The Future of a Commodity

Cyberpunk is an aggressively stylish form of SF which puts a hard dystopian spin on the information age without ever disputing its ascendance. Pan of this is due to the fact that cyberpunk suffers from the dimmed aspirations of its own era, a time when high technology is counterbalanced by lowered expectations, when any sort of productivity is set off against a prevailing stagnation. There are, however, more subtle motives. New forms of culture are particularly sensitive to the historical contingency of various signifying practices. Emerging as it does in the context of late capitalism, cyberpunk is both inspired and stunted by the social process which enables thought to be alienated from its producer and exchanged as a commodity. The grimmest cyberpunk is haunted by the suspicion that information is not merely the socially average form of knowledge, but rather the form taken by capital in the signifying environment. This difference, between meaning as a “humane” consumer good and as a cold instrument of production, is precisely the site where information can become a critical concept. It is also, I would suggest, the fundamental terrain of cyberpunk, for here it endlessly encounters barriers that it cannot burst asunder. Or ore accurately, it cannot overcome those barriers without annihilating itself as a literary genre. (TW)

Art · Commodity · Economics · Market economy · Cybersecurity and Cyber Warfare Studies · Digital Games and Media

• Mapping the Real in Cyberfiction

  E L Mccallum•Poetics Today•2000

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