Why I Write Cyberpunk (blog post)

[pepper]

This is a blog post I wrote for my site. I really like how it came out, so I wanted to share it here as well :3 LMK what you think! Constructive criticism on my writing is always welcome!

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Lately I've been watching as younger people, gen z but also gen alpha, sort of embrace older tech for the aesthetic (and necessarily being shaped by the use of analog technology), while they also seemingly accept the existence of generative AI. I've sat in the living room of a punk house waiting for the band to set up in the basement as a father and his young kid he brought to the show (all ages house show) watched AI-generated pokemon documentaries on youtube on the tv, and teenagers walk in saying "woah, that looks so cool I love pokemon," "oh wait, I think that's AI?" and nonetheless continue watching as the millennial sits in the corner listening to her ipod wondering how a room full of punks can stomach the slop on the tv. I would have said something if not for the child clearly enjoying the AI slop, didn't wanna ruin the little dude's night. He enjoyed the music anyways (don't worry he had some heavy duty ear protection on the dad was a good dad).

There's this sort of weird duality to these sorts of scenes that makes me think what it might look like one day if/ when the majority continues to abuse generative AI tools, and the minority/ counterculture begins to outright reject AI and go all in on embracing analog tech. I can imagine a sort of cultural schism in our near future: one that can very much change how these groups communicate and interact with others, each group becoming more insular, and that difference going on to make two (or more) distinctly different ways of even understanding what it means to be human in the first place. AI, as its supporters love to repeat, is here to stay, and it’s something humans have never experienced before. It’s right up there with agriculture and the industrial revolution, except it’s happening quick, and breaking things faster than we care to fix them.

AI is a tool for corporate control of our very minds, Orwell's newspeak: change the way a population is able to communicate and you control that population. People can't put words to a thing if there are no words for it. People can't think something if they offload all their thinking to the robot that tells the lies the corporations tell it to tell. It’s very existence has shaped how I think about the future, and AI has become core to how I write my science fiction. Funny that this isn’t in any way how I used to imagine “AI in science fiction.” This isn’t Wintermute or Skynet, it’s orgy-porgy, and that’s somehow sadder and more frightening to me.

When I started to think about my cyberpunk art project as a cohesive world rather than as a couple standalone drawings as backgrounds for my fursonas, I found that it was obvious that Pepper and Sodie would be a part of that group that outright rejects generative AI. It only makes sense that the characters that represent my own values would be anachronists in a cyberpunk world.

In the 80s Bruce Sterling coined the phrase "hi tech, low life" to describe the cyberpunk genre. I think about this phrase a lot. Cyberpunk is my favorite genre of fiction. I admittedly love the bright neon aesthetic and all that, but to me that isn't what defines cyberpunk, it isn't an aesthetic. It is a genre able to convey a set of ideas that in equal parts, and for the same reasons, excite and warn of a frighteningly near future. Cyberpunk is telling stories about how technology shapes society, and how it is abused by its creators to enslave its users, and what we can do to deal with that. Yes Ridley Scott's Blade Runner is cyberpunk, but so is Terry Gilliam's Brazil.

I kind of wanted to further explore this angle of cyberpunk, in which we have LLMs in the same world as CRTs: "hi tech, low life, lo-fi". I really love the idea that Sodie has a robot arm that is kinda shitty because it just connects straight to her nerves and her brain, no AI that makes it "appear" to move naturally. Or she does all the math to launch into orbit and land on the moon by herself with a graphing calculator because she outright refuses to allow generative AI onto her ship, and she's not just a better pilot for it: she's a completely different class of pilot for it. There's the Fedex delivery cubes that have AI piloting that safely get your package to the port and that's all well and good, then you have the human pilot that will get that shit to your front door with a smile on her face and a high five: real, stupid, contagious human interaction. Her living room on the ship is a combination radio/record/CD/cassette player and a shitty CRT tv, the kind you used to see in high school CCTV in the early 2000s. No algorithms, no scrolling, just art and music and maybe some old 20th century DVDs.

The Corpos are so disgustingly rich that they built a goddamn death star, crashed it into the moon, then built a second one, then strip mined the crash site and turned the rest of the moon into a resort. Sodie's ship is built from trash and scrap, and runs way too hot and flies way too fast, but it's hers, and she has her friends, and she has her sister, and they can go wherever the hell they damn well please, and they can breathe, because they're alive.

I work as a semiconductor manufacturing technician for a living: I make computer chips, some of which are AI chips. On my breaks in the fab I draw on my cleanroom notebook in ink under yellow lights, and as I was drawing and thinking about this world, about what it means for our potential future, I started sketching Sodie's ship, and wondered at the freedom that it means to her. Like Mal Reynold’s Serenity: “You can’t take the sky from me.” I guess I just really wanted it to be real. So I kept learning, and drawing, and made something that is as real as I can get to that freedom that Sodie has. Makes me feel a little less like a slave.

Cyberpunk is really good at exposing all those worst tendencies of humans, but it shines best when it explores how we can use our humanity to be better than our mistakes. It is ultimately a very hopeful genre, and I kinda really need that right now. I told a friend once that the reason I'm making a fictional world that really just, super sucks is that, if my fursonas can survive in that world, maybe I can survive in this one.

-Robyn

[cyberfun1 (dizz)]

I think people are overestimating how important this AI stuff is because what I realized is that most of the opinions and feelings around AI are fuelled by the same corporations making them. And everybody who likes, dislikes, or doesnt care about AI has taken this bait without realizing it because the conversation has been utterly consumed by the corporations and those who support them.
The AI companies and supporters go onto news outlets and talk about how the ai they make is going to cause human extinction and a robots vs human war, and talk about how humans will have no jobs left so that people who dont like it will be scared into thinking of it as an all powerful being, despite it being non-sentient and non-autonomous
Then they say stuff like "AI is here to stay. The genie is out of the bottle" and "AI is good for coming up with ideas and medical stuff" and "it's a tool to be used" and other lukewarm stuff so that neutral people will take less proactive stances and blame 'people who misuse ai' rather than the corporations themselves and let AI stuff onto their platforms and profiles.
Then they tell people who like AI that it's sentient and will become AGI and encourage a view about AI not to dissimilar to the "future cyber worlds utopia" school of thought they had in the 90s so that they think it's the future and will save us.

But I think none of these ideas are right. It's all just marketing designed to totally consume the conversation and keep people subservient whether they like AI or not. and it's not even AI anyways! its neural-network based pattern mimicking software. Once ChatGPT rolled around, they started doing these scary guerilla marketing campaigns to force people to start using it. Next thing is that they try in put it into crucial parts of our lives so that no matter if people like it or not, there will still be a constant revenue stream. Thats why US tech companies are trying to influence tech laws in Europe, Asia, and America through right wing parties and people. A good example would be WorldEye. Owned by sam altman. he had these giveaways held in 3rd world countries where people scanned their eyes for free cash and nobody thought anything of it, now they're on the WorldEye blockchain without even consenting to it. They literally exploited poor people for their own benefit. So never let your hope get consumed by these companies because all this stuff about AI is bullshit and most of it aint true.