Why Cyberpunk is so hard to write

[Evil Scientist]

Word.

[madunkieg]

I must say that I don't find cyberpunk hard to write at all. It just needs to adapt to the issues and fears of today.

Whereas the old cyberpunk was man vs. machine, the new cyberpunk is man vs. data. By data, I don't just mean relevant data, but also spam, search engine optimized data, spimes, data from other languages, misspellings, and all the other things that promise to clutter up the net over the next few decades. Even today search engines have a limited ability to index sites (search engines don''t categorize, only humans possess that ability). In my game Metropole Luxury Coffin the primary job of the downtrodden was to sift through the masses of data to find tidbits relevant to their employer.

The old cyberpunk was about the individual. The new cyberpunk is about the tribe. That means a multiplicity of different people banded together by some force. It could be a time zone. It could be shared fashion. Whatever ties them together, they also have enough differences that they will likely work well together. If not, they'll split off and form their own tribe, likely with modifications to whatever held the original group together.

I know there are elements that I'm missing. I could have written a more complete description around the time I was writing Metropole Luxury Coffin. Alas, a stroke put a temporary block on my linguistic memories. If I remember more soon, I'll add it to the thread.

[Onix]