Hard Concrete
July 26, 2018 7:05 AM   Subscribe

The Aesthetics of Science Fiction. What does SciFi Look Like After Cyberpunk? In the first part of a two-part series, Rick Libeling examines how science fictional aesthetics have changed over time, and where he sees them heading now, starting with architecture, and specifically the rising use of Brutalist spaces.

From his interview with David Fortin:
I think the Hard Concrete also performs like a frame of the human condition through its materiality. Many sci-fi narratives are ultimately questioning our humanity in a speculative way, including our relationship with technology, our social evolutions and devolutions, etc. The blank concrete surfaces are most often in stark contrast to the human figures and their interactions. There is not a human scale to this material. In fact, it doesn’t really have a scale. Thus it does not relate characters to the natural world or themselves.

In fact, the concrete is not warm or inviting to the human senses in any way when isolated as a material (or when combined with metal and glass). I feel these environments ultimately make a critique of our current trajectory in terms of our detached relationship to the natural world, through the choice of such materials. Without artifacts, decor, or materials that offer an indication of time (as opposed to films like Blade Runner where the intent is the opposite, to confuse time through a postmodern collage of mixed imagery), the blank surfaces, in my opinion, are a strategy to remove time and place from the equation, which has the capacity to estrange the viewer. Even though much contemporary design has ended up in similar places, for now, there is still a significant spatial and material disconnect from the day-to-day experience of the average movie-goer….
posted by Fish Sauce (48 comments total) 43 users marked this as a favorite
 
Important to note that this article is specifically about film and TV sci-fi – which is interesting, because I’ve been seeing a different trend in contemporary sci-fi stories and novels. Many of those are in the neighborhood of solarpunk, which (among other things) is a sort of optimistic rejection of the type of aesthetic discussed in this article. (Maybe the most well-known big screen depiction of this would be the capitol city of Wakanda in Black Panther?)
posted by showbiz_liz at 7:32 AM on July 26, 2018 [13 favorites]


This is a really thoughtful, interesting piece. But I'm surprised that his conclusions didn't include what seems to me to be an obvious reason for the shift -- we're at a point in history where not only does it feel like the future is more scary than exciting, but we've also lost any belief that any of the people in power have our best interests at heart, and that there's next to nothing we can do to change that from within. So a hard concrete future looks like the natural extrapolation of that - it's cheap, it's not designed for comfort but for durability, and it's harder to destroy when the population inevitably rises up.

I feel like in more hopeful sci fi (more in books than films, granted), there's more of an eco/green aesthetic as people cope with the same dark future by farming where they can and living closer to nature architecturally in a way people actually would do if they felt all they could rely on was their own resources.
posted by Mchelly at 7:39 AM on July 26, 2018 [5 favorites]


I was going to say something about solarpunk too! I love the idea of a new backlash of optimistic sci-fi. I'd welcome some happiness in our lives, if nothing else than to escape the brutality of American politics and late stage capitalism. Agreed, Black Panther is a good example of positive optimistic sci-fi. But that's really afrofuturism, an aesthetic dating back to the 70s.

I'm surprised this article only name checked Blade Runner 2049 and didn't use more images; they are very striking. That crazy office / water pool lighting still haunts me. Hell they even managed to make farming look brutalist. But this Hard Concrete aesthetic feels past-looking to me, 2010s movies catching up with 1990s science fiction. I'm more interested in where written skiffy is going next.

Also curious where Ex Machina fits in. Most of its aesthetic is defined by the house, a Norwegian eco-friendly hotel designed to blend in with the landscape. It somehow manages to both be organic and gentle while also being a cold, sterile space. (Excellent setting for the story, btw, offers some intense contrast to the story.)
posted by Nelson at 7:41 AM on July 26, 2018 [7 favorites]


Never heard the term solarpunk before, but that's exactly what I was thinking of - thanks for that link, showbiz_liz.
posted by Mchelly at 7:42 AM on July 26, 2018 [3 favorites]


a cold, sterile space

Bite yr tongue, that hotel is luscious.
posted by adamgreenfield at 7:45 AM on July 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


I feel like in written sci-fi there's also a branch of ecological horror that is the underside of solarpunk, like VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, where nature the future is lush but dangerous.
posted by LMGM at 7:47 AM on July 26, 2018 [5 favorites]


I spent most of my childhood in NE Massachusetts in drably painted concrete school buildings. Went to college at UMass Amherst, which is covered with gray, fortress-looking monstrosities. Then lived in Greater Boston, which is full of places like Alewife Station, which is a kind of concrete sausage grinder for commuters.

Bring on Solarpunk or what-have-you. Brutalist structures are hardy if nothing else. They'll probably last for a thousand years if we don't get inspired and start ripping them down.
posted by es_de_bah at 7:55 AM on July 26, 2018 [2 favorites]


As others have pointed out, literary SF is not necessarily doing the same thing visual SF is doing right now, but that was also true of cyberpunk itself. Cyberpunk’s literary aesthetic (as opposed to its filmic one) has a ton of intersection points with Ballard, often pulls from him in quite deliberate and obvious ways, and Brutalism and Ballard have a really close relationship. One of my favourite things about Brutalism (and I do love it, for the most part–I was lucky enough to work in Robarts Library for five years before they started ruining it with all that glass, and I actually find it a really comforting and reassuring building to be in) is how it ages. Because the emphasis is so heavy on using the properties inherent to the materials it doesn’t stay pristine for long, but it also doesn’t show its age the same way other styles do, so that temporal layering effect cyberpunk uses mentioned in the article is going to happen to these buildings regardless of if they get covered in gomi (which is probably what we should call the cyberpunk equivalent of greebles, now that I think about it), even though, as David Fortin said, the spaces don’t necessarily signal specific time periods.

“Hard Concrete” is not a terrible name for this aesthetic, but so many of the films and other visual works that use it borrow heavily from cyberpunk’s vernacular in other ways that I don’t think it’s as clean a break as Liebling wants it to be. That might be covered in the second part, which I am really looking forward to.

Thanks for all the solarpunk links. Really interesting stuff!
posted by Fish Sauce at 7:57 AM on July 26, 2018 [3 favorites]


but we've also lost any belief that any of the people in power have our best interests at heart, and that there's next to nothing we can do to change that from within

But that's precisely the premise of cyberpunk, at least originally. The problem today is that we got the worst of the cyberpunk future without the good parts: all of the corporate dystopia, but our "console cowboys" are asshole libertarians hawking cryptocurrency scams.
posted by Sangermaine at 8:01 AM on July 26, 2018 [26 favorites]


Ugh! Can Brutalism please please please go die in a fire already? I'm designing a game as a hobby (set in the future, all over the solar system, different environments) and It's oddly become a lot about architecture, which I should have seen coming. Not once have I felt the need to use craptons of oppressive cement...especially when there are much cooler options...Arcologies, skyscrapers so tall they need to be held up by dirigibles in the shape of astro boy and suntory whiskey, glass that's also solar panels, self assembling buildings, self assembling buildings that go out of control like architectural cancer, inflatable space structures, diamond as a building material (what-ever as a building material), 3D printed buildings, additions to existing structures, walls that are factories, space stations grown like crystals from asteroids that look like diatoms, canyons covered in Christo and pressurized, algae farms, space based power installations...etc etc etc etc etc.
And I'm supposed to be inspired by concrete? F*ck that noise.
Also the future is built on top of the past, not instead of...it's not like they're ever going to tear down Versailles to install the Institute of Concrete Oppression.
posted by sexyrobot at 8:02 AM on July 26, 2018 [9 favorites]


Hell they even managed to make farming look brutalist.

That's a real place in southern Spain.
posted by tclark at 8:07 AM on July 26, 2018 [4 favorites]


Sci-fi is always about what might be, so there are always swings from positive (Jules Verne, solarpunk) to negative (cyberpunk, dystopian). At best, it either teaches us a way forward or warns us about what to avoid becoming.

I think "hard concrete" does neither, and operates more as criticism using sci-fi tropes. I miss the "big themes" of sci-fi, but solarpunk is definitely a nice move in that direction.
posted by lubujackson at 8:08 AM on July 26, 2018


But that's precisely the premise of cyberpunk, at least originally.

I'm not convinced that Cyberpunk is innately dystopian -- to quote Bill Gibson himself, he has this to say about The Sprawl:
Do you see any of your work as dystopian? It’s so hard to conclusively define that word.

I think I aspire to naturalism, which today is easily mistaken for the dystopian. When Neuromancer was published in 1984, it was seen by many as a very dark view of the future indeed; yet I knew that the world was full of millions of people who’d migrate to the Sprawl in a flash, if only they had the chance, and be socioeconomically much better off for it.
posted by tclark at 8:28 AM on July 26, 2018 [5 favorites]


I don't want anymore brutalism in my life, half of my college campus already explored brutalism as an architecture style. That school was a panopticon! Are they just trying to keep us in the 70s?!
posted by yueliang at 8:43 AM on July 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


Solairepunk
posted by sfenders at 8:46 AM on July 26, 2018 [3 favorites]


Hell they even managed to make farming look brutalist.
Here's ya solarpunk answer, tho...
posted by Chrischris at 8:58 AM on July 26, 2018 [3 favorites]


Pulling a frame from Dirty Computer is a bit interesting, because one of the things that Monae/Lightning do is contrast the sterile and medicalized clinic against lush, colorful, sweaty,, lived-in, and diverse spaces, some of them connected with natural landscapes. It hits something I picked up from a collection of indigenous queer, transgender, and two-spirit science fiction about the difference between survival and survivance:
SF survivance stories are not about survival. SF survivance stories are about persistence, adaptation, and flourishing in the future, in sometimes subtle but always important contrast to mere survival, or the self-limiting experience of trauma and loss that often surrenders the imagination to creeds of isolation and victimhood, the apprehension of hopeless, helpless entitlement to extirpated past.

-- Grace L. Dillion, Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time: An LGBT and Two-Spirit Sci-Fi Anthology
The introduction of that anthology points out that if you're part of a group that already had the apocalypse and is living in dystopia, the appeal of the typical dystopian hero who gits his or teeth and survives doesn't go far enough. In Dirty Computer, the aesthetic of the problem is medicalized minimalism, the aesthetic of the solution includes rich sensuality. My sense is that Hard Concrete and Cyberpunk tend to frame sensuality as either the decadence of the elite or a feature of exploitative sexuality.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 9:01 AM on July 26, 2018 [6 favorites]


One of the most fascinating aspects of brutalism is its intended perception vs. its present-day perception. Originally, Brutalism had sort of a utopian/socialist overtone. However, we perceive it as monolithic, Orwellian, and dystopian.

I also think it would be helpful to make a distinction between what I would call "high" and "low" Brutalism. Like, when we think of Brutalism, we often think of the more ambitious styles, like Boston City Hall. Like it or not, it's certainly distinctive. I would call this "high Brutalism." Meanwhile, much of Brutalism was basically just featureless concrete -- a good example of this would be the Metlife (formerly Pan Am) Building in NYC. I would call this "low Brutalism." It seems like a useful distinction to make, since both styles occupy the same architectural classification, even though (to me) they have very different aesthetics.
posted by panama joe at 9:32 AM on July 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


Hell they even managed to make farming look brutalist.

That's a real place in southern Spain.

Here's ya solarpunk answer, tho...

...intended perception vs. its present-day perception


Fascinating! The real place is a region full of greenhouses, exactly the solarpunk answer. There must be something interesting to say about the convergence of viewpoints here. What is the ingredient we need to ensure that paradise on the inside doesn't look brutal from without?
posted by TreeRooster at 9:34 AM on July 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


I don't think the Metlife Building is considered brutalist. It's a pretty classically International Style skyscraper.
posted by enn at 9:59 AM on July 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


My sense is that Hard Concrete and Cyberpunk tend to frame sensuality as either the decadence of the elite or a feature of exploitative sexuality.
This is a good point. I don't know that I have a good internalized sense of how Hard Concrete deals with this, but I suspect you're right. I feel like cyberpunk's strength is also its weakness here. It is so interested in class (and the way it operates within capitalism particularly), and with how class can warp things--not just shape them, but specifically warp them--that it becomes hard for it to deal with any other aspect of a thing. Sensuality becomes decadent or exploitative in cyberpunk because that's what happens to it when it's warped by class, and cyberpunk isn't really capable of dealing with the other things it can be, or the other lenses it can seen through (or even the less extreme ways it can be shaped by class). The genre did some very powerful things in that space, but often (usually?) at the cost of developing tunnel vision. I wonder if this is another place where the break to Hard Concrete isn't so clean. I can't help but wonder if the rise of Hard Concrete and the kind of alienation that it represents is an inability to see the way out of that tunnel vision--being unable to see or understand survivance vs. survival because of how, or maybe more accurately because of the necessity of how various groups have had to assign weight to and deal with distinct kinds trauma has been so different from where most of cyberpunk came from. [I don't know if that makes any sense outside my head. Also: I apologize if I'm threadsitting; I posted this mostly because I wanted to talk about it with smart people, and you've all been so obliging. :)]
posted by Fish Sauce at 10:02 AM on July 26, 2018 [3 favorites]


tclark, thanks for sharing that. I had no idea such a place existed. And it's HUUUGE. SciNOFi can be as fun as SciFi.
posted by es_de_bah at 10:22 AM on July 26, 2018


Hello Metafilter. I'm the author of the Hard Concrete/Cyberpunk Architecture essay. I'm brand new to MF and joined because I was blown away by the quality of the community. This is the 2nd time in recent weeks one of my pieces from The Adjacent Possible (my Medium publication) has been posted here. The other one was on Science Fiction and Economics and featured the brilliant Jo Lindsay Walton. If you're interested, you can read that MF convo here.

Ok, so, again, I can't tell you how much I appreciate all your comments. I want to try to address some of them here, but first let me say, I'm no expert, just a guy who likes to write, loves a very certain type of science fiction, and loves bringing experts together to help me get smarter. I'm sure in many cases you guys are smarter than I am about this stuff, but hey, here's goes...

Regarding Solarpunk: Yeah, that's a thing too, and as Showbiz_Liz mentioned, I was focused more on TV/Film than lit SF. Also, in my work I look at a specific type of SF, what I call the Adjacent Possible. So, for the most part, I'm not taking superheroes or Star Wars into consideration.

Mchelly wrote: But I'm surprised that his conclusions didn't include what seems to me to be an obvious reason for the shift -- we're at a point in history where not only does it feel like the future is more scary than exciting, but we've also lost any belief that any of the people in power have our best interests at heart, and that there's next to nothing we can do to change that from within. So a hard concrete future looks like the natural extrapolation of that - it's cheap, it's not designed for comfort but for durability, and it's harder to destroy when the population inevitably rises up.

Actually, that's pretty much my premise. Brutalist architecture stands in so well right now because it looks like how we are being treated right now. Hard, anonymous government/organization preparing the barricades as they take and take.

Nelson - I wonder if the Ex Machina house reminds you of the design work of Zumthor, who is referenced in the essay by Kate Wagner?

To all those who decried, "Enough with Brutalist architecture already!" That's fair, it's certainly not for everyone. I wouldn't say I'm a fan of the style, it's more that I appreciate it. That being said, I view Hard Concrete as strictly utilizing Brutalism, but rather borrowing from it. I just felt that I was seeing so much of the aesthetics - the concrete itself, yes, but even just the colors, spaces, etc. that it seemed like it needed to be part of the Hard Concrete idea.

Apologies for not formatting this response in the cleanest style, as I said, I'm brand new here and haven't figured out how it works yet.
posted by RickLiebling at 10:27 AM on July 26, 2018 [40 favorites]


Maybe I don’t read enough cyberpunk outside of the default novels that started the genre to experience this particular concept, but it’s called cyberpunk, where are all the punks? Where are the kids running around with liberty spikes and chains and leather, carrying a laptop around and jacking in to the nearest terminal? Somebody here on Metafilter posted about how when they were in detention at school they’d plug their old laptop into the phone line, and I immediately conjured up an image of some kid with his skateboard sitting in a school chair outside of the principal’s office, surreptitiously jacking into the school’s internet service to download warez from some Eastern European BBS. But we never actually see the punks of cyberpunk in movies or television shows. They’re nonexistent. Akira is, to my knowledge, the only motion picture that actually shows the punks, and the entire storyline’s backdrop is of mass student protests against the government. Where’s that at? Where are the riots? I go to rallys that literally have flashbangs, tear gas, and rubber bullets used by full-blown riot cops against people wearing costumes, and this is such a typical part of my life now that more than anything Akira appears to be the most representative visual cyberpunk novel and/or movie of our now-dystopian cyberpunk “future”. Some of the first few scenes of The Matrix, where Neo wakes up in his apartment surrounded by minidiscs and has two large CRT monitors, and then some leather-clad industrial/techno people show up to buy a disc from him is the closest thing we’ve gotten to depicting the actual punks themselves in the motion picture medium. It’s so interesting to me that for a genre that regularly typifies the “punk” aesthetic, you never actually see any goddamn punks.

But definitely correct me if I’m wrong, because like I said, I am not too big of a cyberpunk reader myself, but I love the visual aesthetic of things like Blade Runner, Akira, The Matrix, some Cronenberg (I think his movie Cosmopolitan could nearly be considered cyberpunk although it follows around a Wall Street type). I’m extremely excited for the Cyberpunk 2077 video game for this reason alone.
posted by gucci mane at 10:43 AM on July 26, 2018 [5 favorites]


Oh, by the way, I definitely think the Portland-created fashion style known as “health goth” was a step in the right direction in regard to casual cyberpunk fashion, obviously without all the “cyber”, but that could be added. It’s not too far fetched to imagine somebody in full-blown Adidas track suits with full sleeve tattoos rocking some sort of weird laptop with a monocle that gives them access to the net. Tech wear is too expensive to be cyberpunk, imo.
posted by gucci mane at 10:57 AM on July 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


Hello Metafilter. I'm the author of the Hard Concrete/Cyberpunk Architecture essay. I'm brand new to MF and joined because I was blown away by the quality of the community.

Welcome to Metafilter!
posted by mordax at 10:59 AM on July 26, 2018 [6 favorites]


One last thing, because I don’t want to spam this thread but thoughts keep coming in: this is what our buses look like at night, and I simply cannot help but think cyberpunk when I’m going home, even though Portland is a far cry from Tokyo, this particular aesthetic typifies cyberpunk to me, especially in a city filled with a bunch of tattooed street urchins that are riding public transit. It’s overwhelming when you’ve just left a protest that got shut down by riot cops, your ears are ringing, and you’re riding the bus to a bar with a bunch of anarchists in balaclavas and boots and black shirts and work pants. This combination of visual aesthetic with actual punks set around a society that is tearing itself apart in the midst of hacking crimes is as cyberpunk as it gets imo.
posted by gucci mane at 11:12 AM on July 26, 2018 [2 favorites]


"...Oh, by the way, I definitely think the Portland-created fashion style known as “health goth” "

For Part 2 of this series on science fiction aesthetics, I'm going to look at fashion, specifically TechWear. I'll check out Health Goth, thanks for the tip.
posted by RickLiebling at 11:47 AM on July 26, 2018 [3 favorites]


Actually, that's pretty much my premise. Brutalist architecture stands in so well right now because it looks like how we are being treated right now. Hard, anonymous government/organization preparing the barricades as they take and take.

It's interesting that on the one hand there is this view of Brutalism as representative of implacable, uncaring power, and on the other hand the many actual right-wingers/fascists/authoritarians running around right now hate the style and seem to favor a gaudy, overblown traditionalism: Prince Charles's Poundbury, Mar-a-Lago, etc. (I suppose the science-fictional exemplar would be the Village from The Prisoner.)

I once lived near Paul Rudolph's Orange County Government Center, which was recently partially demolished mostly because the county executive (a Trump delegate) couldn't stand it. (Local opinion had it that Rudolph designed the building around a central atrium so that high-ranking officials, in their offices on the upper floors, would not be able to avoid seeing and being seen by ordinary citizens in the public spaces on the main floor—and that this is why the county executive wanted to destroy it.) I don't think this dynamic is unique to this case. Much of the most vocal criticism of Boston's City Hall by public officials seems to come from the right as well.

Brutalist buildings are often at a scale that makes the individual seem small. They are also almost all public buildings, and represent a significant level of investment in public institutions. For these reasons, they would seem a good fit with right-wing fantasies of communist authoritarianism, where the individual is crushed by an all-powerful collective. But that isn't actually the kind of authoritarianism we've got; ours is corporatist, privatized, tribal, and hyper-individualistic—your textbook cyberpunk dystopia. So it's odd, and maybe telling, that we are seeing Brutalism become part of the iconography of dystopian SF when our particular handbasket is careening toward another hell altogether.
posted by enn at 11:48 AM on July 26, 2018 [9 favorites]


You’re welcome! I love the article, especially since Portland has an incredible brutalist building downtown (the Wells Fargo Center, it reminds me of the citadel in Half-Life 2). I mainly wish that there was a live action cyberpunk movie that had the hallmarks of the genre besides just the visual aesthetic.
posted by gucci mane at 11:55 AM on July 26, 2018


As far as auditory influence for cyberpunk goes, I feel like The Matrix, with its industrial warehouse scene where Neo first meets Trinity, hit the nail on the head, whereas the internet these days seems to expect a lot of stuff ranging from 80’s-style synth music and vaporwave to be the prime cyberpunk auditory style. I personally think stuff like this is extremely cyberpunk, and it totally fits in with some sort of brutalist warehouse.
posted by gucci mane at 12:03 PM on July 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


@Gucci Mane - Yeah, that link is pretty much textbook Cyberpunk sound. A piece on the sound of scifi, Cyberpunk and beyond might be interesting as well.
posted by RickLiebling at 12:19 PM on July 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


As far as auditory influence for cyberpunk goes, I feel like The Matrix, with its industrial warehouse scene where Neo first meets Trinity, hit the nail on the head

I've always thought of Underworld's first album dubnobasswithmyheadman as being in many ways a soundtrack to Neuromancer. Perhaps the overlap with SF and brutalism isn't a coincidence, given one of the titles is Mmmm skyscraper I love you.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 12:43 PM on July 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


@Jon Mitchell: funny that you say that, because I’ve been listening to pretty much nothing except Underworld for the past two weeks while taking the bus! Their music reminds me of rapid transit so much, and at night I love listening to Jumbo, it’s perfect.
posted by gucci mane at 12:57 PM on July 26, 2018


Thanks for the article!

"Punk" in cyberpunk may have started off as "high tech, low culture" and kind of evolved as time moved on along with musical fashion. I kind of see Mieville's King Rat as kinda punk-in-spirit even though it's Drum and Bass. I admit a prejudice that a lot of the later SFF "-punks" often are oxymorons.

Part of my reference for sensuality as a marker of the decadent rich comes from dragging my way through Altered Chrome where the rich have decorations and the poor have squalor, and I happened to pick up Moorcock's An Alien Heat which likely is coloring my view of how class is coded in SFF. It's also a feature of Elysium (mentioned in the article), Snowpiercer and Hunger Games, all movies where the class structures are violently disrupted.

There's an old theme in LGBTQ culture of appreciation of sensuality (in texture, color, scent, and sound) as a form of psychological and social resistance to strict gender-normativity. I see that in Dirty Computer (oh, the wedding head-shaving!). I'm sure the contrast between medical minimalism and those beautiful choices in textiles and costume are part of the message. (Also see Q.U.E.E.N. where the pure minimalism of the museum is disrupted alongside lyrics about violating arbitrary rules of race, gender, and sexuality.)

One of the ironies is that the better examples of architectural brutalism involve the use of classical shapes and design systems, and the modernism it represents invented the ideology of better living through lifehacking informed by science. Unfortunately that ended up largely benefitting the capitalist systems that post-war dystopian fiction critiques.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 12:59 PM on July 26, 2018 [2 favorites]


Altered Carbon not Altered Chrome
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 1:04 PM on July 26, 2018


What does SciFi Look Like After Cyberpunk?

Sorry, to time to reply, too busy fighting neofeudal corporate dystopia.
posted by The Tensor at 1:12 PM on July 26, 2018 [2 favorites]


many actual right-wingers/fascists/authoritarians running around right now hate the style and seem to favor a gaudy, overblown traditionalism

My futuristic dystopia looks like The Good Place.
posted by q*ben at 1:19 PM on July 26, 2018 [2 favorites]


But we never actually see the punks of cyberpunk in movies or television shows. They’re nonexistent.

I think part of this is that the "punk" portion of Cyberpunk refers more to a DIY, anti-authority, scrappy, stapled-together approach to life, rather than signalling a direct translation of 70s Punk fashion into Neon Dystopia. But, yeah, I agree that I'd love to see more Punks in Cyberpunk. The clearest example of what I imagine when I think Cyber + Punk, in aesthetics and attitude, is Lisbeth Salander.

Why aren't our console cowboys like her? Well, I think in general there's fewer channels for anti-authoritarian sentiment due to the diffusion of power from figureheads into systems. It's not one specific evil corporate CEO that is the source of the problem, it's the entire convergence of the legal, economic, and political systems that are so successful at control precisely because they don't reside in a centralized person, or area. As the article points out, the systems--and the buildings that represent them--are designed to deny an angry populace targets for their rage. Without clarity of purpose, it's easy for any would-be Console Cowboy to fall victim to totalizing conspiracy theories that make more sense than the real world. Or else, they see the vast corruption of the system and choose one of two paths: 1. Destroy all systems built by society, regardless of outcome and potential for wide-scale harm (your weird anti-everything Libertarians) or 2. Decide that things are hopelessly corrupt and dedicate yourself to getting what you can while the getting's good (your Silicon Valley Techno-Pharaohs). Few are the Mr. Robots who understand the corruption, identify (one of the) source(s), and can take action.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 3:01 PM on July 26, 2018 [6 favorites]


...we've also lost any belief that any of the people in power have our best interests at heart...

...it's not like they're ever going to tear down Versailles to install the Institute of Concrete Oppression.


Ah yes, that glorious time when we could be inspired by the architecture of those who had our best interests at heart.

The reason I personally don't like Brutalism architecture is that it's so damn hard to burn down.
posted by BlueHorse at 4:30 PM on July 26, 2018 [2 favorites]


Originally, Brutalism had sort of a utopian/socialist overtone.

If you're interested in monuments of this nature, I highly recommend the Spomenik Database, cataloging Brutalist anti-fascist monuments in post-war Yugoslavia. Some are quite amazing.
posted by Existential Dread at 9:29 PM on July 26, 2018 [2 favorites]


The Chemical Brothers - Go... Concrete Punk as fuck
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 11:24 PM on July 26, 2018


It's interesting, now I think of it, that most of the shops I bought science fiction books from in my youth and later tended to be in or near 60s/70s brutalist or similar shopping centers and arcades. They all seemed very modernist compared to the small town neo-victorian houses (often broken up into flats) I was living in. So it probably always was a bit of subconscious influence.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:07 AM on July 27, 2018


1) Also wanted to mention Simon's Lair.

2) I think to a large extent that cyberpunk is fading because it has been obsoleted by reality. Its potency as a visual aesthetic was due to the fact that it combined aspects of the past (neon, steam, decay) with aspects of the future (ubiquitous computation, display screens, VR, composites, hacking). But many of the future signaling motifs are already here. In 1981 the average number of screens in a house would've been maybe two or three? Four if you count a calculator screen? Number of computing devices? One or two, a videogame and calculator. In 2018? I've got about 10 screens, and not even sure how many computing devices...15, more? (A person with a heart monitor, phone, watch and bluetooth headphones is walking around with 4 computers on/in their body, more if we're counting chip bank cards!) The cloud, handheld supercomputers (phones), VR goggles, 3-D printers, drones, they're all readily available consumer devices. So their ability to signal "future" has been blunted.
posted by xigxag at 6:50 AM on July 27, 2018 [4 favorites]


I reread Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy last year and one thing that really sticks out is the lack of mobile phones.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 6:56 AM on July 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


I think one of the problems with Brutalism is that while human beings do tend to find beauty in classical design systems based on golden proportions, human beings also find beauty in things that have fractal dimensions. A huge rectangle with that proportion apparently isn't as pleasing as a classical facade where that proportion system is repeated on smaller scales, sometimes down to decorative details on the scale of one's finger.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 8:00 AM on July 27, 2018 [3 favorites]


I think part of this is that the "punk" portion of Cyberpunk refers more to a DIY, anti-authority, scrappy, stapled-together approach to life, rather than signalling a direct translation of 70s Punk fashion into Neon Dystopia.
Totally. And for later generations (like me) there's sometimes a disconnect with what punk meant when that material was written and what it meant when we encountered it. When I was in my late teens (late '90s) "punk" as a social/music scene had stopped meaning--or rather, for me, had never meant--urban disenfranchisement, the rebellious spirit of people with next to nothing making do on their own terms and carving out an alternative aesthetic; instead it meant a particularly bland flavour of aggressive pop and the malaise of middle class kids who had been given everything but couldn't find any meaning in any of it, and so had turned to micromanaging in-group signals while digging through suburban California's garage-rock scrapheap. I'd much rather the "punk" aspect move on to a new shape.
A piece on the sound of scifi, Cyberpunk and beyond might be interesting as well.
I'd be interested in that, too. A poet friend of mine was collecting suggestions for popular music that could be classified as "science fictional" (not including music written for science fiction concepts) because he wanted to write something about it, but I don't know if it ever went anywhere. He was mostly collecting stuff like the B-52s, but the sound of science fiction, and of cyberpunk in particular, to me, is trip hop and post punk (so, some combination of Tricky and Pretty Girls Make Graves, basically), although the Schwefelgelb track gucci mane posted is probably close to the sound most people have in their heads. Weirdly, William Gibson is a huge Steely Dan fanboy and John Shirley seems big into '50s and '60s garage, so who even knows for sure what kind of soundscape they had in mind. Pat Cadigan might be the one to ask. Hard Concrete I'm imagining an appropriate soundscape as being SHELLS, Phantogram, Mr. Little Jeans, Pyramid, Mononoke, stuff like that.
posted by Fish Sauce at 10:18 AM on July 27, 2018 [2 favorites]


More Portland Brutalism by yours truly. At least I think this is considered Brutalism? Building is on SW Broadway & Stark.
posted by gucci mane at 10:18 PM on July 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


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