February 2019

prokopetz:

To be completely fair, authors of transhuman sci-fi aren’t 100% to blame for being oblivious to cyberpunk’s critique of the corporatisation of bodily autonomy – cyberpunk authors did a lot of that all on their own.

There’s a great deal of post-cyberpunk lit that wants to retain the chrome angst as an aesthetic trapping, but doesn’t want to engage with the politics that spawned it, so it scrubs those politics out and replaces “being augmented diminishes your humanity because now Elon Musk owns your left arm” with “being augmented diminishes your humanity because, like, prosthetics damage your soul“.

When transhuman lit came along and started taking shots at cyberpunk’s subtextual luddism, it wasn’t setting up a strawman: it was reacting against what post-cyberpunk lit had willingly done to itself in pursuit of mass-market appeal.