. There is no such thing as an even vaguely sentient computer intelligence of any kind today, but there are systems that appear to be human in important ways.

Cyberpunk envisions agents with human facades - agents that possess their own avatars. No leap of faith is required for this: it is inevitable. We know how to produce fairly realistic faces, we know how to give them appropriate and dynamic human expressions, we know how to synthesize nearly flawless speech (and even singing), we know how to recognize speech with a high degree of accuracy, we know how to implement useful machine vision, we know how to make machines locomote and walk (in many different ways), we know how to produce robotic manipulators that act very much like hands as well as completely unlike hands ... or to put it succinctly, we know how to make machines do what, outwardly, humans do.

If you are envisioning a female face on a 3d monitor listening to you ask for "this past week's mail from Nancy" and responding appropriately despite there being only one interesting Nancy among 500 Nancys that are actually in your mailbox, you are envisioning a point 10-15 years in the future - or sooner if you quit your job and dedicate yourself to the task.

Cyberpunk stories are replete with agents that execute menial but repetitive tasks. Agents may also be required to perform more difficult chores. There are two approaches to this: agents backed by clever human-written programs, and agents with "intelligence." These two alternatives make an interesting contrast.

At its heart, cyberpunk is human-oriented literature. Humans interact with humans, or at least sympathetic entities personified as humans. More importantly, cyberpunk rests on a predicate of human *mastery* of technology, or at least a world in which humans have the greatest importance. Cyberpunk is not about humans creating intelligences that supersede mankind - unless the point is to show how humans turn out to be superior after all, or how humans "resisters" regain control of their destiny.

There are stories in which humans create machine intelligences, but direct comparisons between humans and such intelligences are elusive. Machines aren't "human," or they are hyper-intelligent and aloof [A Fire upon the Deep], or they are hyper-intelligent and inhumanly evil [Colossus: The Forbin Project], or they are stupid, or single-purposed, or inferior in some way. Perhaps writers don't create these comparisons because they are actually - literally - unimaginable. And so, it is rare to read of an intelligent program let loose on a problem. Sometimes machine intelligences are ranked by fidelity - a "Level B" simulation might be capable of human appearance, but lack some essential ingredient - it breaks down quickly, it isn't imaginative, et cetera. Using intelligences as agents seems not only impractical, but is difficult to work into a plot - for example, why would an intelligence retain allegiance to an "owner"?

Clever programs acting as agents are a much more realistic possibility. They exist even today. When a "trojan horse" program (generally called a virus, but it's really only virus-like) insinuates itself into your desktop PC, it generally provides a gateway back to the writer of the infectious code. Your PC has now become the programmer's agent. This technology (or technological bane) exists now, and is rapidly becoming sophisticated.

PRIVACY/theft/control of data; database searching and correlation; identity erasure; identity change; ubiquitous identity codes (identity cards, numbers, bar codes, implants...)

It might be more natural to discuss "paranoia" first, but that's another long topic.

A near (or complete) invariant in cyberpunk writing is the assertion, or unspoken assumption, that the world has become a networked entity replete with vast resources contained in interlinked databases. This is a theme that is both a modern reality and an obvious extrapolation from current reality. These databases contain information about *everything*, and most importantly, about people. Databases that exist now contain your basic personal data, financial records, medical records, tax returns, records of communication (email, phone calls ...), fingerprints, genetic markers, shopping patterns, and who knows what else. The difference between reality and cyberpunk writing is that for the most part, the databases that exist today are poorly interconnected (no matter what fearmongers may assert). In cyberpunk, there is an assumption that everything works well and plays together. The tying together of disparate databases by a common thread (say, a social security number) is normally called "correlation."

Furthermore, the power inherent in this massive collection of information is assumed to be corrupting. Even today, we make that assumption. People who hold the keys to data hold the keys to everything. Your identity can be made to vanish [The Net] or it can be changed (or you can change it) [The Shockwave Rider]. Your private data (say, your records on your home computer) can be stolen. Conversely, you can be "locked out" - benignly, building/computer access denied - or in a completely computer-controlled world, perhaps you wouldn't be allowed a daily ration. If *you* have control over databases, you can steal data or make fraudulent transactions - "losing" a cent every time a large transaction is processed in a bank [Reality and movies].

As anyone who has heard numerous advertisements and PSAs about "identity theft" knows, you must safeguard data that uniquely identifies you, in order to protect yourself from impersonation and fraud. Generally, in the US, that is a Social Security number. The cyberpunk vision of the future often takes this one step further, so that humans are assigned values for the specific purpose of unique identification. This could be a universal ID card ("papers please!"), an implanted chip, a tattooed bar code, a number for a name [THX-1138], or even an implanted microchip that responds to identification queries and is perhaps even allows its wearer to be physically traced.

This theme has been present in science fiction for many years. It was born out of the combination of public fascination with computing machines (the old days of "Big iron") and Cold War paranoia. What people suspect that databases contain is usually beyond what people find comfortable - whether or not their fears are justified. Computers are cold and incomprehensible, and sophisticated computers *belonging to someone else* are almost always objects of nervousness or fear.

The notion that all databases can be thoroughly interlinked and freely "surfed" is unrealistic for the forseeable future, but the rest of this theme ties very closely to current reality.

i have a feeling we won't get to the discussion end of this until next wednesday.

Two texts that I feel desrve attention while you're at it:

True Names, by Vernor Vinge (1981)
- Had a vast computer network in which the interface was a hallucinatory trance.
- Authority is, again, the bad guy.
and
Schismatrix Plus, by Bruce Sterling
- Postulated a bioengineering vs. tool based evolutionary race, with full social analysis.
- Uncommonly epic sweep for a cyberpunk novel. (Hundreds of years of narrative.)

I didn't get into Difference Engine myself, and I've encountered other Sterling works that failed to grab me, but Schismatrix Plus and Holy Fire are both poetic and prophetic.

On the other hand, Stephenson has never really caught me, but as you say, he can't be dismissed.

A book I'd add the the reading list is Hardwired by Walter Jon Williams.
Also, I have discussion questions and comments, but I'm not sure if you're done with your exposition and I don't want to interrupt......?

I have a Work Intervention Problem (TM). Contrary to what might be apparent, I do a lot of my posting when I'm waiting for compiles, waiting on a coworker (cow-orker), out of things to photograph, and/or completely wiped out. I will finish this Real Soon Now (also TM).

Just keeping you (belatedly) updated.

I really hate to say this, but with an assortment of heavy-duty obligations (working late, getting ready for a silly Christmas-photographing-kids event) and a trip to SF for a long weekend, there is no realistic possibility I will post the remainder before the end of next week.

However, I do have some more already in the queue ... Wednesday night hopefully.

Didn't Billy Idol do an album called Cyberpunk?
I'll read this thread later when I have more time. It looks interesting.

In fact he did, and I own the CD (from a bargain bin), and it's on my laptop, and I have never listened to a second of it. Maybe I will get around to it now.

i find it on allmusic.com

I have always considered several of Phillip K. Dicks books very important cyberpunk.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Valis, The Minority Report to name just a few.