The future is now
One of the most hotly anticipated video games of recent memory was released late last year, Cyberpunk 2077. Though it ultimately failed to live up to expectations and was rife with bugs, the excitement it generated spoke volumes about the topic and setting; casual gamers and devout fans alike were excited to try the game, based on nothing more than studio reputation and the genre for which it was named.
Cyberpunk is an imagined future, generally respite with science fiction’s greatest fantasies: flying cars, humanoid robots, realistic holograms, and a blurred line between the virtual and the real. Preventing it from being a chrome-plated utopia is the human element: that is to say, corruption, crime, and culture. The end result is a rusted social ladder teaming filled with hopeless masses at the bottom, climbing pseudo-bourgeoisie, and the god-like overlords that everyone else is beholden to, rendered free from fear of want, discomfort, illness, and often death. This might sound dark, but there’s a lot of neon. Cyberpunk loves neon for some reason, especially pink.
Cyberpunk was a relatively niche genre a few years ago; until a few years into college, I had even confused it with steampunk. The term is popular now, and though calling a game High Fantasy 1077 would sound bizarre, the game has turned “cyberpunk” into a household term. With cyberpunk’s gritty feeling and technology becoming increasingly popular, people are even starting to dress and decorate according its aesthetics.
As much as Cyberpunk 2077 heightened interest in the genre’s style, it’s the pandemic that has driven adaptation of its technology, ones that straddle the physical and virtual. The know-how previously existed, but the lockdown pushed it into areas previously exclusively physical. Date night dinners. Any sort of meal. Institutional education. Any sort of education. Grocery shopping. Any sort of shopping. Workout classes. Cinq à septs. Business pitches. First dates. Doctor’s appointments. There’s no reason to believe that after overcoming the thrill of being able to leave the house again, these changes are staying to some extent. Delivery is easier than going into the store. Meeting online is easier than meeting in person. Eating a snack dropped off by a drone while having a virtual screening date are undoubtedly cyberpunk improvements.
No one knows when things will return to normal, whatever that looks like, but like food delivery and work-from-home, elements of the virtual friendship are here to stay as well. I’ve become accustomed to an increased number of friends who regularly send me content and thoughts, to be responded to instantly or after some time. I’ve recognized that doing an activity online with friends can provide just as much satisfaction as meeting them in person, with less activation energy required. There’s no reason that any of these would disappear, especially as their platforms improve.
These numerous technological advances and adoptions arrive at a time when an increasing number of Western youth are becoming disillusioned about social mobility and capitalism as a whole. Relevantly, the incremental comforts of the pandemic has often been at the expense of an expanding new class of labourers: the delivery-people and the warehouse workers. Not only are they poorly paid and unable to take advantage of the services they support, they are also forced to work at the front lines, interacting with hundreds of people a day to maintain these new conveniences.
The working class has always existed, but the pandemic has highlighted their plight, the choice they must make between risking infection or certain insolvency. This recognition goes jointly with the news that the rich got richer during the pandemic, and that the biggest companies in the world were digital to start, improving their reach and influence with the lockdown that shut out the physical world. Meanwhile, the most vulnerable must labour to either address the issues that these technocrats cannot solve, or support the solutions heralded as the pinnacle of innovation.
Cyberpunk has its origins in the sixties and seventies, taking the nascent genre of science fiction and applying the counterculture flavour du jour. At its core, it always imagines the implications of new technology when rife with the baggage of the human condition, if current cultural and economic models grew alongside the technology, like a Black Mirror episode. Despite the current interest in the cyberpunk aesthetics and technologies, cyberpunk has always existed as satire: not just a warning of what will come, but a reflection of current societal ailments.
That capitalism has managed to commercialize cyberpunk as an aspirational future speaks to the nefariousness of the situation, but it is also important to differentiate between the potential misuses of technology and their intended purposes. Just like flying cars, humanoid robots, realistic holograms, and a blurred line between the virtual and the real, the issues associated with new virtual habits during the pandemic aren’t technological in origin, but rather human in nature.
Take working from home as an example. Trading lengthy commutes, mandated water cooler conversations, and the requirement to be physically present for eight hours, for rolling out of bed, camera-off meetings, and working in pajamas is tolerable if not categorically better. Yet people complain about remote work, usually citing the lack of divide between their job and their home, finding themselves incessantly checking emails and their team expecting quick responses no matter time of day. But does the problem lie with the technological advances that made remote work feasible, or rather with an unhealthy preoccupation with work and unreasonable demands from colleagues? Does the tendency to spend more when online shopping result from a friction-less experience or a desire to spend and a malevolent design to encourage more purchases? Are the poor learning outcomes from distance studies spurred by shaky video and audio connections, or by students aiming to do as little work as possible?
Accompanying technological adoption, is increased inequality, which is also here to stay. Though the upper-end of blue-collar workers earns more than many of their white-collared peers, there is a clear division between those who can continue doing their jobs effortlessly from their homes and those whose jobs are inextricably linked to their workplaces. In a cyberpunk world, this division is further delineated by the stability of the work; as cheap automation moves to replace labour, both skilled and unskilled, those whose skillset is no longer relevant can only find precarious jobs, which leads to the trope of anonymity and shady characters.
To recap, cyberpunk is a future where the technologies of classical sci-fi lore exist not to solve the problems currently present in our world, but serve to exacerbate them, usually to the benefit of a chosen few. Has the technology adopted during the pandemic addressed any of these issues? It’s not hard to imagine a near-future dystopian world with a plague cementing corporate power as the apocalyptic event.
So next time someone talks about wanting to live in the world of Blade Runner or Ghost in the Shell, don’t give them a hard time. Although they might not have have fully considered the implications of living as a bounty hunter in a future where the rich control everything, they have realized that it’s not too far from the time they’re in now. They just want the flying cars and hyper-realistic VR worlds they were promised.
