New Comm Tech

This week’s lecture was titled “Cyberpunk and William Gibson”.

Firstly, an objection to the word cyberpunk which bothers me to no end.
Cyber = my least favourite prefix on Earth, as it has been attached to almost anything remotely technological for the last 20 years by the mainstream media as a way of trying to sound “hip” (think “cybergoth”) or frightening (“cyber-terrorists”).
Punk = This guy.
 

Thus making cyberpunk almost an oxymoron.

But that’s beside the point.  Cyberpunk began as a science fiction genre, normally involving a combination of post-apocalyptic/Dystopian future combined with science fiction.  Think Robocop meets Brave New World.  It would generally involve stories about “hackers” (another despised word), artificial intelligence and corporate quasi-government forces.  Thematically, the ideas of man’s reliance on technology would play a major part in the genre.  It became almost a counter-cultural trend in the 1980’s, most notably in Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner.

Cyberpunk prophesied that technology would, in the future, be so accessible and ingrained into our daily lives that humankind would be unable to live without it (whether physically or mentally).  In a way, that has become true for a small percent of the world.  Those of us who are fortunate enough to be able to afford technologies such as home computers, mobile phones and gaming consoles would most likely find it to be an almost inconceivable readjustment into life without them.

However, I do think the genre missed the mark, in regards to being a legitimate social commentary about the future of technology and its impact on our humanity. Like all new technologies, people were scared of computers.  Even to this day, stands the stereotype of the computer geek being an isolated, evil nerd - a mechanical Unabomber waiting to happen.  However, whenever new technologies emerge, people’s fears get the better of them and urban legends and hysteria run amok.  The Y2K bug was an example of this.

The truth is that even though we live in a time when most of the developed world is reliant on computers for various day-to-day tasks, societies inherent fear of the hacker (purported to some extent by cyberpunk) is completely unfounded.  Most people can barely work out how to install their own OS, let alone create a dystopian world of technological terror.  The kind of wacky hacker hijinks shown in modern films like Swordfish and Office Space is completely unrealistic.  Take, for example, the “hacker” currently on trial in America for using his hardcore “hacking” skills to guess Sarah Palin’s Yahoo! password: checking her birth date on Wikipedia.  Best case scenario, your “hacker” makes an afternoon by having some lulz at the expense of the ACMA (http://www.orzeszek.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/hacked-classification-board-website-content-500x311.png).