The Hegelian Emptiness of Cyberpunk 2077
Cyberpunk faces a choice between stark materialism and subjectivity
by Lapo Lappin
The release of the long-awaited Cyberpunk 2077 was expected to be something of a turning point for the cyberpunk genre. Christening a work after a whole subculture is a bold move—even so, Cyberpunk 2077 managed to provide this turning point, if only by clearly staking out the battle-lines between two competing factions for the legacy of the genre. We might broadly think of these factions as those pursuing a “Hegelian” vision of cyberpunk, in which the focus is a materialist analysis of a technocratic future, and “Kierkegaardian” cyberpunk, pursuing a more subjective and existential approach that concerns itself primarily with individual experience of both the now and of an imagined future. Hegelian cyberpunk focuses on what the future would look like, from a God’s-eye view; Kierkegaardian cyberpunk focuses on what the future would look like for us.
Intentionally or not, Cyberpunk 2077 fulfilled a direction which cyberpunk has been traveling towards for some time: better than any other media to date, it managed to convey the sheer anonymity of life under technocratic capitalism. In the game, the streets of Night City are flooded with passified spectres of people, completely hollowed out by late-stage capitalism. This is in keeping with much of recent cyberpunk, which has become more and more engrossed in the material conditions of the technocratic future—think, for instance, of the elaborate urban caste systems and ubiquitous advertising of Netflix’s Altered Carbon.
We are—not unlike Hegel, or the Hegelian-inspired Marx—interested in how the great plotlines unravel: which permutations global capital will morph into, what hydra-like heads will sprout when the current ones are mulcted. In creating or consuming this materialist Hegelian cyberpunk, the question we so often want an answer to is simply this one: what will happen to the world if market forces are left unchecked? Cyberpunk offers a persuasive, if bleak, answer.
What will happen to the world if market forces are left unchecked? Cyberpunk offers a persuasive, if bleak, answer.
Earlier cyberpunk—Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner being the paradigmatic example—attempts to do the exact opposite, showing how subjectivity can survive even in a place like a future technocracy. The central question of Blade Runner, after all, is the one about the inner life of robots: how, and to what extent, do their inner lives differ from those of humans?
This unabashedly subjective focus of earlier cyberpunk pointed to ways of resistance within an unimaginably oppressive system. And we can still learn from these tactics of resistance today; subjectivity and our existential situation have profound and highly relevant political consequences. This cyberpunk, like its Hegelian counterpart, was a prophet of doom, colorfully illustrating the shape of the future. But by examining the deepest existential questions, it also offered an idea of how radical politics could survive. What is it to be human? What is freedom? What is worth dying for? We should therefore canonize the existentialist philosopher Sören Kierkegaard as the patron saint of this faction in the battle for the soul of cyberpunk.
If we glance through the history of cyberpunk, we can see how the medium has drifted more and more towards the Hegelian end. Like Hegel, who was interested in how history develops and viewed every culture as a stage on the path of the world’s self-development, the interest in cyberpunk has been on the future of capitalism, in trying to supply a vision of a world that has stretched itself as far as possible from an earlier vision of communist utopia that never arrived. The interest drifted away from subjectivity (whether human or nonhuman) and toward the machinations of the stage behind them. This arguably culminated in the Matrix franchise, which discovered that one could simply exchange the corporate machinery with machinery simpliciter and have robots step into the shoes of capitalist corpos with little difficulty. But The Matrix does not, as could appear, denude cyberpunk of its critique of capitalism. It fulfils it: in the torrents of glittering green ciphers that gave the film its unmistakable aesthetic, the flows of capital are revealed in their true anonymity.
This dialectical movement within cyberpunk has been accelerated by the philosophical nodes of the subculture itself. Highly influential in this respect was the Warwick-based accelerationist philosopher Nick Land—before his later decay into neo-fascism—who theorized the existence of what he called the “teleological identity” between artificial intelligence and capitalism. Land argued that capitalism and AI are two sides of the same coin; that capitalism is by its nature a complex self-organizing system meant to postpone an entropic annihilation, and that this—as a natural, ineluctable consequence—births artificial intelligence into the world as the most effective means to propagate itself.
The hostile takeover of human culture and society on the part of parasitic robots—explored in many cyberpunk scenarios—is itself then a simple fulfilment of a Hegelian storyline. But it tells us nothing about how it feels to be there. In fact, there is nothing like what it feels like to be there at all; there are simply soulless, mindless, anonymous flows of technocapital.
Cyberpunk 2077’s dearth of subjective depth borders on the dystopian.
The apex of this dialectical movement was reached in Cyberpunk 2077, a game with such a dearth of subjective depth that it borders on the dystopian. The main character, “V”, is a blank slate without name or history, one whom can be molded according to one of three equally insipid prefabricated archetypes. The demeanor and characteristics of this ill-defined creature can be further altered through surgical implants and bio-hacking. His (or her, or their) entire being is an appendage: it has no essence, only loosely connected accidents.
Within the game itself, V’s existence is no less empty. He flaneurs around swathes of zombie-like NPCs who flutter around in a sepulchral silence. Now and then they will blurt out the same hebetic sound-bite over and over. Occasionally, in glitches of poetic justice, their entire faces are completely erased. The question is whether this is in fact a bug or an actual feature of the game—or perhaps it is simply part of how the creators, and the cyberpunk genre, imagine the people of the future to be.
By contrast, the other side of cyberpunk can offer an antidote to the existential shallowness of Cyberpunk 2077 and its recent predecessors. The locus classicus for this aspect of cyberpunk is to be found at the heart of—and especially at the end of—Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner. The film’s message is loud and clear: even within a society of anonymity, radical subjectivity still manages to burst through. In doing so, it creates a place of resistance against the incumbent, all-pervading logic that assails it from all sides. The film’s android “replicants” are literal commodities, simple excrescences of global capital. Denied the opportunity to have an identity of their own, their very essence is anonymity. Nonetheless, one of them manages to formulate the following, his tears commingling with the acidic rain:
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack-ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Blade Runner draws our attention to the irreducibility of subjective experience. Subjectivity always transcends the restriction of the specific material-historical situation it finds itself within. As Kierkegaard would phrase the matter, “the single individual is higher than the universal.”
If cyberpunk wants to remain politically viable, it must return to the question of subjectivity and resistance under capitalism.
Kierkegaard’s existentialism rebels against the Hegelian fixation with the big picture: what does it matter to us, in our daily struggles to find meaning in what we do, that we are stages in the world-soul’s (im)personal progression, playing out the rules of logical necessity? The existential questions remain inescapable. As Harrison Ford’s much-maligned voice over observes of Roy Batty’s death in Blade Runner: “All he’d wanted were the same answers the rest of us want. Where did I come from? Where am I going? How long have I got?”
If cyberpunk wants to remain a viable inspiration for political action, it requires a reappraisal of the forgotten Kierkegaardian aspect of the genre— the question of what subjectivity under capitalism could be like, and how subjectivity can be a locus of resistance against the logic of the market. Cyberpunk cannot simply continue to draw up sketch upon sketch of how things will fall apart, video game after block-buster after comic after whatever-else, without offering any way to wrestle with the beast in an existentially and politically meaningful way. If it continues along this path, the entire genre is doomed to a glittering irrelevance.
The neo-feudal, technocapitalist skylines of cyberpunk must be viewed from that rain-drenched rooftop in Blade Runner. To paraphrase Kierkegaard’s celebrated lines in Fear and Trembling: if one generation rose up after another like the chips in a silicon android, if one generation succeeded the other as one implant upgrade over the next, if the human race passed through the world like smog over a terraformed clouds, or as a shuttle through skies the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel; if an eternal oblivion always lurked hungrily for its prey and there were no power strong enough to wrest it from its clutches – how empty [and faceless] would life be!
Lapo Lappin is freelance writer and graduate student in Philosophy and History at Siena University, Italy.
