Evan Lee Salim
A year after stepping away from the frenetic pace of tech journalism to pursue a full-time career in education, I found myself standing in front of a high school classroom, teaching a course on the history of cyberpunk. Having taught creative writing and literature for nearly a decade, this wasn’t my first time exploring the genre with students. Yet, this iteration felt fundamentally different—haunting, prophetic, and deeply personal.
The distance from the industry allowed me to see the material not merely as a collection of tropes, but as a mirror reflecting the disquieting trajectory of our current reality. The connections between my reasons for leaving the tech sector, my students’ profound cynicism regarding the future, and the world we now inhabit became impossible to ignore. We are living through the erosion of the "tech-utopian" promise, watching as the digital landscape shifts from a tool of liberation to a mechanism of control, surveillance, and commodified isolation.
The Genre That Refused to Die: A Historical Context
In 1991, Lewis Shiner, one of the architects of the cyberpunk movement, famously penned an op-ed for The New York Times declaring the genre dead. "Cyberpunk in its new incarnation had turned technology into an end in itself and lost its original impulse," Shiner wrote. He argued that the genre had calcified into a set of hollow clichés: neon-drenched alleys, leather-clad hackers, and an aesthetic preoccupation with sunglasses and chrome.
While I concede that the mass market has certainly diluted the genre, I vehemently disagree with the assessment of its demise. Cyberpunk is not dead; it has simply evolved. The real challenge for my students—born between 2011 and 2012—was not to identify the aesthetic markers of the genre, but to understand its core impulse: the critical interrogation of power, capital, and the human spirit in a technological world. The hurdle was preventing us from sinking into the nihilism that defines so much of the literature, and instead finding a way to transform our fears into a roadmap for resistance.
The Victorian Roots of the Hive Mind
To understand the trajectory of technology, we often have to look backward. I introduced my students to E.M. Forster’s 1909 short story, "The Machine Stops." Though rarely categorized as traditional cyberpunk, it serves as a foundational dystopian text that predicts the total subsumption of humanity by technology.
In Forster’s vision, humanity lives in subterranean honeycomb cells, entirely isolated, relying on "The Machine" for every physical and social need. When students read about characters speaking through mirror-like devices or receiving art generated on demand, the "unnerving" parallels to our modern life were immediate. They recognized FaceTime, they identified the isolation of pandemic lockdowns, and they immediately equated the Machine’s ability to generate literature with the emergence of generative AI.
The most chilling parallel, however, was "The Book of The Machine," a 1,000-page manual that dictated every aspect of life. When I asked my students what this represented in our modern world, the answer was instantaneous: "Google."
This realization brought into sharp focus my own departure from tech journalism. Like Forster, I began to see how the platforms I once covered were not just facilitating information; they were atrophy-inducing. They were eroding personal autonomy and the capacity for independent thought. I found myself empathizing with Kuno, the protagonist of Forster’s story, who dares to question the system—a stance that often drew the ire of my former editors whenever I dared to ask critical questions about the ethics of generative AI.
The Nostalgia for a Broken Future
If Forster provided the cautionary tale, William Gibson provided the blueprint for the genre’s shift in focus. His debut, "The Gernsback Continuum," serves as a pivot point for science fiction. It is a brilliant, surgical critique of the "tomorrow that never was"—the mid-20th-century obsession with space-age perfection and technological optimism.
I posed a question to my class: "Is it possible to have nostalgia for a broken promise of the future?" We discussed the difference between fascination with the past and true nostalgia. I used the example of Disneyland’s Innoventions Dream Home, an attraction that promised a "smart" life long before smartphones became the dominant tether of our existence. The attraction is a relic, yet it triggers a specific kind of melancholy—not because it was accurate, but because it represented a future that felt kinder and more manageable than the one we actually inherited.
This tension between the past’s dreams and the present’s reality is the heartbeat of cyberpunk. It is the realization that the progress we were promised has been replaced by the realities of late-stage capitalism and surveillance.
Techno-Colonialism and the Theft of Culture
The themes of exploitation and materialism reached a crescendo when we studied Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner’s "Mozart in Mirrorshades." Set in the 1700s, the story features a corporation that exploits the past for resources and art. It is a scathing, satirical critique of techno-colonialism.
The students were particularly struck by the appearance of Thomas Jefferson, who laments, "You granted us liberty of equality and the freedom to pursue our own happiness. Instead we find your machinery on all sides, your cheap manufactured goods seducing the people of our great country."
One student hit the nail on the head: "It’s like AI! They’re stealing from artists!"
The connection was profound. They saw the pattern clearly: when a society runs out of its own cultural vitality, it begins to cannibalize the past. The lesson here is that history is not just a collection of dates; it is a repository of human struggle. If we, as a civilization, do not learn to engage with our history, we are destined to be exploited by those who treat it as a resource to be mined.
The Economic Reality of Bio-Mods
Cat Rambo’s "Memories of Moments, Bright as Falling Stars" brought us into the 2010s, focusing on the inequality inherent in technological advancement. Through the lens of bio-modifications, Rambo explores the "skill-based job market" of a dystopian future.
In this world, your worth is determined by your ability to afford the latest upgrades. It is a direct reflection of our current labor market, where access to tools, education, and social capital dictates one’s ability to survive. My students recognized this instantly. The pressure to "learn to code" or "adopt the latest tool" is a recurring theme in their own lives. My own refusal to succumb to that pressure—my shift toward "dumb" tech, e-ink tablets, and analog writing—was my way of reclaiming the agency that the industry tried to strip away.
Finding Hope in the Abyss
As we reached the end of the course, we examined Donovan Hall’s "A Sunken Memory," from the Cyberfunk! anthology. The story is set in a post-apocalyptic world where 99% of humanity has been lost. The protagonist, CJ-1844, is a cyborg struggling with data corruption, yet he finds joy in music and persists in a search for the remnants of humanity.
This was the "hope" I had been looking for. It wasn’t a naive, techno-optimistic hope; it was a gritty, persistent, human hope. It reminded my students that even when the systems are broken, and the world feels like it is collapsing, the act of searching for one another—and holding onto our humanity—is a radical, revolutionary act.
The Future Is Not Inevitable
The ultimate lesson I hope my students took from this class is that the future is not a fixed destination decided by Silicon Valley or mega-corporations. It is a construct that we, through our choices and our actions, have the power to influence.
If cyberpunk began as a rebellion against the space-conquering, colonizing tropes of early science fiction, it must now become a rebellion against the commodification of the human experience. Whether we call it "cyberfunk," "solarpunk," or simply "critical thinking," we need to push back against the idea that our creative endeavors and our intellectual autonomy are better handled by machines.
My journey from tech journalism to the classroom has been a process of unlearning the "inevitability" of technological progress. I have learned that the most powerful thing we can do in a world that wants to sell us imitations of ourselves is to remain stubbornly, defiantly human.
I encourage you to read the stories mentioned, to seek out the voices that challenge the status quo, and to fight back against the parts of technology that alienate you. Read everything you can, think critically, and—above all—go be punk. Reject the narrative of the inevitable future, and start building the hope for a way out.
Siti Muinah
Ali Ikhwan
