Junk in Cyberpunk:
The Coming of a Trashed Post-human Age
Prior to the Cyberpunk genre, science fictions envisioned a future with flying cars, robot butlers or pistols shooting laser beams. However, none of the cool stuff promised to us in the 1950s sci-fi tradition came true. The streamline style utopian future became known in the sci-fi community as the “the future that never was” (Gibson, 2003b, p. 29). The downfall of streamline tradition was that it failed to see the society as a complex system but as the playground of technology. In the 1980s, a more sinister sci-fi genre was born that put the futuristic predictions in the social and technological changes of global society based on the self-interest of today. It was named Cyberpunk. Cyberpunk is brutally realistic and reflective of our social situation rather than our technological one. It presents a dark future we are heading toward.
Cyberpunk can be classified as a sub-genre of dystopian fictions, but usually features impotent or indifferent governments rather than totalitarian ones. The rotten societies, filled with junk, overran with crimes, were corrupted by commerce and technology, not by conspiracy but by inevitability. Cyberpunk is a symbol of the up-coming age of post-human society, a society operating on greed and self-denial, a society less human but more recognizably the world of today.
The universal feature of Cyberpunk is junk. Junk has such a potent position in Cyberpunk fictions that it held many names such as kipple and gomi. Junk is the waste of human activities, the residual of consumed resources. But junk still remains as undesirable material even though it yields certain mutual dependencies with the society. Junk in Cyberpunk is not all physical. It represents all things that are rejected by humans, things like idealistic principles and human nature. Junk is a fictional element that reflects many unseen problems of today.
The Coming of a Trashed Post-human Age
Prior to the Cyberpunk genre, science fictions envisioned a future with flying cars, robot butlers or pistols shooting laser beams. However, none of the cool stuff promised to us in the 1950s sci-fi tradition came true. The streamline style utopian future became known in the sci-fi community as the “the future that never was” (Gibson, 2003b, p. 29). The downfall of streamline tradition was that it failed to see the society as a complex system but as the playground of technology. In the 1980s, a more sinister sci-fi genre was born that put the futuristic predictions in the social and technological changes of global society based on the self-interest of today. It was named Cyberpunk. Cyberpunk is brutally realistic and reflective of our social situation rather than our technological one. It presents a dark future we are heading toward.
Cyberpunk can be classified as a sub-genre of dystopian fictions, but usually features impotent or indifferent governments rather than totalitarian ones. The rotten societies, filled with junk, overran with crimes, were corrupted by commerce and technology, not by conspiracy but by inevitability. Cyberpunk is a symbol of the up-coming age of post-human society, a society operating on greed and self-denial, a society less human but more recognizably the world of today.
The universal feature of Cyberpunk is junk. Junk has such a potent position in Cyberpunk fictions that it held many names such as kipple and gomi. Junk is the waste of human activities, the residual of consumed resources. But junk still remains as undesirable material even though it yields certain mutual dependencies with the society. Junk in Cyberpunk is not all physical. It represents all things that are rejected by humans, things like idealistic principles and human nature. Junk is a fictional element that reflects many unseen problems of today.
