I've heard it argued that cyberpunk is a dead, or at least dying, genre due to the world "catching up". We are too close to it, and we are basically living in a lowkey/pre-cyberpunk world.
My question is, what comes next? Is cyberpunk going to evolve into something that fills a similar role, and if so, what would it look like? Or will the genre completely become something of the past?
>pic unrelated
Post-cyberpunk of the Ghost in the Shell and Eclipse Phase bent.
Literally the next step is a setting where scientists learn how to extract the human soul and create AI's from them.
Nothing.
The more advanced the world gets, the less room for adventure there is. Our descendants will live in a post-scarcity utopia without war or pain, a world of endless boredom. They will envy us for living in a time of suffering and conflict.
...I mean, I say OUR descendants; it's not like anyone here is having kids, but you know what I mean.
You don't actually know anything at all about the world, do you.
It will become another subgenre of retrofuturism
I'd say it's pretty retrofuturistic as it is.
>a post-scarcity utopia without war or pain
Exactly. Punk IS the evolution. A life without challenge is just a prolonged death. I see punks as performing a public service by committing their energies to bringing Interesting Times to a somnolent and moribund Slack Culture overdue for a good sack slapping.
>...I mean, I say OUR descendants; it's not like anyone here is having kids, but you know what I mean.
Yup, I know what you mean. The Muslim, African and Hindu kids will inherit the world. Whites are having so few kids they'll all probably be wiped out in a 100 years.
This thread had nothing to do with politics before /pol/ came, why do you ruin everything, I WANT /POL/ TO LEAVE, REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
>instead of ignoring the troll, user helpfully nurses it back from the edge of starvation with carefully-administered and measured doses of (You)s
Cyberpunk is more relevant than ever, the genre is dead because people don't care for social commentary that is actually relevant to the real world in their games.
The writers for the genre are also basically universally terrible.
Ghost in the shell is post-nothing.
It's straight up cyberpunk.
We don't call sci-fi retrofuturistic because we've superceded the flip-phone. The genre changed, the same must be true for cyberpunk.
Cyberpunk is dead because as it becomes more likely, it also becomes more horrifying.
The psychotic anti-authority protagonists of many cyberpunk novels, as well as the psychotic pro-authority antagonists, are both very real, and much more terrifying in real life.
Think of how much damage transhumanism will do to the economy.
Think of what might happen to us when the megacorps buy the government.
>Global corporations control everything
>Increasingly fractious societies abandon cultures and morals in favor of market-driven scruples.
>Everything is permitted, until it challenges the status quo and then is ruthlessly exterminated.
>An exponentially expanding identity culture, supported by technology and social openness to caste fluidity, effectively destroys any hope of a united front against any of the numerous threats to our species.
Cyberpunk is dead because it came true.
Literally what the OP said, but not what he asked
They might even end up sitting in their parents basements, pretending to be warriors from a strange past living a life of excitement they can only imagine.
What a tragic fate.
>what comes next?
Do what the original cyberpunks did 25 years ago: take current trends and turn them up to 11.
Best guess so far seems to be Orwellian dystopia, but ymmv.
>what comes next
Bolo author Keith Laumer wrote a series of stories featuring the exploits of a lone counter-culture guerilla who casually infiltrated the figleaf-festooned halls of Big Bureaucracy to wreak untold destruction upon political correctness and other forms of fascism from the inside. Read Diplomat At Arms (written in 1959) and see if Laumer's "futuristic" themes don't still seem like allegory for current events.
Keyword: Retief.
It's funny how being "politically correct" has been co-opted by people who don't like their bullshit being called out for what it is.
It used to be called "manners".
Cyberpunk was always a very limited genre defined by only a couple of novels, Neuromancer being the defining title.
The next most relevant genre is the transhumanist settings of Eclipse phase and GitS which have a lot of cyberpunks elements but drop the punk part in favour of a more general set of near future settings.
Technological progress will continue to ruin the lives of everyone but the most powerful.
Optimists say that as the world mechanizes and more and more jobs disappear to automation, we will transition into a universal basic income. Post-scarcity, everyone will have enough and no one will starve.
That's not reality though. There will be very few humans who benefit, and a mass of starving, desperate, unhappy humans. And desperation breeds brutality and amoral behavior. Basically we fucked ourselves ever progressing past the agricultural revolution.
Current trends?
Self promotion and self broadcast (people trying to get youtube/insta famous, sharing lives with friends and strangers, cultivating a "personal brand.")
Public opinion extremely fluid (think of all the recently beloved characters we now all hate as information comes to light- messi, cosby, etc. also everyone's view on the lgbt thing changed in about a decade)
Tribalism and polarization in politics (read bowling alone for proof of this, otherwise try to imagine any republican you know changing their views when presented with evidence or vice versa. Also increasing racial tension, hatred for religions or lack thereof, etc. Nobody's really getting hurt in the western world though)
Constant novelty in entertainment technology, movies, porn, etc.
Semifrequent instances of alarming violence which everyone responds to on social and then gets over. via some other mode of entertainment
Most jobs disappearing, wealth concentrating in upper crust
Lost of individuals doing odds and ends type work, but augmented by technology like uber, lyft, airbnb. Look up articles on the "precariat"
," or those who go through their lives barely making ends meet by jobbling.
I could write a few short stories about a world where all of these are exaggerated.
>he knows nothing about r vs k selected species
>implying that having a ton of kids without putting effort into any of them is superior to having a few kids and pouring your heart and soul into their success
Whatever you say fatalist.
Ghost in the Shell, made in the 80s. Try again.
Post-humanism, dropping the low life and while keeping the high tech.
From a literary point of view, maybe do a 180 and return to the style of romanticized SF.
Sci-fi as a genre has been on the ropes for the last 5 years or so. Most of the popular content coming out for sci-fi has been either extremely near future (The Martian, Interstellar) or pre-existing IPs (Star Trek/Wars, Alien franchise).
I think people are very tired of trying to keep up with the future. People have to imagine a completely different world just thinking about the next 5 years. As a result people are often very burnt out on sci-fi.
I think to see a resurgence we need to think further in the future than what most sci-fi does. We need to get beyond the threshold of things people take for granted. Space ships are understood and common place, just traveling to a new planet is boring, rayguns and shields and forehead aliens are all overdone to the point of saturation. If sci-fi is to survive it needs to start imagining new shit again, instead of tredding on what is established in the genre.
Film is really at a great point for this. The CG is getting to the point where you can really amaze people. Think of an entire movie set on a ringworld. Even just a regular plotline becomes interesting if you have the constant reminder that this is not Earth sitting right on the horizon.