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Article video explanation version: (hardcore science) what exactly is cyberpunk
When you see a variety of dazzling and chaotic neon lights decorated by the future city, the development of science and technology is helping human society to prosper; under this bright and bustling world, the city streets are always shrouded in smoke and rain, revealing a dark and dilapidated atmosphere. In the middle are also mixed with those oriental words and graphics that are full of stereotypes and extremely awkward. What comes to mind when you see this?. That's right, this is the cyberpunk world.
In the midst of this
: Neon billboards, prosthetic modifiers, hovering speeding cars and oriental elements dominated by giant Chinese characters almost constitute the public's imagination of cyberpunk. But that's what the general public loves about cyberpunk — but in fact, what the public likes is the visual impact that cyberpunk provides. What exactly is cyberpunk? In fact, many people do not understand. So today I will give the big hardcore science a look at what cyberpunk really is, and its history and influence.
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"Cyberpunk" is actually a genre of science fiction. English word by English
The prefix cybernetics consists of punk (punk originally meant rotten or waste). Autonetics is a science that studies the control and communication between animals and machines. And "punk" is the punk movement that once shocked the world in the 70s and early 80s of the last century. And "Punk" it usually reflects people's dissatisfaction with life. Not only that, but they also have to vent this rebellion and discontent, so the word punk is closer to the characteristics of youth, aggressiveness, outliers, anti-authority, and anarchy
"Cyberpunk" is made up of these two words, which emphasize two fundamental aspects: technology and individualism, and cyberpunk stories are mostly built on the background of "a combination of low life and high technology"
In general, cyberpunk stories are often depicted by marginalized people in highly technologically advanced societies. In cyberpunk stories, there is always a "system" monopoly that controls the vast majority of the "ordinary" population, which can be an authoritarian government, a super-large corporation chaebol, a feudal religion, or a highly intelligent artificial intelligence. These systems reinforce the people within the ruling system through certain technologies, especially information technology. They have not only mastered important technologies about the survival of human beings, but also influence the situation and oppress human beings. In such a future, people's lives are not happy, even if the technology is very developed, but there is still no freedom to speak of, and even reduced to parts of large enterprises.
The Matrix Machine Emperor
What pervades cyberpunk society is not only the oppression between people, but also the departure from human nature.
For example, The Matrix's "matrix" artificial intelligence system even acts as a human flesh generator for the entire human race.
Cyberpunk's metropolis is a predatory world, and much of cyberpunk's story is about a group of people living on the margins in a world where they often use the high-tech they used to control them as their weapons to fight back against the "system."
For example, Neo of The Matrix uses computers to rebel against artificial intelligence systems, cyberpunk works focus on these freedom-seeking people, and cyberpunk stories rarely have "heroes" or "good people" in the traditional sense.
Protagonist of The Matrix
Cyberpunk is a crowded, dark, cold but technologically advanced dystopia in which cyberpunk thought is always sad about the future. Cyberpunk is a mature and profound philosophical and speculative science fiction system that develops with the real social situation.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > to understand the history of cyberpunk culture, it is first necessary to understand punk culture</h1>
In the 1960s and 1970s, in the high-pressure international environment of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union at that time, punk culture began to appear in the Western cultural circles, and punk culture originated in Britain, when the post-war Britain, the economy was depressed, unemployment rates climbed, and the films in the United States flourished, which indirectly led to the decline of the British film industry; In terms of music careers, the UK is in a slump. And the earliest punk, it was all a derogatory term. It is a derogatory term for rogues by ordinary British people. But no one thought that the youth who set off the huge wave were exactly such a group, and such a group of "punk" youth had actually created a miracle.
Punk youth
The most typical is the 1975 ("Sex Gunners") band, which was the starting point of PUNK. The album cover of their album "GOD SAVE THE QUEEN" boldly sealed the Queen's mouth with a "sex gunner" seal. The bold style of work has never come before, and they completely vent their indignation in their hearts, which is even more an indictment of the future and society. This led to the birth of PUNK. Because PUNK belonged to the lower culture, it was very easy for young people to identify and impress in Britain at that time, and people found a way to vent, and for a while, PUNK became a frenzy. At the same time, punk is not only reflected in music, but also in clothing, hairstyles, tattoos, and performance art.
The "Sex Gunners" band
In China, just after China's reform and opening up, during the intersection of Eastern and Western cultures, punk culture also had a brief development, but it was not long. And when you look at the outfits of the punk youth in front, you'll think of the "Kill Matt" era that was popular from 2000 to 2010. While it does resemble it, "Kill Matt" has only a punk appearance and no punk core. Just like many cyberpunk works today. The essence is still different.
The concept of cyberpunk originated in science fiction, and after World War II, traditional science fiction ushered in a golden age of development. Due to the rapid development of science and technology, the science fiction novels at that time were space adventure works, most of the novels were space operas cloaked in science fiction, and at the same time had beautiful fantasies about the future, such as interstellar adventures, plastic high-tech laboratories, silver glittering costumes and the like.
Chinese punk
And on the other side of the ocean, in Britain, there is a punk movement, and the punk movement of the old British science fiction magazine "New Worlds" influenced the writing movement. Here, many hypotheses depicting the cultural and social unrest of the future world due to technological progress have emerged. New drugs, technological crime and sexual revolutions have replaced the utopian world of the past. The embryo of cyberpunk began to appear, in which the conflict between technological progress and human individuals, in these works, one by one, people and technology on the one hand are full of contradictions and opposites, but at the same time there is an inseparable relationship, easy to be connected to today's real life. It is also because of this foresight that cyberpunk themes have been loved by more and more people in the decades of continuous change.
Science fiction at the time
And the most representative is. Famous science fiction masters such as Roger Zerazini and Harlan Allison, who avoided the tendency of the bright future of early mainstream science fiction, launched the New Wave science fiction reform in the 1960s, and took the lead in advocating that science fiction writing should be considered from the three aspects of psychology, sociology and linguistics, thus breaking the monopoly of space science fiction adventure themes, and Roger began to write in 1962, and in his 32-year creative career, he won six Hugo Awards. Three-time Nebula Awards achievement. In recent years, Liu Cixin's novel "Three-Body Problem", which has attracted much attention, has won the Hugo Award. This shows the importance of Roger to the science fiction community
Nebula Award
Liu Cixin
The earliest representative work of cyberpunk in the field of literature is Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel "Will Bionic People Dream of Electronic Sheep". However, because of the long time of creation, the content will be slightly different from what we know today. And at that time, computers were not yet popular in the folk, so it did not depict much computer technology and virtual space, but it included social decline, philosophical reflection between objective reality and subjective reality.
The American drama "The Strange Man of the High Castle" is based on Philip's novel of the same name.
In the 1982 action science fiction film Blade Runner directed by Ridley Scott. It was based on this novel, which did not cause any storms that year, and some film critics criticized the film for being useless. But a few years later, with the development of science and technology and reflection, the film was reinterpreted and found his excellence, the film actually borrowed only part of the plot of the novel, ignoring the religious and mythological elements of the original novel, and the rest was completely played by the director himself, but Philip also believed that it was completely in line with his expectations. The film tells the story of a group of bionic humans with exactly the same intelligence and sensations as humans, venturing back to Earth in search of a way to live forever before their mechanical energy is about to run out. Blade Runner police dispatch the protagonist Deckard to track down and eliminate these bionic people, and the story explores the speculation of the existence and value of people and people, and to a large extent, this is also considered the most classic cyberpunk film and television work, and the film laid the visual effects of future cyberpunk game movies. The dazzling and cluttered neon lights, the city streets shrouded in smoke and rain, and the oriental characters that can be seen everywhere can be found in this movie, such as CDPR's Cyberpunk 2077,
Blade Runner
By this time in 1980, the term cyberpunk had not yet been invented, but many novels began to have cyberpunk-like passages, and what is considered to be the first cyberpunk-type novel was John Bruna's The Shockwave Rider. The term was coined by the American writer Bruce Bethke in his 1980 short story Cyberpunk, which was published in Marvel Story magazine in 1983. At that time, there was no Internet, and fiction writers knew that the latest novel stories were basically obtained from newspapers and magazines, so when other novel writers saw the word, they felt good and easy to understand, and the vocabulary quickly became popular, and the later novel masters used this word to express.
The works of the above novel masters all have the tendency of cyberpunk ideas, but none of them accurately express the definition of cyberpunk, all of which pave the way for the development of cyberpunk ideas, and the next tone of this cyberpunk series is the novelist William Gibson's 1984 book known as the "cyberpunk Bible" "Neuromancer". The novel draws on punk culture and early hacker culture, confirming cyberpunk's status as a science fiction genre. Surprisingly, he did not know enough about computer and hacker culture, but brought science fiction literature into the electronic age.
William Gibson
Cyberpunk works did not develop only in the West, unlike Western cyberpunk, which originated in New Wave science fiction literature, Japanese cyberpunk originated in underground musical culture, especially in the 1970s. Filmmaker Takao Ishii introduced this subculture to Japanese cinema through the punk film High School Panic (1978) and the punk motorcycle film Wild Thunder Block (1980), both of which depicted punk rebellion and anarchy. Ishii's punk films paved the way for Katsuyo Otomo's seminal cyberpunk work Akira. Akira and its 1988 animated films influenced many later productions in anime, film, television, and games. Many elements of films such as The Matrix, Super Runaway and other films come from Akira. It also influenced video games with punk styles, such as Hideo Kojima's Predator and Metal Gear Solid series, and Half-Life's Half-Life series, which doesn't count 3.
Yakira
Japanese cyberpunk animation and manga simultaneously combine a futuristic vision that has the same elements as Western science fiction, so that Japanese cyberpunk works outside of Japan have also received wide international recognition. William Gibson traveled to Japan, and he himself said he found that many of his views of Japan had become a reality: modern Japan is simply a cyberpunk city
Cyberpunk themes have also appeared in many anime and manga in Japan, including Ghost in the Shell, Agent of Death, Infinity Zone, Labyrinth Story, Evangelion, and more.
By the 1990s, cybernetics, global information networks, computers, and bioengineering had developed rapidly. The future depicted in cyberpunk works no longer seems so far away. Therefore, this reflection on technology is no longer limited to literature, but gradually spreads to the entire mainstream society of the West.
"Blade Runner", which was attacked by film critics at the premiere, was re-examined under this trend of thought and became a classic. Rising stars like The Matrix can achieve great things.
But The Matrix series is one of the few highly successful cyberpunk films. Recent filmmaking packages such as Blade Runner's sequel Blade Runner 2049 (2017), Ghost in the Shell (2017) and Elita: Battle Angel (2019) have been less commercially glamorous.
Ghost in the Shell
Cyberpunk fiction has also inspired several subcultures, the more famous of which are cybergothic, steampunk, and biopunk.
Steampunk
One of the outstanding subtypes is steampunk, which is set in a Victorian context in an alternate history, combining outdated technology and cyberpunk's film noir worldview. For example, the games "Resident Evil" and "Humiliation" are based on steampunk ideas
Kowloon Walled City
Interestingly, Hong Kong's Kowloon Walled City (demolished in 1994) is often referred to as the typical cyberpunk/dystopian slum. Because of its harsh living conditions, as well as its political, geographical and economic isolation, many fiction creators have fascinated it.
Cyberpunk also had his negative comments:
Science fiction writer David Brin described Cyberpunk as "the best promotion ever made for science fiction". It may not have appealed to "real punks," but only many readers, but Brin also believed that cyberpunk made science fiction more appealing to academics. In addition, it makes science fiction more lucrative in the eyes of Hollywood and the visual arts community as a whole.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > summary</h1>
With the development of technology and the times, many cyberpunk works depicting the excessive expansion of science and technology and the imminent collapse of social order have appeared more and more. These works have a strange imagination for the future, but they all subvert the public aesthetics of the mainstream science fiction field to a certain extent, and no longer have such a beautiful vision for the future.
The works often reflect on the institutions of capitalist society and the degeneration of society, crime and humanity caused by the excessive development of science and technology.
The widespread presence of cyberpunk today reflects concerns about large corporations, government corruption, and social distancing. Some cyberpunk writers have tried to warn human society through their work
In today's society, the increasing development of network technology, diversified electronic products into every household, but at the same time people are also monitored by some software to monitor their lives. People are desperately trying to survive in the city, the reality is sometimes cruel, not everyone has good opportunities, people are not safe between people, there is oppression around, this may also be a sense of cyberpunk, worthy of our reflection
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