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I first spoke with Cori Doctorov two years ago. I was trying to get to grips with the genre of science fiction known as cyberpunk, which is most famously associated with the work of William Gibson. (It also served as the inspiration for a recent video game, Cyberpunk 2077, which had a famously boisterous launch.) Doctorov, often described as a post-cyberpunk writer, is both a sci-fi theorist-practitioner and a vigorous commentator on technology and policy-making. ; his answers to my questions were long, thoughtful and full of examples. And so, after that first conversation, I made plans to talk to him again, not for research purposes, but as a basis for the interview below.
Doctorow, who is fifty-one, grew up in Toronto, the descendant of Jewish immigrants from present-day Poland, Russia and Ukraine. Before becoming a novelist, he co-founded a free software company, co-edited the Boing Boing blog, and spent several years working for the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation. Our first conversation, at the end of 2020, took place just after he published the novel “Attack Surface”, part of his Little Brother series; dramatizes the moral conflict of cyber security insiders trying to balance keeping their jobs and following their conscience.
The second time we spoke, Doctorow told me he had eight books in production. “I’m the kind of person who deals with anxiety by working instead of not being able to work,” he explained, when I asked him how he’s dealing with the ongoing pandemic. Among those eight books are “Chokepoint Capitalism,” co-written with law professor Rebecca Giblin and published last September, and “Red Team Blues,” a novel set in the world of cryptocurrencies, due out in April. In two interviews, Doctorov discussed the right and wrong lessons to be learned from science fiction, the real dangers of artificial intelligence, and the emergence of big technology, among other topics. Those conversations have been edited for length and clarity.
I wanted to talk to you about cyberpunk because you have written eloquently about its historical and cultural foundations. Has your conception of what a genre is and can be changed over the years?
Safe. I mean, my first encounters with it were short stories in Asimov’s and OMNI. As a kid born in 1971, who was thirteen years old when “Neuromancer” came out, it was simply dazzling, wasn’t it? I’m pretty much with Gibson on this one: he says even though people called it dystopian, it was actually optimistic – because in the mid-eighties he was writing about worlds where there were only limited nuclear exchanges and the human race still existed! I had been involved in the anti-proliferation movement from my earliest years—my parents were political organizers—and I was moderately convinced that there was a good chance we’d all be radioactive ash by the time I turned eighteen.
I identify with a group of writers who loosely refer to themselves as post-cyberpunk. And I think one of the defining characteristics of us is the idea of treating computers as things in the world, not as metaphors. The writer who probably best embodies that shift is Neal Stevenson, who starts out very much as a techno-metaphorist—even though he’s a computer industry professional, or has experience in the computer industry—and then becomes more and more techno-realist in his approach, sometimes even sickening.
Do you think the genre has a new meaning now that big tech companies are no longer treated as harmless engines of innovation?
Big Tech’s comeback has two main sides. There’s a side that says Facebook invented the mind control beam to sell you spinning sinkholes, then Robert Mercer stole it and made your uncle racist, and now we no longer have free will because of big data. And those people, I think, give cyberpunk a real meaning, because it’s a cyberpunk sci-fi plot, not a thing that happens in the world. Everyone who has ever claimed to have a mind control ray has turned out to be a liar or deluded.
The other side is, look at these very ordinary mediocre monopolists, doing what monopolists have been doing since the time of the Dutch East India Company, with the same sociopathy, the same cheating, the same recklessness – we should do to them as we did to them. The Rockefellers and the Carnegies and so on. And that kind of techlash, I think, rightly sees cyberpunk motifs as fiction mistaken for reality, in the same way that Elon Musk mistakes fables about unitary inventors—who, in their lab, create a faster-than-light machine or whatever — for a thing that’s actually happening in the world, as opposed to some kind of juvenile fantasy, and then being billed as Iron Man.
Cyberpunk was radical literature. And, if you want to radicalize people, you have to deal with computers as they are so that people understand that you are not making up a fairy tale, but thinking about their real experience of things that can happen, can happen, and could be better.
In the 1980s, in the metaphor phase, cyberpunk made people realize how intimate technology had become in their lives. But you think we don’t need metaphors so much anymore?
I’ve been at this long enough that I’ve had to explain to people that I wasn’t speaking metaphorically when I said they were headed for a moment where the computer would be in their body and their body would be in the computer — by which I meant their car. And if you remove the computer, the car stops being a car. And that they will have things like pacemakers and artificial pancreases, and all kinds of implants. I have a friend with Parkinson’s who now has a wire in his brain that is controlled by a computer.
We think of computers as the thing on your desk that you use to do your taxes. And then we think of it as a rectangle in your pocket that you use to distract yourself. In the end, we’ll just think of the computer as physics, right? The rules by which we build infrastructure will be our computing capabilities and policies.
Bill Gibson used to go to arcades in Toronto and he saw kids sticking their chests into video games as they inserted quarters and thought, what world are they trying to enter when they play these games? And he coined the term cyberspace. What cyberspace gives us, as a metaphor, is the sense that our technology policy will be the framework in which our infrastructure, and thus our lives, will emerge. And that enormity is difficult for people to understand.
Then there is a danger that people get lost in thinking about escape. “Oh, imagine what it would be like if people could transfer their consciousness to computers,” etc.
I wouldn’t call it a cyberpunk hazard. I would call it the danger of the moment we live in, which includes cyberpunk, which can turn into reactionary or revolutionary goals. You see explicit, self-aware cyberpunk motifs being incorporated into things like the June 12 riots in Hong Kong—a radical, revolutionary, pro-democracy human agenda. But you also see cyberpunk in the motives of white nationalists.
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