Cyberpunk Exegesis

[SeanSparks]

(This is from an entry I posted in a Livejournal community devoted to Cyberpunk)

Hello, Cyberpunk community.

I'm a chronic insomniac currently suffering from a mixture of overworking, underschooling, sleep deprivation, and nervous system asphixiation from failing electrical signals trying to shoot across synapses that are tarred full of caffiene, so bear with me.

I think that, for myself at least, I finally figured it out. By that, I mean the reason we're all in this community. I haven't posted in here in a long time, because the nominal day-to-day breakthroughs in the minute and tedious advancements of technology that bring us closer to the image of the art we love don't really interest me. Clumsy mech-machines, optical screens fused with PDA technology and cellular networking to make us as alive electronically as we are geographically, and government ploys to take back the internet that got away through city-wide federally administered wireless networks... it's all so far from the mystery that brought me to a community like this, that I can't really get excited over it.

But I mentioned art and image before, and that's what I'm really interested in. The thing that I feel excites many of us so much about cyberpunk as a genre, is the very fact that it's not just a genre, and when we really start to dissect it, we find that it's not really anything. We can't seem to all agree on what it is about the books, movies, video games, futurist notions, fantasy escapisms, and techno-pulp-action dramas that makes us feel that something is "cyberpunk". But I think I've got it.

Every year I write a series of web shorts for fun, and just put them in my LJ and post them to message boards I hang out on. I'm not interested in publishing any of them, it's just a recreational activity. This year I let some of my friends and readers pick out what I would write about, and the only coherent and interesting suggestion to come of it was "Thought Police". So to get myself in the mood to write what would be a cyberpunk story, I went and bought Idoru and Count Zero. Then, as I read more, I wrote less, and the shorts never made it past episode two, because I felt like there was something about Gibson's writing that I needed to sort out... that if I just kept reading his stuff I would finally figure out the mystery of cyberpunk. So after I read those two, I borrowed Pattern Recognition and All Tomorow's Parties from a friend, and kept reading.

Halfway through Pattern Recognition, it clicked.

Each book by Gibson, in it's own way, is about technology, art, and evolution.
What I think I love, and many others may love as well, is the marrying of this triad of ideas, because it alchemically transforms each of these concepts for us into something more tactile, rich, and most importanly, real. Technology by itself is something that we don't generally imbue deep emotions to, not like a couch, or a book. Do we feel a love for a document that contains a story which we enjoyed very much as a child, as much love as that of the book itself, in wood binding with pages that smell like old dust? Not usually. But we still love the story, so why shouldn't it bear those same traits, those same markers of familiarity?

That's where the art comes in. Each story has an artistic quest, generally of a quixotic nature, pursuing some abstract and vague source of truly inspirational and life altering works of art, from the boxes in Count Zero, to the dream world surreality of artificial life living dreams in Idoru, and then to the emotionally uplifiting terroristic nature of a mysterious footage in Pattern Recognition. In each element of art we find technology, not technology that is defining art or capturing art, but technology that is creating art... technology that is art.

Now evolution, because making these connections between art and technology, these distinctions that allow us to see the amorphous nature of these two ideas together, we have to see through the character's eyes. A character who is different, who has evolved an ability to see things in our modern environment that we're developing very slowly, because our environment is developing so quickly around us. What is true in the world today is epxonentially different tomorow. So we're slow to evolve the ability to grasp the ability to easily recognize certain concepts and ideas melting together because of our developments in technology.

So that's it, at least for me, technology, art, and evolution.

If this discourse doesn't help anyone in any way, or disagrees with your concept of cyberpunk, then I'll at least know that I resolved something for myself. Maybe even kicked my own evolution of thought into gear.

-Sean