Nicole Brady

Prof. Reid

ENG 529: Cyberpunk

C00171624

Survival of the Fittest: Outlaw Darwinism in Cyberpunk

In this world, all anybody wants to do is to make it. Whether it is as a group, a species, or individual, we all want to be live and be successful at it. The individual’s struggle to survive inevitable leads to the improvement of groups as a whole. In the 1800’s this was first described by Charles Darwin in his book On the Origin of Species. Basically, Darwin’s book showed that the stronger species and individuals within the species would survive over the weaker and less strategically developed species. This led to stronger species and even the creation of new species. Natural selection, defined by Merriam-Webster Dictionary as "…a natural process that results in the survival and reproductive success of individuals or groups best adjusted to their environment…," is a cornerstone of Darwinism. As time has passed, Darwinism has taken on an expanded definition. Social Darwinism applies the theory of natural selection to groups and nations, thus advancing them as a whole. In the future, these theories will be applied differently to aspects of our world, especially as the use of technology becomes more prevalent.

These evolutionary ideas are already evident futuristically, specifically in the science fiction genre of cyberpunk. Cyberpunk was created out of the rapidly advancing technologies of the 1980’s combined with the radical punk movement’s extremism. The future societies portrayed within various cyberpunk novels are often dystopias, or places where living conditions are awful, which makes the fight for survival a central issue in these stories. Due to the pervasiveness of technology in the future, it is pivotal to individual and group survival in these books; in fact, there is even a technological Darwinism of sorts, as the technology itself if forced to change and grow based on surroundings. Another aspect of the survival of the fittest, as portrayed in cyberpunk works, is the extent to which it promotes law-breaking. Often, the protagonists are hackers and the technologies illegal. Following the punk aesthetic, the outlaws of cyberpunk are often glorified and become the rewarded survivors.

The first book to vault cyberpunk into the international spotlight was William Gibson’s Neuromancer. It was the winner of science fictions three most prestigious awards-the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award. Gibson is also accredited with coining the word cyberspace as it is used currently, defined in Neuromancer as "…a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation" (Gibson 51). The novel opens in the frantically-paced seedy urban jungle of Chiba, Japan. This is a city in which criminals rule. The only discernable rule (the rule of the street) involves screwing others before getting screwed oneself. Murder is not uncommon and the characters in the novel seem strangely unaffected by horrific deaths. Drug use is also commonly used as a coping method, as it is used by many in today’s world. The people within the novel are just trying to survive, whatever way they have to. Neuromancer actually lays out the foundations for the survivalist theme on the first few pages. "Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you’d break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way you were gone" (Gibson 7). Our protagonist is Henry Dorsett Case, a down-on-his-luck unemployed hacker. Previously employed by those in the powerful underworld, Case unwisely attempted to steal some technology to further his own goals. This attempt at inching his way up the social ladder, financially and powerfully, backfired when his employers found out and destroyed his only mechanism for money-making. They used mycotoxin to alter his nervous system, so that Case could never again access the global computer network. Being a hacker, Case loses his reason for living. As he spends more time living aimlessly in the dark filth of Chiba, he balances himself increasingly precariously on the edge of safety. Without his job, Case becomes numb to the point of being semi-suicidal. This is why when he is offered the chance to gain back his abilities, albeit to help more criminals in a scheme beyond his knowledge, Case jumps at the opportunity.

The mission Case is recruited for actually is to further the survival of another entity, an AI (artificial intelligence) known as Wintermute. The powerful Wintermute was created with a need to be united with his other half, an AI called Neuromancer. Together they would form a highly-illegal super AI. This shows a very interesting aspect of cyberpunk. In the future, survival is not only something that humans or society struggle for. Yes, Wintermute is human-like and has human-like desires. However, he is NOT human. Technology undergoes a form of Darwinism throughout Neuromancer. Night City has been desribed as an experiment in social Darwinism, yet it is also an experiment in technological Darwinism. Case saw this and realized that "…burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn’t there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself" (Gibson 11). It is a place where various illegal technologies can battle it out, and see which ones are successful and can be brought into the mainstream. Case himself steals the illegal technology of a ROM module that contains the saved consciousness of a cowboy who was a legend in his field, "The Dixie Flatline" McCoy Pauley. This ended up being pivotal in the success of their mission. Using outlawed technologies to perform illegal tasks leads to Case’s ultimate survival, as well as the survival of Wintermute within his new super-AI partnership.

Another cyberpunk novel that deals with personal, social, and technological evolution is Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. The novel is set in a world where most people are divided into phyles, or tribes, which are social groups that people belong to based on their beliefs and/or social standing. Those without a phyle are in the lowest-class of people and are known as thetes. These classes were the results of a belief in social Darwinism which stated that, "…while people were not genetically different, they were culturally as different as they could possibly be, and that some cultures were simply better than others. This was not a subjective value judgment, merely an observation that some cultures thrived and expanded while others failed. It was a view implicitly shared by nearly everyone" (Stephenson 15). The Diamond Age tells the story of a poor thetian girl named Nell. At the story’s onset, Nell struggles in a world she does not even have a fighting chance to succeed in. Abused by her mother’s steady string of trashy boyfriends, Nell and her brother Harv are forced to depend on each other’s love for survival. It is through a convoluted series of events that Nell is given the chance to succeed beyond any expectations. This happens when she is given access to a book called the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, an illegal product of nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is the most dominant type of technology is the future world Stephenson has created. This is most evident in the use of the Matter Compilers, or MCs for short. These MCs are machines that are programmed to create nearly any object by combining atoms. It is from one of these machines that an engineer named John Percival Hackworth creates the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, a book which has the ability to mould itself to the needs of whichever young girl it belongs to. It was created for Lord Finkle-McGraw, a man who knows that the best people are molded as a result of enduring the difficult, or interesting, aspects of life and surviving them. Just before ordering the book for his granddaughter, a neo-Victorian girl who lives a completely shielded life, Finkle-McGraw says, "In order to raise a generation of children who can reach their full potential, we must find a way to make their lives interesting" (Stephenson 24). Nell, however, has already encountered all the difficulties she should ever need. This book gives her the tools she needs to become the leader she was destined to be. She learns various schools subjects, fighting techniques such as martial arts, and most importantly Nell is taught to value herself. These tools combine to help Nell rise up the social ladder. Using her fighting skills, she wards off her mother’s boyfriends and perverted strangers, making her way into the New Atlantis Clave (enclave) of the neo-Victorians, one of the wealthiest and most respected phyles. Eventually Nell becomes the leader of her own phyle, nearly a million girls who have also been taught on the primer, and together they become the saviors of life as people on Earth currently know it. Their actions to destroy the creation of a dangerous technology called Seed technology, along with the help of the primer, ensure the survival of society.

The plot of a Diamond Age is interesting, yet it is the background information we receive on the technologies within this novel that truly amazes. Nanotechnology gives way to the creation of artificial mites, miniscule robots based on mites found in the natural world. "The natural ones [look] like little crabs and [have] been quietly inhabiting the outer layers of other creatures bodies for hundreds of millions of years. The artificial ones had all been developed in the past few decades" (Stephenson 74). However, all the mites are in a struggle for survival. There are mites that protects enclaves, kill people, kill other mites, research the environment, and perform other tasks for which they are programmed. At any given time there are millions on the skin of all the characters in the novel. They permeate the surroundings, and are even present in peoples’ brains and bloodstream. Due to the fact that there are so many, they are inevitable caught up in technological Darwinism. Only the strongest mites survive. These survival mites were useful to hackers, such as the infamously well-respected Dr. X.

Dr. X is an example of an elite outlaw. He is glorified not only to the reader, but also within his own society. He receives respect from renowned pious judges and criminals alike, eventually becoming the Confucianist leader promoting the creation of the Seed technology. Honers, commonly-known as hackers, are consistently the most respected outlaws within the cyberpunk genre. The reader wants them to survive, and more often than not, the reader is not let down.

The third cyberpunk novel deals with the survival of hackers within society more than either Neuromancer or The Diamond Age. In Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, the main protagonist Marcus is a hacker thrown into a situation where he must use his skills to survive, much like Case was in Neuromancer. However, Marcus’ success is also important to the future of the human race as we know it, just as Nell’s success was in The Diamond Age. The story begins when the Bay Bridge in San Francisco is blown up, along with the BART train system that ran underneath the water. Marcus is held captive by the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, for days and he and the other captors are subjected to torturous inhumane condition. Upon his release, Marcus vows to defeat the DHS and he attempts to do this using his hacker skills. Like Dr. X, Marcus takes the technology that is at hand, such as Xboxes and ParanoidLinux systems, and creates an encrypted cybernet that the DHS cannot crack. This is illegal because the DHS says that these actions are treasonous and if Marcus is caught, he will be punished. Marcus is using his bravery and his hacking ability to survive DHS’s crackdown and ensure his friends’ survival. "The best part about all of this is how it [makes him] feel: in control. [His] technology [is] working for [him], serving [him], protecting [him]. It [isn’t] spying on [him]. This is why he [loves] technology: if you [use] it right, it [can] give you power and privacy" (Doctorow 88). His new creation, known as the Xnet, becomes an overnight sensation and is an example of technological Darwinism at it’s finest. It is a great product demanded by the people because it is truly private. Doctorow’s novel explores the issue of privacy in depth, especially in regards to encryption, a technology which has already begun its evolution today. The Nazi’s had their own crypto, with a decipher known as the Enigma Machine. Once the Allies got the machine and cracked the code, the war was lost for the Nazi’s. In order for cryptography to work, the cipher must not be able to be cracked by somebody smarter than you. The problem is the person who creates the crypto cannot know what someone smarter will do. It just has to stand the test of time. (Doctorow 99). Since then, in recent history, encryption technology was regulated and controlled by the government, who said that it was illegal to export or use it on national security grounds. Then, someone came along and created an outlaw program that hacked the governments encryption standard, proving it was not the best. However, it resulted in encryption becoming even stronger.

As Marcus and the rest of the Xnetters encounter more obstacles, they improvise and fight back. Marcus prides himself on improvisation. He says, "The Man was always coming down on me, just because I go through school firewalls like wet kleenex, spoof the gait-recognition software, and nuke the snitch trips they track us with" (Doctorow 10). The gait-recognition software is a tool used by his school to track children by analyzing the different types of walks that people have. Based on the data, the program can define a person's gait and track where they are at all times. Marcus and his friends ingeniously exploit this technology, when needed, by putting rocks in their shoes. His experiences of turning technology to his advantage in the school environment pay off when he is encountered with similar attacks in the real world. When the DHS begins scanning everybody with arphids-Radio Frequency ID tags-in order to keep track of where they are, the Xnetters strike back using arphid cloners to screw with the data. This creates a web of chaos in San Francisco, highly illegal and costing millions of extra dollars in manpower. However, Marcus sees it as a necessary evil. When XNet is in danger of being found out, they have a new novel plan. In order to prevent the surplus of encrypted files on Xnet from being discovered, they enlist the help of a music downloader site to encrypt there files. This makes it look like a higher percentage of all online data is crypto. For everything that the DHS dishes out, Marcus has a response. Finally, when it all is about to come to a head, Marcus decides to tell the truth although it could put him in jail forever. He is not only concerned about his well-being but he is fighting for the well being of those around him and society itself. His bravery in the face of defeat and his constant ability to mold himself to the situations presented to him are how Marcus ends up winning in the end.

All three of these cyberpunk novels approach one of the oldest themes of mankind - the struggle to survive - and modernize it to fit the future worlds they portray. The characters in the novels know the rules, and it is a deep understanding of the rules that gives the characters the ability to break them in new and novel ways. Technological, social, and individual Darwinism is fully engaged, and give us a witness to the future we may possibly be living in someday. Even today, we witness technological Darwinism as companies are constantly coming up with new and improved machines which render prior ones obsolete. Programs are evolving and changing daily to keep up with the times and competing technologies. Our society needs places like Night City, where new technologies can be created and kept for use by the free market. Perhaps we would have electric cars and this would prevent our world being so dependent on oil. Maybe, instead of huge biomedical companies quashing potential life-saving drugs because they may not be profitable, a black market could find demand for them and save more peoples’ lives. These books may glorify the outlaws, but they are also showing us that there is a need for them in our technology-driven future.