Blade Runner received a lukewarm response when it was released in 1982, in part for being too bleak and unrealistically nihilistic in its assessment of where society was headed.
The depiction of our world pushing itself further into the gyre of bleeding edge technology in place of human interaction, and personal responsibility traded for creature comforts at the penalty of allowing corporations to own the individual at every juncture seemed too far gone to its Western audience, who at this point were enjoying the neon clad hopefulness of the MTV era.
Writers of the day were predicting what the worst elements of the unchecked consumerism and aggressive capitalism Reagan era politics could lead to.
Civil unrest bubbles as the ruling class live in literal and metaphorical ivory towers as the lowest rungs of society sink to new depths, struggling to survive whilst the authority erect Potemkin villages to cull intervention.
Striking a resemblance to the intense worry brought on this very year as the average citizen faces financial instability and future opportunity becoming murky, meanwhile corporations such as Amazon have seen nearly quadrupled profits during the COVID crisis.
These are ideas baked in to the fabric of Cyberpunk, a genre sprung from the new wave science fiction movement, born in the late 60’s and created as stark commentary with emphasis on realigning ourselves to avoid the traps we’ve set for ourselves, simultaneously raising the question of what it is to be human in inhuman times.
Whether its Akira’s (1980), prediction of severe political unrest and grim dystopia following the 2019 Tokyo Olympics, Blade Runner (1982) addressing mass displacement of workers through robotic and cybernetic counterparts; as well as pervasive advertisement permeating everyday life, or Judge Dredd (1977) predicting an authoritarian and consequence free police force working for corporate gain in
opposition to the needs of the people.
The forthcoming decades had been painted as grim well before we reached them.
Yet we’ve barrelled toward the precipice, making superfluous change within the set parameters we find ourselves lumbered with, unwittingly enabling the business as usual attitude of our establishment.
What can we learn from the themes of Dystopian media and Cyberpunk beyond it being an eerily accurate, if cynical; depiction of the world we’ve come to find ourselves in?
An inordinate amount of material from the genre culminates as the protagonist finds a means of fighting the powers that be simply by refusing to participate. Searching for meaning outside of a suffocatingly oppressive society and re-establishing the identity of the individual.
Detaching ourselves from our comfort is no easy task ,we’re likely to see a fate closer to the ending of Terry Gilliams, “Brazil” wherein the protagonist believes he has achieved a revolution but instead has been lobotomised and left to his fantasies.
The hope in these stories is found in the difficult truth that to truly end these cycles we all have to become uncomfortable in our surroundings and make concerted and sustained efforts to better ourselves as well as those around us, we now more than ever have the building blocks for social and cultural upheaval as well as the active decision on how closely we follow the scripts of yesteryear.
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”