The High Tech, Low Life of Cyberpunk

The outsider 'net addicted hackers of cyberpunk
served as a neon-soaked prism refracting dystopian
anxieties of the 1980s. Megacorps ruled the world.
Most of humanity had been left to languish in
sprawling sky-high slums. And the tragic,
alienated protagonists were always too
down-and-out to even hope for redemption.

This course asks students to accept the four
primary rules of cyberpunk - "style over
substance," "attitude is everything," "always take
it to the edge," and "break the rules" - while
looking for a way to rescue it from aesthetic
cliché, which has deadened its power of critique.

We will explore that vast array of mediums that
have taken up cyberpunk, including short stories,
novels, cinema, anime and manga, board games,
video games, music, fashion, design, and more.
Along the way, we will interrogate its cultural
conventions, including the figures of the femme
fatale, queer cyborg, afro-futurist rockers,
techno-orientalist robots, holographic
celebrities, slum-dwelling underclass, synthetic
transhuman enhancements, chemical additions,
automated androids and AI, mega-cities, exclusion
zones, secretive military projects, splashy
subcultures, nihilist deathcults, and new age
religions based around techno-gods.

For assignments, students will undertake projects
to develop characters with tragic flaws, worlds
plagued by certain irresolvable problems,
environments that exaggerate specific hostilities,
technologies that magnify existing anxieties,
subcultures that amplify particular conflicts,
musical soundtracks that set the mood, lifestyles
that express values, and stories that specify the
causes for them all. These assignments will be
paired with critical reflection to explain why/how
these choices with scholarly thinking.