welcome to your cyberpunk dystopia
If the world feels increasingly like it wasn't built with you in mind anymore, you're right. But for who is it being built? And what can you do about it?
It was a dark and stormy night as I nursed my sorrows in a dark, sleepy dive bar with a glass of bourbon. The only sound was the ice plinking against the heavy glass as the grizzled old bartender eyed me warily, mechanically wiping down the bar.
Except no, not really. It was a pleasant Californian evening at a popular local pub, with playoff hockey on half the screens, and I was drinking beer with a friend while talking about the future of AI and robotics since we’re both professional nerds, and yes, this is what we do in our free time. What else could you possibly expect, other than maybe a D&D session in someone’s basement?
As far as we were both concerned, the world was careening towards a future in which increasingly sophisticated technology is bound to make us more uncertain as it keeps shaking our society to its core, messily unraveling all the norms and traditions we took for granted. Our gadgets would keep getting more powerful and capable, as would all our medical, scientific, and engineering tools. But our societies would begin to decay since these tools would be wielded on and against us, rather than for our benefit.
There’s a term for this kind of dystopian scenario, a term with which almost every sci-fi and anime fan is intimately familiar and has been immortalized in classic movies, TV shows, and comics. That term is cyberpunk.
Basically, think high tech but low brow. It’s the genre of science fiction which emerged from the work of American writers juxtaposing the rebellion and social upheaval of the 1960s against the rapid gains in technology thanks to early computing and the power of integrated circuitry which allowed us to miniaturize mainframes and add the layers of abstraction which made modern technology possible.
Looking at the glowing neon cities of then on the rise Japan, they questioned whether all those utopian atompunk sci-fi and space operas would really square with the loud, messy, rebellious humans constantly rejecting uniformity and tradition, and the brutal wars and scandals in which governments kept getting involved. Surely, the idea that a future like that of Star Trek was right around the corner was just wishful thinking. Real people rebel against this kind of self-domesticated existence.
And so, the setting and style that evolved over decades of cross-pollination between American writers and Japanese art, set against the cultural upheavals of the Cold War and Civil Rights eras, was a sort of neon-lit film noir. But the gumshoe detectives were now replaced with social outcasts or restless non-conformists, the gloom was pierced by bright, electric lights, the seedy old brick buildings became sterile warehouses and sleek skyscrapers, and the dangerous dames were cyborgs or AIs.
why tomorrow’s dystopia is available today
Fast forward to today and we have LED backlighting everywhere, our phones virtually never leave our hands, some type of AI is integrated into every system, and we’re yet again in an age of turmoil and upheaval with the pace turned up to eleven. We’re both curing children with genetic engineering, fighting and preventing cancers and HIV by supercharging our immune systems, and setting the groundwork for cyborgs just like we see in fiction, but are also rapidly losing our way to make a stable living.
Have I made the case for you yet? Are you ready to pull down your sunglasses to bop your head along with the beat of a retrowave electronic track as you cruise down neon lit streets of a dense, increasingly busy city buzzing with building sized ads for mega-corporations avoiding which feels increasingly impossible?
But the big catch here is that a cyberpunk world is not made for people. It’s made for raw technological ambition and aspiration. You as a typical person, both morally and practically, are an afterthought at best and a necessary evil at worst. So, how do you survive in a society that both demands you prove that you deserve to exist but is also creating fewer and fewer avenues for you to be able to do that?
Your most important asset will be knowledge. Not just how to make things or find the best use for those things, but a thorough understanding of the fundamentals of your new cyberpunk dystopia.
Who are the Singularitarians and why are so many of them obsessed with the idea of mind uploading? Is this even remotely possible? Who are effective accelerationists or effective altruists? Why do they alternatively want to break everything so they can fix it, but then also refuse to fix the things they’re breaking? What the hell is TESCREAL? Is it even a real thing? What’s next for AI, really? Am I still going to be human 20 years from now if our Tech Broverlords have their way?
Even ten years ago, these were obscure academic topics considered too fringe for the typical scientific skeptic to tackle, weird ideas of people who apparently watched way too much anime and read too much sci-fi. As someone who resembles that remark, I decided to actually entertain these ideas on my previous project, WoWT, and they did get some attention, but not much. It was just a weird little footnote used on a slow day for a change of pace by radio and podcasts, or even as game ad.
Fast forward to today, and the stuff I was studying while in grad school is suddenly all over the web, a de facto religion in Big Tech, and random people who find out that I’m a comp sci professional suddenly want a primer in AI, robotics, and how to survive the march of automation which has now become a savage blitzkrieg of layoffs. They ask because they hear “I work in tech” and try to get any information whatsoever since all the Big Tech hype bubble about AI and the future of work now seems like a stream of indirect threats veiled in technobabble.
Whatever amazing benefits future technology will have don’t appear to be meant for them, and so they wonder what to do. Or, on an even more basic level, what’s actually happening and if any of the words vomited by tech executives and salespeople really mean anything, or if it’s just a flood of jargon meant to bamboozle and impress.
how to survive a world no longer built for you
Answering these questions to the best of my ability and gaming out how all those big, weird ideas are likely to play out in reality is exactly what this project is about. If your best bet for making it through a cyberpunk dystopia is knowing what may be coming next, then consider this your survival guide. Hence the name of this newsletter, which was created in the aforementioned pub while we wondered what to do about the odd predicament I’ve just outlined in great detail.
Believe it or not, in upheaval, there’s always opportunity. New skills to learn, fortunes to be made — and lost if you play your cards wrong or get short-sighted — as the new world is being born. Yes, there’s no guarantee new information is going to pay off right away but that’s how knowledge works. It doesn’t deliver a return on investment every quarter. What it does is enable you to do is understand what’s possible and what isn’t, and what needs more study before you can say something definitive.
I won’t be able to tell you what stock to pick or what crypto coin will replace currency as we know it today. I also can’t tell you what diseases will be cured over the next five, ten, or twenty years. Guides and oracles are very different things, especially because there’s no such thing as a true oracle. Our universe simply does not come with a firm guarantee of anything. If it did, quantum mechanics wouldn’t be a thing. (Oh, and they will be making frequent guest appearances given their importance to computing.)
But I can tell you what sounds too good to be true and why, how certain experiments will work, and what bleeding edge technology or idea shows real potential so you can mentally arm yourself going forward. And I can give you brand new ways of looking at the tech world, where it merges with the realm of scientific research, and what might happen next given what the experts’ current consensus on the topic, and the relevant caveats to that consensus, of course.
My goal is also not to provide all the answers or give a definitive ruling on every hyped up piece of technology which falls under the umbrella of AI and transhumanism. It’s to expand horizons and start the necessary conversations about our future as a society, culture, or even a species. Conversations once deemed too weird and fringe and way too complicated and abstract to have, but the consequences of not having which are currently hitting us over the head like a ton of bricks.
Personally, I never thought that I’d have to live through two dystopias before officially hitting middle age — the implosion of the USSR as a small child in Ukraine, and now a neon LED lit one which I remember watching in anime and reading in books as a, well, technically adult. But here I am. At least I remember thinking that by the time Ghost In The Shell and similar fictional universes started to became a reality, I’d be a grown up, so I wasn’t entirely caught off guard. Which is why I want to help those who were, and those who understand something big is happening, but not entirely sure what and are curious to find out more.