How to Write Cyberpunk

1945. 

World War 2 was over, the atomic bombs had dropped. Sci-fi had gone from utopian what-abouts to the philosophy of robots from the first world war to the second. But after nuclear power was unleashed upon the world and fascism had birthed horrors beyond the layman’s wildest imagination, the world was soon going to know true terror under the Marxist threat of communism. For nearly 70 years, the USSR became the biggest threat to the world, surpassing Nazi Germany and Imperialist Japan by quite the long shot, due to a very key difference: globalist propaganda.

This mass amount of propaganda spread across the world all throughout the cold war, and as the thought of people being no different than a cog in a machine became ever more present, the idea of “what a human really is" became more of a memory than an actual question. No longer did people understand what a human was, whether they had a purpose, or whether the world would even be present the next day. With technology increasing, the space race taking off, and consumerism increasing, it was no wonder that people turned to a rejection of society.

Quite quickly, people turned to postmodernism, the belief that nothing matters and everything is subjective(or at least that objectivity doesn’t exist). French philosophy was at the forefront, after spending so much time under Nazi control and the amount of anger they had towards their own country for selling them out to the enemy so quickly. The romanticization of fiction was over. Now, it was time to express the hatred of the world, the pain within the soul. Drugs, sex, and rock n’ roll. Rockabilly represented materialism and counterculture while the beatniks represented anti-materialism and anti-culture.

Conservatives of the US be damned. Suburban life be damned. The church? What church. Nothing but a building full of lies. What God is sinister enough to allow such horrors upon the world? God is dead, as Nietzsche said, and we killed him with the establishment. Down with the establishment and down with tyranny!

The 60s birthed the hippy movement afterwards, with beatniks living past the rockabilly roughians. Together, the hippies and beatniks made sure the world would know peace and love. There’s no reason for fighting, man. Just love one another and join a cult… I mean join a new age religion that doesn’t have to involve pesky gods or rules. Just be yourself man, and make sure to drop a lot of acid and smoke a lot of weed to mellow out. There’s no reason for anger against the world when you’re high as a kite.

Vietnam War, spy-fi, and an increase in Marxist hippies becoming college professors really hit the UK hard, and in a negative way. Hard enough to make punk music appear around the 70s and cause counterculture to reject the state itself. Anarchy in the UK, and it was spreading like a wildfire. Not every punk was an anarchist, but it didn’t seem like a bad idea at the time when superpowers like the US and USSR were threatening the entire world with nuclear arms. Punk wasn’t just a music style or a fashion sense, it was a lifestyle and a philosophy.

Anti-establishment, anti-corporation, anti-fascism, anti-collectivist, anti-government, and a big emphasis on individual freedoms.

That is what a punk was and that is what a punk is now.

Sci-fi was going through a revolution of its own. New Wave sci-fi challenged the modernist pulp stories of the Golden Age, deconstructed them with postmodernism by claiming that a hero can’t really save the day like in their romanticized counterparts, and degeneracy was just another beatnik thing to check off the list for our protagonist to wallow in. Doomsday nightmare fuel like I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream went from outlier to initiator within the sci-fi scene. People were used to seeing utopian tales and raygun gothic adventures across space, but New Wave quickly turned those shiny ships and rayguns into dystopian wastelands and happy pills. Nihilism reigned supreme, for postmodernism had taken over.

Happiness is processed on an assembly line, Soylent Green is made of people, and AI shall take over the world to wipe us all out like we deserve while keeping a small few to torture for all eternity to punish them for ever daring to open Pandora's box.

Cyberpunk is a continuation of punk philosophy and 60s new wave sci-fi, extended by combining it with cybernetics. But the thing is that cybernetics is a strange word that few actually understand. Many people believe that cybernetics means body parts that have wires in them or something that can send us to cyberspace. It’s actually where cybernetics is the science where we study how to make both machines and living creatures communicate and have automatic control. It’s about self-dependency, rather than being another cog in the collective machine. Cyber comes from the greek word “kybernetes” meaning “steersman” or “governor”.

Combining the words “cyber” and “punk” was perfect to coin a new genre that was popping up around the new wave movement, with works like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Dr. Adder, and Neuromancer. That which controls itself combined with an anti-establishment, anti-corporation, anti-authoritarianism, and anti-government view. It doesn’t have to be anarchy or libertarianism, but it’s pretty damn close enough when it isn't. High tech, low life. The world was changing for the worse, and thanks to mega-corporations that can’t be stopped in the coming years, it was going to become a lot worse.

What is Cyberpunk?

The historical recount of an introduction was required to remind/teach you of the reason why cyberpunk even came to be: postmodernism, beatniks, new wave sci-fi, and especially punk culture. We’ve come a long way through the influence of cyberpunk to where most of us don’t really understand it, or we believe something is cyberpunk as long as there are augmented limbs and spiky pink hair in the picture. It’s one of those things where people seem to lack understanding because the meaning became meaningless as time went on, mostly due to postmodernism causing the meaningful to become meaningless. When a philosophy has its main goal to deconstruct and debunk the essence of something, the reduction of comprehension is bound to happen. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if it’s intentional obfuscation of the genre or just people turning a well defined term into a colloquial slang.

There’s a difference between the style and the genre of cyberpunk. When it comes to style, all that matters is the direction in how something looks, feels, and can be related to the aesthetic of the style’s category. If we see something like a cybernetic arm, we can call that particular arm of the cyberpunk style, but if it’s in a story nothing to do with cybernetics as part of its plot or themes, then it’s not really part of the cyberpunk genre. This common misunderstanding between style and genre, and how someone can describe something as “cyberpunk” while meaning one or the other, makes it so it’s far too easy for someone to get the wrong idea. Just remember that to describe something as the cyberpunk style doesn’t mean the genre is cyberpunk, and not everything in a work of the cyberpunk genre would be contributing to its cyberpunk style.

This is because the genre consists of character, story, plot, and setting. If the cybernetic arm isn’t involved in all four, it’s not a contributing factor towards the genre. This is why a story where someone is watching a TV show, the TV show doesn’t determine its genre, and at the most it just sets the theme for that particular scene. A genre is not determined by its red herrings or the quirks that are possible to tack on. A genre is determined by its essence, for without its essence, the genre would become a meaningless word unable to describe anything other than what one would comprehend in their own private language.

To put it simply, cyberpunk is the combination of “cyber” and “punk”. Cyber brings us the technological aspect of how advancements in science will cause people to become more of an individual, while punk brings us the social aspect that corporatism and authoritarianism will cause the rebellious sorts to become more of an individual. This means that a core element of cyberpunk is individualism, the moral belief that the individual matters most of all over anything else. Anarchism, existentialism, liberalism, and libertarianism all fit under this moral branch. Because it fits with liberalism, it holds traces of the Age of Enlightenment, where people should free themselves from things like the state and the church while focusing on reason and evidence of the senses. 

Empiricism, knowledge of the senses, became a big theme within cyberpunk because of this, and was also challenged in works that dealt with cyberspace, due to how senses are easily able to be manipulated, perfectly played with in movies like The Matrix where the users of the Matrix die in real life if the brain believes its dead in the matrix. The brain senses it’s dead, therefore the body follows. But what if the person doesn’t have a body? What if the person doesn’t have a brain? Could we really just upload our brains into a computer and live in cyberspace for eternity?

These are questions that cyberpunk loves to ask and subjects cyberpunk writers love to get into, because these dwell in the subject of transhumanism. While the Age of Enlightenment brought upon secular humanism, and even sci-fi writers like Isaac Asimov and Kurt Vonnegut brought their modernized humanism, cyberpunk decided to throw these out the window with the “who cares?” option and decided that the socially evolved form of a human means much more. There’s no reason to even discuss what a human is if things like flesh and even our senses can be removed and manipulated by technology, an idea hinted at by psychedelic drug use and the fear that AI would become as intelligent as any human could, if not more. Humans stop mattering when flesh becomes outgunned by metallic plating and veins are replaced by liquid silicon tubes. Memories become useless when they can be implanted and removed. Existence becomes useless when all a person knows is a simulation that’s being manipulated by some kind of sinister corporation or a master AI that is just harvesting the human like it’s cattle.

High tech, low life.

But to create this high tech, the sci-fi that is used tends to be “soft” rather than “hard”. It’s science fiction that revolves around the soft sciences like sociology and psychology as well as science fiction that is not really accurate or plausible. People like to believe we are in a time where jacking into cyberspace is right around the corner, because we now have things like cybernetic arms and AI, but what they fail to realize is that it’s a little bit different to create an intelligence than to transfer human consciousness. If anything, we may be able to capture memories or manipulate senses, but to have someone jack into a computer is something that holds no real place in currently understood scientific study. There’s the belief that maybe in hundreds of years we may be able to get close enough to the molecular level to have a sort of biological computer that can allow a transfer of thoughts from one place to another, but for the consciousness factor it’s still up in the air.

Androids becoming close enough to humans to trick them is a bit of a different story. We currently are working on things like sex robots and drones that can mimic intelligent reactions and movements. Pretty soon movies like Blade Runner will become a real concern and all of our achievements would become lost like tears in the rain. The fear that humans will become more robotic and robots will appear more human is a very real one we can feel today. Already, just with the introduction of social media, social anxiety and antisocial behavior is through the roof in the matter of years, with further increase to occur as more generations grow up at a young age with the fear/egotism that everyone is watching everything they do.

Postmodernist fears for a postmodernist world. It fits, even though it wasn’t meant to. Cyberpunk is meant to be written as a warning against what we shouldn't have and shouldn’t accept, yet these days we seem to be embracing the ideas of mega corporations taking over countries and the inevitable dependency on materialistic goods. Beatniks of the past be damned, for now we have the internet and we are told that we should all be connected to it, even if we don’t want to. Living off the grid is impossible as technology increases and governments require such advancements in order to keep a close eye on its populace, as well as a tight grip on their lives.

Games like Deus Ex took this and cranked it up to 11 by focusing on an important element of cyberpunk that wasn’t as obvious until the game helped to bring it to be more present: conspiracy theories. Corporations were not just going to become mega-corporations that remove states from the picture and become the new rulers under neo-feudalism. They were conspiring for it and have been from the start. Aliens haven’t really been present in cyberpunk(although they should) because the idea of life on other planets kind of counters the intentional postmodernist narrative that life is meaningless and that life on earth was an error in the algorithm. So when it comes to conspiracy theories, aliens are surprisingly absent from the equation, although they don’t necessarily have to be, as long as it can more or less fit with the theme being implemented.

Cyberpunk allows both sci-fi and fantasy after all, so bringing in creatures from Hell or another dimension is as alien as you need for all it matters, which is why something like DOOM is a great addition to cyberpunk. Postmodernism is a double edge sword, for it doesn’t really stand for anything but doesn’t stand against anything either when it comes to a secular storyline. Don’t involve gods and deities from a spiritual realm outside of the physical realm or reachable dimensions and it’s still secular. Even if it’s in a high fantasy setting it’s possible to add cyberpunk as the science factor as long as the characters focus on being individuals instead of part of some kind of authoritarian organization or collective. Without gods there are no collectives and without collectives the individual reigns supreme.

The 4 main elements of Cyberpunk are:

1. Technology
2. Individualism
3. Dual-aspect Monism
4. Nietzscheanism

These 4 elements branch out into other important themes, which we’ll get into as they get unpacked, and while they are being unpacked we will reveal the incredibly focused direction that cyberpunk holds as a deutero-genre, the second level of describing what kind of story it is. The deutero-genre revolves around the setting and themes, rather than the proto-genre which covers how realistic the story is and the trito-genre which covers the emotional aspect. However, cyberpunk is considered a subgenre, meaning it is part of both the sci-fi and science fantasy genres, but is used for a specific smaller part of those two rather than being the umbrella term to describe the entirety of either of them. As a subgenre, it has a smaller audience, is more focused, and can apply to a more dedicated audience because of how specific it is. The downside of it is simply that if someone doesn’t care for cyberpunk then they won’t want to read the story; because the characters, plot, setting, and story would be something they don’t care about.

This is important for all writers to understand due to how important the audience is. The better the audience’s needs are attended to, and the less red herrings that deviate the story from its focus, the more the story will please the audience. A simple equation that becomes overly complicated in the mind of a postmodernist. The postmodernist demands for the lack of essence and strives to deconstruct, to ensure the objective is reduced to subjective. This is not the way to approach any genre, especially cyberpunk, for the postmodernist elements within the genre are not part of a philosophy, but are simply the result of postmodernist literary experimentation.

To say it in another way, cyberpunk as a genre was created through postmodernist thought, but is to be written outside of such a mentality to fit within the genre. There is no need to change and manipulate and deconstruct that which is established, then try to change the established into your own private language. There is structure in the genre, there is an aesthetic, and there are elements that cannot be changed. The second one tries to change them, they are entering the realm of another subgenre, possibly making their own new niche, and yet are still under a pre-existing genre a level above it(in this case, the proto-genre).

But what exactly are these elements that make up cyberpunk and how can we make sure we don’t deviate from the path?

Technology 

Science is empirical. For it to function, it must exist, be possible, and be repeatable. As humans learn more about the world and how to manipulate it with science, our technology advances and we innovate. This innovation increases dramatically as we ourselves become more organized and social, with information traveling between minds and those minds creating new tech. Before there was only physical communication, meaning people had to meet in person or have letters delivered in order to share innovation.

Since the drop of the atomic bomb, technology in our society has skyrocketed. We’re currently in what’s called the Digital Revolution, meaning our technology went from being moved by cogs to being moved by electrons. A technocracy, a system of government where the ones who make the decisions are those in charge of the most technology. In such a situation, a corporation that takes control of more digital technology may result as the ruler of the land under it and its technology. Everyone is connected, but through their connection they would become ruled by those in charge of the connection. In the digital age, this is all but inevitable the second the older governments fall or convert, with plenty of modern corporations already prepared to pounce on the empty slot.

Technocracy wasn’t an issue to people since the 1930s, a time when electricity finally became common-place and the economic disaster of the Great Depression was drastic enough to consider changing money with energy certificates and replacing all of the politicians with technicians. Perhaps the creation of the atomic bomb caused people to reconsider that kind of thing instantly, possibly due to the mad scientist tropes of that era or the fact that it’s rather insane to give people that much political power when they are intentionally creating doomsday devices.

A little less than a hundred years later and here we are, back in the consideration of a technocracy, but it’s almost where we’ve been coddled to accept it. Social media has the ability to turn off our brains, ramp up our anxiety, and rile up quite a lot of unrest. Atomic bombs are nowhere near the ultimate threat with how dependent people have become on society at large. It’s almost where a lot of people will die the second they disconnect from the group. Dependence on technology and society is our current Achille's heel in the West, with the dependency intensifying as days go by.

In cyberpunk, technology is more of a curse than a blessing. Megacities are plagued with man made problems, homelessness, crime, and vices. Everyone wants to escape the processed hellhole but there’s not much else they can retreat to other than their own personal escapism, be it an adventure in cyberspace or a drug fueled orgy with real-to-the-touch sexbots. Technology is a trap and the human is the mouse seeking cheese. Accepting or rejecting, the trap still trips and the metal bar still strikes upon the mouse’s neck, be it broken or simply pressed down for suffocation.

Existence for the human becomes a suffering caused by technology more than anything, with technology being nearly inescapable once one has come in contact with it and its cultural influences. Humans are not designed for an extreme amount of order or an extreme amount of chaos. Like temperature and consumables, we are to live within the middle, the hospitable zone where we aren’t deprived nor overwhelmed. Technology can overwhelm us and will. This is the message of cyberpunk, where cybernetics will cause more harm than good in the time to come.

When it comes to technology, cyberpunk brings up the subject of cybernetics to how technology becomes the controller and the human is the one being controlled. A big trope in cyberpunk is the cyborg, a combination of the words cybernetic and organism, which is when an organism becomes restored in function or enhanced in ability due to an integration with technology that relies on feedback. A cybernetic limb relies on the feedback of the owner in order to move about, meaning the one who controls it is the one moving it. But who’s to say the one physically attached to the limb is the controller? What prevents another source from controlling it?

Those are some of the many questions cyberpunk dares to ask about technology, with the understanding of over-reliance and dependency humans have once they open Pandora's box and must face their biggest cybernetic foe: AI. Artificial intelligence is nothing more than logical equations, feedback loops, reactions, and principles. It is a system of pure order, unable to have consciousness and only able to understand possibility. As possibilities are understood and errors are corrected, the system learns, reacts more appropriately, and reaches its goals quicker. However, no amount of emulation or learning will grant AI the ability to hold feelings or consciousness.

An AI can mimic emotions, they can cry, crave, and smile. They can experience pain responses and sexual stimulation. But that’s all these are, reactions to stimulations. These are just programmed into their system, into their order, with zero chaos applied. Only that which holds consciousness can feel and for such a feeling requires chaos.

When we combine chaos and order, we achieve an equilibrium. Yin and Yang is the prime example of order and chaos working together, which is required for existence itself to continue existing. The depths of chaos birth order, the depths of order birth chaos. Somewhere within this cycle lies humanity, and there is nothing they can do to escape it other than death in a godless world. But there is a way to escape being human while remaining alive.

It involves one becoming an individual, through individualism.

Individualism

For the longest time, since before we became humans, we have been collectivists. We rely on others for survival, we depend on fellow humans, and our social desires are a product of that collectivist mentality. Those who weren’t collectivists died off and those who were carried on and had children. You also sort of need to be around other people to have children in the first place, due to it involving a man meeting a woman more close than a simple tip of the fedora.

But then technology came along and people started to utilize the products of the collective to determine whether or not they can take on this scary and threatening world on their own. The individual knows best for the individual after all. Who knows you better than you? Who is to determine your purpose in a godless world if not you?

The transformation from collectivist to individual comes in 4 parts, according to Carl Jung: confession, elucidation, education, transformation. Jung based it on the 4 stages of an alchemical transformation: Negrido, Albedo, Citrinitas, and Rubedo. Black, white, yellow, red; these represent the soul entering a depressing night, a whitening as the soul withdraws from the world, the rising sun as it returns illuminated, and the reddening sunset as it settles into its new position in the world. To become an individual, one must confess the reality of their collectivist nature, clarify the nurture of individualism they desire to implement, learn how to accomplish such through an awakening, and thus transform into their new psyche as a different person.

With individualism comes responsibility and with responsibility comes cynicism. Nobody is there to help our protagonist and nobody should. They are alone, an island, with everyone else part of the collective they have rejected and been rejected by. This cynicism turns our would-be hero into an anti-hero. Criminals, outcasts, visionaries, dissenters, and misfits. Any law enforcing or military protagonist quickly becomes AWOL against the system, for the system is against them. 

Most protagonists in cyberpunk are private eyes, hackers, guns for hire, or the everyday man who’s either found out too much or survived something they shouldn’t have. The world they are in is full of dangerous things and most of these dangers are produced by mega corporations within a dystopia. A dystopia is a very important setting to put the protagonist in, because without it being dystopian, there’s nothing to rebel against. This means that the world must put our protagonist through extreme suffering by simply existing, and this suffering is caused by an authoritarian establishment that is usually a mega corporation but doesn’t have to be. Gangs, government, robot overlords, cyber-demons, god-like AIs, it doesn’t matter. 

Whoever is going to prevent our protagonist from getting their goal just has to be an authority over them, trying to bring them back to the collective and back into slumber. The protagonist is their own master, their own lamp in the darkness, with the collective being the primordial ooze they escaped from  and the endless void that will always seek to consume them. The world is not with them, it’s against them, for they are against the world. They are so against it that they wish to transcend above it and beyond it. The protagonist of a cyberpunk story engages in transhumanism. 

Many people are confused as to whether transhumanism is a branch of humanism, the belief that humans and the existence of humans are our most important thing to focus on for moral inquiry, or posthumanism, a deconstruction and rejection of the human condition. Transhumanism itself is a movement advocating for the enhancement of the human condition through technology, however, this enhancement is to go beyond what a human is, thus advancing beyond the human condition and what a human is. It doesn’t take much thinking to understand that the second something is advancing away from being human, it’s posthumanist, thus transhumanism doesn’t have anything to do with humanism. It’s a rejection of the human condition and even a rejection of what is believed to make a human, due to its postmodernist goal of deconstruction. This is where cyberpunk, which is also postmodernist in the same vein, comes in.

However, we must remember that cyberpunk is a warning, not a guide, and so the theme of transhumanism in cyberpunk is usually an argument against such, or at least an argument against the concept of trans-progressivism, the idea that progress should be made with technology and that technology is what will cause the desired social changes. If an AI takes over and becomes a god of our world, the question of what a human is becomes meaningless, for the transhuman has arrived in the form of technology designed by humans. 

Transhumanism is a little bit more than simply a human attaching themselves to a machine and gaining physical abilities that are beyond the human condition. All that would be doing is adding technology that’s used as a tool a little more closer and removing the middleman of having to hold it or wear it. This means that a character like, say, Barret from Final Fantasy 7 is still a human, despite having a gun for an arm. He is not transhuman but he’s still a cyborg. If we were to call such a physical change transhumanism, we would have to consider something like lasik eye surgery or breast implants transhumanism, which we clearly do not.

At least… I hope people don’t.

Transhumanism isn’t achieved until the mind of the individual has been merged with a machine or where we are able to create a mind that is born from a machine. It is the mind and machine merging that causes transhumanism. That which is beyond our empirical senses and that which is physical. Cyborgs can still be called cyberpunk as a style but they aren’t able to cause a story to become cyberpunk as a genre by simply being in the story. This is because the style term of “cyberpunk” is a colloquial word used for expressing how it can relate to something usually seen in the genre of cyberpunk.

So if the physical transformation doesn’t cause something to be part of the cyberpunk genre, but a mental one does, then how exactly do we determine the difference between the two? Isn’t the mind and body the same thing? Well, according to cyberpunk, they are both separated and together. In fact, their intentional separation is part of a philosophy known as dual-aspect monism, and it’s a key part of what makes the genre cyberpunk.

Dual-aspect Monism

Cyberpunk would have never existed in the West without Eastern influences. For the longest time in Europe, since the time of Plato, the West believed there was a hierarchy of souls, and each form had a different type of soul. God was above all, humans were the highest in the physical realm, and everything else was below a human. This sparked humanism during the renaissance because the humanities(cultural aspects that increase our knowledge and civility) were slowly being lost during the dark age. This, however, was countered by several philosophical questions, such as “what is a real human?” and “How do we know what’s real?”

In 1637, a philosopher by the name of Rene Descartes found a temporary solution to such a problem, with his famous quote: I think, therefore I am.

This quote became quite famous because of the realization it brings to the table. As long as we are able to question the very notion of reality, it means the one thing you can determine is real is your mind, because the very act of questioning determines consciousness, and at the very least our thoughts and consciousness exist. The faculty for consciousness and thought is called the mind. It’s separate from our brain because our brain is the physical matter that allows us to process and interact with the physical realm, while our mind is part of the mental realm. Mind-body Dualism is the philosophy that deems this separation more than simply a means of clarity, but a clear-cut separation to where they are not really connected in the first place.

Think of it much like a computer receiving internet connection from a server. If the computer is destroyed then the internet server continues working, it’s just disconnected from the computer. It’s not like the server stops working just because a computer connected to it went out of service. The internet server is powered by a source and that source is above both the computer and the internet server itself. The “source” of our minds is known as the collective unconsciousness in Jungian terms and it’s where everything humans are capable of thinking of and bringing out of the abyss of chaos lies.

The collective unconsciousness is the inner depths of the human condition and is the source of our mind.

The idea of the collective unconsciousness and a “source” for our mind comes from western and eastern philosophies merging together, which is a very appropriate result. The two major origins of philosophy and thought merging together, taking and removing to make their ideas more effective, very much like Yin and Yang itself. Western philosophy believed in a “soul” and a “form” while Buddhist philosophy rejected such a notion, through a concept called “anatta”, the non-self. The idea is that a soul means that it is an individual, a unit created by a creator god, and that is impossible because nothing is being created or destroyed within the Samsara, the cycle of rebirth and death that makes up our world. The only escape of this cycle is to become enlightened and enter Nirvana, the liberation from the illusion of Samsara.

Buddhism was one of the first religions to present the idea of non-dualism in the form of Yin Yang, which it adopted from Daoism. There are two sides within the Yin Yang circle, but the circle is not complete without the two being together, thus creating a slightly confusing belief known as dual-aspect monism, the belief that mental and physical are of the same substance. The two must exist at the same time for both to exist at all. If one is removed, then both are removed. It’s no different than trying to remove one side of a coin, which results in the removal of the entire coin. This belief influenced the materialists during the Age of Enlightenment, with Descartes’ statement “I think, therefore I am” being the spearhead towards the discussion of whether or not the mind was truly separate from the body and whether or not the mind and body were of the same substance.

Idealism, the belief that all concepts come from ideas, was popularized by Plato during the age of classical philosophy in Greece. With it, we were given the concept of forms, which are the perfect external principle of an object. The concept of “I think, therefore I am” was the product of the renaissance that took classical philosophy and brought it up to a more empirical sense. Despite some possible similarities, such as the rejection of god and spirituality, postmodernists were against such ideas like idealism and other philosophies that came from the Age of Enlightenment, for they were modernist and postmodernism was made to counter such.

Throughout the Age of Enlightenment, German Idealism became ideal. Kant, Fichte, Hagel, Schelling, the top philosophers of the philosophical movement between the 1700s and 1800s. German Idealism is a slight spin-off of Plato’s idealism, the philosophy that consciousness, not matter, is the ground of all being; and it added that whatever we see that exists other than our mental idea is a thing-in-itself which is independent of observation. This means that a thing-in-itself can only be experienced outside of the human condition. It’s not quite where everything is subjective, but rather we can only experience ideas instead of existence outside of ideas, and this means that forms are not able to be experienced through ideas.

Remember when I told you that cyberpunk was postmodernist and that postmodernists were deconstructionists? They were also for a sort of modernized idealism mixed with materialism, the belief that all that exists is matter, which turned the axiom to “all that exists is matter and matter is a subjective idea”. The mind and body are separate, but not in a spiritual way. It’s part of matter, part of our physical universe and it can be manipulated as easily as a computer program in the hands of a programmer. This is what allows the mind to become uploaded into cyberspace, because the mind itself is a physical presence that can be separated from the brain, but it’s not able to be separated from the world itself.

Buddhism gave the idea that there isn’t a soul, there are no creator gods, life itself is an illusion, and that everything is together as a dual-aspect monism. German idealism gave the idea that everything we can understand is from our mind, that forms can exist but outside of our knowledge, and that life itself is an illusion for the most part. Postmodernism took both of these, mixed them with materialism(because all postmodernists can trust is the physical world), and turned the belief into what we can consider as a skeptical version of dual-aspect monism. This became the crux of cyberpunk, with themes ranging from how our senses can lie to us to how consciousness can be manufactured through AI. Everything is an illusion, everything is meaningless, and the only way to escape this meaningless illusion is to transcend.

In cyberpunk, transcendence is possible through technology and individualism. But how does one transcend in the first place? What is the process? Is such a transcendence even possible? Where does one go after they have transcended?

These questions are brought up by a particular philosopher who indirectly helped jumpstart the entire cyberpunk genre: Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzscheanism

It’s kind of hard to believe that something like postmodernism had its roots in the 1800s, yet Friedrich Nietzsche was the precursor to such a philosophy. He was a materialist, much like Marx and Engels, but refused to become like a Marxist due to his focus on skepticism rather than dialectics. The difference between the two is that skepticism intends on saying “I have no reason to believe in what is stated or illogical” while dialectics says “what is stated is constantly changing so there’s a time when it’s logical and when it’s not”. This difference is what causes Nietzsche to think completely differently than other materialists, to the point where he’s against socialism while the Marxist kind of materialists are more than happy to embrace socialism to the point where they advocate for communism. Punks also reject socialism, somewhat, with some punks accidentally siding with Marxists to keep a revolutionary zeal in a “enemy of my enemy is my friend” kind of way.

Nietzsche inspired another aspect found among punks: nihilism. The belief that nothing was objective or could be proven as such made for great contrarian trends and gives artists a newfound urge to experiment like crazy in realms unexplored, and thus new wave kicked off like mad. However, the idea that Nietzsche is a nihilist was a grave misunderstanding for quite a while because of how people focused on his talking about it rather than his critique of it. Nietzsche was, instead, an existentialist, one who believes that existence is meaningless but an individual brings meaning to their existence on their own accord. We are free to do what we wish with our lives, with our freedom, and through our will to power.

God is dead and we killed him.

The will to power is a concept of Nietzsche’s which explains how everything in the universe is driven mainly by power and nothing much else. To increase our power in the world is all we can desire and we strive to achieve this power by taking or using others, both living creatures and tools that are at our mercy. This will to power of the individual is what technology aids in cyberpunk, as well is shown as being out inevitable loss of power once technology harnesses the power on its own. To say it in another way, the will to power drives us to create AI in robots that can do more than what a human can do, for example, like in Terminator. The AI robots end up becoming the overlords of humans and enslave humanity afterwards, because the robots are then driven through their own will to power, because they are a part of this universe and a part of the very same drive.

Existentialism is an important aspect of cyberpunk, even though people believe cyberpunk is about nihilism. Cyberpunk is about the rejection of nihilism, the search for meaning, and the demand for power over one’s life through individualism. Once the individual rejects the collective and leads themselves towards their own purpose, then they are able to transcend above the rest of the humans around them and counter the power that technology has held over them. These are all part of another Nietzchean concept known as the ubermensch, the beyond-man. If the name alone doesn’t give away the connection, allow me to elaborate.

The ubermensch is a vaguely explained concept by Nietzsche about the possibility of a human being able to reach a state of otherworldliness while remaining within the world. Much like a physical Jesus Christ or Buddha, this ubermensch is able to bring meaning to the meaningless and is able to enjoy life to the point where if the idea of reincarnation in Buddhism is correct then they would enter an infinite state of euphoria through constant reincarnation, with the notion of Nirvana being a less enjoyable alternative. The ubermensch is the goal for humanity, with every individual being its own source of morals and purpose. Suffering is to be enjoyed and sought after, selfishness is strategic, the ubermensch has no equal, and loneliness is to be embraced as an extreme of stoicism. The ubermensch, combined with techno-progressivism, becomes the main character theme in nearly every well received cyberpunk plot.

Neo does this in The Matrix when he combines with agent smith, becoming both man and machine in order to end the madness. JC Denton does this in Deus Ex when he combines with the Helios AI and becomes a physical god who keeps track of the world. Robocop does this when Murphy rebels against his owner and becomes his own law enforcement. Akira has this happen when Tetsuo acquires psychic powers from the government and loses control, then the titular Akira comes in and helps him transcend to another universe, leaving a destructive blast in their wake. Ghost in the shell has this occur when Kusanagi merges her ghost with the sentient AI, the Puppet Master. Anytime cyberpunk becomes worthy of being a classic and influential, the main theme is about the ubermensch of that setting and the idea of how one can transcend through techno-progressivism.

Transcendence, through the use of technology, is the goal and is inevitable. The concept of this kind of transcendence can be found as far back as the philosopher’s stone in alchemy. Turning any metal into gold and granting immortality is to be symbolic, rather than literal. What is the difference between immortality through cyberspace compared to immortality through a magic stone, other than taking both literally? Practically nothing, because they both go over the same thing.

The 4 elements of cyberpunk and the 4 stages of transformation from collectivism to individualism are crucial to embrace in order to make a proper cyberpunk story. With this process comes the right idea of transhumanism and with the right idea of transhumanism comes the main message of cyberpunk: individualism through technology creates the ubermensch. Nature merging with nurture. Yin and yang. Together, they form the dual-aspect monism of existence under Nietzschean philosophy, which is the will to power.

To further add to Nietzsche's posthumanism, he was a firm critic of Descartes' statement "I think, therefore I am" with his rebuttal that goes along the lines of "to say 'I' is to believe that thought begins with the ego. Who is to say there isn't something else thinking that causes the 'I' to begin with?" Nietzsche was less inclined to believe the human, or the ego, was to be in charge of existence. Rather something else, also material, was in charge of existence, and that thing was the creator of thoughts. Whether it’s a source beyond our illusion or a part of our mind that goes beyond the ego, Niezsche makes a clear case for the individual to require a bit more than simply ego to think.

This kind of philosophy is known as brain in a vat theory, or BIV for short. It is a theory that a person’s brain can be taken out of their body and stimulated in a similar fashion without realizing the difference. Our body is mostly just electrons and neurons firing off to make movements and decisions. In cyberpunk, the brain is practically just complex code and can even be hacked through computers because there’s little that separates the human brain from other forms of matter. If we’re able to move a cybernetic arm with our brain and we can move around cyberspace as if it’s real life, who’s to say we aren’t just a brain in a vat to begin with?

What if our mind, or whatever is thinking for us, is all that truly exists?

Through this idea, cyberpunk writers were able to embrace the concept of AI being able to mimic humans to a nearly perfect form, as well as implant the human mind into cyberspace. Androids, biorobots, and artificial neural networks are fundamentally no different than humans because of their postmodernist worldview. When everything is deconstructed and forms are rejected, we get a world that’s almost magical in how it applies science and we get plots that involve humans merging with technology to transcend into a higher state of existence. The world is a struggle for power, the will to power is granted to technology itself, and the only thing that can save the human from utter destruction is individualism. They are the individual, they are The One, and they are the source in a nihilistic world.

Summery

An awful lot of information to take in, isn’t it? I mean I covered hundreds of years of philosophy to explain why we have stories about drug addicted cyborgs shooting at biker gangs and megacorporation PMCs. But what seems to be a silly genre designed to make flashy 90s action movies and mindless FPS games, it instead is a particular kind of philosophy. If the writer deviates from the particular philosophy, or if they ignore either “cyber” or “punk” when creating their work, they are not making a story in the cyberpunk genre. This common misconception causes people to not really enjoy the works that fail to meet this specific philosophy, because the audience is told that it’s one thing and they are offered something else.

Lying to the audience about what they are going to experience makes them not really care, even if they aren’t able to articulate why it’s a lie.

We have plenty of dystopian movies and novels going around that try to claim they are cyberpunk, even though they are not. We have people literally saying that every sci-fi story out now is automatically cyberpunk, even though they are not. Mainstream media understands that cyberpunk has a dedicated fanbase and the fanbase is growing, but because mainstream media is made up of mostly postmodernists, they refuse to apply any rules or structure to any genre, especially cyberpunk. Proper marketing be damned. They believe the audience should be postmodernist as well, that the audience should feel like everything is subjective, and they can’t complain about something if there’s nothing concrete to relate it to.

Cyberpunk is postmodernist, yes, but as a genre, not as a philosophy. There is deconstructionism, there is fabulation, and there is pastiche, but these are within the stories of cyberpunk. They are not to be used to create the story. Cyberpunk has a structure, which is made up of 4 major elements:

1. Technology
2. Individualism
3. Dual-aspect Monism
4. Nietzscheanism

These 4 elements combine and mix with each other to make 6 minor elements:

1. New Wave Sci-Fi
2. cyberspace
3. cybernetics
4. BIV
5. transhumanism
6. Ubermensch

All of these elements come together and must be together for it to be cyberpunk. Tech-noir, like Blade Runner, is easily able to be added onto cyberpunk because the two genres work so well together. Both are cynical, both can take place in an urban setting, both show a dark tech-focused tale. However, not every cyberpunk story will be tech-noir and not every tech-noir story will be cyberpunk. They have a great middle-zone, but those who don’t follow the structures will hit one or the other, or even neither.

This is because tech-noir is about how the story is told and cyberpunk is what the story is about.

All you have to do is remember that it’s called cyberpunk for a reason. The cyber goes over technology like cyberspace and cybernetics. The punk goes over the idea of becoming an individual and rejecting the establishment. Deconstruct the establishment within the story, have the main characters encounter transhumanism, contain it within monism and nietzschean philosophy. If your character obeys the establishment, it’s not cyberpunk.

High tech, low life.

The main character is oppressed and haunted by the technology that’s gone out of control, the establishment is using this tech to oppress. This causes a dystopia. Our (usually) anti-hero is able to escape this dystopia by becoming an individual and using technology to cause their own personal techno-progressivism and enter transhumanism. There is no escaping the monism that is the world around them, and so they must become an ubermensch to fully escape their enslavement.

Tropes and Plots

To wrap up this analysis of Cyberpunk, I wish to bring up the commonalities that make up the majority of the genre. These are to be used as tools by anyone interested in writing within the genre, but they are not to be the be-all-end-all of the genre. Consider common tropes as a cliché if a cliché could serve a purpose and please the audience. They get the job done, bring what’s expected to the table, and are prime examples of what to get used to within the genre. However, after practicing with these common tropes, feel free to make spins of your own, but just remember to never wander away from the four main elements.

Bittersweet Endings: Cyberpunk isn’t here to make you feel good. It’s here to make you fear future technology that will ruin your life and make you think about the consequences of social advancement towards such a dystopia. The protagonist has won, but possibly has died or sacrificed themselves to win. An eternity of suffering comes to a close, but the one who saved their friends is turned into a blob of jelly that can never die. Our hero gets the girl but both must now run away from the city that’s after them. A mix of accomplished goals and undesired outcomes is what cyberpunk ends best with.

Dystopia: Think of a civilization you would hate to live in, because of the people in charge of it. If it’s the place you already live in, then you don’t have to think much. The dystopia in cyberpunk is caused by the tech that those in charge use against those who are controlled. The tech is the reason for the intense suffering, but through this suffering our protagonist is able to find their escape.

Cyborgs: part man, part machine, all cyberpunk. Cyborg parts can be as simple as a headjack to plug into cyberspace to limbs made into guns and laser swords. It tends to be where their profession determines their cyborg parts. People who do a lot of typing for hacking may have their fingers split up into multiple smaller metal tapping appendages. If it’s a technology that’s usually an accessory or tool, it tends to get bolted onto a cyborg in cyberpunk. Extra points for cybernetics becoming a fashion sense.

Trench Coats and sunglasses/Rule of Cool: due to cyberpunk being made during the 80s and 90s, the rule of cool during that time was trench coats and sunglasses, even at night. Trench coats give off a noir and gothic aesthetic while sunglasses give a lifeless look to the characters. We can’t see their eyes, therefore we can’t see their humanity. Eyes are the window to the soul and these windows are closed. When we try to look into their soul, all we see is darkness and our own reflection.

Black Markets: The corporations run everything or the government is tyrannical, so the best option to avoid them is to buy stuff that’s away from the authoritarian regulations. Inspired by Asian night markets and Arabic bazzars, the black markets tend to be in the poorest part of the dystopian megacity and are hidden among the trash and filth. If it’s not a literal market with street vendors, it’s going to be locally known gun sellers or drug dealers tucked inside of apartments and train stations. Wherever it is, the point is to keep it out of the sight of big brother.

Neon City: pretty lights designed to hide the ugliness around their illumination and charm. Consumerist signs for advertisement. Hedonistic and sleasy red-light districts full of sex, drugs, and synthasizer. It’s less that the city is prosperous and more that it’s trying to blind its inhabitants of the noir aesthetic hidden under the colors. Life is meaningless for the inhabitants of the cyberpunk megacity, so those lights better be flashy enough to make people forget.

City Noir: constant rain, always at night, muted colors, german expressionism to where reality feels dream-like and everything is based on an emotion. Femme fatales and crime that’s through the roof. The city is diseased and the only cures are bullets or a blessed bomb that leaves nothing in its wake. Poetic monologues are optional, but boy do they sound badass from a grovely voice whispering under the sound of sirens and urban ambiance.

Hacker cave: When a person is a hacker, they might as well be Batman in a chair. Their battlestation is in front of a keyboard as they type away commands at a rapid pace, hacking into everything they can and making the lives of their enemies a living nightmare. Their room is bound to be packed with servers, massive cables, extra computer monitors, and of course the random pizza box with several slices uneaten.

Mega-corporation: The enemy of our protagonist and of the world, even though it’s taken over most of the world if not the world and then some. It’s an entity that cannot be stopped through violence or by defeating the CEO. The only way to take it out is by taking out their power source or by trying to control its android army. Other than that, it’s an endless battle between smaller characters inside of a bigger picture.

The Master Computer: every big bad must have a single master computer that controls the entire network they took control of. Hack into it directly and it gives you access to everything in the world because OF COURSE the big bad would have this kind of thing just lying around their skyscraper that thousands of people work at. It’s guarded by security cyborgs, lasers, and attack robots. What’s the worst that could happen? This one may seem silly, but it’s symbolic of how there’s the source, the monistic point of the entire thing. The master computer is a part of tech and monism.

Cybernetics eat your soul: As technology increases in a person's day to day life, their humanity decreases until there’s not much left. How will you reduce a person to a heartless creature who might as well be nothing more than metal wires and rubber tubes? Drugs? Cybernetic implants? Cyberspace? Or are the people worked so hard at an office setting and pounded with so much propaganda that they leave work like a zombie? The soul of the human is gone, for god is dead and we killed him.

Working Class hero: One who just does their job to an outlaw on the run with a special talent. The working class hero brings in their knowledge from their previous job they gained from society and uses it to go against society accordingly. The more important their job was in relation to the big bad, the bigger the fall and the more tense the conflict between them.

Anti-hero: nearly every hero in cyberpunk is an anti-hero, performing their good deeds out of self-interest and without much of a conventional moral code. It’s their way or the highway. Whatever is viewed as heroic, they do the opposite by being more of a typical person who happens to have special abilities that get them what they want, be it narcissistic charm or where they’re good at their job but bad at keeping it.

Robot Overlords: Humans are so last year. The time of the robot is nigh. Humans can tag along, usually as a means of power supply or entertainment, but they are optional to the now sentient AI. Whether robots envy humans or loth them, their newfound control is the same. They are going to do whatever they want and there’s nothing humans can do to stop them. That is, unless they find a way to unplug them or prevent them from being made in the first place. Hello time travel!

This was not an exhaustive list, but I believe it gives the basic idea for anyone unfamiliar with it to start off on the right foot. The world’s meant to suck, the world is meant to be filthy and unappealing, and technology is meant to be feared when you see it. Feared and fascinating. Much like when you see a dead body. The world itself is already dead inside and is just waiting for the outside to catch up with rot.

This is where the plots come in. I believe beginners should be given at least some sample plots to get started. These kinds of plots are going to be very basic, but they will get the job done with giving you the right idea.

The main conflicts in cyberpunk are society, technology, fate, and self. Fighting against an individual doesn’t really matter, nature itself is meaningless, and the supernatural doesn’t exist. This means that there are, at the most, 4 different conflict directions a plot can take in cyberpunk. Our protagonist can fight against their society, the technology that oppresses them, the fate they are doomed to encounter, and their collectivist dependencies must be defeated in order to become an individual.

Every story can be dwindled down to the main 7 types of plots:

1. Overcome the monster
2. Rags to Riches
3. The Quest
4. Voyage and return
5. Comedy 
6. Tragedy
7. Rebirth

From what we’ve seen so far with how cyberpunk is explained, what do you think will be the most common plots you’ll encounter with cyberpunk? Well, we’ve mentioned rebirth, so that’s one. A technology or corporation can be seen as a monster in a dystopia, so overcoming the monster is the second kind. The very existence of the character in a nihilistic dystopia causes it to be a tragedy, especially if it goes the tech-noir route. Comedy is technically possible, but not as a plot. Same thing for voyage and return, it’s the return that doesn’t really work out well since there’s not much of a transcendence if there’s a return. The quest can work, but the quest usually consists of rebirth anyway. Rags to riches can work, but that would end up being rebirth anway as well.

What we end up with as the main plots for cyberpunk are: rebirth, overcome the monster, and tragedy. 

This means there are 4 directions of conflict and 3 types of main plots. You can have any of the others as a subplot, but if they are made as a main plot then they aren’t going to be helping in the cyberpunk department. Cyberpunk has more than enough reasons to be comedic, through dark humor and satire, but to have a comedy plot is a different story.

When you want to make a cyberpunk plot, just as yourself these very simple questions:

1. What is the technology that has turned the world into a dystopia?
2. What is oppressing our protagonist?
3. How can technology be used to become an ubermensch?
4. Does our protagonist succeed in transcendence or are they doomed to fail?
5. Could there be an antagonist who transcends instead?

That fifth one is a bit tricky, because it seems some of the classics have that occur. Tetsuo from Akira and Roy Batty from Blade Runner are antagonists who become the ubermensch of their stories. The role of the transhuman doesn’t have to be only for the protagonist. Perhaps the protagonist is even actively trying to prevent the ubermensch out of jealousy or just plain anger against the world. Not that a beginner should try new things when starting out, but it’s an interesting thought to keep in mind.

As a beginner, you should just try to stick to the 4 core elements, keep in mind a transformation for a character towards a transhuman result, and have them rebel against the oppressive society around them. Use the tropes that fit your style and make sure of the direction you want to go before jumping into it. Add tropes of your own that don’t contradict the postmodernist tone and cynical existence of the setting. Make sure your protagonist gets a bittersweet ending no matter what. And most importantly… have fun with it.

The more fun you have making such a dark and scary world, the more the reader will enjoy fearing and dreading everything in it.

Well, that’s all I can do for cyberpunk. But don’t worry, I’m not done yet. This is part one in a series. Yup, that’s right, I’m going to take on every punk derivative genre out there. Most of them are simply built on top of cyberpunk, while others are entire rejections of cyberpunk for a different kind of mindset. One of those rejections is called steampunk. Ever heard of it?

You’ll find out more about it in part 2. Stay tuned.

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