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To start off with, let me clarify that trying to define Cyberpunk is a difficult task. In short, however, Cyberpunk refers to both a culture and a genre.

Cyberpunk is a sub-genre of science fiction that features advanced science and technology in an urban, dystopian future. On one side you have powerful megacorporations and private security forces, and on the other you have the dark and gritty underworld of illegal trade, gangs, drugs, and vice. In between all of this is politics, corruption, and social upheaval.

Cyberpunk is also a culture with attitude and a distinct style. Anti-authoritarian, brandaverse, tech-literate; these are just some of the qualities you may find in a cyberpunk.

Cyberpunk began as a literary movement but has become a subcultural organism. What is Cyberpunk? is a complex and multi-layered question, whose answer is ever-changing as the subculture and our perception of the future changes. The tendrils, that began in the written word, have infiltrated beyond movies to all forms of art, fashion and philosophy generating an all-encompassing and evergrowing subculture.

There are number of ways to examine the origins of the cyberpunk movement. The term cyberpunk itself can be traced to the short story Cyberpunk by Bruce Bethke. Then of course, there are the core cyberpunk authors that are generally accepted to have laid the ground work of the cyberpunk movement William Gibson (Gibson is considered the founder of Cyberpunk), Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley and Lewis Shiner. There are also a number of precursor novels that had strong themes and imagery that would be later associated with the cyberpunk genre such as The Demolished Man (1953) and The Stars My Destination (1956) by Alfred Bester, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) by Phillip K. Dick, Dr. Adder (Written in 1972, but not published until 1984) by K.W. Jeter, Gravitys Rainbow (1973) by Thomas Pynchon, The Shockwave Rider (1975) by John Brunner, and True Names (1981) by Vernor Vinge. More recently Neal Stephenson, author of Snow Crash (1992), is largely credited with bringing cyberpunk into the post-cyberpunk era.

Blade Runner and Neuromancer were a convergence event that created the filmological and literary birth of a movement. Blade Runner influenced, and still does, all cyberpunk that would come after it visually, the same way that Neuromancer influenced, and still does, all cyberpunk literature. Cyberpunk never was just a literary genre.

We can break down a basic definition of cyberpunk by dissecting the word itself. Cyber refers to technology, and is most often associated with cyberspace (this word was originally coined by William Gibson himself), and cybernetic enhancements to the body. But this can also refer to other technologies suchas biotechnology and nanotechnology for instance.

Punk, on the other hand, refers to the people and the attitude that cyberpunk has. Protagonists in cyberpunk tend to be outsiders, anti-heros, outcasts, criminals, visionaries, dissenters, and misfits. The underlying aspect that applies to all of these groups is their subversive nature. To subvert is to overthrow or undermine something. The cyberpunk genre itself subverted science fiction, and we never looked back. To be punk is to question authority, and to actively subvert any of that authority you dont agree with. Different people do this in different ways, just as our cyberpunk protagonists do. An example is Motoko Kusanagi from the Ghost in the Shell franchise. On the surface she seems to be a tool and agent for the Japanese government. This is true, but this is not what defines her, nor how she defines herself. Throughout the series she is not afraid to go rogue and take things into her own hands if it will get her closer to what she thinks is right fuck the politicians. She is a subversive element within the government.

There are a number of quotes that help to illustrate the essence of cyberpunk:

The future is already here its just not very evenly distributed. William Gibson This quote puts the cyber/punk and the High Tech, Low Life, dichotomy into context. There exists today high technology, but this technology has failed to erode away social divisions leaving a disparity between the classes which leads to social strife. In addition, although this technology exists the low class does not have the means by which to benefit from it, thus widening the divide as the rich elite get richer and thus have more access to technology.

Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. Bruce Sterling This is an important concept. We do terrible things to rats in the pursuit of progress, and we are not impervious to any of them. Many cyberpunk plots resolve around some sort of drug effect or brain tampering that we have, in reality, already done to rats. Its just a matter of time before we start tampering with ourselves in the same ways. Rats are just the preview.

The street finds its own use for things. William Gibson This gets down to the punk/low life aspect of cyberpunk and puts it into the context of the open source, maker, and DIY movements. The rate of technological development is so fast that we generate a lot of stuff that is just there, and obsolete. These things lose their perceived value and are discarded, but then this refuse can be repurposed and used in ways that the original creators never would have imagined. Like using a DVD player to test for HIV.

Biopunk is a subgenre of cyberpunk, that focuses more on the biological technologies such as genetic manipulation. Often cited examples are Gattaca, and Dark Angel.

These can be considered cyberpunk because although Biopunk tends to lack the cyberspace and cybernetic aspects that cyberpunk sports, it is faithful to the High Tech, Low Life, aspects. It is a different visualization of the same ideas.

Post-Cyberpunk is a modern reaction to the now antiquated visual qualities of 80s inspired cyberpunk. PostCyberpunk tends to have a greater focus on Transhumanism, space travel, and emerging technologies that werent imagined at the time of the 80s.

A cyberpunk has attitude. This attitude is culturally and socially aware, just like the fiction from which they take their name. They question everything and anyone and decide for themselves what they believe is true. This path to understanding yields different world views and opinions, but diversity is key to a successful population. A cyberpunk knows that the system isnt in your favor, and the deck is stacked against you. A cyberpunk knows how to hack the system so that doesnt matter. Dont fuck with a cyberpunk.

A cyberpunk has style. This style can be different for each person. It can be practical (Mil-Tec) or flashy (Cybergoth). The style often mirrors the cyberpunk personal philosophy and thus can vary drastically. There are recurring themes such as traditional punk, Blade Runnerinspired, Matrix-inspired, CPUs, Mil-Tec, and Cybergoth.

Cyberpunk is now. Many of the things that were predicted in cyberpunk are coming to pass today. Improvements in prosthetics and brain computer interface have resulted in brain controlled prosthetics, a mainstay of cyberpunk. Corporations increasing dominate global politics, and influence culture creating a situation ripe for subversion. The poor are getting poorer and the rich are getting richer, creating a larger and larger divide.

The cyberworld is ever merging with the real world through things such as the Internet of Things, social media, mobile technology, virtual reality, and augmented reality. Hackers have brought gangs, corporations, governments, and individuals to their knees. We have entered the cyberpunk agewelcome.

Cyberpunk has spread to all forms of media, creating a subculture rather a simple genre. There are cyberpunk movies, television, comics, music, and art everywhere. All you have to do is look. Cyberpunk has influenced fashion, architecture, and philosophy. Cyberpunk has become much more than what it was when it began. And it will continue to evolve and become more relevant as we move further from the Cyberpunk Now into the Cyberpunk Future. Keep watching

More:

Cyberpunk - All that we know and you should know - TheTechy

In The Overlook, A.V. Club film critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky examines the misfits, underappreciated gems, and underseen classics of film history.

The information highway is leading straight to hell Abel Ferrara

The films of Abel Ferrara are probably too anguished and tragic to be called hangout movies. To an extent, they wallow in states of sin, doom, and moral disrepair: a personal hell in Bad Lieutenant, the Lower East Side as it faces the end of time in 4:44 Last Day On Earth, a grueling film shoot in Dangerous Game. To the circles of Ferraras inferno, one can also add the indistinct cyberpunk future of his 1998 William Gibson adaption, New Rose Hotel. Its a shame that Ferraras forays into the fantasticsuch as Body Snatchers and the vampire film The Addictionare more obscure than his crime films and psychodramas, as they interpret well-worn sci-fi and horror tropes in very personal and unsettling ways. But New Rose Hotel is a strange movie. It might be the only film of its time to portray a connected, information-economy digital future more or less accuratelynot as an eclectic, visor-wearing, multicultural smorgasbord ( la Until The End Of The World or Johnny Mnemonic, the former indebted to Gibson, the latter loosely based on one of his early stories), but as a global nowhere of small screens, where the day-to-day reliance on data and video draws basic facts into question. By definition, a virtual reality isnt a reality at all.

So call it a prescient or prophetic film. Its a languorous, trip-hop movie, very in its own head, and it pushes the limits of how much of a narrative can remain invisible, as though it were taking the old adage that science fiction is the literature of ideas very literally. Its set almost entirely indoors, in hotel suites and lobbies. And though futuristic technology is central to the plot, its never seen. In fact, at least half of the plot occurs off screen, as Ferrara never leaves the point of view of an unnamed corporate mercenary (Willem Dafoe, sporting a very of-its-time soul patch) and his philosophizing colleague Fox (Christopher Walken), who have been hired to pull off a corporate defection involving a scientist they never see face-to-face. As low-budget anti-spectacle, its pretty brazen. The perverse faithfulness of the script (by Ferrara and the splendidly named Christ Zois) to Gibsons original short story only highlights the intangibility of New Rose Hotel. The dialogue often mimics the father of cyberpunks early prose. Its that hyper-materialist composite quality in which the object of every third sentence is a speculative trend, kink, or technology. A man looks a woman up and down and says to her, The outfit is Chinese. Knockoffs, not Tokyo originals. Its good, but the accessories dont do it justice.

Screenshot: New Rose Hotel

I think of it as akin to the low-budget sci-fi and horror B-movies of a much earlier generation, whose blank spaces asked for some kind of leap from the audience to facilitate a point. But New Rose Hotel is part of a tradition of alienated sci-fi that rarely makes it to the screenthe sort that deals not with how basic tenets of the human experience might endure, but how they could be irreparably damaged. And its future, in theory, is a lot like our present. The impression of not being set anywhere in particular is boosted by the fact that Ferrara and his longtime director of photography, Ken Kelsch, shot a lot of the film in close-up, sometimes with long lenses that confuse space. Its another thing that makes New Rose Hotel so unusual: Its mise-en-scne is basically all faces, even in the grainy videos through which Dafoes character (and thus the audience) sees much of the plot unfold. So of course its about how people relate to one another. The first major scene is one of my favorites in the filma perfect example of a Ferrara hangout scene, lit in extreme chiaroscuro and blocks of red. It features some of Ferraras most ambitious sound design, basking in the din of languages, chatter, and music. The whole sequence is a sardine can of stylized conversation and sex.

In order to pull off their scheme, Fox and the nameless protagonist hire a prostitute named Sandii (Asia Argento) to seduce the scientist in question in exchange for $1 million. In typical noir fashion, our nameless protagonist falls for her just as the plan is starting to come together. But suspense is not the films goal. The caperfinanced by a Japanese corporation, targeted at a German rival, and involving a hotel in Austria and a research laboratory in Moroccois a sequence of virtual transactions that the movie makes no attempt to visualize, creating an intentional emptiness at its center. Almost everything that happens is as real as money in a bank account: Its there because it says so on a screen. But what we actually see in the film, besides the protagonist waiting around and talking to Fox, is his relationship with Sandii, the femme fatale. In both a literal and a figurative way, the film is very murky, but it has a sort of conceptual purity. The unnamed man is always is always clothed in black, Fox in off-white, and Sandii in red. There is a repeat of the iconic image of Ferraras gangster film King Of New York, the city pressed in glass. And there are all those anonymous hotel rooms. A hotel room is a contradiction, at once private and impersonal, in equal parts a symbol of hedonism and banality.

New Rose Hotel is imperfect in its strangeness; its vague, indirect minimalism can be hypnotic or off-putting. But these are the kind of imperfections that make a point. The metaphor of art and sex work always seems less tired in Ferraras hands, in part because his films tend to portray art as something that is both intimate and exploitative and because he never seems to begrudge his characters for either paying or being paid for sex and skin. (Its telling that his most warm-hearted film, Go Go Tales, is set around a strip club.) Hotels are just another example of something very personal being commoditized. The title itself is the name of the derelict Tokyo capsule hotel where the unnamed man hides out in the final third of the moviean ersatz, but oddly poignant metaphor for the dark night of the soul. His phony relationship with Sandii is the most tangible thing in the film. Its where New Rose Hotel retreats. In a world where everything has become somewhat virtual, whats to keep a person from disappearing into their memories? Why leave the hotel?

Previous The Overlook From Fascist Italy came a violent medieval fantasy epic way ahead of its time

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The director of Bad Lieutenant takes on the prescient cyberpunk of William Gibson - A.V. Club (blog)