https://twitter.com/ClipperChip/status/1337289319988473856
People seem to think you can use etymology as some clue to deciphering the cyberpunk and cyber philosophy in general. You can read a whole
Thomas Rid book on it, and it's weird when people stress "Cybernetics" as if they've found some long lost hieroglyphic clue when the reality of how everything cyber evolved is staring right at them in flickering neon lights. As Hunter S. Thomson said, "with the right kind of eyes you can go up onto the top floor of any Silicon Valley building and you can almost see the high-water mark. That place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."
When I was 20, working at the NSA, I once attended a cypherpunk meeting in DC, with Diffie and others crowded into a brownstone somewhere in one of the nicer parts of the city. The cypherpunk motto is very simple, "Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy. We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and we're going to write it."
At 20, in my larval stage, I was so socially awkward that it wrapped around to blithe unfiltered ignorance. During introductions, when they asked me where I worked and I said, "The DoD", they asked me why. I shrugged, "'Cypherpunks write code', and there are are more at the NSA than you might think." And people got over it - I pestered people with technical questions later as I always do, and there were snacks. But everyone in that room was a fighter, striving against an unspoken force on the field we now know as cyber war.
Although no genre is "about" anything, to some extent Cyberpunk novels have often had a keen awareness of analyzing what it means to be a human mind. The new game Cyberpunk 2077 is an excellent adaptation of this theme, and avoids playing the horrors of modern life for laughs - where GTA 5 leveraged its open world to poke fun at the system, and Red Dead Redemption allowed you to marvel at the world despite its failures, Cyberpunk 2077 drops you into the scene in first person as a rollercoaster of existential dread takes you on a fast paced journey into tasting every gritty philosophical sandgrain of losing what it means to be a human, to have a mind of your own.
William Gibson has said, "Science Fiction is never about the future. It's always about the present." but he also said "The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed." And in the same sense that chemistry is just really slow applied electromagnetism, Cyberpunk literature, and the new game is exactly that, is a story about how some place's future, Xinjiang's perhaps, is all of our futures. The way that brownstone living room was, if you had the right kind of eyes.
-dave