> Cyberpunk was essentially a sub-type of counterculture, and counterculture itself has pretty much been dead for a couple decades now. When the hackers are primarily interested in VC funds, the cryptocurrency ethos overtaken by the finance industry, and the goal of every artist to “make it” as a creator, there’s basically no room for culture that explicitly wants to operate outside the system.

Counter-culture still exists. Look to minorities for it to exist, and think independently outside of what you get exposed to through media. The small web, and mastodon, are both built on the backs of queer/bipoc people, and it's possible to find spaces that still are operating outside of the system, you just have to actually leave the system to find it. Nobody's going to put it on your facebook or linkedin feed.

Which is one reason I think novels like Neuromancer and count zero and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, feel so dated today, is that they are so decidedly not-queer in their sexual dynamics.

Eh, that is a take but hetero normative sex still sells lots of porn subscriptions today and depictions of queer sex in media only feel novel because it was so heavily disallowed in the past. Whereas hetero normative sex hardly appears in movies or tv anymore because it's boring to watch actors pretending to have sex when you can see the real thing effortlessly.

The other factor both of you are failing to see is that the majority of males are hetero normative and don't like watching sword fighting. This is not an outdated take but factual reality. There is nothing wrong with the alternative, but depicting only "hetero-normative" stuff is the statistical norm back then and even now.

It's absolutely the right thing to do to legitimize "non-hetero-normative" in the same way left-handedness is legitimate but saying any of it is "normal" and declaring anything not involving it as "dated" is absolutely out of touch with reality.

I didn’t even mean about sword fighting.. it’s just descriptions of women characters and the way the male characters talk about their lusty passions is soo boring.

Agreed, but lol at the center-right hacker news populace ever accepting such a philosophy.

Sadly, the minorities (in the Anglosphere at least) don't deliver at either "think" or "independently". Their counterculture is as countercultural as joining a church. Just another way to fit in. Be be slightly different and they'll chastise you - a high-profile example of this mechanism has just happened again https://archive.is/qeDfU. Unless that's what it's always been.

Hooligan-like countercultures are also excluded as far as "think" or "independently" goes for an obvious reason.

Thus, the only independent thinkers I've encountered are individuals who don't aim to have all the answers, who can accept disagreements, who attempt to know themselves - but those are individuals, not countercultures.

I'm erring on saying that countercultures were never about independent thinking. They were about fitting in with different people.

> I'm erring on saying that countercultures were never about independent thinking. They were about fitting in with different people.

This is my understanding. Was it really different in the 60s/70s?

Being unique, by definition, means you don’t fit in with a “culture”. There’s something inherent in human nature that causes people to form tribes (and copy others leading to cargo-culting, groupthink etc.); those who are too different to want to join the mainstream group still want to join some other group, they want to be accepted, which means they still have pressure to conform.

The main thing I see today is that most liberal “countercultures” don’t tolerate political differences. But they seem to tolerate other differences (at worst if nobody else has your difference it’ll be ignored which has always been the case), and perhaps 60s/70s counter-culture tolerated political differences more but had some other taboo.

In the 70s/80s, the jobs that were available to you were basically what your family member could "get you in". I am of that age and I remember General Motors was a great place to work at that time. My friend "got in" after high school because his father was a union boss. For me, "getting in" to General Motors was literally impossible because I had no connections.

I was into 90s cyberpunk and the problem was the ideas were basically all wrong about the internet. Or maybe we could have gone in another direction with the internet but didn't.

The main difference overall though is in the past life was incredibly boring. It was so boring people had to invent all these cultural activities to escape the disconnected, mind numbing boredom of existence.

Life today is just much more interesting regardless of finances so there isn't the motivation to hang out at goth bar once a week.

What makes life so much more interesting today as compared to 50 years ago?

When's the last time you were bored? It's been ages for me. Too much going on all the time. Most people have an endless scroll one phone tap away.

I was bored all the time in the 90s and early 2000s.

I actively am trying to cut off the overstimulation though. I never used those types of phone apps but youtube and the net have endless content.

I think if you searched you'd find other articles mentioning the lack of boredom, I don't think I'm an isolated incident.

When's the last time you were bored? When's the last time you did something interesting?

I'm putting out a new track on spotify, as soon as i get the master back so I'm excited for that. I'll admit though, not a ton of interesting stuff going on. I mean, I make jewelry, am learning Japanese and do visual art too so I'm not lacking for good hobbies but idk where to meet people these days.

Being bored is good for you my dude. Google for it.

Seems you missed the part of my comment where I say I'm explicitly trying to cut down on stimulation. I'm aware.

Not being bored doesn’t mean you’re leading an interesting life.

Not at all. I see why you say that. My general thought of why things more interesting is not that they truly are, rather our time and attention spans have been taken up by more frivolous things while boredom leads to ideas and innovation.

I meant that boredom I experienced earlier in life was arguably a good thing.

I see, I thought you were trying to argue for the GP’s point.

> In the 70s/80s, the jobs that were available to you were basically what your family member could "get you in"

(UK here). My first job in 1987 was in computing for an engineering company and my father had exactly zero influence on me getting that job.

I don’t think that’s an accurate view of what the job market was like in the 70s and 80s.

My point was more that I think there was more of a feeling of security, in the sense that regular people felt a little more optimistic about the future and their personal finances. People started low on the totem pole but felt confident about moving upwards slowly. That feeling doesn’t really exist anymore.

>In the 70s/80s, the jobs that were available to you were basically what your family member could "get you in"

Perhaps this may have been true for those who didn't have a university degree. Otherwise, this experience doesn't line up with anyone in my family.

I partially disagree, there are still some cyberpunk medias that feel fresh for today. But yes, they're definitely not as famous as the previous ones.

Mirror's edge (catalyst or not) comes to mind immediately, that game feels like is set in an apple store. It essentially is a modern cyberpunk setting, which apparently is called post cyberpunk.

Another title coming to my mind is cloud punk. That games has a very "old style" cyberpunk esthetic - rain, cloud, whatever trope you name it, there is -, but it is still kept quite fresh by the style with which the plot is written, the characters, and the situation happening.

I would like to say more titles, but I don't know any

Well, I’m talking more about the culture environment of society at large, but even then – mirrors edge came out almost twenty years ago. While it might be considered “Post-cyberpunk,” (and I do enjoy that genre) it really doesn’t have much to do with the original genre in the countercultural sense. It’s more like an exploration into other aspects of a fictional cyberpunk-esque world.

Cloudpunk is the same thing as the recent Cyberpunk game: fun, but operating on stale tropes and aesthetics that haven’t changed in 40 years. This is a problem that pretty much every piece of cyberpunk media has.

Counterculture moved underground.

Cyberpunk as a sub-type: well, science fiction was for decades bound to get there, eventually. The Stainless Steel Rat would like to have a word about it…

where though?

It was already a libertarian/neoliberal fantasy - one where everything is corrupt, everyone is competing with everyone else, and the point of the game is to grab as much as you can for yourself while selling your services to the highest bidder.

There's nothing counter about it. It makes surviving in a white knuckle corporate techno-dystopia cool. It's a celebration, not a critique.

Compare with PKD or the much less well-known John Brunner in books like The Stone That Never Came Down and The Shockwave Rider - the latter being an obvious influence on Gibson.

I’m confused. What I read you to be implying is that simply describing current reality is automatically an endorsement of that reality. Am I misreading you somehow?

Another reading is that there is no more counterculture because it won and became the culture.

I get where you are coming from but in my mind, when mutating into the dominant culture it loses vital, essential characteristics.

Counterculture, modified by the relentless shameless drive to "make it", and the acceptance of operating within existing systems, is no longer a counterculture.

My point being a question; did counterculture truly win or was it subsumed and perverted?

"And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back." - Hunter S Thompson

Over the past ten-ish years I've often wondered what HST would make of our current society... not much good, I'm afraid.

arguably, no. counterculture ceases to exist when it becomes dominant culture, but it's not that "it won" - countercultural concepts are either adopted into mainstream culture through a widespread genuine desire for change (no longer countercultural, simply cultural), or they're vapidly recuperated (see chain stores like Hot Topic or Zumiez, if you're in the US) into commodity goods.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperation_(politics)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle

fascinating insight

I think what you're trying to say was that "cyberpunk" appealed to a subculture of computer enthusiasts emersed in Asian cultural artifacts like manga, empowered by the 80's mantra that sex and violence sells and driven by the idea that all technology is socially transformative, just not in the ways we hope it will be.

Subcultures are far from dead and GenZ seem to be a subculture factory. Counterculture is also far from dead as it usually expands in the US every time there's a conservative president in power or a recession. Subcultures != Counterculture. The subculture of amateur horticulturalists that are also cat lovers and like photographing their cats in their gardens is only a thing because it's been empowered by technology.

Perhaps publications like Mondo 2000 and WIRED (and Boing Boing) killed Cyberpunk the way The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis stuck a knife in the beatniks of the 1960's. Not that they made fun of Cyberpunk, but rather they so overly-embraced it that they kind of unintentionally made a mockery of it (so perhaps not so much like Dobie Gillis?). That was the way I saw it in the 90's anyway.

Good point. Over-enthusiasm is definitely a way to make a cool thing uncool. There are a few contemporary writers who seem to labels themselves as involved with cyberpunk, but whom really make it all a bit juvenile and silly.

Mondo 2000 was always a bit too tongue in cheek for me to be able to gauge their intent properly.

Computers, the internet, it is all mainstream now, the opposite of a counterculture.

If you want a counterculture, look the other way. "digital detox", permaculture, degrowth, etc... In the tech world you have the "small web".

"Maker" movements, repair/reuse/recycling, etc... used to be countercultures but they have gone towards mainstream in the last few years (and I think it is a good thing).

Not all countercultures are "good". For instance what we now call "wokism" used to be a counterculture, it is now mostly mainstream. The opposite is now a counterculture, including incels, red pill, etc...

Countercultures change and go. Very few countercultures of the past still remain, they either integrate in mainstream culture, or become so niche that they effectively disappear.