Note: I wrote this in 2020. Since then, Tango Gameworks released Hi-Fi Rush, a game that takes the exact angle I said was underexplored (Cybernetics as loss of autonomy to unaccountable giants) and made a breakout hit with it. CDPR hired Studio Trigger, and made CP2077 “cool” again by leaning into the trope I said was the absolute worst (Cyberpsychosis) by turning it into the tragic result of ambition for their antihero. 2077 (And It’s Consequences) missed the point so hard it almost spoiled an entire setting for me.
Oh, you think I’m talking about some yuppie computer game? What is that, for your Apple Macintosh? I bet you shelled out for the DeLuxe model too. NO! I’m talking about Cyberpunk the concept. Dirty ladder-climbing people-pleasers and committees got their hands on the whole thing and they diluted it so bad not even the old fans can remember what’s what. I’m going to prove it with one test.
Ask your narrator: Why do futurenazis hate cyborgs?
A. “Because cyborgs aren’t pure, and also their faces are ugly.”
B. “Because cyborgs are ‘cheating’.”
C. “Because being a cyborg makes people murderously unstable for plot convenience.”
D. “Because cybernetics is a concentration of power, applied through human bodies and controlled by an unaccountable elite.”
Now, how many dystopian speculative fiction narratives have you seen in the last 10 years that incorporate D? Now how many real-life extremists use D to justify their actions? The answers, respectively, are “Basically none” and “Basically every one”. Option D is already happening in real life right now, and it’s accelerating at an alarming rate, but for some reason speculative fiction won’t touch that. A and B are typically provided as an analogy to racism or luddism, and C is a handwave that should outright disqualify the work from the genre. But why do these fail?
A. Racism doesn’t need a sequel.
Anti-cyborg hate groups are often posed in these works as raging against the “dilution of humanity” in much the same way that modern ethnonationalists claim their race is being “edged out” by miscegenation or whatnot. There’s a few millennia of history of people making the same claim and using it as a rallying cry to commit violence against minority groups. It works, because in racists’ eyes “ethnicity” is a definitive and immutable tie to their history and a marker of their specialness. They fear that the “impurity” will take that specialness (privilege) away from them and their children if they no longer have a ubiquitous majority in all walks of life. Terrifying, I know.
Being a cyborg is not heritable, nor is it a familial culture. Cyborgs are created when a consumer decides to buy a robot eyeball or an indestructible colon. Cyborgs’ existence does not violate the “purists'” consent, or indeed have anything to do with them. What are they trying to fight against that drives them to violence? Why risk retaliation from these superhumans just to let them know you don’t like their stylish personal choices?
We see some better parallels to the general “I think it’s icky” sort of bigotry when compared to transphobia. But even with transphobia, the thing being enforced and the fear being played upon isn’t “loss of purity,” or “loss of hegemony.” It’s a combination of propagandized nonsense fears (“trans women will assault cis women in bathrooms because for some reason we think sex offenders obey laws”) and boring old traditionalism (“No one should be allowed to do things I wasn’t allowed to do”).
For cyberhaters, that propagandized fear actually would make sense in-universe, if it served anyone in power to make it happen. Transphobia is propagated and maintained in the West largely by existing power structures, like all kinds of other immaterial hate and polemics, because it’s essentially meaningless whether the Powers that Be win or lose in the long run. It’s a great distraction that keeps the masses fighting. In a cyberpunk world, which is run by unregulated corporations who almost all have a major investment in cybernetics, why the hell would they astroturf hate groups to scare people away from the most profitable products in the world?
“Well,” you say, stupidly, “what if it’s a hit job by the non-cybernetics corps to kill their competitor’s sales?”
Sure. Fine. Then why would you make “purity” your rallying cry and not “cyborgs are traitors and cheaters?” One resonates with delusional racists who were just looking for another thing to hate, and one resonates with literally every decent person who can’t afford modifications and feels like the the world is abandoning them.
B. It’s not cheating if everyone can do it, and it’s not bigotry if it’s against cheating.
Ok, so you’ve read my rebuke of “A” and it seems like “B” still works, right? Well, yeah, it actually does. “Cyborgs are cheaters” is a totally valid and reasonable opinion for people to have, especially in a genre originally crafted to highlight accelerating class disparity.
“Cybernetics as a class marker” is, in every way, the ideal explanations for violent tensions in a transhuman world. Unfortunately, the media I’m talking about doesn’t use it this way. Instead, narratives tell us that cyborgs are paradoxically better at job-critical tasks but also somehow discriminated against in hiring. Crappy cyberpunk will discuss cybernetics as a hideous curse forced upon members of the lower class, while also presenting cyborgs as enhanced and superior to other humans.
This is the worst “written by committee” trope, in a lot of ways, and it definitely comes from the compulsion to make the future fun and exciting. You really can’t have it both ways, though. Either being a cyborg is shameful necessity for the poor, or it’s a display of power worn by the upper classes. Please stop writing characters who were “passed over for promotion for having cyberlegs” or some bullshit.
People don’t mistreat felons or people with gang tattoos because they’re jealous of them. No one is being classist for distrusting men who wear Rolexes and drive Ferraris. This isn’t complicated.
In summary: If it’s hatred of the wealthy hegemony, stop characterizing cyborg hate as bigotry. If it’s hatred of The Poors™, stop characterizing cybernetics as (voluntary) enhancement.
C. You believe mental illness is a moral choice, but that being a piece of shit who hates sick people isn’t.
I don’t think I need to explain this one. The “brain damage makes you a movie villain” trope is pretty tired at this point.
Speculative fiction asks “what if,” so anything is technically fair game, but are you seriously going to spend your story asking “what if giving quadriplegic folks independence turned them into serial killers”? How many angels can dance on the had of a pin? What if Superman decided to kill everyone? Yeah, bro, you’re asking the real questions.
D. The story THEY don’t want you to hear!
If I were to lightly speculate about the future of the human struggle – and I will – I would say that of all the issues, the accumulation of power is the driving force behind the ebbs and flows of history. If I were to write a story about Big Conflict (the sequel to Big Data) in a world where technology is evolving faster than humans can control it, it would be about the consolidation of that technology and the power that the consolidators hold. It’s barely even speculation, you could replace any 2020 headline about user data with “cybernetics” and you’ll have an accurate 2070 news story.
Where are the stories where the anti-cybernetics movement is a principled stand against corporate ownership of human bodies? Where are stories where the “naturalists” and biohackers are on the same side, because their driving ideology is a demand for bodily autonomy? Revolutionary ideology usually boils down to “some nigh-untouchable elite has too much power and our only recourse is violence” and nowhere is it clearer exactly who that elite is than in cyberpunk.
And yet…
Who is it for?
I’m obviously not condemning these tropes. (Except “cyber psychos”. If you write that into your story I’m going to assume you side with whatever ill-conceived bigots you invent.) There are variations on most tropes that actually do make sense and reflect observable and interesting human behavior.
Unfortunately, I’m starting to think that writers have exhausted the good ideas here, or at least the ones they can sell.
Cyberpunk, as a genre, strongly reflected the Reaganomics malaise of the 80s. It was a way to speculate about what would happen if things kept getting more Reagany, and the US never added creature comforts to simulate “middle class” lifestyles for the balooning lower class. But it didn’t happen like that, because the same forces that brought us Reagan were prepared to level out the damage over the next few decades. Instead of hyper-dense megacities, we got more urban sprawl, the nearly imperceptibly slow erosion of public services, and booming tech companies that already knew how to look like benevolent humanitarians.
I think people just forgot how startlingly bad the fallout of Reaganomics was, or maybe that the “benevolent high tech megacorp rips off the mask to reveal they were evil all along once no one stands to oppose them” trope is a foundational dystopian plot.
I’m just disappointed by the worldbuilding out there, and I wish people would think a little harder about settings. Doing something to follow in the footsteps of prior art is a normal step when you don’t want to microfocus on every detail of your world’s history. Unfortunately, transhuman politics is not a minor detail, so when an author throws in “and also people are future-racist against cyborgs”, it screams to the audience that this story has no interest in engaging with the politics cyberpunk exists to explore, and that’s just kinda sad.
Profanity Filter Testing Domain 