Do you have any theories as to why it petered out? Like you I feel it's more relevant today than ever before but also can't find a growing or healthy community with that mindset anymore.

Aside from conspiracy-theorizing about current events (and I don't use that term pejoratively), people tended to discuss the same topics. New cyberpunk media doesn't come out very often, so people tended to talk about the same books, movies, manga, anime, videogames, and fashion. Some of the alt-chans with dedicated cyberpunk boards would run out of ideas to talk about pretty quickly, since there weren't enough posts that the website had to prune old threads like 4chan did.

Another hypothesis I have is that cyberpunk media is not as captivating as it used to be since we arguably live in a cyberpunk world. In America there is unimaginable wealth inequality, with some cities having insane costs of rent for cramped apartments, with access to the best technology and medicine in the world but only if you can afford it. We also don't have to use media to imagine a world where digital corporations have a huge amount of power over daily life and the government spies on everyone all the time since both of those things are happening right now. I think we live in a cyberpunk world, it just doesn't have huge buildings, neon lights, and widespread punk fashion.

I came in contact with a few guys who wanted to make another alt-chan with a different model (see what other users are typing in real-time, and all posts get deleted early in the morning) but it never materialized as far as I can tell.

Edit: do any of you want to join an online cyberpunk community?

I don't think your two points are mutually exclusive, and suspect they are both correct to one degree or another. I live in a second-tier city working for a second-tier company and my daily life is already fairly cyberpunk! During the day I actively work on the advertising economy surveillance state, and at home I do things like install the Pi-Hole for my family and try to help anybody who will listen reduce their target profile for the eye in the sky. I mention this, particularly that my city and company are second-tier, because you don't have to work at FAANGM in SV to experience these things.

There is definitely a sense in which I would be interested in at least checking out a cyberpunk community, but as other have mentioned, it's more or less culture now.

Another challenge is when your alt culture goes mainstream, now it's just culture. The alt community has to tack deeper to the extremes to stay alt. You don't need an alt board to talk about current events (aside from conspiracy theories)

While this is true, I still experience a little of that early-exposure-to-the-Internet sense of wonder when I stumble across a community that's off the beaten path technologically. sdf.org's Gopher service was such an experience in the past couple years.

I think you nailed it there. We live in the cyberpunk world envisioned by so much if great cyberpunk media. Sure it's not as gritty and bleak, at least not in the West but I'm pretty sure that there are less fortunate places, where hi tech resides alongside low-tech in the cyberpunk aesthetic. Wikileaks, Anonymous, bitcoin, data heists, billionaires going to mars, VR, AR, stuxnet and cyberwarfare. The real world has it all.

Edit: yes to joining a cyberpunk community.

Not an online one. If it was a BBS running on a cube sat, then maybe.

>Edit: do any of you want to join an online cyberpunk community?

I will when Cyberpunk 2077 comes out next year. That game has been in development for more than 7 years and looks absolutely insane. They have released 48 minutes of gameplay for anyone who is interested (I have no connection or monetary interest in this game).

https://www.cyberpunk.net/en/news/22523/gameplay-reveal-48-m...

If you can't recognize that this game will be mediocre at best, I'm already sorry for the amount of disappointment you will have on release date.

>Edit: do any of you want to join an online cyberpunk community?

I'd be interested in that, but I stopped browsing Lainchan a while ago, for instance.

Maybe it's time to create anew.

Are you considering making it materialize now?

I'm considering making an alt-chan that cyclically purges content.

By now, it should be obvious that your efforts to attenuate the duration of long-running content won't prove to cultivate an increase in the quality of participation.

There are (at least) three aspects of online community participation, that seasoned users are pretty well-versed in:

  1. Archiving, mirroring and back-ups.

  2. Leaked screen captures and scrapes 
     of private direct messaging.

  3. Back-end aggregation of logs and 
     messages, even for supposedly private 
     SMS interactions.

Forget it dude. We all know that whatever signals get placed onto the wire turn out to be spliced through passive beam splitters and land in an open S3 bucket.

The ones that don't? Your girlfriend just screenshots it, and and tweets it out in the open for the world to see anyway. Whoops!

There are no more online subcultures. Only distortions of perception enforced by impulsive, would-be moderators.

The point of imageboard-style thread pruning isn't to erase the content from the Internet (after all, there's a small archive for every board on 4chan on 4chan itself and much larger ones elsewhere on the net) but rather it's to keep the content fresh and encourage new material rather than ruminating on old material - it's much easier to notice new posts when threads are small, instead of scrolling through 1000 posts that most people never bother to read. HN deals with it with the fact that if you comment on a HN post two weeks after it was posted then it won't bump the thread.

There is still one place left on the internet where conversations more or less fade away forever after they end: IRC

Sure, there are probably logs somewhere. User logs and server logs. But in all the decades I've been using IRC, I've never seen my chatlogs show up on a search engine before. It's just obscure enough and just low value enough to slip under the radar.

What about bash.org?

Oooh, If you're still at the stage of getting ideas for what people want to see...

Merchandising. I'd love to support a site like that with mugs or shirts of my favourite greentexts. You could get memorabilia of the instant when memes were born, and it would fix the monetization problem that pops up when they get big.

> You could get memorabilia of the instant when memes were born

An irrational anger stirs deep within my soul at this suggestion. Too many marketing agencies have attempted to monetize internet culture with catastrophically misguided results. At this point, monetizing internet culture is synonymous with meme murder.

Curious how you think this is a solution? There is often really useful info hidden in old threads, why would you purge that?

I have a couple theories. I think there's a genuine attempt to subvert the countercultures and it's easier to do so now than ever before, the decline of 4chan didn't feel organic to me at all, more like the members of the community got crowded out by automated accounts. Then there's the fact that the /punk communities have kind of splintered, I try to get involved in a lot of ecopunk or solarpunk for example, and there are various aesthetics that people gravitate to depending on what they think the solution is. And on a positive note, I think that this might just be a year where a lot of people are building - groups like 4 thieves, the Odin, Blockcon are actually getting after it. People are fairly busy, but this year in particular it's the kind of busy that doesn't make much noise.

You might consider asking why so many of the greatest cyberpunk authors abandoned the genre. Many science fiction authors idealistically try to produce stories they feel society needs to hear at a given point rather than just retreading genres that have been well-mined and which they feel aren't contributing to progress.

Google Neal Stephenson and "getting big stuff done". Stephenson wrote some of the best books late in Cyperpunk's sci-fi reign, but later came to feel that portraying technological advance as leading to decay, inequality, and corruption was contributing to the stifling of technological ambition in the U.S.. When huge technological leaps are necessary to get past pressing problems like clean energy, space exploration, etc., does it make sense for pop culture to portray technological progress as a negative force that will lead to dystopias?

William Gibson gradually moved away from Cyberpunk for a long period of time, writing novels that were set closer and closer to the present day. "The Peripheral", released in 2014, was the first book by Gibson set in what could be considered "Cyberpunk" for quite a while, but it's not really cyberpunk. (Note: Mild spoilers ahead) Technology does indeed create a calamity that negatively impacts world society in this book, but "cleptocrats" are just as much to blame for creating a dystopia. However, the book also shows some "big stuff" being done, even in the dystopia, and some pretty far-out tech ultimately prevents the calamity it created in the book's prime timeline. A fairly idealistic group of heroes actually change the world for the better using technology in this book, which is rather more optimistic view of both people and technology than is consistent with standard cyberpunk.

While Ernest Cline was not an established author before writing "Ready Player One", it's interesting to note that this book doesn't really represent a return to cyberpunk for serious science fiction. The plot can certainly be considered cyberpunk. (Note: I have read the book, but not seen the movie yet). However, it's basically one long dose of 80's nostalgia, so the cyberpunk setting makes perfect sense for that book. Thus, it's not really science fiction in this respect. It's not trying to predict or shape the future. It's an exercise in wallowing in the past, and the form of this novel matches that function.

I'm still a fan of cyberpunk, but I recognize that science fiction has moved on. It responds to the needs of society, and nightmarish technocratic dystopias are not what is needed today.

I think post-cyberpunk, which is essentially cyberpunk but with a more balanced view of the impact of technology, stands in good stead. Rather than having technocrats lording it over neon slums filled with addicts and hackers, post-cyberpunk portrays high-tech futuristic environments where technology is a disruptive rather than an oppressive force.

Not everyone is a stim-addicted decker working for the mob, but there's still a corrupting element when you include e.g. pervasive smart glasses that make regular social interaction more manipulative (Sight by Sight Systems), or biomechanical arms that give the wealthy an unbeatable advantage in sports (briefly touched on in Deus Ex: Human Revolution). It addresses real ethical questions about near-future advances in technology instead of the fairly blunt instruments of cyberpunk like power and oppression. I think there's still plenty of room for more post-cyberpunk content because the questions it poses are the ones we're actively talking about at the moment (or will be in the near future).

I think a worthy and more relevant successor to classic cyberpunk may be bio/ecopunk or whatever it's called, like The Windup Girl and much of what Paolo Bacigalupi writes.

It describes struggling or weird futures without the somewhat outdated trappings of cyberpunk, but with some of the same attitude.

I don't think it did. I was just like OP here, getting involved in the anonymous boards around 2004 because they were spreading funny images and links.

But I was 19 at the time. And around the age of 26-27 I stopped spending time in that culture.

So I think you just outgrow it.

But those cultures are still alive out there. New people come in, some old people stay.

There are always going to be kids who refuse the "normal" trends like snapchat. Who seek out alternative places and those alternative places are imo still websites. Apps will never breach this space because apps are too easy to adopt by large groups of your peers.

The alt.kids want something tougher, a challenge. And most of all they want to get away from the throng.

I'm just waiting to see persistent community forums in darknets. Of course I don't make an effort to track these things anymore but I'd love to know that it has become a reality.

Anonymity is important because just like games lead to programming and hacking, anonymous forums lead to free expression and sub-cultures. It might look like they're just goofing around but look at what 4chan became. We were just goofing around but enough people came to goof around to make it a potential movement.

PyCon? DefCon? Ethereum? MAGFest? Speedrunning?

What is cyberpunk actually? I have only a very vague understanding of it and would be interested in a summary and how it relates to the present.

It's many things at once. For some people, it's just an aesthetic. It's the whole "hacker, rebel, techy, lone-wolf" aesthetic.

It's also a genre of science fiction. It basically combines futuristic tech with dystopian/utopian elements, and grimy, old-world stuff. For example, a cyberpunk setting may have godlike AI, but everyone lives in the ghetto. Usually there are rogue actors that try to disrupt or exploit the technology system in place-- the "hackers". These actors are all about reclaiming old tech, building gadgets, and often cyborg-like body mods.

Cyberpunk is a sort of philosophy as well, along the same lines. This is where the subculture aspect comes in. Ever heard of steampunk? Steampunk in a fictional setting is where all technology is mostly mechanical, usually drawing on Victorian elements as well, and sometimes magic or supernatural stuff is included. Steampunk can be boiled down to an initiative to create stable, reliable, mechanically sound systems, usually put to interesting/novel use.

Cyberpunk as a subculture is similar. It's all about making tech work for you, pushing it to its limits, experimenting and exploiting within the given system. It's a rebellious attitude and a response to corporate and government tech control. It incorporates a fashion element like all good subcultures, likes to resurrect old tech (like nixie tubes), and often incorporates body modification (like NFC chips under the skin). People like to repair their own technology, modify their own technology, and collect obscure technologies. Many are also hackers, or want to be.

> It basically combines futuristic tech with dystopian/utopian elements, and grimy, old-world stuff.

In other words, “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed” — William Gibson.

And it will probably always be that way, not just in terms of global inequality, but even in a single person’s life: you might be among the billion or two people living as humans have lived for thousands of years, on subsistence agriculture and herding with no running water, but you also have a smartphone and can video-chat with your cousins across the world. That aspect of cyberpunk storytelling is just taking this fact of existence and amplifying it to draw attention to it.

A decent explanation of the media genre is "radical breakdown of the social order combined with radical progress in technology". It is also an aesthetic inspired by cyberpunk media. It is also a mindset which is quite hard to define, but is definitely prevalent among certain subcultures.

What was the cyberpunk worldview? Afaik it was something along the lines of "the world is run by vast networks of shadowy dystopian entities and we must use cryptography to resist this so we can have freedom" (basically, Information Technology libertarians)

Cyberpunk [1990] Documentary

"CYBERPUNK is Marianne Trench's stylistic documentary about the cyberpunk movement of the 1980s. William Gibson, author of cyberpunk classic Neuromancer, and Timothy Leary, famous advocate of psychedelic drugs, share their thoughts on the future of society and technology.

While looking a bit dated now, this film provides an interesting insight into the cyberpunk movement of the 80's. The feeling at the time was there was some overlap between this new technical age we were entering vs the counter culture of the 1960s."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxbZq8Zmd88

That's the cypherpunks. Cyberpunks are 'high tech low lifes'.

I believe Charles Stross described it as 'Whither bohemia in a hyperconnected world?'

Guy's got a way with words...

That's cypherpunks.