i am going to solve the cyberpunk discourse forever, part 2: the punks.

as usual, all screenshots are ones I took unless otherwise credited (or i forgot to identify one) and they usually have no bearing on the article other than this one is ostensibly about cyberpunk 2077

“Cyberpunk 2077,” they said, “isn’t really Punk. It’s a Corporate Product, made out of Corporate Greed. It completely Misses The Point of Punks.”

They were wrong, of course; it’s the kind of mindset you’d expect from someone whose understanding of punk begins and ends at the Sex Pistols.

We can do better.

There is a curious phenomenon I’ve noticed happening whenever TikTok videos leak into my awareness: people hear a word referring to a thing, but instead of bothering to find out what the word means or is about, they start applying it haphazardly, without actual meaning or purpose. At some point, the word becomes disconnected entirely from what it’s supposed to actually refer to. If we’re not careful, we lose something in the process, which damages our ability to communicate effectively.

Take the acronym POV. It refers to “point of view.” In a game like Cyberpunk, the “point of view” is “first person,” meaning that the camera is representing your eyes — what you, as a human being, actually see. And yet, if we look at POV videos on TikTok, we see people going “POV” and then it’s just a third person (meaning: outside you) video of someone else doing a thing. So you’ll see “POV: you are cleaning a car” and it’s just a video of a guy cleaning a car. A real POV would be strapping a camera to your face and recording as you clean it.

When words change, we often lose something. If “house” just ends up referring to “building” at some point, then we lose what “house” refers to. How do we then communicate “a permanent, single-family dwelling?” which is different than a duplex (a permanent, two-family dwelling), or an apartment (a building that generally has multiple suites, each usually rented temporarily for a period of time)?

Specificity is what allows us to communicate clearly. When I’m writing a story, saying it takes place in an apartment creates a very different image of the living space than someone having an entire house to themselves, you know? A brownstone doesn’t have the same kind of driveway or yard that a suburban house does, and so on and so forth.

This has been an issue with “punk” for a real, real long time.

A lot of people seem to think that “punk” is an ideal, a means of authenticity in the face of an inauthentic world.

This is not true.

This isn’t what punk means at all.

And it certainly isn’t what cyberpunk is all about. Knowing what punk is, and what cyberpunk is, is going to help us communicate better about games. Being able to articulate what we mean, how we say it, what we’re trying to get across to each other… that’s what enables us to understand video games, and it’s our understanding that helps us both enjoy them more and make them ourselves.

But, before we do that:

Hey, I could use some help with medical bills and groceries. If you want to support the work I do, like this article about the biggest pitfall young writers face and how to get around it, then hey, hit up my tip jar. One of my diabetes meds is $869, one of them is $375.

I figure this kind of writing helps inexperienced writers the most — which means people who might not have the finances to afford my work if I kept it behind a paywall. A paywall would help me, obviously — I could guarantee a certain minimum that would ensure my ability to continue writing these articles — but the people who need my help the most cannot afford it. So I gotta rattle the tip jar. I know it’s not pleasant, but like… think of me like a busker. I’d rather play a song on the street and get a few coins in a hat than just run a gofundme or something.

I, personally, can only do this with your support; if I wasn’t doing this, I’d have to get a second job, and as disabled as I am, that’s really not great. I have to spend between $160 and up to an entire Nintendo Switch’s worth of my income on medical care every two weeks. That’s an extremely difficult burden for me.

AND NOW THE FUCKERS WANT ME ON SOMETHING THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME TO AFFORD AND MY INSURANCE DEDUCTIBLE DOESN’T KICK IN UNTIL I SPEND $7,500 BEING DISABLED FUCKIN SUCKS, DUDE! I’m trying not to freak out, but fuck the medical system in America, man.

So it’s either do this or get a second job, and a second job would not be ideal given my current disability. So when you send me a tip, you’re not just helping a disabled writer like me, you’re helping tons of students, disabled people, and others without access. Thank you.

paypal.me/stompsite

ko-fi.com/stompsite

@forgetamnesia on venmo

$docseuss on cashapp

It Starts With The Witcher

I asked recently if there was anyone better making video games than CD Projekt RED right now. I imagine some of you will quibble — we all have our faves, after all — but I think it’s difficult, if not impossible, to argue that CDPR isn’t among the absolute best.

Their work always has a level of substance to it. Even The Witcher, their first game, had a spark to it that made it feel special. I think understanding The Witcher is core to understanding CDPR as a whole, so let’s chat about it real quick.

For those of you who don’t know, The Witcher was an overlooked RPG released in 2007 for the PC. It was overlooked because it was released for the PC in an era where PCs were, according to common knowledge, on the way out. The Orange Box would release that fall, changing the course of history.

Valve’s The Orange Box was seen as one of the best deals in gaming: for $50, you’d get Team Fortress 2 and Portal and Half-Life 2: Episode 2, all new games, in a bundle that also included Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode One, just in case you hadn’t played them. The week before, I’d pirated — later purchased, but I was making $5.15 an hour at the time. At the hours I was working, $50 was about a quarter of my monthly salary after taxes. After Bioshock, The Orange Box included the second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth games I ever purchased.

It was a great way to get people using Valve’s launcher, Steam, and cemented Valve as the most influential platform holder in gaming.

But nothing in The Orange Box could compete with some of the other PC games out that year — STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl remains the best game of 2007, followed by, in no particular order: Crysis, World in Conflict, and, yes, The Witcher.

All of these games were nearly impossible to write about. The bias — and, yes, it was bias — against PC games was strong. I had editors laugh and tell me “no one wants to hear about PC exclusives” when I pitched STALKER until Stephen Totilo at Kotaku let me write about it. Bioshock was lucky to be an Xbox 360 and PC exclusive, because without the Xbox 360, most journalists would have passed it by.

So when it came to The Witcher, you best believe it was ignored.

And, hey, it was rough. In fact, every single game CD Projekt RED has ever released is rough. The Witcher had this weird rhythm-based combat system that I eventually got into by act 4, and that was cool, but… also, it kinda sucked. The first three acts are rough, and the game only achieved its classic status because of the players who managed to get to the end. There’s a brilliant story there, a genuinely fantastic RPG underneath it all, and just… I dunno. It’s a game I love very dearly, but it never got its due because it was a PC game that played a bit awkwardly.

You can read more of my thoughts on The Witcher here, where I talk about Act 4 in depth.

The Witcher 2 released in a similar state. The combat, notably, had realistic, motion-captured animations, a very Western way of doing things, and something that always makes game feel worse. I don’t know why, but it often feels like in the AAA space, Western publishers and developers don’t really prioritize game feel as much as they ought. Dark Souls, which released the same year as The Witcher 2, feels so much better to play as a game with third person combat; it emphasizes game feel over anything else, and it’s all the better for it.

Sure, I’m using Dark Souls as the comparison here, but anyone who’s played The Witcher can see the actual comparisons: it’s building on Gothic, a series most people haven’t even heard of because… well, you guessed it, it was a PC series.

It’s weird, because so much of the future of this medium comes from PC gaming, eventually filtering into Xbox titles, and then to the rest of game consoles. If you track most major innovations in the game space — take online multiplayer, for instance — it gets established on the PC, consoles take a few cracks at it with mixed results, then the Xbox comes along and suddenly, thanks to Halo 2, multiplayer gaming becomes commonplace.

Yet our gaming canon tends to be preoccupied with console titles — and while yes, some games are iconic and sell well, you’ll often note that the actual innovations start on the PC. Sometimes they start on the PC with mods, but they start on the PC.

Most of the people who love The Witcher series haven’t even played The Witcher, much less Gothic or weird shit nobody even remembers like Wars and Warriors: Joan of Arc. They have no idea where their history comes from.

With editors actively ignoring PC titles as “not that interesting/nobody cares” because most games websites basically just publish whatever they’re interested in because people write what they’re interested in, and websites tend to hire people who they think they’ll get along well with.

As jobs dry up, people go “oh, my friend needs a job! hey, boss, we should hire this person, I worked with them before! they’re good people” There was no coordinated “anti-PC gaming” agenda, mind you; it was just… the people who ran things tended to be console gamers who owned Macs and who hired people with similar tastes.

While I was writing for Kotaku from about 2012 to 2019, I pushed the PC stuff hard, seeing it as my responsibility to try to push the needle a little bit, but it wasn’t until Jason Schreier decided to build a PC, that the needle really started to move. I remember when he announced he was building a gaming PC. Kirk Hamilton, who edited some of my pieces (he’s lovely) built one around the same time. And then, wouldn’t you know it, more and more editors and journalists followed.

I cannot articulate enough to you how many editors and journalists I knew who were both snobs against PC gaming and happened to be habitual Mac users. There was a period until about 2017 or so when you’d ask any journalist what games they played, and unless they were from England, where everybody played PC games, the only mention of PC gaming would almost exclusively be Lucasarts adventure games because they were, somewhat notably, available on Macs.

That’s just the nature of the Gen-X editor cohort. As Millennials take over these sites and now that Steam and game streaming on Twitch, best done with PC games, become more central to gaming as a hobby, wouldn’t you know it, PC coverage is starting to grow in prominence. It’s still much easier to pitch someone a topic that’s on consoles, but it’s getting easier.

So CD Projekt Red showed up at a terrible time to get any attention, which means most people haven’t played The Witcher, and that is a damn shame. The console port was eventually canceled; I believe they’re working on a remake now.

Putting The Witcher 2 on the Xbox 360 was a good step, and it got CD Projekt Red some attention, but the game’s combat was so bad they actually had to go back and patch in more responsive controls. Apparently, the lesson “please make your combat input-based and snappy, rather than slow and boring and laggy as fuck” didn’t quite stick.

You’ll never believe what CD Projekt Red had to do to The Witcher 3 shortly after launch.

Yup, garbage controls required a patch, allowing you to switch between standard (garbage) and alternative (tolerable) controls. It helped that the game was also one of the best RPGs ever made, and it also helped that it released on consoles. Of course, The Witcher 3 was huge in a year that included Metal Gear Solid V (the best one) and Mad Max (a game I loved so much that I put both The Witcher 3 and Metal Gear Solid down and played nothing else until I had finished Mad Max. I love the shit out of that game. Wrote about it for USGamer (RIP). Ya’ll should read up on it — it’s a smart game if you give it the attention you’d give any of your favs). 2015 was a great year for games.

Anyways, The Witcher 3 was kinda the undisputed winner of all games forever that year. Wildly popular, easily beloved, hoovering up awards better than one of those as-seen-on-TV vacuum cleaner demonstrations. But it launched in a bit of a poor state, and it required some patching to get right.

But people forget this. They forget how buggy it was, how bad the controls were, how much patching it needed to get right. Many people picked up the game with the release of the Netflix show, after the expansions, after the patches, after all the stuff that got it into the best shape it was ever gonna be in. Heck, some people’s first experience was with the Switch port. So the idea of what the game is and what it had been in the first year or four were very different things.

People remembered CDPR for the results.

The Witcher 3 was so good that people could not get enough of it. Fantastic writing, phenomenal world design, expansions that substantially built upon everything it had done. Of course everyone was excited as fuck for whatever the fuck CDPR had to offer next.

Of course, two years before The Witcher 3 released, CD Projekt RED told us they were working on something else: they were adapting the Cyberpunk 2020 tabletop game into Cyberpunk 2077, a first person video game.

And oh boy that trailer, Archive’s Bullets playing over MaxTac taking out a Cyberpsycho, eventually recruiting her into their number? Oh, buddy. Fun fact, you can actually meet her in game. Her name’s Melissa Rory, and she’s a prominent member of MaxTac by that point.

If you weren’t there, you can’t really imagine the excitement. It was like James Cameron announcing he’s working on a new sci-fi epic after Titanic.

Titanic was the single biggest-grossing movie in human history, and James Cameron remained the director with the highest grossing film of all time until he was dethroned by, yup, you guessed it: himself.

Avatar remains the single biggest movie in human history. Only two other movies have outsold Titanic. Wanna guess what? Sure, there’s Avengers: Endgame, the culmination of a decade long series of movies, but there’s also… yeah: James Cameron with Avatar: The Way of Water.

As my co-writer Phil often says, “never bet against James Cameron.”

And that, my friends, is CD Projekt RED. In 2015, it would have been foolish to bet against them. And in some ways, it still is; Cyberpunk 2077 is, in fact, a fantastic game, and it was on launch — on the PC.

People were singing CDPR’s praises, writing articles about how amazing The Witcher 3 was, how excited they were for Cyberpunk, you name it. Journalists, who were themselves focused on unionizing in their workforce, excitedly shared stories of how CD Projekt RED was committed to a no-crunch culture… and then two things happened.

The Fall From Grace

I think it would be fair to say that Cyberpunk 2077 was the most hyped game in history at this point. People were still checking out The Witcher 3, which had hit the enviable critical mass point all mass pop culture objects do: word of mouth. People just kept buying the fucking game. The Witcher show on Netflix, poorly-written as it was, still got people checking out the game.

And most people were only checking out The Witcher 3. That was the easy one to get. They were still kinda ignoring The Witcher and The Witcher 2, which was a shame, but The Witcher 3 was a big, open, story heavy RPG with great pacing (I’ll write on article on great pacing at some point, but what you need to know is this: in The Witcher 3, no activity feels like it takes too long to finish; it’s easy to move from one point to the next and maintain a sense of flow) and world design (there’s always something interesting to find). Combine that with the charming characters and quests, and oh, boy, you got a stew going.

So people are excited for Cyberpunk.

…and… then… we wait seven years from the time of announcement to release.

All that energy has nowhere to go. An initially great hype cycle has the ability to get rancid — look at Star Citizen and the way the press constantly talks weird shit about it despite it actually doing everything it says it’s doing. If anyone paid any attention, they’d be like “damn, wow, yeah, they are actually working on it, and it’s amazing what they’ve managed to do.”

Easier to shit talk a game for taking so long, though, which is why you should never announce a game until you’re within a year of release.

Avatar, interestingly enough, was in development from the scriptment (a term invented by Cameron, a mix of ‘treatment’ — a prose-based version of the story that is often required by studios — and ‘script’ — the story as written for film) that began when he wrote it in 1995 (and it subsequently leaked; you can read it right now! it’s out there on the internet!) until its release in 2009. Roughly fifteen years between the world hearing about it and release, but the average time it takes to develop a movie, at least when I was in film school, was nine years, and Avatar needed technology that didn’t exist at the time.

Good shit takes a while, is what I’m saying, but audiences hate waiting.

Once you start showing people what you’re working on, a clock starts ticking. Now that it’s got oxygen, the idea’s hype builds, builds, builds… until people start losing patience.

And that’s what happened with Cyberpunk. You can only hear “this is a once in a lifetime event” so many times before it feels like you’ve been waiting for your whole lifetime for the event. It loses its luster.

Now, game developers don’t work quite like Hollywood. In Hollywood, you put together a temporary company, hire a bunch of crew for a gig, and you shoot the gig. On Avatar 2, Edie Falco actually assumed the film had bombed since it had been four years since she shot her scenes and the film’s final release (becoming the third-highest grossing film of all time, like we discussed).

In games, reveal trailers are made to attract talent; you need a person who’s gonna sit there and work with you for a long period of time, not some camera crew who’s just helping another unit get some additional footage of mountains or deserts for a film while the actors shoot on a soundstage in England or something.

So you announce your project, go “this is exciting, right?” and people start coming to work for you, because they want to work on that. It’s why there was a fancy trailer for Quantic Dream’s new Star Wars game. They’re hoping you’ll forget about the abusive practices at the studio and come work for them.

But it’s a bad idea if you’re trying to court audiences, which is why building a studio with a great reputation for culture is gonna be way stronger than “check out the sizzle reel for this exciting new project,” I think. Better to have people who want to work with you than on a specific Star Wars project, right?

CD Projekt Red, as it turned out… had some issues.

First, even though they promised they wouldn’t crunch, you’ll never believe what happened next: they crunched. I’ve talked to some Polish devs who all kinda roll their eyes when it comes to CD Projekt Red and go “oh yeah, they have a reputation.” I’ve also talked to some people who have worked there over the years who seem to love their jobs, so who knows?

I recall some journalists who’d championed CDPR’s no-crunch promises feeling pretty upset, feeling like they’d been used. I thought they came on a little too vindictive, though. Yes, crunch is bad — I’ve been crunched. It’s hell. It’s why we try to keep Mischief at a 30 hour work week, and we use very strategic planning and project management to get there.

We’ll talk about this more later on, but with art, there’s often a belief, particularly among people who consume art but do not necessarily produce much of it, that art is pure and sacred and good and as a result, must be created in ideal circumstances only. For art to be good, the art’s creation must be perfect. No art has been created under pure circumstances — even a monk living in a monastery far removed from civilization, drawing little pictures in the margins of a book for the pure joy of it is still a monk who exists within the structures of the institution that he is a monk of.

Of course, we know that art is not pure — you think Michaelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel for the love of the game? No! It was his job! Also, he appears to have made art while he was bored and in hiding. When you run a studio, it is your responsibility to run it well. You have to treat it like a business, because if you can’t put bread on the table making art, you’ll have to put bread on the table another way, and then you won’t have time for art.

Art and business have always been intertwined. I was chatting with a friend the other day about a radical art movement that went under as soon as one of the members hijacked it, drove the other founders away, and then was eventually ousted from the university that gave the movement rooms to meet in. The guy destroyed his own movement just by trying to be a “fuck the man” type. The general consensus was that this man rewrote everyone else’s work to get his weird ultra-right wing views across, and then fucked off to teach in China, where he got really into fascism.

Look at your favorite works of art. How many of them were built without commercial constraints in mind? You think David Lynch just makes weird shit for fun? David Lynch frequently talks about how he’ll make art for money. John Carpenter too, and there ain’t many artists more legit than either of them.

Lucrecia Martel is considered a very artistic director, but the reason she didn’t direct Marvel’s Black Widow wasn’t out of artistic integrity, it’s because she wanted to direct the action, and Marvel refused to allow it, so she walked. The idea of “the artist” is that she’d say “no, I will never sully my ouevre with a Marvel movie,” but here’s Martel going “hell yeah, I want to direct the action!” A serious filmmaker! Directing action?

To the elitist punk wannabes, that alone would be too much, but everyone else knows what an artist Martel is. Humans love having the opportunity to do cool shit, no matter how much of an artist they are.

The only artists who try to talk about artistic purity and shout about how everyone else is an inauthentic slave to The Man are rich kids who don’t need to work to survive, ignorant motherfuckers who love the idea of The Artist but have never made any art that actually affected anyone, or frauds. They’re all frauds, really.

The idea that art can be pure is ridiculous from the outset. Art is something humans make, compulsively, and those of us who want to do it full time must consider how to keep the people we are responsible for housed and fed.

We talk a lot about art here — meaningful art — and I think, if you read the writing and discussion about my own works, you’ll find that people often say my work is meaningful. People have cried, reconnected with family, dealt with grief and loss, and they’ve done it because my work was meaningful art from the heart.

But I do have to think about the business of it, because I have people I employ and need to pay good money to. So one day, I might focus heavily on writing a script about grief in the face of a dying world, I might direct my artistic energies toward exploring the way the wealthy attempt to maintain class prejudices while the world dies all around them, and I might also pay out an invoice to an artist, make sure our taxes are in order, and set up a meeting with a money man.

As games go up in complexity, that becomes a lot more challenging, of course. A movie like Avatar, even with all the brand new technology and complicated underwater filming is extremely simple in comparison to a game with hundreds of interlocking quests and conditions that need to be met in order for the story to progress.

But that’s not an excuse, of course. The early announcement, dealing with investors, all of that? It messes with your ability to deliver. The more times you have to say “we’re moving our release date,” the more opportunities that fans become former fans. They’re fed up with waiting.

And then there was the… fanbase.

Another issue with announcing your game too early is that you build up a ‘fanbase’ of people who are really only fans of their idea of what you are making. These people will excitedly tell their friends about their hopes and dreams for the games you’re making, but in lieu of an actual game… things get bad, because nobody has actually played the game you’re making.

You can never control your fans, but you can set expectations. The thing is, marketing cannot be constant for a game that does not exist, and in the absence of any new content for the players to discuss (which is largely marketing material), the fandom starts to die down, which some fans take as actually dying, rather than having nothing to talk about. So… yeah, they start making shit up.

We saw this with No Man’s Sky; remember the discussions around that? Comment sections, forums, and social media were full of people excitedly talking about things they might do in the game and being heavily disappointed when the game didn’t have the things it never promised to have. Of course, there were some things they did promise or allude to that didn’t make it in (looking at you, weird public appearance that resulted in people reasonably understanding that co-op would be in the game at launch), but the results are always the same:

A shitload of angry nerds who set their own expectations because the developers didn’t give them enough. It’s everyone’s fault, really, but it’s a situation that can be avoided by not showing off your shit early.

But now that people were angry, they were gonna look for reasons to be angry.

the fuckin’ culture war bullshit

There are, if you look for them, plenty of music mixes calling themselves “cyberpunk music” and the like. The fantasy of Cyberpunk’s world — its cool tech, Keanu Reeves announcing his presence in the game in 2019, the sick music, all of it, spoke to a fantasy.

Here’s a world that’s like ours, but shitty enough that it’s not unreasonable to pull out a gun and start blasting. Here’s a world that’s like ours, but you get to customize your looks and body and go around being a badass motherfucker. Everything looks cool. The music is cool, eating noodles at a stand while talking to a cyborg is cool, looking like a badass while dudes point guns at your head and you instantly disarm them is cool as shit. And you get to do it with Keanu fuckin Reeves in a sun-drenched sci-fi future while blowing shit up?

Sign me up!!

But then there’s this asshole by the name of Elon Musk.

They made a documentary about him a few years back called “Elon Musk: The Real Life Iron Man.” This was before Avengers: Endgame took all the wind out of Marvel’s sails. People were in love with a guy who, very clearly, read some science fiction books as a kid, bought his way into companies that were vaguely sci-fi related, and did what he could to make himself a god-king tech billionaire like fictional beloved character Tony Stark, purely through acquisitions. He had a surplus of money and was deficient in intellect.

Tesla was founded in 2003. Musk took over in 2004 and rewrote history to name himself as one of the founders. SpaceX happened because he happened to know a guy in the government and basically said “I can totally do this even though I’ve never proved I could” and got given the kind of lucrative contract that allowed him to build SpaceX. Anyone could do it. He just happened to have the money.

So, at the peak of his popularity, while he was, or at least was on his way to becoming, the world’s most wealthy man, Musk did what he could to appear to be the real world’s Tony Stark (heck, he even cameoed in Iron Man 2, saying he had an idea for an Electric Jet. Tony Stark says “we’ll make it work,” endorsing Elon as an intellectual peer)… and a lot of people bought it.

Well, being a guy who is trying to make science fiction (life on Mars! electric cars! neuralink!) into a reality so he can be like all those out of touch tech trillionaires in science fiction who get murdered by their own creations (hey, Tyrell), of course the most popular upcoming game in the world might want to connect with the world’s apparent real-life Tony Stark. Heck, he was even dating Grimes, a sci-fi nerd musician who sings about shit like the technological singularity (a bullshit idea pushed by dumbass Ray Kurzweil).

But… this was also happening while people were starting to see through his bullshit. The man was making bigger and dumber mistakes, news articles about how his hatred for the color yellow meant people were being injured in his plants, people were finding out he created The Boring Company as a way to kill a rail project so more people would buy his cars, like the greedy, shortsighted bastard he is… and so people were falling out of love with him, at least in Western spaces.

So, a few times, the Cyberpunk social media account makes some dumb decisions, like jokingly asking if they should put the Cybertruck in Cyberpunk 2077 (which they ultimately did not do).

So you’ve got this powderkeg:

On one hand, you’ve got journalists who said “wow, they’re not crunching” and then going “shit, now I have egg on my face from saying this.” They’d only really had the one game — The Witcher 3 — to play, so this wasn’t the long-standing fanaticism for much worse studios, like Square Enix, who’d released several bangers, but had also made tons of far worse mistakes than CDPR ever had. No one was particularly loyal, and a few had eggs on their faces, so they started shitting on CDPR.

On the other hand, you had fans who were weird online reddit techbros, an evolution of “the narwhal bacons at midnight/le rage face” meme types — fucking losers who put all their hopes and dreams in the guy they thought would finally bring us the sci-fi future they were all craving, the dudebro equivalent of disney adults. These dumb motherfuckers are so obsessed with fiction becoming reality that they’re sitting there screaming about how Cyberpunk will be the best game ever because, somehow, in their weird little brains, it will validate them and allow them to act out their science fiction fantasies.

And then you’ve got the rest of the world, ranging from ambivalent to innocently excited to fans of CD Projekt from the beginning to, well… people who might have been interested in Cyberpunk 2077, but who were watching the studio get turned into villains for their delays and “they lied to us about crunch.”

It was weird to see those same award-giving journalists immediately turning around and giving Naughty Dog, a studio plagued with crunch and mismanagement, more game of the year awards than ever for the middling sequel to The Last of Us 2, a game that almost immediately dropped out of cultural consciousness because no one gave a shit about it, as well as making $242m in digital download revenue — not profit, revenue — on a $220m budget. Makes you think they didn’t actually care about crunch all that much, not if Naughty Dog got a pass for something way, way less good.

The double standard was obvious to anyone with eyes, but one was a beloved console exclusive company that had convinced a lot of journalists that games were art, and the other, well… they’d made the greatest RPG of all time, but as far as most consoleheads were concerned, they’d only made one game. Easy to turn around and shit on them. Harder to shit on studios that were significantly worse.

So these normal people are hearing from people they trust how this studio actually sucks, and then along come the fans — rabid, frothing weirdoes telling them that a game no one has even played is the greatest game ever made and bringing in all this weird cyberpunk baggage.

I’ve been watching The Boys, and it depicts the alt-right weirdoes that staged January 6 as a bunch of generally poor suckers. Of course, the actual January 6 demographics skewed much wealthier than that — dentists, car dealers, actors (Jimmy Pesto from Bob’s Burgers, for instance), that kind of thing. When we look at the guys driving a lot of alt-right scams, a lot of them are very well off. One of the reasons there’s only about 3,000 Tesla Cybertrucks on the road? They’re too damn expensive — the people who buy them are stupid, sure, but they’re rich, too.

Seems like The Boys is missing the opportunity to point its audience at the shitheads that actually drive a lot of this: the upper middle class and above. That’s also a big part of Musk’s largest fanbase — rich guys who wish they could be just as rich as he was.

So here you are, with the most insufferable people in the world demanding that you give a shit about a game that they themselves are excessively head over heels in love with, despite never having played it… and then the opportunists come in, people looking for a grift or just to shit on the fanbase they don’t like by shitting on the game that none of them have played.

I recall one person arguing that the studio was evil because a social media manager for another company owned by CD Projekt said something bad — and this person conveniently left out that the individual in question had been fired. As someone who has had to deal with shitty employees, I have to say, I think this sucks. I did not know my guy would do the things he did when he came so highly recommended; if I did know what the future held in store, I would not have hired him.

It would be dishonest to blame a company for the actions of its employees when the company itself takes action to stop those actions from happening. Some people would rather be shitheads than get with the program. You fire ’em. It’s all you can do. But, hey, if you’re trying to associate Cyberpunk with Musk, and Musk with the alt-right, of course you’re going to say “this one social media manager said something shitty so the company that fired him endorses those views.”

At one point, someone insisted that a discussion of “the sacred and the profane” was transphobic, trying to draw a link between the idea that body modification was inherently viewed as bad in the Cyberpunk universe (which is a weird thing to say about a game where the fantasy and game progression is entirely about body modification and how cool it is), but that was incredibly bad faith, since “the sacred and the profane” has nothing to do with human gender and sexuality at all.

There was this philosopher, Durkheim, who argued for a different moral axis than “good” or “bad” that was, yup, you guessed it, “sacred and profane.” CDPR’s staff talks about it in some of the Cyberpunk interviews — it’s even the name of a song in the game — but the general idea is that religion brings in a different moral axis based around what the church itself likes. If the church likes it, it’s sacred. If the church doesn’t, it’s profane (Durkheim’s area of interest heavily involved studying the religious power structures of the Catholic church).

The idea is that these things are separate concepts. Adam Badowski, the game’s director, was asked why there was so much nudity in the game. He provides an answer that’s very much in keeping with cyberpunk themes. He brings up Ghost in the Shell, he brings up the idea of “what does it mean to be human?” he asks if, as you remove bits of flesh, are you becoming less human? And the game deals with this! If you’ve watched Ghost in the Shell, you already know they were exploring that shit in the 90s! Hell, before Gibson codified — but didn’t originate, that’s Bethke, and we’ll get to him later — cyberpunk with Neuromancer, Ridley Scott was already exploring that shit in Blade Runner!

What did you think “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe…” was a speech about?

Cyberpunk is exhaustive when it looks into this. The original tabletop game had this perspective of ‘the more robot you are, the less human you become and more crazy you might get’ as a means of game balance, which is understandable but conveys some not great ideas about body modification. Your character gets “cyberpsychosis” as a result of going too cyber. Cyberpunk 2077 reframes this as being people pushed to the breaking point by their lives in a capitalist hellscape, augmenting themselves to keep up and losing themselves in that capitalist system.

When you talk to the AI on the other side of the Blackwall, and you talk with a person who’s been so influenced by the AI that it’s not clear if it’s her, an AI masquerading as her, or something in between, it’s reminiscent of the end of Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell movie when Major Kusanagi and the Puppet Master merged into a singular entity.

Cyberpunk often explores what it means to be human and how humans relate to each other — Neuromancer explores it through AI, Blade Runner with its exploration of what people would do if they met God, and Snow Crash through the exploration of language, consciousness, programs, viruses, and identity.

To argue that “CD PRojekt is saying that changing your body is an act of profanity, which clearly means they think it’s bad” was either said with profoundly ignorance or in immense bad faith. Either way, the criticism can be discarded. Cyberpunk 2077, here, was doing exactly what it should have been doing, but someone thought “profane is bad. They’re saying changing your body is profane” and tried, stupidly, to link it to alt-right propaganda.

Other people tried to argue that the game was an act of copaganda, because in a dystopic, shitty, crapsack world… the cops issue bounties and you can take them on. Never mind what that says about how shitty the cops are, apparently. Never mind that you control the buttons you press. The fact that the cops offer work was seen by some very, very stupid people as enough to declare the game a work of copaganda. We thoroughly debunked this in Part 1.

So when Cyberpunk 2077 came out, and it was kinda a buggy mess that should never have been released on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, a lot of people felt validated, regardless of whether they were right or wrong, and regardless of whether they were doing so in good faith.

Too bad the game was better than The Witcher 3, the greatest RPG of all time, huh?

yeah, cyberpunk was still a fuckin amazing game

I’m not really interested in proving this point.

come on, dude. you’re gonna make a claim, you should prove it

Yeah, but it’s pretty easy stuff: the game’s beautifully written, with fantastic characters and god tier quest design that transcends your average “just go kill ten wolves” shit. It’s more cohesive than some of the other genre masterpieces. It’s astonishingly evenly-paced.

Like The Witcher 3, it took a while to get there, but, hey, my favorite RPG ever is Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines and Cyberpunk 2077 is just that but bigger, more refined, more fun to play, and, well, nowhere near as wonky as VTMB.

I have this rule not to talk about graphics because, well, graphics are just a cost thing, and I once read that someone at Insomniac Games did an analysis of reviews around the time the PlayStation 3 was shipping — it was on their website back then — and they concluded that reviewers mention graphics more than anything else in their reviews.

Framerate did not get mentioned in reviews as much (this was years before TotalBiscuit would point out that arbitrarily locking ports of console games to 30fps when the Xbox 360 generation was getting long in the tooth and PCs were finally more powerful than consoles meant that we didn’t need those 30 fps locks and framerate should be more important — he’s the reason why people care about framerate so much these days), so Insomniac concluded that it would be better to prioritize graphics over framerate.

Because of this, I made a conscious effort not to talk about graphics in my reviews, but man… I am consistently gobsmacked by the things Cyberpunk 2077 does. I have a one terabyte folder full of game screenshots, but Cyberpunk 2077 is the best looking game I have ever played, to this day (even if one could argue other games are doing more advanced graphical things, like Hunt: Showdown).

It plays well, it’s got a helluva story, fantastic level design… there’s just… I don’t have much to complain about. I really don’t. Hell, because it was a first person shooter, it played, by default, way better than their third person games since they weren’t focused on trying to get ‘realistic animations’ in anymore. They were focused on gameplay.

Running around, leaping up on a building, hitting someone with a hack, then shotgunning a robot in the face and getting a million crits feels amazing.

The characters are extremely well-written. One of my favorite quests is a small one that depicts poverty better than… just about everything I’ve ever seen. A woman gets a job, she gets to finally leave her life of poverty behind, and other people aren’t too happy with this. Then that plays out. It’s really human — it feels less like the usual “I went to an ivy league university and am now writing what Iassume poor people are like — people who have to go to vacation in the Poconos instead of on another continent” and more like a story from someone who has lived that exact, very human kind of pain.

“You are trying to survive! How dare you do what it takes. You’re no longer a real one, you’re no longer authentic.”

The game also (consider me mischievously cackling here) shits on the cops all the time; just about every quest involving a cop, even a good one, like River, is about how fucking inept, evil, and corrupt cops are. It hates corpos too. But it’s not misanthropic; there’s a deep love of people throughout the game and its expansion, Phantom Liberty. It’s sensitive, it’s considerate, it’s deeply, passionately human.

There’s a reason The Witcher 3 is good, and it’s the same reason that Cyberpunk 2077 is good: CD Projekt RED knows story better than just about anyone.

I loved The Witcher, The Witcher 2, and The Witcher 3, but I would kill for a new Cyberpunk game. Fuck, man. It’s a world I love submerging myself in, and it plays great and has stories I love. What more could I ask for?

but then there’s that punk shit…

I remember hearing arguments that Cyberpunk, being a video game made by a company, cannot ever be punk, which is a ridiculous thing to say for so many reasons.

First, “cyberpunk” and what you think of when I say “punk” are two distinct concepts. There will be a whole section on this eventually. Second, what a lot of people think of when you think “punk” is one of the most successful branding exercises that business has ever pulled on the audience: commercial product as authenticity. We’re going way deep on that one.

Third, Cyberpunk is a genre and yes you can absolutely fucking tell a story about it even if you’re a corporation running a business. Again, humans make all sorts of art while working for a paycheck. Every celebrity, every actor, every musician you know, unless they’re doing all the work themselves, is surrounded by an army of people who are financially vested in making sure that the work makes enough money to keep them all employed.

You know the kind of people who go “fuck The Man, I’m gonna do this all bootstrap shit and make it all myself”? They, more often than hot, end up being psychopathic, monstrous assholes. They tell the world “oh it’s because I’m Authentic and I’m Choosing this,” but then you find out the actual reason they’re struggling to find work is because they’re impossible to work with and genuinely monstrous people, like Shane Carruth.

I loved Shane Carruth’s movies. You’ve probably heard of Primer, his mind-bending time travel movie, which he also acted in, and maybe you’ve seen Upstream Color, one of my favorite movies. I was so excited for A Topiary and The Modern Ocean. The music for Upstream Color? He composed it. The computer effects that Kris is working on in the movie? He made that himself for A Topiary.

He seemed like a guy who could do it all — act, write, direct, do effects, compose — and then he just… disappeared. For years, people thought the industry was being unfair to him. Steven Soderbergh stepped in to help him get The Modern Ocean made, and even then, his projects were plagued by setbacks.

Things have changed.

Now, Amy Seimetz has a permanent restraining order against him for abuse. Turns out, this cool, punk filmmaker was actually struggling to find work because nobody wanted to work with him. Amy Seimetz was in a recent Soderbergh movie. People like her; she’s wicked talented, so she gets work.

Making art requires a great deal of responsibility — you have to care for the people who work under you, and based on the reports of crunch, CDPR didn’t do a good job there — but you also have to keep the lights on (so you don’t have to let people go) and you have to make art that doesn’t make the world a worse place (by, say, convincing people that other humans all suck so we should stock up on guns to shoot them in the event of an apocalypse).

The idea of being some kind of ‘pure’ artist who rejects everyone and everything just to make perfect, true art on their own… it’s only something liars and frauds are into. Sure, if I get an offer from Elon Musk to keep my studio afloat, on moral grounds, I’d have to refuse. I find the man repugnant and too stupid to understand what I’m making. Plus, I’m just not into the idea of him showing up to my studio with a gun to demand a cameo because his girlfriend is in the game and he isn’t.

Think about it; why would you want that? People who do often want to be important, setting the terms, and trying to foster a community of acolytes who will hang on to their every word. They reject society because they want to be on top, and it’s easier to be a big fish in a small pond you’ve created than it is to enter the vast sea of human existence.

But we are human! We are all human beings! We are part of this vast sea of existence! If you want to be a big fish, it is you who must grow, not the ocean that must shrink.

People who view the world this way — the artist’s calling is sacred, the artist must be some avant-garde weirdo who makes shit everyone else is too afraid or lacks the vision to make, the artist should eschew money and live a life of suffering… they’re idiots. They don’t know the first thing about any of the artists they like.

Think about it; of your artistic heroes, how many of them match the above description?

How many?

The world is full of failed artists, people who gave up, people who burned out, died, failed to make a meaningful mark because they were determined not to sell out. There are a million zines you’ve never heard of, a billion novelists you don’t even remember forgetting, a trillion people with podcasts and short films and radio plays and, yes, video games that you’ll never give a shit about, much less try.

Most of them weren’t making art worth a damn. They were trying to copy other, bigger artists. They were the failed garage bands that jammed for a few sessions. At best, they might have played at a bar once, and everyone said “this sucks” and they didn’t get invited back.

A whole lot of people make a whole lot of shit and tell themselves they’re the real unappreciated geniuses and their lack of success isn’t because they suck at what they do, but because the world just isn’t ready for their genius.

Those people aren’t real artists, they’re frauds. Pretenders. At best, they’re amateurs, but they deserve no respect while they’re busy telling the world it doesn’t appreciate them enough.

The world don’t appreciate me enough either, at least from where I’m sitting, looking an $1100 diabetic medicine and a separate, $500 diabetic medicine (reduced to a mere $375 with coupons! how generous!) in the face and going “damn, I wish I mattered enough to be able to afford this,” but you know what I’m doing? I’m working on making more art. One day, the rest of the world will understand why I’m making this shit. Until them, best not to complain about being underappreciated; instead, I’m just going to do things worth appreciating.

Why reject, say, making art that works for people? Easy; people who don’t know shit about art but want to be celebrities believe that “authenticity” is part of what makes one a celebrity. They believe this because they consume the secondary product that celebrity puts out: hagiography.

Great artists want their work to reach their audience. Audiences tend to pay money. Great art isn’t inherently financially successful — marketing and other factors matter — but a quality of the art that has lasted through the centuries is that it tends to reach its audience.

Bad art tends to leave people feeling hollow. You can make a song full of awful sounds and with zero energy and most people won’t listen to it. You can make a song that is catchy as hell but has all the artistic nutritional value of a single Pringle chip, and it’ll get played out of rotation after a while. But if you make something that is both blisteringly authentic and incredibly listenable, well, buddy, that’s when they say “this person’s a great fuckin artist.”

That’s why Biggie can release Hypnotize and it can be both art and a commercial success. These forces are not at odds, they are forces that must be balanced. Contrasting energies are not the same as incompatible ones. You just need to balance them so that they contrast appropriately, and no one ingredient overpowers the rest.

Some people will compose the worst dogshit imaginable and go “yeah. Uh. Listen to my soundcloud.” But if they have no sense of taste, no sense of what their audience wants to hear, if their music just kinda sucks… well, it sucks. And no amount of “I made what I wanted” will matter. The fact they wanted to make it is step one of the thousands of steps required for any individual piece of art to exist. We never set out to make art we don’t want to make. Unless you’re just doodling in your notebook for yourself, if you’re making art and you want an audience to look at it, if you’re really interested in being a celebrity… and I know that’s why some people get into this, then “it’s good because I made it” won’t be enough.

The actual celebrities and the actual artists both focus on the work they have to do, not posturing, and while I don’t think celebrity matters all that much, for those of you that do, understand that the if you want to be seen as a visionary, and you try to follow the route of “this person was a visionary not appreciated in their time” you will inevitably become someone who is not appreciated in your time either.

Don’t do this for the fame. It won’t work.

You have to know what you are doing with your art. Who it’s for. Whether or not it lands, right? You have to develop taste, you have to develop literacy, you have to be good at the actual discipline of art. It’s not selling out to make something that works, but it is fraudulent to expect greatness that has not been earned.

Greatness comes from other people. You don’t get to claim greatness while proudly explaining that you’re too legitimate to be a success.

“okay, Doc, what do you think makes someone a great artist?”

I think a great artist is someone who makes work that reaches people and whose work lasts. Someone who churns out a bunch of forgettable dance tunes and makes most of their money on Spotify streams at restaurants that don’t want to pay for a proper sound system and licensed music is successful, but that doesn’t mean they’re great. Greatness is about standing the test of time, and if you’re media literate enough, you can anticipate what art and which artists will — Mad Max: Fury Road will obviously stand the test of time. It’s not likely that Avengers: Endgame will be considered with particular fondness twenty years from now, much less a hundred.

No one is exactly clamoring for new work by the guys who directed Endgame.

So, why are we talking about this? We were talking about Cyberpunk, right? Where did this come from?

Well, initially, the idea for this section was “it’s stupid to suggest that authentic art can only be produced by some fucking rando living in a shack somewhere, barely getting by, obsessed only with perfecting his craft.”

We already know the idea of the solo dev is a myth, which means that we already know that the idea of “going it alone, as art for art’s sake” is already bullshit. I made Adios to keep a roof over my head. I put in my grief about my dead dog, among other things. Both of these things are simultaneously true.

This is, and always has been, about balance. Michaelangelo was commissioned to paint and sculpt things. Nearly all great art is commercially motivated. Shakespeare redefined the English language; it was his job to write plays to put bread on the table, and that’s why he did it. Was he a sellout for ensuring people would buy tickets to The Globe? Of course not.

Phil has pointed out to me that Shakespeare famously modified the content of his plays towards a darker, more historically-focused fare after King James I took the throne. Artists change all the times to suit commercial interests, and here’s one of the most influential artists who ever lived, a man more legit than most, doing the same thing.

So the idea that the humans at CD Projekt RED couldn’t make a game about punk shit is ludicrous on the outset. Art — great art — can come from anywhere. Casablanca is great art; that was made at Warner Bros, the company that makes all sorts of random shit (but also Mad Max: Fury Road).

Making art for hire is how almost all art you love has been made.

Until the 1800s, people made art at the behest of their patrons. All of that art was commercially motivated — the idea of making art for third parties to buy hadn’t been figured out yet, but that doesn’t mean people weren’t making art for pay. In fact, making art for patrons meant making art the patrons wanted. They’d ask you for a painting of them looking cool in front of their mansion, and you’d comply. It wasn’t until the mid-1800s that, as an artist, you could make something you wanted and sell it.

The idea of making something you want purely for its own sake? It’s ahistoric.

Business considerations matter. It’s not glamorous to talk about, so you won’t see it in the actor interviews building hype for a movie, or a musician interview in Vogue or whatever, but it’s there. Watch the special features, listen to the artists when they aren’t promoting their work — especially when talking to other artists. There is much less of a gulf between “this needs to be profitable” and “this needs to be authentic” than you think. Ideally, art does both, so you can keep being able to pay the bills and make more art.

Part of this issue is because, around the 1950s, when advertising was taking off, the world got so heavy into crass commercialism that people took a stand against it. To be corporate was to be inherently gauche. You can see this build and build and build until the 1980s, when Gen-X was growing up and watching Saturday morning cartoons.

Good ol’ American President Ronnie Fuckin’ Reagan killed the regulations that kept corporations from advertising to kids, and now we have a generation of people who make video games with Saturday Morning Cartoon style ads in them that don’t sell for shit because, well, it was crass commercialism. While you might find comfort in the aesthetics of it because you were a child, the adults of the era were talking about how we needed to return to a simpler time where we weren’t bombarded with ads every second of the day. Go watch movies like Repo Man to see how they explore this kind of heavily corporatized commercialism.

So when they sell art to you, they’ll try to make it seem authentic — in his second album, Dr. Dre (the Beats headphones businessman) complains that people think he ‘fell off.’ He asks how, because his last album, The Chronic, was considered a landmark work. Dre is a businessman; he builds the careers of all sorts of musicians and makes his wealth doing it. There’s no shame in it, but he hears the complaints that he’s losing his touch, and he fires back making sure you know how authentic he is.

Dre’s earned it, I think. He’s still one of the best producers of all time, and his albums have all been fantastic. But even he feels that need to remind you that he is authentic. Everybody does, because everybody wants authenticity.

And nowhere is anyone more determined to prove to you that they’re authentic than the punk scene, home of the biggest sellouts of all.

god save the punks

If you read Hebdige’s Subculture: The meaning of Style, you can learn an awful lot about where punk came from. He talks about its roots in a variety of places. Frequently mentioned is William Burroughs. Funnily enough, my old writing teacher, David Ohle, was Burroughs’ assistant, driving to a house a few blocks from where I’m seated right now, letting himself in every morning, and sitting there, with pencil and paper, ready to jot down the dreams Burroughs would tell him upon waking.

I can’t say I learned a lot about the beat generation from Ohle, since he was teaching me how to write screenplays, not how to tell stories, but it’s a fun connection to mention.

William Burroughs isn’t just mentioned by Hebdige — Bruce Sterling mentions Burroughs as influencing the cyberpunk authors of the 1980s as well — and he seems like a particularly defining force. Patti Smith and David Bowie cited him as an influence as well.

Hebdige goes further back; he talks about the evolution of the music scene as a whole after World War II. He talks about the teds, the beats, the mods. He talks about the Caribbean immigrants to the UK, the racism of the teds, the way Britain imported a great deal of rock from the US without understanding the history that got it there (every style becomes aesthetic at some point).

Hebdige spends a great deal of time talking about how African culture — particularly Caribbean and African-American — left an undeniable mark on culture in the second half of the twentieth century, pointing to the way Jordan, the fashion designer, said that reggae was all she listened to, or pointing to a quote from the mods saying “we’re going back to dancing close because [they] do it.”

As the mods broke down, the skinheads emerged. We think of skinheads as being Nazis, and we’re right to do so, because they often are, but that wasn’t how they originated. Hebdige describes them as “aggressively proletarian, puritanical, and chauvinist.” Where the mods had been all about visual style, the skinheads created a specific visual style by appearing to reject it. It was affectation masquerading as a lack thereof — true lack of affectation wouldn’t have the uniform with Doc Martens, you know? Choosing Doc Martens means affectation. It’s a deliberate, conscious choice.

Hebdige suggests that the skinheads “drew on two ostensibly incompatible sources: the cultures of the West Indian immigrants and the white working class” but he explains that so much of the skinhead identity was manufactured by an ignorance of history. “Its rituals, language, and style provided models for those white youths alienated from the parent culture by the imagined compromises of the post-war years.”

(He spends a lot of time on this process, beginning with Ska and pork pie hats and, by the time he gets to the birth of Punk, he’s talking about racist skinheads)

While the skinheads were trying to co-opt reggae, according to Hebdige, reggae was becoming increasingly concerned with things like Rastafarianism. The skinheads were no longer able to take it for themselves, leading to the summer of 1972 where skinheads tried to attack second-generation immigrants in Liverpool. Reggae, says Hebdige, had come of age, and the skinheads were left in perpetual adolescence.

It’s around this point that Hebdige documents a growing schism. David Bowie went one direction. One of the sources he cites, Taylor and Wall (1976) express some frustration with Bowie, arguing that:

Bowie has in effect colluded in consumer capitalism’s attempt to re-create a dependent adolescent class, involved as passive teenage consumers in the purchase of leisure prior to the assumption of ‘adulthood’ rather than being a youth culture of persons who question (from whatever class or cultural perspective) the value and meaning of adolescence and the transition to the adult world of work.

But Hebdige has other ideas — he argues that Bowie did question the value and meaning of adolescence and the transition into the world of work… “by artfully confounding the images of men and women through which the passage from childhood to maturity was traditionally accomplished.”

Translated into something a bit less academic: Bowie got people thinking about gender and sexuality, which Hebdige thinks is just as important as questioning why you should just grow up to become an adult and get a job somewhere because that’s what the prevailing culture says you ought to be.

I get why Taylor and Wall would view the visual style of Bowie as colluding with capitalism, and I think they’re half-right, but in getting people to question reality as the people in power would’ve wanted (compliant workers at odds with other workers just doing what they’re told). Even though people were buying products and people were making money off that, it was still helping break them from the cultural hegemony of the upper class.

In other words, people can claim someone is inauthentic because of one factor (commercialism), but we can see how they are deeply authentic, despite aspects of consumerism.

Nowadays, David Bowie is considered one of the greatest, most authentic artists of all time. How could someone viewed as colluding with consumer capital be seen as a real artist? The answer is obvious: because the idea of the real artist being pure is complete bullshit.

Hebdige is right there, though:

The punk aesthetic, formulated in the widening gap between the artist and audience, can be read as an attempt to expose glam rock’s implicit contradictions. For example, the ‘working classness’, the scruffiness and earthiness of punk ran directly counter to the arrogance, elegance, and verbosity of the glam rock superstars.

He continues, talking about how Punk uses some of the style of glam rock, like the language and fashion, but tries to “puncture glam rock’s extravagantly ornate style,” which meant that people started going back to reggae, because they saw reggae as standing against the existing British status quo. “It resonated with punk’s adopted values — anarchy, surrender, and decline.”

Basically, a bunch of white kids saw a bunch of black people going “fuck Britain” and went “yeah, hell yeah! This speaks to me!” They went heavy on the irony (invoking the Union Jack and other stereotypical British signifiers). In keeping with their sense of apocalyptic decline, rather than imagining for themselves a better world (which Hebidge says reggae was doing at the time, and I must admit I’m not particularly familiar with it, so I’ll take his word for this).

There’s a kind of nihilism in it, an embrace of irony, a “fuck yeah, fuck the world” sensibility within the nascent punk movement. Or, since Hebdige has a fun way with words, even though he’s an academic, “once inside this desecrated circle, punk was forever condemned to act out alienation, to mime its imagined condition, to manufacture a whole series of subjective correlatives for the official archetypes of the ‘crisis of modern life.’

In more poetic words, he calls it fraudulent:

…the punks dissembled, dying to recreate themselves in caricature, to ‘dress up’ their Destiny in its true colours, to substitute the diet for hunger, to slide the ragamuffin look (‘unkempt’ but meticulously coutured) between poverty and elegance. Punk, having found an adequate reflection in the shards of broken glass, having spoken through the holes in purposefully torn tee-shirts, having brought dishonour on the family name, found itself again at the point from which it had started: as a ‘lifer’ in the ‘solitary’ despite the fierce tattoos.

The punks sought authenticity through manufacture; they created a scenario for themselves where they could neither win nor lose, where they never had to do anything but purposefully tear their t-shirts and brag about being authentic.

Another thing began to happen: while the punks of the late 70s were more willing to admit that they were borrowing heavily from reggae, heavily participating in the Rock against Racism campaign, they were still constructing “…a music which was emphatically white and even more emphatically British.”

Not very authentic, choosing to be ignorant of your history like that, is it?

By rejecting that association, and by being, as it often was, reactionary. “Punk music, like every other aspect of punk style, tended to develop in direct antithesis to its apparent sources.”

It’s a recurring theme; punk puts on the airs of being authentic, but it’s usually doing so as a reaction to something else. It’s a way of saying “hmm… hnn… no, this doesn’t match my perception of authenticity, so I’m going to make it myself by making very careful, very intentional visual choices.”

So it’s always an exercise in branding, with the branding as a means of achieving some form of self-actualization. In other words, rather than trying to know themselves as people, they put on a uniform and act as if it gives them identity. It’s a fraudulent action, a way of conforming by performing anti-conformity.

Nowhere more clear is this than with the Sex Pistols.

So you’ve got this band that hangs out at a fashion club, owned by a guy by the name of Malcolm McLaren. The shop has a couple different names, but it’s most famously known as Sex, and they were selling stuff that was intentionally counterculture, so to speak. This band hung out there, as did Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious.

Now, I’ve heard it said that the mononymous Jordan is responsible for everything we know about punk iconography, the mohawks and all that. I know that Jordan was employed by Vivienne Westwood while working with Malcom McLaren at Sex. And Vivienne Westwood sure had that same anti-conformist attitude.

In one reflection on her life, the author recounts “when the Sex Pistols’ single “God Save the Queen” was banned from British radio, Westwood renamed her shop Seditionaries and outfitted the band in her provocative designs, which included a distressed muslin top emblazoned with Queen Elizabeth II’s portrait and the infamous “Destroy” T-shirt that featured a swastika and an upside down crucified Jesus.”

There’s that same reactionary shit, huh.

Westwood later said it was just a fashion style that was used for marketing, a far cry from the rosy idealized authenticity that ‘punk-ness’ is said to possess. Be outrageous, get clicks. We know the story.

It’s not to say the aesthetic isn’t compelling, of course. Just that semiotics doesn’t work that way. You can’t encode purity into identity. Same reason christofascists who declare they’ve accepted Jesus into their heart don’t automatically become good people just for having said “I accept Jesus into my heart.” Speaking it doesn’t make it so. The proof is in the doing of good.

If someone creates an icon, someone else will make it a fashion statement, and a fashion statement can never be enough to make something good or bad. Tearing a perfectly aesthetic hole in your jeans to make them look cosmetically worn is a choice you can make. That action is not powerful enough to do much more than influence aesthetic decision making, it’s not meaningful enough to do it, and that’s fine. Maybe it’s even good.

Johnny Rotten was noticed, apparently, for having a shirt of Pink Floyd with the band members having their eyes scratched out and the words “I hate” put on the shirt, as well as for having green hair. I’m not sure if that was his style, or Vivienne Westwood’s, or Jordan’s, but he was wearing it, and it got him noticed.

The Sex Pistols were, briefly, very provocative. But as you read about the band, you get the sense that it was all pretty cynical. Malcolm McLaren managed to make the band famous by capitalizing on the ever-popular desire of youth everywhere to piss the old people off, thereby rendering their elders eternally uncool.

Reading quotes from the time and you get shit like: “there seems little doubt that Lydon was fed material by Vivienne Westwood and Jamie Reid (who was responsible for the band’s visual iconography), which he then converted into his own lyric” or “Before it, we were all about the music, but from then on it was all about the media.”

The band hangs together for a little while, but Johnny Rotten fucks off when they go hang out with Ronnie Biggs, one of the most notorious train robbers of all time. Rotten’s since said that he didn’t like that they were hanging out with a guy who stole working class people’s money, which, hey, I hope that’s true, but given some of his later actions, who knows? That could just be Rotten — John Lydon — trying to maintain artistic credibility.

But I do have to say, given all the publicity stunts, all the ways that Malcolm McLaren particularly seemed to be driving all this for the profit — according to Sex Pistols member Steve Jones. A musician who performed with Sid Vicious, Marco Pirroni, said “After that, it was nothing to do with music anymore. It would just be for the sensationalism and scandal of it all. Then it became the Malcolm McLaren story.”

There’s another story about Vivienne Westwood telling Malcolm McLaren to get “the guy named John” to be the singer. He came back with Johnny Rotten. She wanted Sid Vicious (whose actual name was John as well). Notice how that’s not the actual band picking its members, that’s a fashion designer telling a band manager to pick a singer for the band that she’ll use as her means of putting fashion out into the world.

It’s all business. It’s not authentic, it’s fraudulent. There’s no honesty here, no artistry beyond fashion and marketing, but the way it’s… in a way, Sex Pistols was a virtual band, like Gorillaz, not so much a real band so much as a performance for the real artists (Hewlett and Albarn) to put their work out into the world. Or, if that doesn’t do it for you, Lily Chou-Chou, from the movie that’s all about her. She’s another fictional musician used as a means for someone to put their actual art into the world.

It’s just fashion and commerce go hand in hand — the punk aesthetic was created by Vivienne Westwood, and sold by Vivienne Westwood, and Malcolm McLaren did all the exhibitionism, because that was his art form, and the band, well… it existed for a couple years, released an album, and then Johnny quit and Sid died and the band was no longer selling fashion, selling product, so the world no longer needed the band to exist.

Nothing about that gritty, anti-establishment, brave, provocative artist schtick was real, because it never is.

I know I do not have the influence to change the world, but I do hope that I can change the minds of the people who read this piece. Do the punks sound authentic to you, or do they sound pious? To me, they sound like the religious scolds who tell you that you are not pure enough to be close to god, pretending to be pure while they do the very things they say not to do behind closed doors.

“The way to be righteous is to be pure,” says the priest at a pulpit, but he commits tax fraud so he can own ten private jets. “The way to be an artist is to be authentic,” screams the punk, preaches authenticity while being, more or less, the mascot brand for a fashion designer. It’s all fake. If you’re thinking this is how to become a successful artist, then you need to understand that the bullshit they spew is part of their marketing. They’re trying to make you buy the product, and they’re doing that by telling you that the product is authentic. It’s like saying your hamburger meat is gluten free.

The real artists do this shit for money. They do it because they love doing it, but they do have to do it in a way that will get them paid. Some people will call this fraudulent, but no. They’re here because they want to be. They could go get jobs doing other things — better paying things — but they choose art because they love it. They just have to make artistic decisions that include survivability.

The only people who don’t are the ones whose parents can afford to let them be artists, and they’re coincidentally the ones who try to pull the ladder up behind themselves and suggest that authenticity is when you can make art without profit motive, because they’re the only people with the luxury not to have a profit motive.

The frauds do this for money too, because that’s not what makes someone inauthentic. We all need to survive; what makes the frauds the frauds that they are is that they pretend to be authentic when they’re trying so crassly to build that brand that they never could be authentic. Everybody’s gotta get paid, and this predates even capitalism.

I will make you art, and in exchange, you will hopefully pay me enough for me to live on. That’s the ancient contract. It’s what it’s always been. The basic needs of all human life are food and shelter. I do art in exchange for that.

Blue, one of the artists on Adios and our current game, put it to me like this: “one could argue that the only real art out there is found art shit.” I’d buy that. Phil chimed in with the example of people finding a bunch of wire sculptures when an apartment building was being torn down. No idea who made them. I said you could expand the concept — even the doodles we made in the margins of our school textbooks could be said to be pure art.

But… you’re never gonna get famous off of that shit, and the people who want to ascribe to the idea of Being Punk often want to be Sid Vicious Famous and Sid Vicious Successful, and they believe he achieved success because of an authenticity he never possessed, just one that was fabricated by Westwood and McLaren. It requires a level of cynical branding you can’t do if you’re earnestly trying to be authentic and you’re not trying to be appealing for radio play. If you want to be like that, you need to appear to be authentic while appealing to as many people as humanly possible. You need to become the biggest sellout you can be, because what you want is the fame that comes from being appealing while appearing authentic.

Personally, I think you could save yourself a whole lot of trouble by understanding that you can be both authentic and appealing. The First Slam Dunk is a fuckin’ perfect emotional tearjerker of a movie that is simultaneously raw and authentic and also commercially one of the biggest animated films ever made.

But, if you’re one of those people who thinks like a punk — that is, you think your relevance is determined by your opposition to the prevailing winds of whatever it is you’re facing — then you’re, I dunno, the human equivalent of a weathervane. Being against the status quo don’t mean shit. You gotta stand for something, not against whatever’s biggest.

You gotta believe in something other than crass commercialism that packages itself as authentic living, and the suckers who seek fame as punk rockers ain’t likely to get it, because the act of seeking fame means appealing to others, and once you’ve appealed to others enough, you can’t really call yourself punk at all. At that point, you’re just The Man.

Now I get why Hebdige said that punk was forever condemned to act out alienation. Because it can’t do anything but act. Punk is performative alienation as a means of achieving authenticity.

should you even want to be a punk?

At space camp, I met a kid named Tanner. I was an idiot then — I’d grown up in a house that was firmly Republican and determined to make me one, and while I can proudly say that the ideas they attempted to instill in me didn’t last particularly long (when I was eligible to vote, I did not register with the Republican Party, and I figured out pretty quick that Ronald Reagan wasn’t the great saint he was presented to me as being) — and this was at the height of the “God Bless the USA/George W. Bush is Leading us Through this Horrible Crisis” shit — Tanner had figured a lot more shit out than I had at the time.

He tried to introduce me to punk music, I think Anti-Flag (since broken up because the lead singer was apparently a rapist); I thought it sounded horrible. It just wasn’t what I wanted to listen to (if I want to hear someone scream, I’ll be more inclined to listen to Joe Duplantier). Tanner told me how Bush sucked, and while he had as much right as you could for a fifteen year-old kid, he also had this idea that punk music was pure and good because it was Against The Man, trying to get me to like it because of the ideal of what it ought to be, and not what it was, which was “kinda shitty music.”

This works when The Man sucks, but it doesn’t work out so well when, say, Johnny Rotten, of God Save the Queen fame, tells you that he voted for Trump. Why? Because he was anti-establishment. Therefore, to him, what mattered was that Trump wasn’t a career politician. Never mind that Trump was a lying rapist, whose crimes were the kind of crimes all rich people inevitably end up committing — what mattered to Johnny Rotten wasn’t that he thought Trump was good, he just thought Trump was not like the establishment.

The problem with being a reactionary is that you end up being defined by your opposition. This failure is multiplied when you argue for anyone who opposes the status quo. Nazis have always been heavily punk, because they oppose the status quo that says “trying to murder people you don’t like is wrong, actually.” Yes, neolibs suck, but Nazis suck worse. If you oppose neolibs because you perceive them as having power, and not because you have a specific value set that opposes their ideology, then you will find yourself supporting right-wing shit heads, as Johnny Rotten, who arguably defined the punk movement, has in recent years.

So, one night, as I was talking with Phil, I said “you know, there’s that saying about how a good soldier is one who wants wars to end” (it’s an idea that we’ve written about in our upcoming game; fascists, somewhat notably, always desire struggle, because fighting people is what makes them feel strong), “but shouldn’t that apply to punks as well?”

My thinking was this: if you view the powers that be as doing something vile — for instance, Joe Biden’s support for an ethnonationalist state has resulted in an actual genocide, and I oppose genocides — then it is your moral imperative to oppose them. That would make you punk. But if your government is doing the right things by, say, objecting to genocide, then you probably wouldn’t want to oppose them.

You should oppose someone when they do wrong, because your goal is to do good.

But if your idea of punk is about self-aggrandizement — that is, you see yourself as being a punk, and see the simple act of being punk as an inherent good, well, you’ll end up picking Trump like a stupid motherfucker.

In other words, for punk to function as advertised — as Tanner and countless would-be punks have told me since — a punk must yearn for a world where they do not need to be punk. However, most people just want to slap the label on and get praised for joining the proverbial club, and then they go support stupid fucking shitheads.

There’s no honor in that. You’re just being a contrarian shithead, not something special.

And, I mean, hey, as you look at Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, you can see how their specific stylistic choices were always about appearing to appear authentic through the power of contrarianism. “Stick it to the man” as a callous branding exercise. The entire view of the movement as authenticity is birthed there.

It’s not good enough to label yourself punk; that’s just like a religious asshole deciding they can do no wrong cause they said “I accept Jesus into my heart.” There’s more to it than that; it requires effort. It requires thought. You should fight for what’s right, not define yourself as fighting against things. The onus is on you to choose to do right.

Anything else is just trying to convince yourself you’re a good person because you’re wearing the right clothes, and that didn’t exactly work out well for all those Catholic priests who sexually harass kids now, did it? Did being A Man of the Cloth make them morally good? No. Doing good — which requires actual effort — is the only way to be good.

Look at the skinheads — they started out as proletarian. Now they are identified with neo-nazis. Do you really want to end up like that? Is that what you’re all about? Defiance to anyone or anything in power, regardless of whether or not it’s worth defying? If the people in power say “murder is wrong and we should give to the poor,” do you oppose that on the grounds that the people in power say it? That there is power is not enough. Goodness must also be a factor.

cyberpunk has never been punk

At this point, you may be wondering: what does any of this punk discussion have to do with Cyberpunk? The copaganda stuff we discussed in the last essay was at least related to the direct accusation that Cyberpunk is copaganda, and we roundly demolished that nonsense.

But this? None of this punk shit has anything to do with Cyberpunk at all, right?

Yes. The people who view Punk as a Correct and Good Way of Life are actually just moral cowards who oppose the world whether because they’re shameless self-promotors or idiots who just need to oppose whatever seems worth opposing in the given moment. They’re not just hypocrites, they’re people with nothing genuine to say or do.

So, sure, we could stop the piece here and go “yup, it was always dumb to leverage this as an accusation. Cyberpunk 2077 is as authentic a work of art as they come. That it’s being made by a corporation is hardly a disqualifier.”

Luckily, the creator of the word can tell us exactly why he came up with that term, which he did nearly thirty years ago, in 1997.

The invention of the c-word was a conscious and deliberate act of creation on my part. I wrote the story in the early spring of 1980, and from the very first draft, it was titled “Cyberpunk.” In calling it that, I was actively trying to invent a new term that grokked the juxtaposition of punk attitudes and high technology. My reasons for doing so were purely selfish and market-driven: I wanted to give my story a snappy, one-word title that editors would remember.

I’m sorry, is that commercialism I hear? The genre was created out of a commercial drive? Say it ain’t so, Bruce!

That’s right. Bruce Bethke wrote a story in 1980 called “Cyberpunk,” which begins in the style we now recognize as being cyberpunk:

The snoozer went off at seven and I was out of my sleepsack, powered up, and on-line in nanos. That’s as far as I got. Soon’s I booted and got —

CRACKERS/BUDDYBOO/8ER

— on the tube I shut down fast. Damn! Rayno had been on line before me, like always, and that message meant somebody else had gotten into our Net — and that meant trouble by the busload! I couldn’t do anything more on term, so I zipped into my jumper, combed my hair, and went downstairs.

Bethke was selling computers for Radio Shack in the 1980s, when some kids wandered into his store, programmed something — I have yet to find an account that says exactly what — into his computer, and left it. He was in awe of their ingenuity.

1980: I was living in River Falls, Wisconsin (population 7,000), selling Radio
Shack TRS-80 Model 1’s, taking courses at the local college, and hanging out on the very distant periphery of the Minneapolis music scene. I thought I was doing okay; after all, I’d gotten the sales job by a dazzling display of computer prowess (I’d shown the Radio Shack store manager how to load and run the BASIC demo program for his display model), and I was making as much money each month as I’d made in the previous year as a musician. (Which mostly speaks to how badly the music business sucks if you’re not doing Top 40 covers.)

Then one day a trio of kids, the oldest maybe 14, came into the store and started puttering with the demo computer. I turned my back on them for about two minutes. When I looked again the kids were gone, the demo program was trashed, and in its place they’d left me with something that had the Model 1 jumping through hoops. I took a few minutes to admire their ingenuity, then broke out of the program and looked over the code. Damned if I could figure out what it was doing.

Okay, no problem. The Model 1 had this big orange RESET button on the front panel. I hit the button, reloaded my only copy of the demo program (can you tell where this is leading?), keyed in RUN —

And that’s when I discovered their other little surprise.

Bethke doesn’t say what that surprise was. Wish he did.

But then he continues:

My stories rarely spring from a single idea. Rather, I’ll have a whole stew of ideas floating around in the back of my head, then something will happen to catalyze the mix and precipitate out the story seed. In this case, I took a dash of Linguistics — Children have some undefined wiring which enables them to learn multiple languages far more easily than adults do, and this ability is not restricted to “organic” languages.

A pinch of Educational Psych — Teenagers live in an ethically neutral state. They haven’t got the hang of empathy yet, nor have they really grasped the linkage between their causative actions and the resulting effects.

A snort of Political Theory — Just as command of a communication medium is power, technological skill is enfranchisement, and in 1980 we were some 20 to 30 years away from an explosive proliferation in technology that would radically change the distribution of power in society. (Okay, so I was wrong about the timeline. Get in line behind my ex-wife and sue me.)

A double-shot of A Clockwork Orange — Colloquial English evolves in response to technology. What will it be like in twenty or thirty years?

— and I ended up with this core idea: The kids who trashed my computer; their kids were going to be Holy Terrors, combining the ethical vacuity of teenagers with a technical fluency we adults could only guess at. Further, the parents and other adult authority figures of the early 21st Century were going to be terribly ill-equipped to deal with the first generation of teenagers who grew up truly “speaking computer.”

THEREFORE, if you thought that punks on motorcycles were a problem, just wait until you meet the — the — You know, there isn’t a good word to describe them?

So I set out to create and define that word.

All of this makes perfect sense for the kind of science fiction he was writing. Here’s Bethke, writing about punk kids — not the punks of the God Save the Queen marketing stunt, but true punks in the original sense, disaffected youths.

Think of the era — The Vietnam War has ended, a lot of the hope is gone. The future is uncertain; we haven’t gotten to the neoliberally optimistic false hope of The End of History yet. People are burned up, burned out, chewed up, and spit out.

When we look at early cyberpunk, much of it pulls from noir or neo-noir. As computers enter daily life and technology starts shifting more rapidly than ever before, as the world becomes more corporate — ruled by these giant companies that, at the time, were pillaging and plundering each other and science fiction authors were beginning to speculate that they’d hire their own private militaries to neuter the government and wipe each other out — people were going “man, fuck all these ads, fuck the corporatism, fuck all this shit.”

We entered late stage capitalism, and people took notice. They felt disaffected, alienated, fucked up by a world that treated them as a fertile field in which advertisements could be sewn and profits generated, and, like I said before, Ronnie Reagan was determined to make sure corporations could market to children as well.

As we look at the post-war reaction to Vietnam, we see a resurgence of noir, just like we did after World War II. The same old tropes come back — the loser and outsider who knows it but keeps going because he doesn’t know why. There ain’t much of a difference between Sam Spade and Henry Dorsett Case, not really. Molly Millions’ femme fatale belongs right there alongside Nora Desmond or Phyllis Dietrichson.

Cyberpunk is a genre of alienated people who relate to technology in ways that their analogue forbearers could scarely dream. Another Bruce, this one Sterling, rather than Bethke, offers up an interesting idea:

Science fiction — at least according to its official dogma — has always been about the impact of technology. But times have changed since the comfortable era of Hugo Gernsback, when Science was safely enshrined — and confined — in an ivory tower. The careless technophilia of those days belongs to a vanished, sluggish era, when authority still had a comfortable margin of control. For the cyberpunks, by stark contrast, technology is visceral. It is not the bottled genie of remote Big Science boffins; it is pervasive, utterly intimate. Not outside us, but next to us. Under our skin; often, inside our minds.

Prior to the Cyberpunk narrative, a great deal of science fiction either framed its technology as something for the realm of esteemed scientists and government agents had their hands on (Star Trek spent precious little time outside of Starfleet, for instance, and the technology of The Andromeda Strain was entirely within the hands of its government-backed heroes). Other science fiction was almost dreamlike, blending the past — characters might talk about “viewscreens” to see who is at the door, turning knobs and dials that somehow make the contraptions move.

Cyberpunk, on the other hand, was dirty and grimy. Rather than exciting adventure stories, Cyberpunk translated the alienation of the present into a world where technology were the tools for daily living. Sure, just a short 12 years after Cyberpunk was published, 15 years after it was written, Kathryn Bigelow directed Strange Days, a movie that had the kind of tapes you see in Cyberpunk 2077, recording a person’s memories and letting people watch them, but it was a thriller about the fact that a guy recording Terminator 2’s production managed to capture the Rodney King assault a few years prior.

Cyberpunk was contemporary, even if the computers were a bit more powerful, the language a bit too silly, the worlds just a touch too apocalyptic. It was about what we were feeling then and there. It was Bethke wondering what happens to the kids who grow up the children of computer-literate adults. What’s the generation of the 2020s look like?

Weird, sure, though not quite weird in the way Bethke anticipated. His punks are more like the punks of the 50s and 60s.

But now we are extrapolating, trying to figure out what the next couple of decades look like, trying to reflect the reality we are currently in. It’s different than the far-fetched adventurous science fiction full of space travel and ray guns that gave us Forbidden Planet, Flash Gordon, and Star Trek, even shit like The Foundation.

Let’s be real: psychohistory is a silly idea. The idea of cyberpunk are much more achievable. We’ve got computers that fit into our pockets. Hacking is, in fact, a major concern these days. Heck, just the other day, the Kadokawa corporation got hit with ransomware and hackers are threatening to release that data if they don’t pay up.

What could be more cyberpunk than that?

Bethke refers to this sort of character as “a young, technologically facile, ethically vacuous, computer-adept vandal or criminal.” As for the visual design, he got it from Billy Idol who, yes, was an underground punk rocker once upon a time.

How did I actually create the word? The way any new word comes into being, I guess: through synthesis. I took a handful of roots — cyber, techno, et al — mixed them up with a bunch of terms for socially misdirected youth, and tried out the various combinations until one just plain sounded right.

Rather than being a story about a punk-as-the-punk-sees-themselves, as people with Firm Conviction who Oppose The Man, Bethke’s writing about “socially misdirected youth.” Punk kids, not The Punks.

Beyond Billy Idol informing the fashion choices of a science fiction writer, the genre has no actual connection — at least conceptually — with the brand Malcolm McLaren was trying to sell you. It was just about disgruntled teens who understood computers on a level their parents couldn’t because they’d grown up with ‘em.

The man was writing about Millennials, the ones who come after Gen-X, a generation that had computers, but a generation that would raise their own kids on computers by just handing them a tablet pc and expecting YouTube to do the parenting. The millennials, on the other hand, were raised to know how computers worked, cautioned against meeting strangers online, and generally pretty tech savvy as a result.

Most of the modern internet is structured by millennials and Gen-Xers, with the websites largely being run by Gen-X (Facebook, Twitter, and so on) and the culture (the shitposters from Something Awful — that’s where the “I Can Haz Cheezeburger?” meme comes from, and image macros in general — which are largely referred to as ‘memes’ by people who don’t understand that memes are ideas with a life of their own, rather than just Impact Font on a Silly Image).

“Loss” is a meme consisting of four symbols: one shape, then that shape and another shape, then two more shapes, and, lastly, one shape vertical and one shape horizontal. It comes from a comic that was supposed to be a Very Serious Story About a Gamer Man Rushing to the Hospital to Support His Wife Who Just Had a Miscarriage, but the meme is the idea of putting the visual pattern in various forms and tricking people. Rickrolling is another kind of meme — trick someone into clicking a link, and the link is actually a YouTube link to Rick Astley’s song “Never Gonna Give You Up.” That’s evolved now into trying to smuggle the words of the song into conversations; when people recognize it, they realize they’ve got got.

That’s what a meme is, and memes were largely created and spread by the millennials (those born from 1980 to 1996) on various image board sites. Cyberpunk culture.

Bethke was writing about these sorts — the people who grew up with, understood, and loved technology, the kind of people who knew how computers worked, rather than Gen Z (1997–2010 or so) and Gen Alpha (the kids being born now), for whom technology was so ubiquitous that they don’t really know how computers work. As Apple’s walled garden approach gets worse, as technology becomes more mundane, the control we exerted over it seems lost.

I hope that millennials raise their children to understand and respect technology better.

Sterling, in his introduction to Mirrorshades, does link cyberpunks — the authors of cyberpunk fiction — to punk music, but not as an origin point. Instead, he focuses on who they are.

Like punk music, cyberpunk is in some sense a return to roots. The cyberpunks are perhaps the first SF generation to grow up not only within the literary tradition of science fiction but in a truly science-fictional world. For them, the techniques of classical “hard SF” extrapolation, technological literacy — are not just literary tools but an aid to daily life. They are a means of understanding, and highly valued.

In pop culture, practice comes first; theory follows limping in its tracks. Before the era of labels, cyberpunk was simply “the Movement” — a loose generational nexus of ambitious young writers, who swapped letters, manuscripts, ideas, glowing praise, and blistering criticism. These writers — Gibson, Rucker Shiner, Shirley, Sterling — found a friendly unity in their common outlook, common themes, even in certain oddly common symbols, which seemed to crop up in their work with a life of their own. Mirrorshades, for instance.

…

Thus, “cyberpunk” — a label none of them chose. But the term now seems a fait accompli, and there is a certain justice in it. The term captures something crucial to the work of these writers, something crucial to the decade as a whole: a new kind of integration. The overlapping of worlds that were formerly separate: the realm of high tech, and the modern pop under- ground.

What Sterling suggests — though I don’t know if he means to suggest it — is that the early cyberpunks were on the bleeding edge, taking things from the underground of pop culture, doing things differently than the establishment — yes, you could say this work was “punk” in the artistic sense — but it wasn’t trying to be Capital-P God Save The Queen Punk.

It was a natural process because that’s what people were doing at the time. Sterling talks about rock music — in the 60s, counterculture was “rural, romanticized, anti-science, anti-tech” but always with an electric guitar at its heart.

As with any culture, what was once subculture becomes hegemony after a time, though I think Hebdige puts more weight on the thought behind it. When he explores subcultures, he attributes a great deal of conscious decision making to the reason people do things, but when I read about people like Johnny Rotten, I can’t say I see that.

What I see is a moment in time — the summer of 1977 was hot and apocalyptic. The newspapers went from “wow, what a nice summer” to “when will the summer end?” Westwood’s fashion was in style at the time.

How do we get style?

The way it usually happens is that a person does something individual — they develop a personal aesthetic that they bring somewhere. People see it, they think it looks cool, like Bethke thinking “hey, Billy Idol looks like Rayno” (he mentions, at one point, that he’s credited as creating the purple mohawk look, but explains Rayno’s mohawk was, in fact, white), and they put it in the story. Other people see it, they think it looks cool too, so they start copying it.

Eventually, the copied style, divorced from any ideologies that created it, but purely aesthetic, becomes old hat, and some individual somewhere decides they want a personal style that matches them. Look at the tech bros who try to copy Steve Jobs’ visual style of jeans and a turtleneck. He was doing it, almost certainly, because it’s how he wanted to dress. They do it because they’re trying to dress like him.

It’s possible people will see my neon pink shoes and my Caribbean blue pants and decide that bright shoes and complementary pant colors are the way of the future (though, God, I hope they don’t), and suddenly people will start dressing like me. Who knows? All I can say is that when I look at the clothes I choose and the colors I wear, I am happy and comfortable in them. But that is how it starts. It’s not A Movement, it’s A Stylistic Personal Choice, and that is influenced by the world in which we live.

The cyberpunk writers were dealing with the post-war haze of Vietnam, the alienation of the consumerist late-capitalist culture, and the ease of access for the personal computer. It wasn’t a statement, it was, as it is for all humans, the digestive process of absorbing the world around you and putting out something after it has been processed through their consciousness.

When I wrote one of my thesis projects back in 2016 or so on “dash punk aesthetics” (cyberpunk, solarpunk, steampunk, grispunk, and so forth), my core argument was that all of these genres are concerned, predominantly, with the aesthetics of technology. Dieselpunk isn’t atompunk, and their visual languages are distinct from each other.

Cyberpunk is an aesthetic born of a certain era. It looks cool. It still resonates — less so when asking “what does it mean to be human?” which is a bit heady for its humble origins, and more when it says “the world in which I live feels hostile to me. I feel like a stranger.”

It’s why the cyberpunk protagonists like Cyberpunk 2077’s V and Johnny Silverhand are so alienated from the world. Cyberpunk protagonists are people who are lost, who are looking for something to hold onto in a world that’s drowning them in corporate greed and poverty.

Anyone can tell that kind of story, and we’re lucky that Cyberpunk 2077 is so well written, because they’ve done a fucking great job of it. How could you play as V and feel like you belong in that world? You’re a murderous badass just trying to get by after a heist gone wrong (even Cyberpunk, the Bethke story, is about a heist). It’s why crime and cyberpunk so often go hand in hand.

So, yes, Cyberpunk is connected with ideas of being a punk, but only in the sense of being disaffected with the world as it is. It is not simple contrarianism, it is not inherently good or bad. Yes, a corporation can make a project that deals with these topics — CD Projekt Red is a corporation of artists, and they can tell you that Monsanto is evil and participating in regulatory capture just as honestly as anyone else can.

Cyberpunk is an artistic movement, and all movements have their time. They are vibrant, resonant, speaking the truth to the present, and after a while, they go through a filtering process. Eventually, they become aesthetic. That is the place where the big corporations will try to make them a reality, the way that Elon Musk’s useless Cybertruck is supposed to reflect the aesthetics of Cyberpunk with none of the alienation.

After a while, people reinvent the aesthetic. The genre, now fully understood, becomes a playground for new ideas. We can come back to Cyberpunk now, after it’s been flattened into a fashion statement, and we can reinvigorate it, in the same way that people can tell stories about adventurers in the 1800s, or George Lucas can turn Flash Gordon into Star Wars.

So Cyberpunk 2077 was never punk, not in the McLaren sense. It was punk in the way it recognized the world does not entirely suit us, with its all-consuming corporations and desperation for identity in a world determined to rob us of it.

And that’s a great deal more interesting than merely being a contrarian.

know thyself

Throughout this piece, the thread has been about history. People got upset with Cyberpunk for being broken because they didn’t know CD Projekt RED. They didn’t pay attention to CD Projekt RED’s history because they didn’t know the history of computer gaming, nor did they particularly care.

People who idealized the punks have no real awareness of the history of the movement, nor do the people who try to tie punk and cyberpunk any more closely than Bruce Sterling did in Mirrorshades, and he was one of the early cyberpunks, and he clearly doesn’t tie it in as closely as people do these days.

When we brought up Insomniac, they looked at reviews, which omitted framerates; they changed their emphasis to graphics over framerate, and the prominence they enjoyed on the PS2 diminished. They did not understand that their history of responsive, snappy games was what made them successful. They let their study of reviews rewrite their own history.

Even Naughty Dog, mentioned above, got a pass for crunch because people ignored its own history in favor of the revisionist idea that they’d made art. Druckmann ignores Naughty Dog’s history as a studio that makes games all about dudes who can jump, dudes for whom jumping is their primary thing, that they only made one game where a dude could not jump, and he tries to say “this is what’s going to make our narrative better.” Pressing the jump button isn’t going to make your writing more dramatic. That’s what someone who doesn’t know how to write would say.

Hell, even the gamers who bought into Elon Musk’s bullshit fake history as an inventor caused some of the fuckups we got to here. You ignore the past, you fuck up. When you create an empty space — like the seven year marketing cycle for the game — you create holes for bad actors to move in. Failing to understand your history is another way to dig those holes.

And that’s this piece, isn’t it? That’s the real point: we got to where we are because of so many people ignoring their histories. This is why we’re here, and what we can do with it but study our pasts in order to make a better future? To do that, we must know ourselves. Our actions do not happen in a vacuum — they matter, they have purpose and origin, and to leave those unclear is to invite disaster.

When Hebdige talks about the punks, he explores the Caribbean influence on Britain. He reckons with the racism of the white people. He shows how they attempted to reject the history of where their music came from, and we can see how some really sinister shit got in. It’s how we got to the Nazi skinheads. You need to know who you are, what you’re doing, and where you’re going if you want to understand the world and defend yourself from its ills.

Slapping a label on yourself and calling it a day, that’s just a fashion statement.

Hey, I could use some help with medical bills and groceries. If you want to support the work I do, like this article about the biggest pitfall young writers face and how to get around it, then hey, hit up my tip jar.

I figure this kind of writing helps inexperienced writers the most — which means people who might not have the finances to afford my work if I kept it behind a paywall. A paywall would help me, obviously — I could guarantee a certain minimum that would ensure my ability to continue writing these articles — but the people who need my help the most cannot afford it. So I gotta rattle the tip jar. I know it’s not pleasant, but like… think of me like a busker. I’d rather play a song on the street and get a few coins in a hat than just run a gofundme or something.

I, personally, can only do this with your support; if I wasn’t doing this, I’d have to get a second job, and as disabled as I am, that’s really not great. I have to spend between $160 and up to an entire Nintendo Switch’s worth of my income on medical care every two weeks. Seriously, it was $300 not too long ago. That’s an extremely difficult burden for me.

So it’s either do this or get a second job, and a second job would not be ideal given my current disability. So when you send me a tip, you’re not just helping a disabled writer like me, you’re helping tons of students, disabled people, and others without access. Thank you.

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