As George Carlin said ... The Real Owners don't want people capable of critical thinking because if people were, the shit would hit the fan in terms of knowing how our so-called leaders have betrayed us in ways boggling the mind. Consider facts like the environment's collapsing thanks to rampant capitalism and overt lies perpetrated by the likes of Exxon, the ultra rich and big corporations not paying their taxes thanks to off-shore tax havens and a tax code comprising of 70,000+ pages and ... the ongoing privatization of government services with particular emphasis given to the control of water, events one and all, showing, in part, how the US is rapidly unraveling as we move further into the 21st century. Cyberpunk, circa 2021, equipped with appropriate modifications, has arrived but in this case, politics becomes intimately involved whereas in the formal cyberpunk lexicon, politics was but an afterthought in depicting a dystopian future of our own making.
To whit.
Where is the president in Blade Runner?
Beneath the 1982 neo-noir’s trappings of genetically engineered human automatons is a story about corporate power over and indifference to life, alienation in the face of wealthy indifference to the plight of workers. Replace the Tyrell Corporation with Amazon and reframe the replicants as “essential services,” and suddenly you have a world of workers terrified that their jobs are inherently a death sentence—moving straight from fiction to reality.
But while Blade Runner’s once-distant future of November 2019 feels resonant in so many ways—vast corporate power, persistent surveillance, life in a time of constant crisis—it misses the actual 2019’s most salient feature: an inescapable, painful awareness of politics and of the presence or deliberate absence of government in daily life.
Government, as experienced for much of the 20th century, is largely absent from the lives of characters in cyberpunk stories. Police are a durable feature, but government services and functions beyond the security state are absent.
Yet for all the aggressive visibility of politics in our daily lives, we’re not that far off from the powerlessness of a cyberpunk future. Cyberpunk speaks to the present because the conditions that inspired cyberpunk remain largely unchanged.
Carlin was right.
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