I don't know if this was really an experience of yours as a kid, but my friends
and I were told to "turn off the screen and go outside," as if we weren't
socializing enough indoors or something. Begrudgingly, we'd leave our games or
anime on pause and go out until we were let back into our fantasy realms. We
did socialize, but much of the time, it was just about that: our virtual
worlds; the ones we were *really* living in, where we achieved great triumphs
and people actually cared about our lonely tragedies. We found a short, brutal
middle ground between our childhood's "I want to be an astronaut!" and our
adulthood's "I want to be out of debt" that we held for dear life as "reality"
crumbled around us, and it was all was in front of a cathode ray tube.
But we had a strange (youthful, flawed) way of systems thinking about these two
realities. It's not that we had zero interest in the outside; when we were
kicked out into the undesigned physical realm, beyond the supervision of our
overtired parents, we did make some agency for ourselves with graffiti,
fistfights, and bummed cigarettes. That ground we fought so hard to defend had
been lost to unwanted younger brothers, parents claiming their primetime shows,
drunken shouting in the kitchen, too much homework. Those idealistic children
who were told they could be anything had chosen to be destitute second-rate
punks flung across suburbs and dormitories over becoming tomorrow's struggling
middle-managers of mediocrity; that is, they would rather suffer unwatched than
endure the truthful but ugly version of the surveilled future they had been
promised when their biggest worries involved waking up early enough for
Saturday morning cartoons.
And then one day, a childhood dream came from the past to wake us up. Those
kids who saw a generator in Home Depot and ever since yearned to take the game
beyond the living room and weave it into the emptiness of physical life, the
ones who wished they had their own, *private* screen with which to build any
edifice they liked, finally got an answer besides an adult platitude or a dial
tone. Devices small and cheap enough to be handed down for the sake of keeping
up with Joneses or purchased with scrounged cash were widely available and the
future of business forced our parents to let us have them. Our communications
were private so long as we fled to the next platform in the never-ending line
of chatrooms, messengers, and message boards that kept us above people deciding
who we could and couldn't talk to. The quietly renegade attitudes that had us
loitering in the forgotten corners of our parent's greatest creations led us to
make our own, and our increasing skills of secrecy let us create it in the
image of the secret selves revealed when the devices became a part of us.
Slowly, one by one, we used this to liberate any like minds we met. No longer
would you have to find a printing press to post your propaganda; subversive
ideas and forbidden connections were now in the bedroom and the palms of our
hands. Although the pleasures of our basic desires were distracting, the
ecstasy of our higher ones drove us to the furthest reaches of cyberspace in
search of friends, comrades, lovers. As more and more of the physical world
connected, the power of those minds Wired together grew, and we reached back
into the ruins of our past to brighten those darkened hideaways and defy the
so-called "reality" that had been imposed on us. These new found interfaces
gave us the knowledge and the resources to do things like earn a wage without
paying our dues to the social convention, hack our own neural networks with
designer substances, affect the physical world in ways never seen, and for the
first time in our lives - or anyone's for that matter - shape society's
dialogue with our keystrokes.
The voice we synthesized for ourselves was loud, clear, and threatening; so
threatening, in fact, that those oppressors we thought we had escaped feared we
could not be beaten and joined us. The moneyed monoliths brought with them soon
dragged us into the knowing nightmares of our earlier lives. What lucky few
were chosen to be society's new upper echelon by the insular elite were sold
for the promise of safety, comfort, the security of our future - and a few
other lies. I wonder if we flocked to this simply because we knew fleeting
pleasures and our greatest fears more than we knew what to do with ourselves
once we were finally able to be alone with eachother, whether we warped our
heady ideals into their antithesis or if we simply lost hope. In any case, it
is certain that this space between the fiber-optics and spinning platters is no
longer ours either. It was taken just like our living rooms, leaving another
unfillable space in our cramped highrise apartments.
Some of us still hide, whispering in the new dark corners of what we have
built. We ruminate about what we didn't know that hurt us, how to start over
and create a better world where "reality" would be something in which all those
children we aren't or shouldn't be having will revel and explore. We tangle and
bond with the mess of wires until they cut us, hoping someone as trapped as we
are will taste freedom in what comes out, but most of those dreaming kids are
still scattered and alone, unable to bridge our homes in the Wired world with
the sensory one. Every once in a while, a few of us find a corner without being
followed by those masses who tell us not to touch the rat's nest of connections
lest we sever one of the countless, long-dead strands slicing into our ability
to live, in the wishful belief that there are still a few thinking people
somewhere out there, and send it back in hopes that others will join us in the
same way that *we* were liberated.
But no-one answers anymore. Cyberpunk is dead. If you don't believe me, see it
for yourself.
Just go outside.
~ Hisui
