“Here be dragons” is a phrase used to denote dan­ger­ous or unex­plored ter­rit­or­ies, in imit­a­tion of the medi­eval prac­tice of put­ting sea ser­pents and other myth­o­lo­gical creatures in blank areas of maps. (Wiki­pe­dia, Here be dragons)

As a reac­tion to the Uto­pian sci­ence fic­tion (fre­quently set into a dis­tant glor­i­ous future), cyber­punk pro­jec­ted all our fears into the uncharted ter­rit­ory of the very near future.

What sep­ar­ates us from the near dark future is a kind of unspe­cified, yet immin­ent apo­ca­lypse. Hence, most of the cyber­punk scenes are post-​apocalyptic ones, where the apo­ca­lypse is a given, part of a for­got­ten history:

“…no one today remembered why the war had come about or who, if any­one, had won.” — Do Androids Dream of Elec­tric Sheep (Chapter 2)

This lack of the time dimen­sion, from dis­in­terest in his­tory to a “carpe diem” atti­tude towards life is the image of a chronic exist­en­tial nihilism.

Actu­ally vari­ous forms of nihil­ism are present in the cyber­punk set­tings: from the afore­men­tioned exist­en­tial nihil­ism, under­lined by the time­less Mercer’s cycle in ‘Do Androids Dream of Elec­tric Sheep,’ to the meta­phys­ical nihil­ism in The Matrix:

Boy: “Do not try and bend the spoon. That’s impossible. Instead… only try to real­ize the truth.“
Neo: “What truth?“
Boy: “There is no spoon.”

Moreover, The Mat­rix fea­tures Jean Baudrillard’s “Simu­lacra and Sim­u­la­tion” book, as a hol­lowed book from the chapter “On Nihil­ism,” beau­ti­fully under­ly­ing Baudrillard’s mes­sage. Later in the movie, Morph­eus shows Neo “the desert of the real,” a clear ref­er­ence to Baudrillard’s work (see first page here).

The “carpe diem” beha­viour fuels the con­sumer­ism, which becomes extreme and deval­ues everything: Pen­field mood organ deval­ues genu­ine feel­ings, plastic sur­gery deval­ues beauty, sim­s­tim edited real­ity replaces real­ity. Everything is avail­able in too many eph­em­eral options, anchor­ing every­one in a per­petual present.

“…by the 1990, the vari­ety of (android) sub­types passed all under­stand­ing, in the man­ner of Amer­ican auto­mo­biles of the 1960s.” — Do Androids Dream of Elec­tric Sheep

The lack of genu­ine items is under­lined by the concept of ‘cheap cop­ies of rep­licas.’ This and the con­tinu­ous re-​purposed antique objects illus­trate almost a cop­ro­phag­ous soci­ety, feed­ing on its own detritus.

Para­dox­ic­ally, these set­tings makes you exper­i­ence a claus­tro­phobic feel­ing in an open space, this is achieved in Gibson’s Sprawl tri­logy through the social and urban detritus; the ‘dessert of the real’ in The Matrix.

In Do Androids Dream of Elec­tric Sheep the kipple, the radio­act­ive fal­lout and the pres­sure to emig­rate from Earth cre­ates the claus­tro­phobic envir­on­ment on a depop­u­lated Earth; with over­lap­ping glimpses of agora­pho­bia triggered by the sound the empty build­ings creates.

“And for a minute I shut off the (TV) sound. And I heard the build­ing, this build­ing. I heard the — ” She ges­tured. “Empty apart­ments,” Rick said. — Do Androids Dream of Elec­tric Sheep

It is the same blend­ing between extremes char­ac­ter­istic to cyber­punk, here blur­ring the phys­ical space between claus­tro– and agoraphobia:

Silence. It flashed from the wood­work and the walls … From the use­less pole lamp in the liv­ing room it oozed out … It man­aged in fact to emerge from every object within his range of vis­ion, as if it — the silence meant to sup­plant all things tan­gible. Hence it assailed not only his ears but his eyes; as he stood by the inert TV set he exper­i­enced the silence as vis­ible and, in its own way, alive. Alive!
 — Do Androids Dream of Elec­tric Sheep

This is the uncharted ter­rit­ory to which we know we’re head­ing to, the scar­i­est future of all pos­sible futures: the future without a future.