Cyberpunk just looks and feels cool.
The gritty, saturated neon signage and the dark urban “sprawl” engage our craving for mystery and danger. Body modifications that not only look dope, but can make us stronger, more agile, and more deadly, satisfy a deep-seated desire to be physically powerful. The ability to interface our brains directly with technology in a world that is dependent upon that technology scratches our itch for clever agency. But that edgy aesthetic can subvert the sociological narrative at the heart of cyberpunk stories—one that attempts to address issues of inequality, human value, and alienation—and I think a tweak is in order for whatever modern cyberpunk becomes.
I have loved technology and science fiction since a very young age, but I didn’t read Snow Crash and Neuromancer until my early twenties, and they are exactly the kind of absurd, visceral, and sexy fantasy world twenty-year-old BJ Bell wanted to inhabit. I connected with it instantly, and while I knew they were supposed to be dystopian fiction, and a sociological criticism of laissez-faire capitalism, I still wanted to live within those fantasies, and I know I wasn’t alone.
The archetypic cyberpunk protagonist is a hacker-samurai in a leather jacket or a smart-ass console cowboy with a self-destructive streak. They are literally rebels without a cause because their motivations are highly self-serving, and their antagonists are typically champions of a status quo that they (the protagonists) themselves have completely accepted. We still relate with them because it’s easy for us to feel as they do—that the deck is stacked—but also because they are just really damn cool. But what if we didn’t let them off the hook that easily? What if we demanded more punk in our cyberpunk?
One of my favorite parts of the Snow Crash world is the blatant absurdism that leans so far into the kitsch of marketing and capitalist culture that some would argue the novel is actually cyberpunk satire. Shamelessly, our main character is called Hiro Protagonist. On top of being a samurai and a hacker, he is a pizza delivery guy for a mob-run franchise. It’s a story that is engaging and doesn’t take itself too seriously. While the story is solid and mostly satisfying, there is some real heart and backbone missing. In the end, Hiro Protagonist faces off against the big bad Rife and defeats him, saving the world from the deadly virus—but without pause or comment on the tribalism of the burbclaves, the franchise-nations, and the corporate mobsters that perpetuate suffering, violence, and inequity throughout the world. Hiro is heroic circumstantially, but he’s not punk.
With Neuromancer, it is no wonder it became the quintessential model for what cyberpunk should look like. Night City is beautiful and dark, and so are the characters that occupy it. Molly Millions is a femme fatale that is impossible to forget, and the Rastafarians are delightful. The main character, Case, is a very different type of protagonist from Hiro, though. He doesn’t have a clear antagonist to heroically defeat, and more often you find him in a “man versus himself” narrative. The problem with that is that his arc is virtually flat. His story ends leaving him a little more wealthy and healthy, but otherwise still living the life of a self-interested hustler. What’s worse is that he has helped to unleash a god-like super AI, but has registered zero anxiety or guilt over the potential fallout from that decision. This is the opposite of punk.
What is punk: rebellion is intolerance (or at least anxiety) regarding a status quo that is contrary to the character’s own personal ethos. For rebellion to matter and be engaging, it has to reject nihilism and self-interest. It absolutely has to stand for something. Advocacy is punk.
If you think about what punk started out as in terms of music and culture, it was more a collective than a lone-wolf enterprise of self-interest. People showed up for one another in dank basements and dusty garages to listen to music that fat-cat record producers weren’t interested in promoting because it didn’t jibe with the established metrics. The music also carried a message that was contrary to an authority that punks did not see as representative of their own beliefs. It was a community of like-minded individuals. Community is punk.
I want to make it clear that I’m not arguing that the characters should start off full punk, or even be that way most of the time. I’m not saying cyberpunk protagonists have to be folk heroes. The characters that I fall in love with are those who show vulnerability and struggle to be better. They may go about things the wrong way and make bad decisions, but they get called out when they do. In the end their arc trends towards reshaping their life and their world for the better. They’re determined and they try. Ardency is totally punk.
What I think this looks like is what I have tried to do with my cyberpunk book, Karma Ledger. I hope that the world, the city of Nexus-Hub, is every bit the kind of world that Night City is in Neuromancer or the burbclaves are in Snow Crash—seductive and dangerous with all the trappings of that cyberpunk aesthetic. But when my characters fall into its trap, I don’t want to let them off the hook. The consequences of buying into it are theirs to reckon with. Taro Matsunaga is, hopefully, a protagonist that starts from a similar place to the cool samurai-hacker with a leather jacket (in his case it’s a casual suit jacket with joggers), but ultimately becomes a true advocate for his values and an ardent supporter of his community.
There is another piece that feeds into how punk is cultivated: the underlying power structure of the cyberpunk world. Karma Ledger’s world of Nexus-Hub stands apart from what I’d consider classic cyberpunk, because the greater antagonist isn’t a specific company or person so much as a social surface area. In reality, big bads don’t become big bads purely by chance and opportunity. They have their own communities and social circumstances that promote them into their position of authority in the status quo. So Karma Ledger has many antagonists. There’s a prominent face in Toge-Kim, CEO of Arura Group, who serves as the more tangible threat to Taro Matsunaga—but there are also the faceless ones: Arura Group as a whole, the other mega-corporations of Nexus-Hub, and the Nexus-Hub Board of Directors.
Those enemies are faceless by design, because they represent the greater threat: a community of self-serving individuals all making decisions to the detriment of society as a whole. They share an ethos. And often, they genuinely believe they’re on the side of progress. You can’t reason with that kind of threat, and you can’t launch an assault on it in a procedural narrative. In truth, there’s never an ending—there are only, at best, equanimous periods of relative peace and freedom before the whole damn cycle repeats. This seems daunting, but remember that the protagonist has their own punk community. In Karma Ledger that community is Sangha Syndicate, an equally anonymous force that supports our protagonist—and not with a decisive scheme orchestrated with the intention to subvert the antagonists, but with the merit-driven goal of building up their own community.
Although much of what I have said reads as something adjacent to a “substance over style” criticism of classic cyberpunk, that’s not my purpose. The classics are the classics for a reason, and I love them. They laid the foundation for me to build upon, and building on it is what I want to do. Let’s keep the cool, but tweak it by breathing ethos into it to give it more life, and then let’s amp up the punk!