There's a website called The Verge (not to be confused with The Verve), which posted an interesting article about the recent recovery of Cyberpunk, not as writing or futurism so much as photography posted on Tumblr. And isn't that weird. As a member of the cyberpunk movement back in the 1990's and someone who got into the internet on the ground floor, from before people had computers because they weren't graphic yet, to the various iterations of Netscape Navigator and the Dot.com boom and bust and Y2K, GIS, and cellular phones with wireless data... smartphones are now everywhere, soccer mom's are using cybertechnology more powerful than we could imagine back in 1994, and the alienation caused by technology sort of evaporated. Wireless data is easy. Getting an electric car with real battery capacity when lithium is headed for precious metals index pricing... well, cyberpunk's flashy bits of technology means we're SOL. Those flying cars with antigravity aren't happening. And post-oil means the high energy future is going to be rather dusty, populated with lots of bicycles, and you can't have total control when you can't get there to impose your will, much less get past the power outages. Cyberpunk died. Now it's just art.
I have to agree that I got suitably tired of black leather coats and dusters by the time Matrix came out, and its not something I ever took to wearing once I could afford it. I did like my Wife's old army jacket, but that was mostly because it was really comfortable and waterproof enough for drizzly weather. Leather is the wrong thing for real weather.
The cyberpunk obsession with guns is mostly out of ignorance. Video games and Hollywood movies make it look so easy, but hitting stuff you aim at is actually hard. And getting consistent ammunition requires more effort than a Mall Ninja is ready to put into, what is basically, a fashion statement with murderous implications. I don't like those kinds of people. The great strength of scifi authors is admitting that if there's going to be science in their scifi, they'd better study well the subjects they're writing about. Most authors just want the cool scene, the pose. They loved The Matrix even though it isn't science and badly fails basic math like everything in Hollywood, which is leading to Video Games leaving Hollywood to sullenly pout, alone and unwanted while video games have higher production values and profits. Funny how that is.
Who needs cyberpunk anymore? We live there. Your car has more computing power than the space shuttle. And your video game console's graphics processor is more teraflops than a 90's supercomputer. Suck on that. We live in the future. There is no "punk" in the cyber. Its just people, being people. And modern people are worse than the villains of 80's scifi. More callous, more cruel, more indifferent, more abusive, more disrespectful. Its not what we thought it would be. That's the trouble with Yesterday's Tomorrows. They become interesting footnotes of our own naïve imaginings. How messed up is that?
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