cyberpunk always was

 

 

It is just in the meeting of machine and man that

 

the usual questions come finally in the open space

 

manifest themselves.

 

Like america, it was there already before we could give it a name,

 

and like america’s discovery is defined the discovery of a country,

 

so the name cyberpunk defines a genre,

 

but both are processes.

 

It happens, it soothes fashion, fits style,

 

but the word is just too narrow, as it only implies interaction between human and metal through electricity.

 

whilst here I would like to explore how this interaction can modify us, and what stemmed out of it so fascinating, awing, disturbing, true. It is not a word defining a genre to me, it is a password to the perception of things to be as they will be, and already potentially are.

 

a world where the meaning of human is the more intense, the more it has been stripped bare, merged, twisted, made useless, etc etc.

 

I can’t escape yet philosophy and critical-writing, I need to define this idea.

 

so far. whoever but few will drop here and understand where i am aiming at and leave a few hints?

Employees, Supervisors, and Line Managers

“This house has got really high levels of entropy”

A tenor out of a speaker at the bottom of the corridor.

Random pieces of my host’s pc in his hands, the father of one, on a Snday, is installing a chipset.

I still can’t find the word to substitute cyberpnk.

sense and new

If it feels new, then it’s not cyberpunk.

If it makes sense, then it’s not cyberpunk.

I realised that in cp fiction, all technology is given for granted, nothing is new in a world so full of innovations: characters tend to be really jaded about technology, and it works in a very different way from classic sf, where the sense of wonder and discovery is relevant…H.G. Wells just came to my mind: he the exception, he was so ahead. I’ll fetch the titles of the stories Im thinkign to.

Anyways. Chaotic prose and uselessness of material progress seem to me some good reference points to start with. Still Im very bothered by a silly problem, that is not being able to use another word than “cyberpunk” in this blog, but i really lack of decent alternatives.

Im very busy with my job lately and im not getting any time to ponder about the meaning of android life.

One thing I managed to sketch out is that roleplaying games are historically, pen and paper ones, began to spreaad at the same time as science fiction did. I actually wrote a few things about RPG’s and the similar, I need some time to go through it again. The point of it though, is that RPG’s are a primitive way to develop a “mind theatre” (term later on used by White Wolf publisher), and a mind-theatre is an internal virtual reality. In some ways, from a human point of view, i think pen and paper-path to other realities is “pure” from electronic-AI-addiction, on the other hand, on the timeline of our recent history, RPG’s were the precursors, or the aids, to many SF and cyberpunk scenes/environments etc.

I am interested in cp for the times we are in are really crucial to the understanding of the realtion creator-created, since we approacha season when creations will suffer realistically, their artificial neurons will mushroom, and we’ll face more or less the same questions that the Greek gods dealt with while dealing with mortals.

Which brings my topic discussion yet to one more field, on the exoteric-technology-in-the-past bend.

One interesting analogy is: now sex is the prevalent drive in the development of the internet, whether you like it or not, and most interactive technology is being developed, or it will become accessible, in order to have males mating artificial females.

Genesis 6:2 …the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose.

So maybe we’ve been worshiping a graphic designer or something.

If you are interested in thsi stuff, there are a lot of sources on the net, of course most of it is psycho, but serious researchers have addressed the topic myth/technology since a good forty years ago with professionality.

so far so good.

gotta really get some sleep.

post No 3

I thought of a sketch for a manifesto of this thing that – as i have been explaining – we don’t know what it is, a scratch of a manifesto, a sketch, and it goes:

(He leaves the room and storms through the corridor in the room)

- I’ve forgotten what I came here for

X: – You’ve come for the manifesto

POEVATIVE INNOSTICS AND ACOULOGIES TECHNISTICAL

it’s the title of our manifesto. And it is soon before we realize it does not portray at all what we mean todo. Realizing that anything would do it’s what we do most.

cyberpunk is an old word for something that, like indeed punk, must constantly evolve or else die. It is a being desperately present to his own time. Forgive for being random and humourless: I am uneasy and awed when i try to explain cyberpunk. It is like an odour, a smell, an essence of something. It points at something rather than being something. It is a theatre that we find new, because even if we are young, we are old already, and marvel before Bladerunner, the romantic and the jaded for once in one, but be wary, it just represents a fashionable set of future technologies and drugs.

Only, it is reality, and the word future loses sense because it is the old way to locate the place where we are: like science fiction, it grows old and needs a new skin.

the new skin. I cannot make my point clearer if not expressing it in blurred jots of insight: the chase demands/ a wide-angle lens.

Gibson sticks in my mind because of many many times hearing his name on the mouth of someone else would mean well, the sporadic spreading of cyberpunk spores; then I came to Calder, Cythera, the most striking I’ve read, the best whitenoised suyburpan fiction I’ve read, intense and with a blush of cyberbritish, and also the most unavaliable book downtown, a shame to the nation.

the city and the stars, a. Clarke, has one of a good novel time-span: the most ancient time recalled in the fiction, is when Man had conquered the galaxy. Then, the novel is set long after an alien race overcame Man to the point of reducing his empire to one single city, that kept self-sufficient and totally isolated from the rest of the universe for twenty times a thousand years. This book makes you feel hosted in a really grand space.

the taste of cyberpunk?

random fundamental questions:

1- the perception of future: SF is realism ahead. why SF writers predict the future?

2- Are we already biologica CPU’s. Why Creation myths in religions and mythology are coherent with high-tech dynamics.

3- The definition of life: how it comprises non-brething forma like electricity.

4- Why it’s always fucked up heads that persistently try to ask really smart questions.

5- The effect of audiovisual constant fire in the brain. Extension of brain data storage, conscience=memory, pioneers of different mindsets. Why care of politics?

6- AI. All is based on Asimov here. But AI is also the default functions of an avatar, thence a blatant similarity with the relationship that occurs between conscious and subconscious. Am I an extremely powerful mmorpg made of player and avatar?

7- Is cyberpunk a genre that leads independent life just because it can exploit a scenery that didn’t exist before? The technologic evolution created such a quake on this planet that it is not possible to just re-set an old plot in a new bacground: that’s what classic SF did maybe. Here, if you show your characters in this high-tech filled universe, it’s impossible that they won’t be influenced strongly if not completely absorbed, by the powerful intrusion of technology/bioscience/virtual in their lives. Perhaps that core friction between humanity and tech of cyberpunk is pceivable as the common tone of understatement of CP writers: characters try to lead a normal human life, but it is obvious that everything is deranged, thus their human nature is present just as a radical statement: I am not a machine, because all other barriers have been broken. This question is literary, and I am not so interested in the lit-side of cyberpunk, more in the vision and in what it implies.

With my friends cyberpunk has aquired a function similar to the words “art-nouveau”, “medieval”, “liberal”: that is, it comprises both a definition of a period of literature, and the meaning of a taste, a style: the second one, is tranferrable to other times, so we spend time trying to find “cyberpunk” things in the past. Like with words such as “indie”, you don’t know exactly why something is “more cyberpunk” that another thing: our attempt is to describe the “taste of cyberpunk”.

E.K.

Cyber and Punk

The first reason of existence for this blog is

to put down ideas related to cyberpunk. The word, we feel, is obsolete to cyberpunks. In the origin, the movement was called mirrorshades. We started thinking over this word, and how to redefine what it used to mean, and we reached and got lost in the larger spectrum unwinding from the first beginnings of artificial intelligence to the significance of technology in aesthetics. Shortly after we had begun to have some animate talks about the place held by cyberpunk in history, we happened to watch Ironman. More on it later on.

We are glancing at vaste plains, that hold the secret of technology, as it becomes more and more integrated, or as it spreads its life-form like the borg, as it becomes closer and closer to what was called magic, in the whereabouts of The City and the Stars.

Awed by the extent of our undertaking, we almost got our will to write drowned down at the choice of the title of the blog.

If you have always been having thoughts about Mario being the the beginning of the end of history as we conceived it, or about how to set the speed of passing of time inside an artificial universe where you have your 300,000 terabyte-each AI’s enacting evolution; if you ended up desiring to stick a jack-in in the back of your skull and see really what is this thing with wires, see Electricity and
Metal. If you wish you could prove of seeing right now how Of seeing the two marry and we beginning to choke in between. And if at the same time, the fiction of it, the chrome storytellers, made you want it, or better, made you pretty certain that’s exactly what the future is going to be like. It is already like it with a few graphics still missing.

If is this so, writing your comments would most please us.

E.K.

Enter Eddie Kanta

la creazione del primo ottobre.