When you can't sleep at night and William Gibson visits you in a cyberpunk jellyfish form

It is impossible to move, to live, to operate on any level without leaving traces, seemingly insignificant fragments of information.

Jan 30, 2024

It is impossible to move, to live, to operate on any level without leaving traces, seemingly insignificant fragments of information. (William Gibson)

And we are information. That's right. We are information. Consider DNA. Codes, symmetry and asymmetry of our bodies. “Humans look symmetric on the outside but have stark asymmetries on the inside.” Pretty messy when you add emotions.

Cyberpunk thoughts by Tohamina (Freepik)

Someone said that writers are day dreamers. The great cyberpunk writers were no dreamers at all. Cyberspace is not a dream place; it is the “tech-nightmare” that walks beneath the surface of reality. Cyberpunk writers message to us was that technology is morally neutral only until someone uses it. Is there good info and bad info? That's what cyberpunk is about. That's what resonates in its colorful boxes; its blinding neons; its social excesses; its empowering transplants. Cyberpunk genre is a powerful shock. You get it if you who dare to venture between its stories. I love this narrative shock. I feel it page by page. Word by word. Cyberpunk walks on your skin, shatters your bones, distorts your thoughts, but then everything lines up again and the concepts begin to line up like neat codes; like the precise, sequential commands of a universal algorithm designed to decode society.

A shining illusion

Cyberpunk is about emotional technology:
Observe. Want. Buy.
Do it. Wish it. Buy it.
Act.
Morality has nothing to do with it.
Want it?
Go do it.
Want it?
Have it.
Are you afraid of death?
Use technology to ward off death.
Life is all a shining illusion.

The jolt that changed it

Pick up one of Gibson's novels and immerse yourself in his sea of bright garbage (a great deal of our world is bright garbage). Let yourself be itched by the cnidocysts of his words. His sentences are glowing filaments. His concepts are filthy jellyfish. His characters look like the dead neurons expelled from the brain of a privileged haver.
In the mid-1980s, science fiction experienced a jolt that changed it, made it different, rutile, and alien. I wonder if cyberpunk is science fiction, and answer myself that it may not be. But it took science fiction readers out of their spaceships. It came from novels and short stories by a number of authors, almost all of them born at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s, who were then grouped together under the label of cyberpunk.
That’s all. Or maybe not. I don’t know.

Neuromancer inside

I picked up Neuromancer again. This is the fourth time I read it. It rips away layers of oxidized thought each time. It strips me of certainties about life, roles, why. As I read it, I thought that we are like Gibson's characters, and that we inhabit the world, carrying the madness in our hearts and brains ‘cause this is our human potential. Madness. But are Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) perhaps foreshadowings?

Cyberpunk in jellyfish form

And then you realize that it’s not a matter of trying to foresee, but of trying to put the pieces together and see the present picture. And so you get it. You get that Cyberpunk lives and renews itself in the social cube of each individual reader. Mistakes in foresight may turn out to be side lines, branches that seemed to be blocked or left unbroken, based on visions and needs that our previous partial and confused view had overlooked or considered of little or no importance, or even not seen or even imagined. Half truths and hypotheses that are not far-fetched and that perhaps need to be considered for tomorrow, not only or not so much from a technological or socio-political point of view, but from that of the human condition.

A dream-brain code

And so you look up and you see the filaments of the jellyfish in front of you. The non-life form of life. The silent existence of the unconscious. And you ask yourself (or maybe you are asking the absurd jellyfish swimming before you): Where are we going? Why? And how long will it take us?Humans are doomed to dead. Technology can postpone the moment of death, but not infinitely. That is why all of Gibson's characters dance with death, because they want to live. They want to feel flesh, blood, bones, nerves, neurons connected to a soul, not a computer.
For me, true cyberpunk is not about how to live as a human, but how not to die as a non-human.