by Hazel Anna Rogers for this Carl Kruse Blog
I was on the train, and the girl next to me had a phone that opened sideways to make a large dual screen. She was watching a video of a woman crumbling coloured chalk in between her manicured hands. Long nails. Crisp-scratch sound. Are these the end days?
Fads swept the youth of the Sprawl at the speed of light; entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly.
Neuromancer, William Gibson, 1984
Cyberpunk. High tech, low life. The tech keeps getting smarter, but the streets are still covered in dog shit. I’ve got the protein shake in the flask with the handle, $40 well-spent, this shake’ll get me through, it’s got everything I need except joy. I’m running out the door, on the bike with the electric wheels, down to the yawning station mouth, homeless woman there but nobody got change anymore, money’s gone supersonic, it’s all in the cloud. Airpods in to dull out the drone scream of the underground train. I ain’t got the answers, AI gives them for me, does my emails too, nothing to do but listen to that right-wing grifter grift his way into my heart. Smartwatch to count down the hours left before I can leave through the front doors of my office block into the punch-squeal-circus of the megalopolis. Glasses with cameras built in to film up the skirts of girls coming out of the metro station, gotta get my fix somehow. Elevator, I’m looking down, gotta order those shoes, the new ones from the collection by that celebrity, gotta buy ‘em now not a second to waste, they’ll be sold out later and I’ll be kicking myself in the teeth. Leave via the stairs and I come to that square building, shelter underneath from the torrents of acid rain and watch the projections of forests and flowers float by, ain’t it beautiful, this pixel world, better on screen than in real life, there’s no dog shit in here. Out to the park, there’s a phone propped up and the girls are filming a dance for the madmen on their machines, make a quick buck, someone’ll pay. I’m going to eat, they don’t talk to me; I scan the code, black swirls in a white box, order on the app, I didn’t wanna talk anyways. Home at last, there’s a draft coming through the door, my laptop’s on my knees and I’ve got three jumpers on, I’m four hours deep into this phony TV show, can’t stop now, I’m halfway through, half rotted but I’ll finish it. Don’t read anymore, I’ve got the app for it, whole books in 15 minutes, I’m brimming with information, I’m a computer now, I can’t relax, goddammit, my head’s screwed, I’m putting on delta waves, it’s not working, fuck it I’ll get on the screen again, pictures videos, anything to make it out alive.
Please, he prayed, now –
A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.
Now –
Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding –
And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity.
Neuromancer, William Gibson, 1984
We live in cyberspace. We’re in a sci-fi world come early, hundreds of years they thought it’d take, but it took fifty. It’s only getting denser, this forest of data. A former employee from the AI company Anthropic came on the news yesterday and said artificial superintelligence is coming, and it’s gonna kill us all. It’s beautiful, in its own way, like the way a scorpion’s tail glitters bronze. It’s beautiful in the way that it’s unimaginable, like time travel or life on Mars. It’s beautiful in the way that it makes shivers run up and down your spine. It’s Akira (Katsuhiro Otomo, 1988) on the big screen, the biggest screen, the whole world, government corruption gone breakneck, protests getting louder, gunfire getting wilder, motorbike screeches at night, but we can’t hear it over the sound of our noise-cancelling wireless headphones. We’re in Cyber, and they’re listening in, the big dogs are listening and taking notes on you, the words you say, the things you buy, the things you like, the pornography you watch. The kids don’t read anymore, books or the news, no-one knows anything, the context has been lost, 320 British newspapers dead and gone between 2009 and 2019, the illiterate generation is coming, they’re too depressed to read, too anxious to sit in silence, big tech brought them in and cradled them and they didn’t hear the coming of the end because they were watching 260 TikToks in 35 minutes, 520 in 70 minutes, a lifetime spent with their thumbs on glass.
The Punk side of Cyberpunk is to be found somewhere. That’s the protests, for starters. But the real world doesn’t always work as good anymore, haven’t you seen, the police are getting gluttonous, arrest you for nothing, be illegal to protest soon.
And it’s all online now anyway, that’s how they snag them, that’s how the right-wing pull the people in, the people done wrong in life by the men at the top, they drag them into the wormhole; fake news, fake money, Jack the Ripper is a refugee, that’s what they tell them, they don’t know who to believe, so they dress up in black hoodies and take the law unto themselves. We’re gonna have to get smart, hack into the cyberverse, Julian Assange-type protests, hang classified secrets out to dry, stamp the walls of the internet with their human right violations, governments pressing the buttons on civilians, all for money, money made of deep black oil spilling out from the desert.
Mad world. I’m fascinated by it. My life isn’t like that. My life is quiet, my house is good, there are cracks in the walls but it’s home, and the nights are still. Are these the end days?
This was it. This was what he was, who he was, his being. He forgot to eat. […] Sometimes he resented having to leave the deck to use the chemical toilet they’d set up in a corner of the loft. Ice patterns formed and reformed on the screen […] Its patterns burned there while he lay […] watching the red dawn through the steel grid of the skylight. Its rainbow pixel maze was the first thing he saw when he woke. He’d go straight to the deck, not bothering to dress, and jack in. He was cutting it. He was working. He lost track of days.
Neuromancer, William Gibson, 1984
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The homepage of this Carl Kruse Blog is at https://carlkruse.at
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Hazel include Our Obsession With The Lives of Others, Single Mums, Grimes, Music and the Future of AI Art.
