First they came for our internet spaces, and we said nothing.
They built safe spaces and support and we stood by watching. The New Generation will be the end of us.
“This is supposed to be my community and I feel like I can’t even go to the club and feel proud of myself for existing without some teen wearing a wraith shrug and looking proud of themselves,” says Seattle native and declared Cyberpunk, Router Cable.
“It’s really getting out of hand,” agrees Radia Screw, a cyberpunk blogger who sips a vodka and cranberry as we all enjoy the sounds of obscure goth/new wave mashups. “One of those fucking hipsters says that cyberpunk is just steampunk in the future. I just can’t even.”
Screw adjusts her “outlaw cowl,” a fashion item resembling a black scarf. “I went to the Extreme Future Festival and I saw some chick running around with what were clearly steampunk goggles and not cyberpunk goggles. Like, hello? Do you even code, bro?”
As Millennials age, subcultures are evolving and changing, moving farther and farther away from the original goal; we are finding it really tough to watch.
Router Cable is a technosexual transhumanist biohacker with over 6,000 Twitter followers. “But these kids don’t care about that. All they care about is sending each other armpit porn on MOX-E. It’s like Twitter never even happened.”
Our work is completely ignored in great context because the newer generations are taking on our wisdom.
Screw echoes Cable’s frustration: “Now it’s all cool to be politically active but they’re all like ‘what about racism’ and don’t see that there wouldn’t be racism if we were all robots. They’re missing the bigger issues and looking too short term.”
In a time where we need to focus on the singularity, it does seem incredibly ridiculous to bother with social justice; social order will be completely overhauled as we reject our current flesh based limitations.
I agree with Screw and Cable’s assessment on the state of the cyberpunk movement. Once a glorious time for white people mastuburating to Hentai and into varying degrees of body modification, our bastion of intelligent discourse has been overtaken by the New Generation. They are all flash and no substance. They didn’t have to walk uphill both ways to get blue hair dye.
They are too green, too positive–nothing has stripped them to their raw steel.
I knew our stronghold on futurism has been lost to these newbies when I tried to address a youth reading Neuromancer on his thoughts on transhumanism, he told me I was being ableist and to leave him alone. It’s a dark time now. No one gives a shit about Snow Crash. I worry about the future of cyberpunk.
What if I get my head cryogenically frozen before I've answered the question “androids dream of electric sheep?”
How will I freeze peacefully with that weighing on my mind?
How Whippersnappers Are Ruining Cyberpunk-And Everything Else
— Thinkpiece Bot ()
You can learn more about ThinkPieceBot and Nora Reed here.