The Future Died in 1999
Reclaiming the radical possibilities of Cyberpunk.
by Colin Broadmoor
The future died in 1999. Ever since, we’ve been trapped in the eternal present—waiting for the other shoe to drop.
For two decades, we’ve fought the same wars, watched the police murder the same people, voted for the same duopoly, and paid for the same IPs in books, movies, and video games. I’m typing this at the close of A.D. 2020—the year I waited for all my life, the way some Christians wait for the Second Coming.
2020, the year forever associated with media like R. Talsorian’s Cyberpunk 2020 (2nd ed., 1992). Each day I wake in 2020 and look around to see myself surrounded by the ash and shadows of the spent neon future of my youth.
For those of you who were not there or don’t remember, it’s difficult to explain the ways in which the 1990s were different from today. There are two key aspects of that final decade of the 20th century that you must keep in mind:
- It was the last decade in the West in which the analog took precedence over the digital in all fields.
- People felt as if we were witnessing the first rays of a 21st-century dawn, one that promised humanity better living through technology.
Cyberpunk—as a media genre—existed in various forms since at least the 1970s. It experienced a pop-culture florescence in the 1980s with iconic films such as Blade Runner (1982), Videodrome (1983), Bubblegum Crisis (1987), novels like Neuromancer (1984), When Gravity Fails (1987), Islands in the Net (1988), Ghost in the Shell (1989), and games both video—Metal Gear (1987)—and tabletop—Cyberpunk (1988).
The 1980s produced the most influential cyberpunk media, but it was in the 1990s that this influence was most powerfully embodied in a social sense. In the ‘90s, Cyberpunk was a living genre.
As the Reagan years wound down, elements of the aging Punk scenes and illicit Hacker networks congealed into an anarchic subculture that was referred to with the “cyberpunk” sobriquet as early as 1981 (see: Katie Hafener and John Markoff’s Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier, 1991). Starting in 1984, the hack-curious could read 2600: The Hacker Quarterly and by ‘89 there were glossy “lifestyle magazines” geared toward cyberpunks—most famously Mondo 2000. In 1992, a special coffee table edition of Mondo 2000: A User’s Guide included a statement of six tenets of “Hacker Ethics” drawn from Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984). Two of these rules were central to the hacker/cyberpunk ethos of the ‘90s:
- Mistrust authority—promote decentralization…
- Computers can change your life for the better.
If you were into hacking or phreaking (unauthorized access to and control of telecom systems) you were already operating outside the law. The FBI used high-profile arrests characterized by dramatic and overwhelming force to deter would-be hackers—but this had a negligible effect, as the cred earned by taunting federal law enforcement was worth the risk of your mom getting no-knocked in the middle of the night by the SWAT team.
Elements of the aging Punk scenes and illicit Hacker networks congealed into an anarchic subculture that was dubbed “cyberpunk” as early as 1981.
As an aesthetic extension of Hacker culture, cyberpunks identified as outlaws even if they were themselves barely computer literate—or, worse, simple “script kiddies” who relied on code written by more skilled hackers for their mischief. Competent or not, cyberpunks saw themselves, like every counterculture before them, as the natural enemies of law enforcement and authority. For a cyberpunk, technology—computers in particular—provided the key to taking down The Man. Colonel Colt may have “made men equal,” but the computer opened up a new front in asymmetric warfare against an otherwise effectively invulnerable security state.
Technology promised new modes of resistance and a true digital revolution. These days, the Cyberpunk genre is primarily associated with dystopia, but at the core of the ‘90s subculture was an optimism that insisted it was possible to fight back… and to win.
On March 3, 1991, roughly 20 LAPD officers participated in the beating and torture of Rodney King, an unarmed Black man, in front of a crowd of horrified onlookers. George Holliday, who lived across the street from the attack, grabbed his camcorder and filmed what has become one of the most famous works of citizen journalism in the history of the United States. After being rebuffed by the LAPD when he offered them his footage, Holliday passed KTLA the clip of the police hammering King’s body with batons and kicks for more than five minutes (CW: graphic violence) and it immediately caught fire across the major networks—a proto-viral video. When an LA County jury acquitted four of the police officers involved in beating King, Angelenos greeted the verdict with a week-long uprising that provided enough suburban nightmare fodder and rightwing talking points to drive content on the nightly news for months.
Even as technology amplified the problems caused by capitalism, ‘90s cyberpunks still believed tech could be used to build a better world — and just because we live in a worse world, doesn’t mean that they were entirely wrong. We’ve allowed ourselves to be disarmed, to lose sight of the radical revolutionary potential of cyberwarfare. There was a lingering cyberpunk ethos to “hacktivist” projects like Anonymous and Wikileaks, but nothing has replaced them. The vulnerable digital infrastructure of corporations and online shopping would seem to be an ideal target for online protesters, but we haven’t seen much in the way of coordinated DoS attacks. However, as police violence against protesters in the streets escalate, it is inevitable that the protests will take digital form—and by this, I don’t mean celebrities and brands posting black squares.
1990s media frequently referenced the Rodney King video and subsequent uprisings, but the impact these events had on cyberpunk media cannot be overstated.
Kathryn Bigelow’s 1995 film Strange Days culminates in a mob of police clubbing an unarmed Angela Bassett as she tries to explain their mistake—ultimately, the crowd of onlookers, led by a young Black man, attack the police and rescue her. The central corrupt cops are thwarted with evidence provided by a technological MacGuffin that records a user’s memories and physical experience. Rodney King is rescued! Technology triumphs over authority! It’s worth noting the film is set in the-then-not-so-distant-future of L.A., New Year’s Eve 1999. Counter to the pessimism we associate with Cyberpunk these days, the film’s ending suggests that a better future made possible by technology—in which police brutality is prevented—was coming.
‘90s cyberpunks still believed tech could be used to build a better world.
While the LA Uprising was still in progress, Billy Idol was hard at work on his soon-to-be critically-panned concept album Cyberpunk (1993). Inspired by what he saw, Idol wrote the song “Shock to the System” which included samples from news coverage of the riots. “Shock to the System” was the first single released for Cyberpunk and was promoted with a music video. In the video, Idol—playing a less glamorous version of himself—witnesses the police beating a man. Idol pulls out his camcorder and starts filming until the cops spot him and then kick his ass and break his camera. In a disturbing stop-motion sequence reminiscent of Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), wires and camera parts meld with Idol’s body until he becomes a human/camcorder cyborg. The citizen-journalist-as-cyborg then leads a crowd of protesters against the cops, who shoot him, only to discover that he’s now bulletproof.
The cyberpunk community received Billy Idol’s album with outright hostility. In Cyberpunk Handbook: The Real Cyberpunk Fakebook (’95) by St. Jude R.U. Sirius and Bart Nagel, the entry for “phonies, poseur & pretenders” is accompanied by an empty box with the words: “photo of Billy Idol goes here.” But Idol’s belief that the uprising was justified and his optimism that camcorders and related technologies would empower citizens and put an end to police brutality was reflected throughout the genre. Indeed, it seemed as if such a thing really were possible as “cop watch” chapters popped up across the country in the wake of the Rodney King video.
Even Demolition Man (1993), a work of Cyberpunk Copaganda, allows for this possibility. The film opens with police helicopters circling above a burning Los Angeles—sights made iconic by coverage of the LA Uprising—and then comes the grim punchline: “Los Angeles 1996.” Sylvester Stallone’s heroic cop gets framed for police brutality and causing the deaths of hostages, and gets sentenced to cryogenic freezing until the plot requires him again.
The central conceit of the film is that by 2032, society will have advanced through technology to such a point that violence—and violent police—would be eliminated. If you think that sounds pretty good, Demolition Man disagrees. The rest of the film concerns itself with inventing a reason—superbadguy Simon Phoenix, wonderfully played by Wesley Snipes—to reintroduce violent policing—Stallone—into a utopia.
One of the great things about Demolition Man is that despite its completely reactionary logic, it consistently produces anti-police images. These images range from the clearly fascistic cop outfits that are evolved forms of the LAPD motorcycle officer uniform to a revisionist re-enactment of the LAPD’s attack on Rodney King.
Baton-wielding future cops surround Snipe’s Simon Phoenix but—Alas!—being neutered by cognitive behavioral therapy they cannot consummate their violence against him. This is meant to show that, without their violent inclinations, police would be weaklings ill-equipped to deal with criminals. Instead—and thanks in a large part to Snipes’s charisma—the audience gets two minutes of wish-fulfillment as an unarmed Black man goes Billy Jack on a bunch of pigs.
In this way, even ‘90s Cyberpunk with bad politics inadvertently conveyed the same anti-authoritarian messaging and the idea that technology would mitigate social ills. Cyberpunks were people who believed that things were bad and getting worse, but they also believed that individual or group action amplified by technology could change the world—in the words of Crash Override in Hackers (1995), “Hack the planet!”
So, what happened?
After the Y2K bug failed to plunge the world into a digital dark age, the promise of the 21st century was still palpable among the people. But then we slipped into a timeline that saw the Supreme Court steal an election and hand it to a puppet with daddy issues who wasted no time turning a catastrophic terrorist attack into an unending imperialist “War on Terror” that has cost millions of lives, destabilized multiple regions of the world, and unleashed the full power of the surveillance state and militarized police.
Even ‘90s Cyberpunk with bad politics inadvertently conveyed the same anti-authoritarian messaging and the idea that technology would mitigate social ills.
Around 2005, once the digital infrastructure developed to a level where it could support streaming video and its user base increased to allow for nonstop content from a media-hungry audience, “virality” became the norm and the goal for online activity. Whereas the Rodney King video going viral on old media was something you might see every few years (see also: footage of OJ’s white Bronco), the internet could produce hundreds if not thousands of viral videos daily.
Gone were the days when the ‘net was a resource—an endless library—or a place to meet fellow initiates of esoteric subcultures. After people realized that virality could be monetized, cyberspace became an extension of Reality TV programming. The internet has been Debord’s spectacle ever since.
Cyberpunk, as it was known in the ‘90s, was really a genre of the old internet. That period of Cyberpunk art—optimistic art that argued technology could liberate people—came to an end with the release of The Matrix (1999).
The Matrix didn’t introduce the idea that reality isn’t real to Cyberpunk. Films like Total Recall (1990) and eXistenZ (1999) also explored the trope (see: A Dream of Revolution: Total Recall, the Red Pill and Reality by the great Trevor Drinkwater in this very magazine!). But The Matrix—largely on the strength of its groundbreaking CGI—caught the attention of the broader culture. Ever since, Cyberpunk media has focused on questions of un/reality—we live in constant paranoia, afraid that our very bodies and senses are gaslighting us…in the same way the US government gaslighted the world with visions of WMDs.
We see this fixation across 21st-century Cyberpunk in works like Black Mirror and even in the blandest examples of the genre like Ready Player One. The reason this theme resonates so well with 21st-century audiences is that our digital lives now dominate our offline lives, to the point where actual life just becomes content to be commodified. Not only do we become more divorced from our understanding of material conditions, we now doubt material reality itself.
Alongside this digital existential dread, we also find a sense that technology—instead of uniting the world and bringing people together—creates an ever more atomized and alienated society. This is particularly noticeable in “AI gf” media. The AI gf—girlfriend—is a simulacrum that promises intimacy, empathy, and real human connection, but inevitably results in depressing machine sex. Examples of this trope can be seen in Her (2013), Ex Machina (2015), Blade Runner 2049 (2017). Of course, this theme has been addressed in Cyberpunk before in works like Cherry 2000 (1987) and even Metropolis (1927), but it’s taken on a new significance in a period that has seen the parallel evolution of the Incel movement.
2020 was not worth waiting for, and 2077 will be no different. If we want to have a new future, we need to build it ourselves.
Feelings of loneliness and isolation permeate 21st-century life and, consequently, art. For some reason, we’ve decided that technology should be up to the task of replacing human companionship, and tech’s inability to do so has produced a profound sense of pessimism about our relationship to technology. The message is clear: though you may have a good time with your AI gf, you’ll be crying into the mirror when you wash her out in the sink afterward. Pity sex is no solid basis for the techno-human relationship.
In the 1990s, cyberpunks thought they could discipline the authorities through technology. They thought cyborg citizen journalists would provide democratic oversight over law enforcement. Today, we watch as hundreds of Rodney Kings are beaten, gassed, and shot. It’s just content now. Even as we’re more connected to one another than ever, we feel increasingly isolated and abandoned. Even the Jolt Cola formula is different.
We’ve missed the Cyberpunk future and landed squarely in what Kurt Schiller calls “Corporate gothic.”
We must reject the idea that technology can only alienate us when, even as you read this, we—who have never met—are sharing a moment of communication made possible only in cyberspace. We must resist the spectacle’s ability to get us to question our own material reality—obscuring the true levers of power with conspiracy theories, media-induced delusions, and false consciousness (recall: The Matrix replaces Cyberpunk’s archetypal villainous corporation with a rogue AI, thus severing the genre from its class criticism). We must embrace the potential offered by technology to disrupt networks of capital. We must make sure 2021 is not just another unremarkable step along our short road to a corporate-sponsored extinction event.
The worst part of 2020 is that even after all the needless death and pain, terrible losses and absolute stupidity, it won’t mean anything come 2021. A few months from now, people will be talking about 2020 like it was “just a bad year.” It won’t even have the finality of being the end of the world. This isn’t the 2020 we were promised. This isn’t the future.
The future is something you have to believe in—and how long has it been since you believed in something? It can’t be this endless present we’ve lived for the last two decades that we know will stay roughly the same but will get just a little bit worse every day until we all choke on the burning air. 2020 was not worth waiting for, and 2077 will be no different. If we want to have a new future, we need to build it ourselves. And before we can do that, we must dismantle the system that’s killing us and all other life on Earth.
So break out your pager, vinyl pants, and mirrorshades. It’s time to bring back a little of that ‘90s cyberpunk optimism and asymmetric electronic warfare.
Hack the planet.
Colin Broadmoor is a Contributing Editor at Blood Knife. He is a recovering anthropologist who writes about mass media, technology, and cyberculture.
