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by postmodest
1059 days ago
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Having grown up in that era, I think the "cyberpunk" look is very much tied to the end of the 70's nostalgia for the counter-culture of the 50's (I'd even argue that Punk is the first symptom of that nostalgia; a reaction to the hippie aesthetic and a look back to the postwar rebellion of surplus military leather-wear.) So cyberpunk as a vibe is a neon Disco veneer atop the inward-looking exhaustion about the failed Space Age, over a substrate of 50's nostalgia. It was a mash up of dated styles from the start, ageless in the way that all postmodern thing are, because it refuses to imagine a "present", it's just a blend of every past moment. Cyberdecks in particular though, are dated, because they imagined a Present, and came from the mind of an author whose idea of "a machine that creates a consensual hallucination" was the very typewriter he was using to hallucinate the tale. Gibson had never used a computer when he wrote Neuromancer. So his model starts with what he knows, and alludes to the computers of the day: typewriters you plug into your Sony TV. Having read the book in the 80's, I imagined the cyberdeck as being something between an ZX Spectrum and a TI-99. It had that Bertone wedge aesthetic, and was black. A Keyboard with a ROM slot for the Dixie Flatline. Because while Neuromancer was nominally a sci-fi novel, it wasn't imagining anything new in the way that other Big Science space-age authors did. It was a beat-inspired noir novel about demonology and ghosts, that only happened to take place in the future. It was in its own way backward-looking nostalgia. And that's why I think it's hard to "date" Cyberpunk: it's not so much futurism as it is encompassing the whole 20th century ("Le Vingtième Siècle" if you will...) and placing it in the future context as a way of transposing it for examination. |
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I don't see any 50s nostalgia or "postwar rebellion of surplus military leather-wear" in Bladerunner, one of the biggest influences in the cyberpunk aesthetics (even bigger than Neuromancer, who mostly provided language and concepts, not the look).
I do see 40s noir aesthetics, combined with the "rising Japan", "corporatism", and "dystopian future" ideas of the mid-late 70s.
And Gibson wasn't that far off with his Cyberdeck either. 40 years later and hs description is not that different to a Mac Mini, a Raspberry Pi 400, or even, with some minor form adjustments, to the Apple Vision setup.
If anything both our "cyberspace" and machines are still lackluster compared to the imaginations of that era, even with the authors being "soft" sci-fi and not into engineering.
I don't think it's "hard to date" cyberpunk either. It's a distinctive early 80s vision. The reason that it still looks cool, is because we've lost the knack for inventing new visions of the future (or even bold looking industrial design that's not some minimal Braun inspired fare).