The futures we imagine are never the ones that actually arrive. This is a basic fact of life.
The 20th century did not usher in an era of massive concrete blocks and men living in perfect harmony. Jetpacks and flying cars are still frustratingly absent. Alas, you will not go to the moon.
And so given our poor track record of predicting the future, we shouldn’t be surprised that 2020 finds us ... not slaving away at a zaibatsu that hires cyborg assassins to take out renegade biochemists, or kicking off the Straylight Run under the brutal neon of a Berlin nightclub, but stacking Funko Pops in cardboard boxes for Amazon or laughing at animal pictures on our phones while using the toilet, falling for phony IRS scams and yelling at malfunctioning spreadsheets.
And it's not just us, the working suckers for whom so much of the cutting-edge remains predictably out of reach. Our rulers, so cool and collected in those works of fiction, are clowns and goofs. Childish weirdos who build replicas of the Batcave, accuse scuba divers of pederasty, get taken in by phony heiresses, ignore cancer treatment in favor of smoothies. The villains of our own disappointing future are objects of mockery, not terror, more Douglas Adams than William Gibson.
But 2020 is still, undeniably, a Future Year. It’s a year that might — and often did — feature prominently in the templatized schlock sci-fi of the late eighties and early nineties, named things like Blood War 2020, 2020: Cyber Clash, and so on. You can probably imagine the poster art: A single robot eye, a metal hand, a blue grid and shimmering text, TRON-like, over a dark background.
This was the ethos and aesthetic of cyberpunk, that literary and artistic movement that encompassed Blade Runner, Neuromancer, Shadowrun, Schismatrix, Snow Crash, and a thousand other stories where the heroes are hackers and street ninjas, the villains shady corporations and their hired goons, and technology has fundamentally altered the rules of the game as deeply and permanently as might the existence of magic, or demons, or spells.
Cyberpunk was an extrapolation of the future from the present, just as much as those Moon-questing children's books of yesteryear. But whereas so many visions of the future are utopian, cyberpunk was fundamentally dystopian, a fate to be avoided even as we dreaded its approach. And so while it's easy to dismiss so many other visions of the future as a failure of reality to meet our hopes and dreams, the non realization of cyberpunk can't be dismissed quite so easily — cyberpunk is a vision of our fears, and so many of them have come so terribly true.
Because increasingly, it does feel like we live in a dystopia, and so many of our fevered imaginings of a cyberpunk future have come to pass. Corporate power is rampant. People feel smaller than ever. The seas rise and the land burns. The line between the imagined and the real, between our digital selves and our physical bodies, is as thin and frail as it's ever been.
It’s almost monthly that I see a declaration that “things are cyberpunk now,” usually accompanying a news story that, yes, feels ripped from Gibson or Sterling or Stephenson. (And I don’t judge, not at all. I’ve made plenty of these myself, over the years.)
Maybe it’s a renegade hacker, fallen from corporate grace, driven to the depths of despair for daring to compromise the wrong system.
Or a rival military leader, executed by a robot assassin piloted from a thousand miles away.
Or protesters using handheld lasers to take down police drones.
Or the discovery that the ultra-rich move in secret systems of power all their own, pursuing ghastly tastes with terrifying purpose.
Or even an athlete who competes with high-tech implants and winds up improbably tangled up in murderous intrigue.
But really, that's where the similarities end. The stories of cyberpunk seem to happen all around us, but the characters we imagined in them are troublingly absent. We ourselves are not ICE’d out super hackers or high-powered corporate executors, but — at best — hapless end-users of a bewildering and badly designed system. Gibson's Armitage would be stuck in customs arguing with underpaid contractors from an outsourcing firm, as Case and Molly ate airport sandwiches; Stephenson's Hiro, the Deliverator, would be driving a 15-year-old Kia Soul. (They got the video games right, though.)
But in the abstract, yes, this is indeed the future we dreaded. Technology has completely transformed human existence, and we humans find ourselves dwarfed by the vast machinery of capitalism, soaring high above us in steel towers that we scurry between and beneath, trying to eke out a living.
But maybe the death of that future is the beginning of another, grim though it may be. Maybe we were looking in the wrong place. What if the future is not cyberpunk, not science fiction, but a more down-to-earth blend of Unreality?
What if we're living in a new Gothic?
One of the limitations of cyberpunk is that it is usually cool, and mysterious. It's a world of competent people doing important things — something that feels so unlike our own world, where jobs make no sense and our leaders are loud-mouths, predators, and creeps.
But the hapless, doomed idiot and the pathetic king are perfectly at home in Gothic literature. In what’s usually considered the very first Gothic story, The Castle of Otranto, a kingdom descends into chaos after a sickly prince (dare we call him a Fail Son?) is crushed by a giant stone helmet on his wedding day and his father decides to marry his bride instead. It's both horrifying and laughable, both poignant and, frankly, a bit corny - just like us, just like our world.
The supernatural — curses, ghosts, and premonitions — is another building block of gothic tales that feels all around us, frustratingly so. What else are we to call the baffling manifestations of the Internet, where a cackling madman seems to foretell the future and the haunting visages of departed loved ones are thrown back into our faces again and again by incoherent, otherworldly systems?
Our technology provokes consternation, not awe. It doesn't plot against us — it frustrates and mocks us. Our real-life Wintermutes — AI, algorithms, predictive learning — aren't shapeless things of pure brilliance, but blind idiot gods that mainly want to sell us shoes and recommend movies, although they might accidentally convince our children to watch pornography or become Nazis instead.
Our crumbling architecture, too (requiring trillions to repair, to say nothing of improve) may have started off as the shining glass and steel of cyberpunk but increasingly resembles the decaying stone facades of Dracula and Frankenstein. And when we dare to build the sci-fi future of our dreams, the architecture of unrealized possibility mocks us with falling windows, melted cars, and mysterious moaning sounds.
I increasingly suspect we live in a world not of cyberpunk but of corporate gothic. Our mad kings are cultist CEOs bearing personality tests and efficiency programs. Our alchemists and mad scientists are incompetent startup weirdos and brain pill merchants. Our castles are not the crumbling stone of Transylvania but the cracked concrete and filthy streets of the financial district.
Our doomed romantic heroes are not Manfred and Conrad of Otranto but Lord Elon of Musk and Sir Jeff of Bezos. Our spells, our supernatural, our spirits are the manifestations of the digital world, ghosts in a baffling machine that haunt us and mock us in our attempts to make sense of the world.
If this were cyberpunk, really cyberpunk, then there would be heroes — or stylish anti-heroes, at the very least. But the most likely candidates — our Assanges, our Mannings, our Reality Winners and Ed Snowdens — are heroic for their deeds, to be sure, but not their roles in the story. We’ve had our genius hackers and mysterious techno-wizards. They came and went, but the villains of the story remain undefeated.
Because here in the age of corporate gothic, there’s no singular cyberninja coming to free us, no secret cadre of hackers powerful enough to actually end or even significantly upset the corrupt system — no Panther Moderns to help us liberate the Dixie Flatline.
Our change is slow, inexorable, the decay of kingdoms and the collapse of bloodlines. And if we're to break the cycle and topple the kingdom, to become the agents of change in our own gothic story, we may need to fit the mold dictated by the fiction in which we find ourselves: not the singular heroes of cyberpunk, but the angry peasants and villagers of our digital feudalism.
And like the end of those imagined Gothic kingdoms, it increasingly looks like there may well be torches and pitchforks involved.