Today, it is all but impossible to imagine popular culture without Japanese games, cinema and anime but at the time cyberpunk was being written, Japanese culture was restricted to the domain of theologians, artists and cinephiles. Nevertheless, cyberpunk was on to something here. Of course, fascinating as the OG cyberpunk vision was, it was not far removed from the romanticism of some centuries earlier which set the groundwork for the Eastern-infused modernist works that were to follow, and ultimately lead to cyberpunk itself. (And fair enough, I mean they are pretty cool!) But this sort of cross-cultural dialogue (or appropriation, depending on your perspective) is also where the genre of cyberpunk starts to become interesting, because unlike many dystopian fantasies that are really utopias for nihilists, cyberpunk attempted to depict an ambiguous future in which the slow process of secularisation of the West escaped anomie by replenishing itself in a fusion religion which married Buddhism, Taoism or Islam to Christianity and capitalism perhaps most beautifully realised in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and while modern cyberpunk is not so forward-thinking, it nevertheless embraces the marriage of American and Japanese pop culture. Nor does modern cyberpunk explore how the intrusiveness of the great tech monopolies was built not only on the innovation of the military-industrial complex, but also in direct consultation and collaboration with intelligence agencies indeed, modern marketing and data collection techniques for corporations grew out of the propaganda and intelligence wings of the twentieth century’s military-industrial complexes, and both have remained in close collaboration ever since.Īdditionally, in the pastiches and genre works of today, the anxiety over Japanese economic power has been stripped of its orientalist paranoia (Japan was one of two major post-War capitalist economies established by America which experienced an economic boom based on skilled engineering: yet not a pearl was clutched over zee Germans), and is now little more than an excuse to show off how cool kanji and samurai are.
Today, cyberpunk is no longer a movement, but a genre or an aesthetic to pastiche, and its depiction of the feudal lord-like power of our great tech monopolies gives the audience the impression they are run by innovative, evil geniuses not unimaginative rentiers. Its critique of capitalism came only after capital was already being transformed into the omnipotent printing press of neoliberal hegemony, and its depiction of this process not only excluded the genocidal crushing of labour power in the colonies and the legal oppression of unions in the colonisers’ homelands (with the notable exception of Blade Runner, which did not shy away from mythologising real actions being taken by imperialist countries at the time it was being produced), but also inadvertently glorified the rising political power of corporations by depicting this process as being far more interesting, far more obscure than petty bribery and the symbiotic relationship of the military-industrial complex and the market’s adoption of its technical innovation. Cyberpunk, the literary movement, was as out of date as it was prescient.
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