- 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.
Neither William Gibson nor Bruce Sterling have written a story that doesn't hold, at its very heart, the tension between government and free enterprise. Gibson's stories tend to be about freelancers caught up in the grind betwixt the two. Sterling's tend to be about citizens caught up in the grind betwixt the two. To say that government is absent in cyberpunk is to miss the fucking point (as nearly everyone does): individuals benefit materially from interaction with the corporations until they don't, and then they're fucked. And they suffer materially from interaction with the government until they don't, and then they're saved. The fundamental message in pretty much everything William Gibson has ever written has been "the government will save you when it gets out of its own way and gets around to it so you'd better be resourceful enough to stay alive in the meantime." Interpol is the deus Ex Machina of so much of Gibson's oeuvre that it's kinda painful watching someone paint it into some dumb neolibertarian bullshit paradise. Islands in the Net is even more on the nose. Corporations fuck around doing corporate stuff and then nation states take over and murder people and then the heroine gets kidnapped by terrorists, escapes with the help of a National Geographic reporter, posts a video from the desert somewhere that rallies everyone's patriotic fee fees such that Uncle Sam whips out his dick and blows up the terrorists on their surplus ex-Soviet nuclear submarine. I mean, there's this whole rant - one of the more interesting parts of the book - where Laura contemplates why her kidnappers are so in love with the '80s, down to their video games, which you have to play and play and play until you die, never able to beat them, never able to achieve anything, just grind away at Centipede or Missile Command or Asteroids until you're wiped out. Sterling goes as far as having her describe it as a Reagan Death Cult. But I mean it's just noir. Raymond Chandler's heroes were always running afoul between big money and big government. "Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown." It allowes a debt of gratitude to the attitudes of the '70s. The Prisoner, Rollerball, THX-1138, Logan's Run - they're all about the diffusion of individual liberty in favor of corporations.