the taste of cyberpunk?
Ottobre 6, 2007
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.
