Cyberpunk is a genre of science fiction which has been
around since before the 1980s, and has increased in popularity
ever since its inception. If you aren't familiar with it (and
especially if you don't want to leave geminispace to look it up),
it's basically a gritty dystopia setting, often described by the
phrase "high tech, low life". If you've watched "Blade Runner,"
that's an example of cyberpunk.
One reason for cyberpunk's enduring popularity is its prescience.
While the core of the genre was created several decades ago, many
concepts which were mostly fictional back then have become parts of
our modern reality: high-profile computer hackers, computer programs
that can pass the Turing test, excessive control of society by
large corporations, &c.
Another prominent reason is the aesthetics. Cyberpunk is very
recognizable due to its aesthetic: usually very grungey, full of neon
lights, rain, drugs, and computer screens. As somebody who obsesses
over aesthetics, I will note that I find a lot of cyberpunk aesthetics
to be "debased;" that is, they don't fall within what I feel is the
"true" cyberpunk aesthetic, and instead only provide a shallow mimicry.
Finally, the cyberpunk genre has been criticized for various
reasons, such as its treatment of gender and appropriation of certain
cultural aesthetics. In my opinion, a good lot of these criticisms are
quite sensible, but they are also quite obvious. It must be noted that
cyberpunk shouldn't be tossed out the window simply because of its issues,
because the genre contains a rich amount of ideas to explore, most of
which are not instrinsically tied to those elements which may be seen as
controversial.
It's difficult to describe how an aesthetic impacts a person's emotions
and thoughts. That being said, I'll try to do it (and probably fail).
Cyberpunk, at least to me, conveys many different emotions: alienation,
sinfulness, hopelessness, and fascination, to name a few. However, there are
also subtler aesthetics at play, which convey emotions that don't yet have
names. Consider the retro fashion and technological aesthetics -- how do
those make you feel? Maybe it's hard to describe, but it is a huge part
of what distinguishes cyberpunk and of what makes cyberpunk feel so real.
Cyberpunk stories ask many different questions; for example:
- do androids dream of electric sheep?
- how do we define humanity? how might that change?
- what could the internet become?
- what is our true relationship with technology?
These questions seem to ask very different things, but there
is a common theme that ties them together, which I'll explain soon.
First, we need to think about what "the future" is usually taken
to mean in our present era. In much of the west, we tend to implicitly
think of "the future" in terms of progress. The past two centuries
have been a period of rapid industrialization and proliferation of
technology, so we tend to think of time in terms of technological progress.
History doesn't really work that way, as history itself has shown, but
that isn't incredibly relevant since we're just talking about a genre.
Anyway, when you go far enough into "the future," certain things
-- ideas, systems, technologies -- are pushed to their limits. Scientists
have refined physical laws by observing how their current understanding
of the physical world holds up under extreme conditions
(extremely small things, extremely large things, extremely fast things,
extremely cold things, extremely hot things, ...), and are then able
to gain insight and discover new things by observing what changes.
Similarly, speculative genres like cyberpunk can push ideas to their
extremes, forcing us to refine our definitions of them. An example of
this is how stories involving robots (the good ones, anyway) raise
questions about how we define humanity.
And so, cyberpunk can be thought of as pushing things to their limits.
Many genres of speculative fiction do this, but cyberpunk is unique in
how it explores those ideas, as well as the aesthetic that it uses.