What Is Cyberpunk? (Hint: Not What You Think)

Ask the average pop culture consumer what “cyberpunk” means, and you’ll get some variation of the same stock answer: rain-slick streets, flickering signage written in kanji, a trench-coated loner hacking a corporate mainframe from a phone booth while street gangs jacked up on designer drugs war for control of a Skid Row street corner.

In other words, you’ll hear “film noir, but lit with neon instead of street lamps slanting through Venetian blinds.”

Or, if you ask the younger crowd, “Like, Blade Runner?”

By which they’ll mean the post-Ground Zero desecration, not the original. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Those definitions have been repeated so often, they’ve ossified into a meme: a shorthand aesthetic detached from its roots.

The irony is that cyberpunk began as a revolt against shallow genre formulas. Its defining authors like William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and later Neal Stephenson, were reacting against the lifeless sterility of mid-century “hard” science fiction. They wanted sci fi to rediscover its guts: messy and human, with street-level consequences.

But in the process, their invention was itself sanitized and repackaged into the same kind of superficial spectacle it was meant to shake up.

To understand what cyberpunk really is, you have to start with its name. And the word “punk” does not mean what most people think.

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