Today, I used the term punkpunk to describe a movement, a term that I use to refer to the recent swell of media that is, effectively, something-punk. I’m not the first person to use the term, but I want to talk about what I mean when I use it.
The talk in class was about ‘four ages of Cyberpunk.’ At first, we had Cyberpunk which was a genre about punks using high levels of technology – punks in a cyber space. They were punks because they were anachronistic, they were chaotic, they were often without formal training or structure, but made or did what they did based on lived experience. This original period was very short – because in a lot of senses, the punks the characters were could only exist in a fresh, new way, characters who were striking their own direction in a world without role models, without precedents.
It’s kinda hard to be punk when you’re following another person’s path. You need to be working in totally new spaces.
What followed after this first group were the Cyberpunks-as-branding. This isn’t to say these stories and ideas weren’t good stories, but they were less cyberpunk in striking out their own way as much as they were developing that space where the punks had created. The first wave were punks without a culture, rebels without identity; the second were the ones who took the identity of the first because it resonated with them. Again, these aren’t bad, they’re just fundamentally, characteristically different. If you get down to the core of it, these cyberpunk stories are where you’ll see a cyberpunk aesthetic being developed. Bright neon green, brainpan plugs, smooth plastic moulding – the whole look of cyberpunk. In some cases this led to things that wore the look of cyberpunk without really being about the same themes, the undertones, the worldviews.
Then we had neocyberpunk, which is sort of what you get when you both have cyberpunk as a dawn point, the visual aesthetic of earlier cyberpunk to work with, but exist in the world predicted by cyberpunk. It’s where media like Standalone Complex can talk about concerns of surveillance, identity and the tension of being trapped between corporate interests as actually addressing the now. It’s where the technology of our science fiction isn’t about the tomorrow we dread.
Now throughout this time, we have the idea of -punk stuff. -punk became not about the original cyberpunk, but rather about the deliberate application of aesthetics. When something was -punk, we were told, ahead of time, that it was not about striking out in new directions, but was instead about juxtaposition and deliberate anachronism. There was a point made to contrast what values the visuals informed to us and the narrative that showed us. Steampunk, Dieselpunk, Decopunk. We’d taken the idea of anachronism and driven it off in lots of directions.
We’d gone a new way.
Like punks.