Mirrorshades question 6: Pop culture and democractisation

NeilNjae

In the preface, Sterling says:

The term [cyberpunk] captures something crucial to the work of these writers, something crucial to the decade as a whole: a new kind of integration. The overlapping of worlds that were formerly separate: the realm of high tech, and the modern pop underground.

Cyberpunk comes from the realm where the computer hacker and the rocker overlap.

On the one hand, artists have always been eager to adopt new technology to bring new art (for instance, the Impressionist painters). But art creation has rarely been so easily and widely communicated. Is cyberpunk the true spirit of the Tiktok generation?

Apocryphal

I don’t think making dumb videos about copying some dance move in your pool or dumping cold water over your head is very cyber pink at all. Also, Although ’Cyberpunk’ as it’s perceived more gut be about the blend of tech and rock, I think that just part of its pretentiousness. I think the real tech guys were more like Bill Gates or Wozniak. They weren’t rockers. Maybe they had cool envy, but tech itself certainly wasn’t very cool in the 80s. The genre of cyberpunk seems like it’s supposed to blend Rumblefish with Revenge of the Nerds and end up with Revenge Rumble, even though things were more like Fish Nerds in real life.

RichardAbbott

Yes, it feels like the endless cat videos or whatever of Tiktok, and the existence of vicious opinion silos on Twitter and the like, is kind of cyberpunk gone wrong! Although I said earlier (I mean yesterday) that I didn't find much in the collection about Big Globally Important Issues, I do think there was a sense that the matter itself, and the underlying technical and personal challenges, were serious things that had meaning. Somehow lots of the techie chatty stuff that goes on globally seems like a trivialisation of the intention of the 1980s writers. A bit like Marvin in Hitchhikers' Guide "brain the size of a planet and they use me for a door-stop".

clash_bowley

Nothing I can add here.