What is a Cyberpunk Dystopia? - How to Not Live in a Cyberpunk Dystopia #00
What is Cyberpunk?
This post is targeted towards a general audience. No prior knowledge is required. This is the first post in a series about what we can do to make real life less of a cyberpunk dystopia. If something is unclear, please refer to the footnotes or contact me to ask for clarification.
Cyberpunk, in this context, refers to a setting in which there’s high tech–that’s the cyber part–and the tech is used as a means of exerting power over disadvantaged people. Technology is an indiscriminate force multiplier. Corporations, unchained from regulations by either their absence or their lack of enforcement, fully utilize this to expand their influence, often weakening or supplanting nation-state governments. This weakening of nation-state governments is not a new idea; it’s a reflection of the effect that accumulation of wealth and economic power has had on democratic governments in recent history.
The thing that makes it cyberpunk is the further acceleration of this practice by computers. While cyberpunk is most often a setting in science fiction, I hope to offer a few examples of how we already live in a cyberpunk world, and what we can do to prevent it from being a cyberpunk dystopia.
The indiscriminate nature of technology also lends it to being the tool of the people–that’s the punk part. The only computer we know how to make is what we call a Turing machine, a computer that can run any program. Software and hardware can be designed to make it arbitrarily difficult to run some types of programs, but you can’t make it impossible for a computer to run certain types of programs under any circumstances. This means that no matter how hard corporate engineers try to make it so that you can only use their proprietary software, or their compatible proprietary hardware, technology is always hackable.
What is Hacking?
Hacking in this case is not just the act of compromising someone else’s computer. In the context of this article series, and most often as used by hackers, hacking means modifying technology to function in a way not intended by its creators. It can be as complicated as replacing the firmware on your printer, or as simple as using a universal remote to emulate the remote that came with your TV. Hacking is modification beyond the intended use of an object. Hacking is freedom, because the alternative is criminalizing modification of hardware that you own. Unfortunately, that criminalization is already here. Terms of service are allowed to ban reverse engineering of hardware you’ve purchased, legally barring you from understanding the device you hold in your hands. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) criminalizes circumventing Digital Rights Management (DRM) software, which is any software that controls access to copyrighted works. As an example, since Blu-Ray discs are weakly encrypted, ripping your legally purchased disks to produce a video file to watch on your laptop is illegal. The DMCA doesn’t even include a portion of the law specifying that you must intend to circumvent DRM, so accidentally doing so can still land you a fine between $2,500 and $25,000. The law says that the court may reduce the fine if you were unaware it was a violation, but that’s solely up to the court’s discretion.
The essence of cyberpunk is the tension between the overwhelming power of corporations that command technology and the power of the everyday person to fight back by modifying that same technology, as well as creating and sharing their own. Cyberpunk dystopia is when in this setting, the power distribution becomes so unbalanced that corporations are allowed to enforce nearly unfettered oppression in the name of ever-increasing profits.
Some Examples
An example of this is what Cory Doctorow calls the Darth Vader MBA: “I have altered the deal, pray I don’t alter it any further.” When corporations are allowed to violate the terms of their own agreements without consequence, but still able to enforce their agreements on people, those people are left with few options but to hope they don’t get screwed again. Most people would agree that this is breach of contract. Certainly it’s unreasonable behavior, but unfortunately whether it’s legally punishable is in practice only partially resolved. While I would say that it’s a pretty open and shut case, in the United States, it’s only truly resolved when there’s court precedent to back it up.1 (Sometimes not even then! Court precedents can be overturned, but that’s always the case so we won’t worry about it for now.)
While you would think there’s pretty obviously court precedent for breach of contract, and that in fact it would be one of the most precedented things imaginable, the US legal system has a problem: lots of our legislators and judges are tech illiterate. This has allowed corporations to glitter dust well-precedented issues (such as the aforementioned breach of contract) with technology, and then pretend that it’s a brand new problem. It’s not breach of contract, now it’s a “violation of terms of service.” It’s a breach of contract with technology, which means it’s clearly not the same as regular breach of contract. Since we’re pretending there’s no precedent, these things could be re-litigated as new issues. If the corporations win this re-litigation, the court precedent will effectively say “breach of contract is not allowed, unless you do it with a computer.” In addition to re-litigation in court, there’s the similar issue of re-legislating things done with a computer as if they were substantially different from the same act unaided by technology.
While re-litigation is unavoidable, the ideal change here is for tech literate judges to issue court opinions (the reasoning given for the decision) addressing that these issues are precedented, rather than issuing judgements as if these issues are unprecedented.
We currently stand at a crossroads: there is no standard practice for handling these glitter-dusted relitigation cases, and they’re increasing in volume and importance rapidly enough that we’ll soon need one. The decisions made in these future cases are important steps that we can take either towards or away from dystopia. I would tentatively say things are heading in the right direction.2 In addition to these relitigation cases, there are genuinely unprecedented cases that spring up from the development of technology. These not-yet-regulated areas are often leveraged by corporations to do anti-competitive and anti-consumer behavior until they are finally regulated.
For example, right to repair is the concept of consumers having a right to service their own devices, rather than being required to bring them to the manufacturer to get them serviced at usually exorbitant prices. Since computing power has become much cheaper in recent years, manufacturers have begun digitally serializing parts, which is where they add microcontrollers that check to see if your replacement parts were made by the original manufacturer. If they were made by a third party, they may show warnings, or even brick your device entirely. This is scummy, but currently legal. Companies even do this with consumables, like printer companies stopping their printers from using anything except price-gouged ink of the same brand. With printers, the harm remains merely monetary. If this were to be applied to life saving medications like insulin, the cost would be measured in lives. At present, the only thing stopping that is the massive PR backlash that it would cause. If healthcare were to be consolidated into a single monopoly, meaning they wouldn’t have to worry about market share, there would be nothing left to stop it. It is the opinion of this blog that the societal harm of such tactics massively outweighs any legitimate uses, and thus they should be banned.
Recap
That was a lot of information. To recap, I will be working with these definitions for the rest of this series:
- cyberpunk: A setting in which high tech becomes an indiscriminate force multiplier, and is used both to exert power over disadvantaged people and as a weapon of said disadvantaged people.
- cyberpunk dystopia: A cyberpunk setting where corporations are unchained from effective regulations and exert massive power over people’s everyday lives, often to the point of causing great material harm.
- hacking: Modifying technology to function in a way not intended by its creators.
Footnotes:
Court precedent is when the court has decided a similar issue in a previous case, and uses that decision to inform the current case. ↩
Google v. Oracle (2021) seems to indicate that judges are getting wise to the technology glitter-dust technique. In short, Google copied Oracle’s code interface (function names, not function implementation) and Oracle claimed that this was infringing. ↩