‘The internet is a rare example of a true, modern, functional anarchy’ (Sterling, 96). Life feels pretty bloody Meta these days, and that word Meta seems to haunt at us at every turn as even now our social media platforms are trying to envelop us into another dimension. Elon Musk, the wanna be space lord even suggests that we are turning into cyborgs simply by the act of carrying a personal computer with us everywhere. Our arm extension has ambient listening capabilities and we didn’t even have to be persuaded into plastering the digital imprint of ourselves on every platform. Cue the ‘neural lace.’
How did we get to this place? Our waking imaginarium rippling outward at every thought spike? Thank god people have stopped posting their brunch on insta. Humans love to envision the future, especially through mediated portals and one of the ways we do this is through design fiction which, ‘allows us to deep dive into theories (of the future) before the change actually happened, and to ponder its promises, challenges and threats.‘
Punks not dead, it’s just gone Cyber and to be precise, we have crested that era by now anyhow. But let’s hold our digital horses and circumnavigate back to this idea of Design Fiction. I grew up in the before (internet) time, not technically but I lets just say I passed notes in class on Maths paper and spent my days wondering (imagining) what the flip was going on in the big ol world. The idea of the NET was birthed by the army, looking for a way to correspond with parts of its organisation should the worst transpire. The worst being a nuclear fist fight, so their aim was to make communication possible in the least direct way and to cut a cool story short, they did it, but found that people weren’t exactly hurrying to share intelligence info, they were swapping jokes and casual chitchat in this digital sphere.
The birth of our digital collective brain grew along side our perceived manifestations of the future. Some of my favourites growing up were Tank girl, The Matrix and Blade runner. Recurring themes in these include our planet being an uninhabitable hot mess, that is ruled by future technologies, overarching corporations and grimey space aesthetics dotted with people still smoking darts. Essentially we were/ are wrangling with our industrialised world and looking for an escape all the while making things at a disproportionate rate to our ability to grapple with this new reality. And we were projecting a grim blacked out landscape. Through this ficticious design space, humanity got the chance to play out these futures and a lot of the ideas toyed around with here are now apart of your day to day life. Chicken, egg or just multiple realities in which time is not a construct. Haha, I’m kidding, back to the unintelligible discourse.
HEART VERSE SCIENCE?
As my tutor travis notes, Design fiction gives us an opportunity to think about the nature and opportunity of the material manifestations of these information systems. Black Mirror is a hauntingly realistic vector to view our interwoven speculated future. The useful and daunting aspects of technology are paralleled with the Starkness of our human condition and the curious things we focus on as a species. Striking vipers (features above) touches on my youth of Mortal Combat except, now you are the player. Transported into the game via a chip in your head, free to be somebody else in any form but hang on, we aren’t just here to fight. Emotions are a defining human element and Black Mirror again and again seeks to imagine tech as additional space to unpack the way we negotiate with our consciousness.
So cyber punk has evolved, as fiction enters a technology entangled cluster fluff that may just leave our beating hearts behind as we seek transcendence as the ultimate goal. And not as the Buddhists envisioned it. Ok so we’ve seen the interplay between our mediated design fiction landscapes and the actionable aspects that have appeared in our day to day world but lets take a little peak again into the here and now.
Musk better throw a few more skylink satellites up because our industrial era exponential growth model has shifted to infinity brain power, our only limitations are our storage.
Jane BAMBI Drew 
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