Articles & Essays

Released in 1992, Sneakers flew (and continues to fly) under the radar cyberpunk fans. Cyberpunk 2020, the popular tabletop roleplaying game was published just one year prior to the movie’s release. Snow Crash, often regarded by fans as the point in which cyberpunk literature officially “died”, dropped the very same year as Sneakers.

Privacy may be dead, but in this series we’ll be examining various small ways to take back control of your life and secure your data, as well as how to generally subvert the organizations trying to control you. First step: anonymous mail.

The normalization of “virtual” body augmentation has been building for many years, in several subtle forms – the digital alteration of photos for magazine spreads, promotional ads, and album covers being an example. Younger generations have been exposed to these edited, idealistic pictures of people they commonly look up to for the majority of their adolescent lives, being visually exposed by movies, TV, magazines, and especially the internet.

Modern mass media has created an idealized image of what a hero must look like: usually male, white, skinny but buff, pearly white teeth, full head of hair. The list goes on, crafting such a high and unrealistic criteria of perfection in order for anyone to feel good about themselves. 

What pops into your mind whenever you think of cyberpunk? A futuristic metropolis? Body augmentations? Government surveillance? Underneath a lot of neon luster, Katana Zero has all this and more.

Randonauts do not make clear distinction between the medium and the means of exploration. That is why, taking into consideration the simplicity of the operation of traveling through water by means of a ship, we can say that the operation of traveling through quantum randomness by means of multiple technologies that direct quantum random sacks of sentience (read: us meatbags) is a complex operation.

But that is entering too much into the realm of “Randonaut Theory” for now.

Walkaway is a book about many things, but fundamentally this is what it wants you to think about, the rest is a thought experiment viewed from a few different characters’ eyes. On paper, this book has everything I want from a post-cyberpunk book, including callbacks to the first-wave cyberpunk books.

Computer generated imagery and modeling have become an unlikely couple as “CGI influencers” begin appear in cyberspace. This new branch of technology has led to much controversy, backlash, and confusion.

I’ve recently come through a bout of Coronavirus. It was horrible. Imagine running a marathon and then going to a party where cigars are compulsory, the only drink on offer is 120 proof whisky, and the thermostat on the AC unit is broken – causing it to behave as if it’s playing hopscotch across Mercury’s terminator line. Add in some deeply disturbing dreams, and the morning after that party was my COVID-19 experience for two and a bit weeks. Your own experience, when it inevitably arrives, may be different.

Some early cyberpunk predictions feel as distant as their publication date; as those years have come (and gone), other predictions have begun to feel horribly prescient. Sure, we aren’t all cyborgs, can’t plug our brains into alternate realities and don’t live in an eternal night. Yet other ideas – like global corporations more powerful than nations, technologically provoked social upheaval and an alienated lower class – have arrived.