Portrait Of A Cyberpunk As An Old Fart

 "It Used To Be Cool, Now It's Just Junk Fiction, Dude"

Live long enough, you get outmoded. It doesn't actually take all that long - more like "long enough". The music, the styles, the movies, the what's-so-cool of anything becomes obsolete so quickly. When I was a teenager working in the local music shop, there was this guy Neville who did repairs. He was a lovely old fella, but alas, you just couldn't talk to him about how cool Eddie Van Halen was. Neville, an old jazzer had played in some great stage bands in the 1940s and 1950s, looked at popular music in 1981 like it was musical junk. This aesthetic obsolescence on his part was just something that happened to him some time in the 1960s. One minute he was a really switched on sax player and then the whole musical world had changed on him. The radical aesthetic shift had dealt him out of the musical mainstream he once inhabited. 

And it's not just music where this kind of thing happens. There are whole tracts of popular culture that are here-today-gone-tomorrow. Even in the internet age you have things like MySpace which was all the rage once-upon-a-time and now it's a punch line about how we were in the mid-2000s. There are kids today, - totally into Tik-Tok - who will look upon this moment in history as that moment when they had the cultural cool or mojo or whatever going for them. Arguably, this stuff happens even faster than it used to.  

For instance, Cyberpunk was not a sub-genre as such way back when. It was more like an aesthetic about technological civilisation and urbanity. After William Gibson won some awards with Neuromancer it became recognised as a sub-genre of science fiction and other people jumped to the fore with ever edgier bits of fiction about how urban spaces would devolve into the future. The beautiful capitalist/consumerist dystopia of the near future was suddenly the darling. Then came the Matrix movie and other bits of appropriation by other science fiction branches and franchises until the aesthetic itself became so old hat a young kid told me "that stuff's so lame!" 

Heh, kids, right?  

And that was well over 13 years ago. Today that same kid has grown up and he still tells me that the worst fad in science fiction was the whole cyberpunk thing. I keep telling him he just had to be there; but were we ever really there? Today, - after 2019 when the original Blade Runner was set - we're living in an alternate reality to all that. That stuff is all in a parallel universe of imagination, tucked away into a bubble of memories and nostalgia and fascination with pretty lights. As for the things the kid likes, it all looks like junk to me. It's frustrating to be so old your entire aesthetic outlook and framework has been consigned to the dustbin of history. You become obsolete, like an older model human.  

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