If we don't live in a cyberpunk dystopia, what kind of dystopia is it?

The Almanac guide to the retro-future

To everyone in the industrialized world born before 1990, the shamans of the future presented a vision: the high-tech lowlife.

Technology, it was said, would flow like battery acid over society and dissolve the institutions of cohesion and safety. The state would wither, and with it the protections of the law, to be replaced by giant corporations. (Think OCP buying the city of Detroit in RoboCop or the ruling oligarchy of television networks in the Max Headroom series.)

In the absence of a state, organized crime would explode, along with cities, and the environment would collapse. (Think of the opening scenes of Blade Runner and Akira or Judge Dredd’s Mega-City One.)

The wealthy would flee, often off-world, leaving us to cower under a criminal elite dissatisfied with owning just our labor. Forced to adopt invasive technologies to get ahead or just to survive, our bodies, our human selves, become the very means of post-industrial production. (Think Johnny Mnemonic, When Gravity Fails, Altered Carbon, Ghost in the Shell, Appleseed, or the original Cyberpunk role-playing game.)

It was a compelling vision, so much so that you often still hear comparisons to it, despite that as much of cyberpunk came true as Buck Rogers before.

Hold a picture of a suburban living room or kitchen from, say 1981, the year Johnny Mnemonic was published, in front of an actual suburban living room or kitchen and you’ll see not much has changed. There won’t be a phone tethered to the wall anymore, and TVs are quite a bit thinner, but we had microwaves and remote controls in the 1980s. There’s nothing in your living room or kitchen that would shock anyone from that time. (That’s in your pocket.)

What’s most remarkable about the cyberpunk era is just how durable it’s all been. We think of ourselves as living in a time of great technological change, but since the 1970s, we haven’t had anything like a Trinity Site or moon landing. Other than the slow dawn of the internet, all of the major historical events of the last 50 years have been sociopolitical: the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11, the housing crisis, the pandemic—change that could’ve happened in any era.

In that time, technology has weakened some institutions, yes. But it strengthened others—the state in particular. Despite the unanimous predictions of cyberpunk, nations have not withered. Thanks to the centralizing force of the internet, they have power that would’ve driven any Czar mad with envy, power that is largely transparent. We only get glimpses of it through leaks and unauthorized disclosures.

Corporations are bigger than ever, but so is everything, including governments. Only three of the nine largest employers in the world are private companies. The rest are all state enterprises: the People’s Liberation Army, the US Department of Defense, the UK National Health Service, Indian Railways.

Nor are states vassals of corporate power. Of the ten largest corporations in the world, four are state-owned, and the rest routinely kowtow to rights-violating requests from government without so much as a strongly worded letter. Recently, major media companies in the US voluntarily cooperated with the state security services to identify and arrest a government informant, exactly reversing the antagonistic stance they took during the Cold War with the Watergate and Pentagon Papers leaks.

Transnational governmental organizations like the UN, EU, and NATO have also not withered. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine how we might ever get rid of them even after they’ve served their purpose!

The wealthy haven’t fled. The furthest they’ve gotten are a few briefs trips to orbit. They’re still stuck here and masked up with the rest of us during COVID.

Cities have not swallowed entire continents. On the contrary, people are fleeing high-population areas like California and New York in droves.

It’s difficult to have rational conversations about the environment, which has become the New Christianity, but certainly Los Angeles and Las Vegas don’t look anything like the world of Blade Runner. Thanks to several decades of government regulation, there’s actually less smog in LA now than there was when that movie was released.

None of us have put computer jacks in our heads—an impossibility anyway since there is no I/O center in the human brain—or replaced our limbs a la the Bionic Man. We aren’t dodging roving gangs of drug-addled cyborgs on our way to work. In fact, the streets are generally safer than in our youth. Until COVID, crimes rates had been steadily falling.

The only things cyberpunk “got right” were cheap drugs (per capita deaths keep going up and spiked after fentanyl) and the advent of a ubiquitous global data network.

But even there, the shamans of the future got it backward. They assumed we would invade “cyberspace,” like the hackers in Neuromancer, where in truth “cyberspace” is invading the real world.

People don’t generally want to escape into virtual dreams. Hence, the predictable failure of the Metaverse. Rather, they want their dreams to manifest as reality. (If Zuckerberg really wants to own the future, he should make real android companions, not virtual cybernetic ones.)

Already, the nascent technologies of generative AI and 3D printing have begun to instantiate our digital fantasies physically, while cooperative online belief systems like QAnon and DEI remake the living world into non-overlapping alternate tribal realities, something much closer to China Miéville’s 2009 novel The City & the City than anything from cyberpunk.

Of course, all of that is very glib. As a narrative movement, cyberpunk wasn’t so much trying to predict the future as it was trying to say something about its present—and its past. It was as much a reaction to the utopian science fiction of the 1930s-50s as it was eschatological treatise on the post-1960s West. Fair enough.

But that begs the absence of such a movement in our own time. The world is never not a dystopia, but if ours is not a cyberpunk dystopia, what genre of dystopia is it? What is it about life in the 21st Century that our shamans can no longer conjure a coherent vision of the future, which is by reflection a statement on our present? Or is it that after the internet, everyone’s a shaman now—one giant chaotic cacophony that can’t make sense of anything?

Would it make a difference if we knew?

Whatever future appears, it won’t be the one we imagined. History has no genre. The future isn’t a slippery slope present. We can’t harpoon it on a trend line. What actually happens next will confound us, and all of us.