Why subscribe?
It’s interesting, and it’s free. It also happens to be accurate.
The purpose of this blog is to:
1) Assemble, document, or otherwise curate evidence that we are living in a cyberpunk world.
To the end of documenting cyberpunk dystopia in real life, there are two main approaches used here. One consists of recap posts that list dystopian events within a given time frame (e.g., September 2020). The other is thematic, and covers where a certain situation stands at the time of writing (e.g., Amazon’s surveillance state or how close we are to nuclear war).
2) Analyze our cyberpunk world. Rationally.
That means differentiating between fluff and substance, being level-headed about where things are at and how they’re shaping up. May include essays on how dystopia can be avoided.
There’s also an illustrated series I started in 2020 and never resumed, but hope to come back to someday. Each “issue” of the present punk graphic novel is a standalone short story with a few illustrations. The themes explored vary issue to issue, but the general point is to ask how far apart real life is from dystopian fiction.
What is cyberpunk?
Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction that Wikipedia describes best as focusing on “a combination of low life and high tech.”
There are all sorts of aesthetic components that most people recognize cyberpunk by—robotic limbs and neon cities, for example. I focus more on the thematic elements here.
Common elements of cyberpunk include:
Advanced robotics, especially as augmentations to the human body
Even when not a physical augmentation, the general integration of man and machine
Advanced artificial intelligence and computing in general
Advanced, constant surveillance
Massive corporations, typically more powerful than governments or even in replacement of them
Wealth stratification and widespread poverty (and crime, correspondingly)
Environmental degradation
Frayed social relations, atomization
If any of this sounds familiar…
A lot of these posts will include content that doesn’t sound flashy. For example, news about politics, or economics, or technological innovations that aren’t necessarily headed down a terrible path.
Those who love cyberpunk know it’s a lot about aesthetic, and as much as I truly appreciate that, my focus here is primarily about the things unfolding today that build up tomorrow’s dystopia. A court ruling about the employment classification of Uber drivers admittedly does not sound cyberpunk at all — it’s just news — but it’s one detail in a larger trend of the economic demolition of workers in the high-tech economy. High-tech, and low life.
So bear with me. Most of the content isn’t about flashy things like robot police or augmented humans with machine gun arms. Call it citizen journalism.
Who are you?
I’m just a normal person running this as a hobby outside of a day job. I work in media professionally, so I consider myself fairly well-informed, but don’t let that encourage you. I’m in my late 20s, and I just have a BA. I’m not a PhD candidate, or some dissident scholar.
Why are you anonymous?
First, I don’t want to suffer professional repercussions for the opinions I express here. Staying anonymous is a practical way for me to maintain a regular source of income and to be independent as a blogger.
Second, I think it adds some fun intrigue. (This is a cyberpunk blog, after all.)
I dislike how much online content creation revolves around social media personalities, so running an anonymous blog is a fun way of bucking the trend. It makes growing the blog a lot harder, but ideally the result is that people are reading for the quality of the content over anything else.
