Category Archives: Transhumanism

“I, Robot.”

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I’ve just read Cory Doctorow’s “I, Robot.” I’m stunned. There is no way I can ana­lyse it object­ively; as it renders back to life vivid bits of memor­ies from my child­hood. Let me explain.

I was born behind the so-​called “Iron Cur­tain,” been raised in a com­mun­ist soci­ety where we were taught that we were the chosen ones, that our ideo­logy was the purest and our tech­no­logy was the best. And sup­posedly — in our glor­i­ous his­tory — we inven­ted everything and the per­ver­ted cap­it­al­ists had again and again stole from us, but in the end we will prevail.

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Cyberpunk is dead.

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“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.”

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Here be dragons

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“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)

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