What is Cyberpunk Idiocracy?
Welcome to the modern world?
Contents
I. Cyberpunk
What is cyberpunk?
High tech
Low life
II. Idiocracy
What is idiocracy?
Hysterias and bugbears
A new faith’s fury
III. Conclusion
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I. Cyberpunk
What is cyberpunk?
Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction that started in the 1960s and 70s. It was in part a response to the work of the early post-war period, where science fiction tended toward an optimistic view of the future and technology’s impact on it. In contrast to such utopias, cyberpunk featured a dark and gritty world, where high technology often aids authoritarian regimes, corrupt corporations, destabilizing social change, and the decay of human morals.
In a nutshell, cyberpunk explores the meeting of “high tech and low life.” It might also be described as “the dehumanization of humanity.” Its theme is that technology is not, in fact, guaranteed to lead to a better future and might lead to something worse.
One of the first notable works in the cyberpunk genre was Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Cyberpunk really took off, however, in the 1980s and 90s, starting with Blade Runner in 1982. Other popular works of the genre include:
Akira (1982)
Neuromancer (1984)
Bubblegum Crisis (1987)
The Running Man (1987)
Total Recall (1990)
Battle Angel Alita (1993)
The Matrix (1999)
The genre seemed to decline around the turn of the millennium, but advances in technology, recent social trends, and the release of Cyberpunk 2077 in 2020 have brought a revival. Indeed, many of the genre’s predictions and critiques have proven too real. We can explore how in brief below, but before we do that, you might be interested in knowing that I’m writing my own cyberpunk series. To stay updated, subscribe to my personal mailing list at the link here.
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High tech
Undoubtedly, technological advances have been great in the last few decades, especially in communications and information. This is likely only the tip of the iceberg. Several technological developments are under way which would, if successful, completely transform human life. Three come to mind on the spot.
1. Fusion power
In December 2022, the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory made a stunning announcement - it had achieved a net-energy positive controlled nuclear fusion reaction. In a laser experiment, it had gotten 3.15 megajoules of energy out of the reaction for the 2.05 it had put into the shot. Although the lasers needed 322 megajoules from the grid to operate, the experiment proved that it was possible to get net energy out of a controlled fusion reaction.
And more exciting developments are occurring in the private sector, now flush with investment. One of the most promising is Helion Energy, which recently inked a deal with Microsoft to build the world’s first commercial fusion power plant in 2028. Helion expects that its Polaris device will demonstrate net electricity in 2024. Other private companies are making similar strides.
The successful use of fusion will solve humanity’s energy problems. Because it would produce so much more power than any other terrestrial method, it offers the promise of almost unlimited energy for every inhabitant on Earth, drastically increasing the standard of living and eventually (over decades) enabling humanity to become a Type I civilization on the Kardashev Scale.
Fusion also does not produce the negative environmental externalities that fossil fuels, solar farms, or windmills create and much less radioactive waste than today’s nuclear fission reactors do. Many current environmental problems would therefore be solved once fusion gets on the grid.
For these reasons, energy experts have called fusion the “holy grail,” but many became skeptical that it would ever be possible. Advances over the last decade have brought the impossible quest closer to completion, however, and fusion might just start to be viable in the 2030s.
2. Organ cloning and transplants
Aging is more a consequence of physics than biology. As the body accumulates wear and tear over time, its structures start to degrade, in line with the second law of thermodynamics:
If this interpretation of the data is correct, then aging is a natural process that can be reduced to nanoscale thermal physics—and not a disease. Up until the 1950s the great strides made in increasing human life expectancy, were almost entirely due to the elimination of infectious diseases, a constant risk factor that is not particularly age dependent. As a result, life expectancy (median age at death) increased dramatically, but the maximum life span of humans did not change. An exponentially increasing risk eventually overwhelms any reduction in constant risk. Tinkering with constant risk is helpful, but only to a point: The constant risk is environmental (accidents, infectious disease), but much of the exponentially increasing risk is due to internal wear. Eliminating cancer or Alzheimer’s disease would improve lives, but it would not make us immortal, or even allow us to live significantly longer.
That doesn’t mean there is nothing we can do. More research into specific molecular changes in aging is needed. This may show us if there are key molecular components that are the first to break down, and whether that breakdown leads to the subsequent cascade of failure. If there are such key components, we would have clear targets for interventions and repair, possibly through nanotechnology, stem cell research, or gene editing. It’s worth a try. But we need to be clear about one thing: We’ll never defeat the laws of physics. - Peter Hoffman
The quest for immortality is a trope in cyberpunk fiction which I will discuss in the future, but there are indeed strides now toward slowing the laws of physics.
Organ cloning, through stem cells or some other such means, is on the horizon. In 2022, for example, a series of micro-sized human organs were grown on a chip and linked together by vascular flow, even boasting circulating immune cells.
Such technology would mean nothing less than the ability to replace depleted, aged organs with new ones, much as you would replace parts of your car that no longer work. Cellular intervention is also on the horizon.
With this ability, lifespans would increase dramatically, with ages over 100 being common, and with less age-related debilitation.
It is feasible that by the middle of the century, cloned organs, stem cells, and other anti-aging therapy will be common.
3. Quantum computing
Quantum computers can solve much more complicated problems than classical computers can. For example:
Complex problems are problems with lots of variables interacting in complicated ways. Modeling the behavior of individual atoms in a molecule is a complex problem, because of all the different electrons interacting with one another. Sorting out the ideal routes for a few hundred tankers in a global shipping network is complex too. - IBM.
Classical computers all run fundamentally on binary code - 0 and 1, but quantum computers need not. Quantum computers can be in states where they represent 0 and 1 at the same time, allowing for vastly more computing power:
When extended to systems of many qubits, this ability to be in all possible binary states at the same time gives rise to the potential computational power of quantum computing. - National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
And in 2022, scientists created a quantum computer that breaks free of such a binary altogether, through what the builders called “quidits:”
It can do calculations not with qubits but instead with qudits – quantum digits that could allow for vastly more computing power.
Most quantum computers have the access to more quantum states than are actually used when they are doing computation. In the new study, scientists used a computer at the University of Innsbruck that stores information in trapped calcium atoms that can exist in eight different states, for instance – but of which generally only two are used.
Researchers were able to show that they could make use of that full potential of the computer, and do so in a way that does not make the computer less reliable, as it does with a traditional computer. - Andrew Griffin
The applications for quantum computing include much better predictive power, superior manufacturing techniques, and advanced artificial intelligence. In addition, quantum computers will greatly assist physicists in decoding the universe.
For example, Rolls Royce and NVIDIA recently announced a breakthrough that will help simulate the performance of jet engines, undoubtedly leading to better-engineered ones.
Quantum computers cannot solve normal computational problems easily, so they will not replace the computers you know. The fact that they need to be kept in supercool states also acts as a limit on their use. Still, they are likely to be a part of the world’s institutions in limited form by the end of the decade.
These technologies will reinforce one another. For example, if fusion power comes online around the same time as quantum computers, the latter will have more energy to spread. Fusion and quantum computing, meanwhile, will make the medical breakthroughs of organ and other regenerative transplants easier to produce.
Low life
The hallmark of cyberpunk is that technology does not solve many longstanding problems and indeed, creates new ones. Slums in otherwise high tech megacities are a frequent setting in cyberpunk fiction. Beneath the glittering towers of wealth and technological triumph is an underworld of decay and despair.
Blade Runner is the classic example, but the most extreme is Battle Angel Alita. There, most people live in the Scrapyard beneath the floating city of Zalem. The sole purpose of life in the Scrapyard is to recycle Zalem’s waste and manufacture goods to ship back up to the forbidden city. Law, order, and social structure as we know them do not exist and instead, “factory law” prevails.
We have fortunately not seen such extremes in the real world, but there are similarities. For example, super-wealthy individuals, sometimes called a “plutocratic insurgency,” have increasingly retreated behind their gated communities and fortified needle towers while crime rages in the streets below, often because of the policies they champion.
Meanwhile, for decades, probably since Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2000), observers have discussed atomization and the decline of American community life. Amidst the technological triumph, individual people are increasingly isolated from one another despite the abundance of instant global communication.
Some indicators of cyberpunk-style social decay include the following:
18% of American adults are suffering from depression.
Between 2000 and 2020, suicide rates in the United States on an age-adjusted basis increased from 10.4 per 1000,000 to13.5. The draconian response to Covid-19 undoubtedly increased that number. Although men still commit suicide at a far higher rate, the fastest-growing demographic for suicide since 2013 is in teenage girls. Overall suicide rates did decline worldwide over the same span, however.
60% of 20-30 year-old men are single compared to only 30% of the women. Many young men have lost interest in even casual dating. The share of sexually active Americans is at a 30-year low. Young men are increasingly addicted to social media and pornography.
Americans’ social circles are smaller than before and decreasing.
Life expectancy in the United States is going down because of fentanyl.
Birth rates are collapsing worldwide through a combination of social, economic, and technological pressures.
Crime and mass shootings have increased in the United States over the last 10 years.
These and other trends suggest that material well-being and technological might are not life’s highest goods. The supposed “wonders” of the world being at one’s fingertips through a smartphone are in many ways just the calculated hijacking of our data and attention by ravenous corporations hungry for profit. It is well within the themes of cyberpunk.
And there are potentially many social downsides to the new technologies on the horizon as well. Fusion power has enormous liberating potential, but it could provide authoritarian regimes and corrupt corporations with unlimited energy to fulfill their ambitions. Quantum computing could give these entities far more power to track, predict, and shape much more minute aspects of life than the already-powerful algorithms do today, all but ending privacy and potentially any notion of free will. Organ transplants threaten to create a much more glaring class stratification than exists today - those who can afford them will live much longer, healthier lives than those who cannot. The effects on the social fabric would be profound.
But there is another factor which is shaping the world, in some ways in line with and in some ways opposed to the cyberpunk trend.
II. Idiocracy
What is idiocracy?
“Idiocracy” is a term popularized via the 2006 movie of the same name by Mike Judge. In it, a thoroughly average soldier, Joe Bauers, and a prostitute, Rita, go into hibernation for 500 years. When they wake up, they find themselves the smartest people around, as American society has degenerated into a circus of low-brow commercialism and is populated by people who can’t even speak English properly, but can enforce an authoritarian regime.
Idiocracy was not financially successful, but became a cult classic and its title has entered the lexicon. Although it is not a cyberpunk movie, it is adjacent to the genre, and many of its satires have become eerily close to reality in the following ways:
1. Hysterias and bugbears
We live in a time of a strange paradox: greater access to information has not led to a smarter or better-informed public. Instead, attention spans have been reduced dramatically. Most people now get their information from a small screen, and the attention span for that is less than 30 seconds. In other words, if you have carefully read to this point, you are unlike most people.
Little wonder, then, why hysterias are incentivized and easily catch fire.
The spread of smartphones and social media has fostered a culture that seamlessly moves from one hysteria to the next, and this is a bipartisan phenomenon.
Some examples of left wing hysterias over the last decade include:
The belief in “systemic racism.”
The notion of world-ending climate change, which is so widely believed that it is aiding the increase of depression.
The Trump-Russia collusion hoax.
The belief that lockdowns, masks, and vaccines would end the Covid-19 pandemic.
Some right wing hysterias include:
The pizzagate hoax.
The Q Anon conspiracy theory.
The belief that Donald Trump won the 2020 election.
It is notable that many of the right wing hysterias center around one figure and his resulting cult of personality, while left wing hysterias tend to center on society as a whole. It is also important to note that because of its current institutional power, the left’s hysterias tend to do more damage.
Even so, the proneness of the public to fall for and spread such hysterias has done much damage to the social fabric. Political figures and the media pander to these hysterias and try to profit off of it, continually dividing society into opposing camps driven by their factional bugbears. Social media “influencers” often get their livelihoods from them and have an incentive to keep them going. Social media algorithms also promote such hysterias because they are addictive and keep users on the platform for longer. Smartphones allow the public to fill their minds with hysteria wherever they go. Through technology developed by companies like Neuralink, it is feasible that one day, the phones will no longer be necessary and hysteria will be fed directly into the brain. It is a darker variation on the cyberbrain of Ghost in the Shell.
In the technological promotion of idiocracy, we see how cyberpunk themes anticipate and reflect real life, but idiocracy goes deeper, and it is not all technological.
2. A new faith’s fury
To say that “wokeness” resembles a new religion would be merely to repeat what many others have said. What fewer have said is that new religions or ideologies, especially those characterized by an uncompromising central belief, try to replace the culture and beliefs of the previous society, often violently in a type of Year Zero millennialism which I have written about in the past. Some of it features in my Lives of the Luminaries collection of essays.
Wokeness has, since its origins, steadily replaced the previous operating beliefs in Western society. A good overview of the phenomenon is Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed (1995), which was astonishingly accurate in its predictions of how this ideology would infiltrate institutions and elite social circles. There, he noted how it would replace traditional beliefs and wisdom, accumulated over many centuries, with much dumber ideological fads.
In everything from coddling criminals to undermining merit in schools and institutions, we have seen a deliberate attempt to make society dumber.
Consider the attacks on gifted and talented programs in public schools and the assault on merit in college admissions and hiring. All of these attacks come in the name of “equity.” If they continue and expand their beachhead, it is only a matter of time before the people populating the power centers of society will be there not on merit but through identity and ideological conformity. We saw this in action during covid, when quite stupid proposals became objects of orthodoxy, and public health agencies and officials were more concerned about “racism” than their mission to promote public health.
In the near future, it is possible that quantum computers, programmed by DEI hires, will spend more of their time focusing on rooting out “racism” than helping humanity venture to the stars, as optimists like Elon Musk would wish.
Meanwhile, the political right has been ineffective in combating these trends, because it has become its own increasingly isolated bubble, cut off from the rest of society and dominated by a cult of personality where being obnoxiously stupid in service of the Dear Leader is rewarded. The 2024 primary between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis will be most interesting, as it will tell us if the cult-like behavior of “MAGA” is a temporary hysteria in the Republican Party or something far deeper.
Conclusion
Let’s turn to Carl Sagan. In his last book in 1995, the year before his death, he wrote a startlingly accurate prophecy:
I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness - The Demon-Haunted World, pp. 28.
Sagan’s prophecy has ironically come truer because of technology. Overall, the United States and Western world resemble a high tech, cyberpunk version of Numenor from Tolkien’s legendarium - wealthy, powerful, and technologically advanced, but in its late stages, irredeemably corrupt. I did a podcast on this a few weeks ago.
It is the interaction of high tech, low life, and idiot-administered rule which we will trace here. I think you’ll also like the cool cyberpunk fiction that I’ll discuss in the course of these observations.
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Next article: a revolt against the gerontocracy.