by veen

In William Gibson’s Neuromancer, characters interact with the government either through past military service or in the law literally made manifest in code. Real power is reserved for entrenched wealth. For Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net, politics is visible but is driven by corporations either bending states to their will or actively routing around governance. These dystopias are the logical culmination of a political project designed to fundamentally limit what government can do for people and expand what it can do for the wealthy.

“Back in the 1980s, before movies and video games reduced the genre to a mass of unimaginative violence and body modification tropes, cyberpunk was the literary movement that was busy projecting our fears about rampant capitalism, media oversaturation, and emerging computer networks into fictional futures,” writes Infinite Detail author and journalist Tim Maughan.

I feel like they may have a point, but it wouldn’t be the first time that I’d be misled by Slate. kleinbl00

Also “cybourgeoisie”, yuck.