“Ubik helps you con­nect and share with the people in your life. Your friends will say, Christ, I used to think that you weren’t fun. But now, wow! — Safe when your pri­vacy set­tings match your level of com­fort, do not for­get to review them often. Avoid pro­longed use.”

The above para­phrase is a cross­breed between Philip K. Dick’s “Ubik” ads and the Face­book Safety guidelines. I was ran­domly brows­ing my book col­lec­tion, stumble upon “Ubik” read an advert and I had an eerie feel­ing, like the book fade out and the Giant appeared and said “It is hap­pen­ing again!” … then I wrote the above para­phrase. And some­how it doesn’t feel like fic­tion any­more, it remained fairly present after I’ve shelved the book.

Every­one loved when Wil­liam Gib­son said “The future is here. It’s just not widely dis­trib­uted yet.” — everybody had in mind the glor­i­ous future envi­sioned by the clas­sical sci­ence fic­tion; but it wasn’t about that dis­tant future, but about our near future envi­sioned in the cyber­punk works. Just turn the TV on, and you will see it: cyberter­ror­ism, cyber­bul­ly­ing, inter­net addic­tion, inter­net cen­sor­ship, inter­net legis­la­tion driven by cor­por­a­tions, per­vas­ive sur­veil­lance, massive telco data reten­tion, iris scans at the bor­ders and we just pro­posed DNA pro­fil­ing for immigrants.

We are now so far in that envi­sioned near future that early cyber­punk works read like archae­olo­gical reports full of euphem­isms. And in this aspect cyber­punk is his­tory, and you can think of even being dead. Actu­ally, cyber­punk is alive in its very own cyber­punk­ish way: it is dead, and it is haunt­ing us.