Cyberpunk and the Failed Vision of Virtual Reality

Cyberpunk is a genre that never quite made it in the mainstream. After its brief day in the sun in the 80s, it fell by the wayside and was eclipsed by its endless spinoff genres, most notably steampunk. Today it mostly surfaces in discussions of the history of science fiction, and its major authors, like William Gibson, have moved on to other things. Cyberpunk caused a major shift in the world of science fiction, the repercussions of which are still felt today, but it did not end up reaping the success of that shift—creating the odd side effect that occasionally a new cyberpunk book surfaces and is hailed as an innovation with no acknowledgment of its forebears.

While this is wholly unfair to the pioneers of cyberpunk, rereading classics like Neuromancer and Snow Crash, I can understand why it happened. For a forward-thinking genre, cyberpunk feels intensely nostalgic. It’s a genre that could never have existed at any time other than the 80s and early 90s, and exists now only as an expression of nostalgia for the 80s. It was simply too much of its own time.*

The problem is perfectly encapsulated by Neuromancer‘s iconic first line: “The sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel.” To readers in 1984, it was obvious that this meant gray static. But the static of an analog TV set is no longer a familiar sight to modern readers. Today, the quote evokes the blue of a screen with no input source. A line that was supposed to evoke tech savvy now sounds retro and obsolete.

There are a few factors at work here. For one, some aspects of cyberpunk have become so ingrained in popular culture that their original appearances seem cliché (Neuromancer‘s Trinity-esque character Molly comes to mind). And, certainly, the genre’s roots in the deeply homogeneous, white male culture of the very early internet did it no favors. But the most important factor is that, for a bunch of futurists, cyberpunk authors just didn’t do a very good job of predicting how people would use this new technology.

Cyberpunk faced an unusually difficult challenge. When writing a space opera, for instance, predicting what people will use spaceships for doesn’t take, well, a rocket scientist: We’ll get in them and go places. But in the days of ARPANET, it wasn’t at all clear what the internet was going to be for. Was it a type of communication infrastructure? A distributed database? A defense system? A stepping stone to AI? Cyberpunk authors guessed where it was headed and usually landed wildly off the mark.

For one thing, there’s the matter of scale. While cyberpunk authors predicted that internet use would become widespread, they failed to predict what that would be like. In 1993, there were 130 websites. You could, quite feasibly, visit every site on the internet. Many cyberpunk books retain that “cozy internet” feel of a world that just isn’t that big, where everyone is part of the same community and important facts, events, and people are known to all. Neal Stephenson, whose world feels the biggest, probably thought he was being wildly superlative when he predicted 120 million people in his digital universe, slightly shy of the four billion internet users today. And he still imagined everything being clustered around a single massive city center.

In the real world, there is no “city center” to the internet because it’s just too massive for one single element (be it a site, a person, or an activity) to unite everyone. Even seemingly ubiquitous behemoths like Facebook and Amazon are used by a minority of the internet—about one in four internet users has a Facebook account—and there are entire countries with millions of people who use completely different sites and apps (WeChat in China, Ozon.ru in Russia). Within a site like Facebook, people still aren’t all centrally connected; it’s a sprawling network with countless major and minor hubs, where two random users most likely no friends in common and might never see the same posts. Today, 6,000 tweets are sent every second. It’s beyond anything cyberpunk could imagine.

But the bigger mistake is what they envisioned this digital world would look like. Cyberpunk authors envisioned a fully implemented virtual reality universe that people would experience through 3D goggles much as they experience the real world, creating and customizing homes, talking with other people’s avatars, interacting with files and programs as if they were physical objects, traveling from place to place, and so on. Here’s the description in Snow Crash:

Like any place in Reality, the Street is subject to development. Developers can build their own small streets feeding off of the main one. They can build buildings, parks, signs, as well as things that do not exist in Reality, such as vast hovering overhead light shows, special neighborhoods where the rules of three-dimensional spacetime are ignored, and free-combat zones where people can go to hunt and kill each other. (p. 23)

So yeah, that didn’t happen.

 

Ever since Wolfenstein 3D, virtual reality has always seemed to be five minutes into the future. It made its first appearance in the mid-90s, when virtual-reality booths began popping up at technology fairs and science centers, but while these were big draws, most people lost interest in a few minutes when they discovered that wandering aimlessly around a virtual world wasn’t much more fun than wandering aimlessly around the real world.

3D took off in the gaming world, of course, and MMORPGs at first glance look very much like the virtual worlds of cyberpunk. But these are still games that exist for entertainment. Virtual worlds have never expanded to become emulations of real life. It turned out all anyone wanted to do with their Sims was torment them in creative ways; Second Life‘s half-million users are mostly just there for the porn. (Okay, that’s like real life.) And even the largest are a tiny fraction of the internet’s users. World of Warcraft, for instance, has about five million—a lot, but still one in a thousand.

Nor have virtual-reality interfaces exactly taken the world by storm. Two years after the launch of the Oculus Rift, VR headset users make up only about 0.25% of Steam users. As prices, game selection, and graphics cards improve, it may grow to be a respectably popular gaming console, but it doesn’t seem on track to become a universal accessory. (And again, gaming.) Apparently, not everyone finds strapping a phone to your face to be an immersive experience.

By now, it’s clear that technological limitations aren’t the only obstacle to an all-encompassing virtual world. People just don’t seem to want it that much. Why not? What did the cyberpunk authors miss?

Ever since the early days of personal computing, people have been assuming that we would interact with computers the way we interact with real life. When GUIs first came on the scene, some tried to emulate real-life spaces (Microsoft Bob** and the experimental file navigator fsn, which you know from that one scene in Jurassic Park). These flopped because, it turns out, having to hunt around in a rendered space to find the file you want doesn’t add anything to the experience. Non-representational GUIs can organize files and programs more efficiently and are therefore more useful.

Around this time, we saw the dawn of e-commerce. At the time, the idea of buying things online was novel, and nobody had any sense of what an online store would look like. Many people expected them to look like physical stores: There would be aisles and shelves and you’d navigate around and look for the items you wanted. Of course, this did not happen. Wandering around a store trying to find something is not most people’s favorite part of shopping, and if you wanted to do that, you’d go to a physical store. Straightforward lists of products with logical categories and search functions make shopping more convenient, which is the entire point of e-commerce.

Fast-forward to the present. Cyberpunk correctly predicted that the internet would become an important tool for networking and social interaction. But, once again, creating a fully-rendered 3D world for the interactions to take place in has proven unnecessary. Even in an MMORPG, if you want to say hi to your friend, you don’t physically walk your avatar over to their avatar’s house and knock on the door. You use the chat.

Just as with file management and online shopping, it turns out that the logistics of traveling from one location to another, manipulating objects, and having to be in proximity with someone in order to talk to them aren’t the parts of social interaction that people enjoy (especially since online avatars inherently don’t communicate the subtle expressions and physical contact that are the main benefits of face-to-face communication). Letters, telephones, e-mail and so on were all invented specifically to get around these inconveniences. There would be no reason to spend time and resources developing a digital world that mimics these aspects of the real world, because there’s no demand for them.

As it happens, we did end up with a parallel digital world where people use avatars to interact. I refer, of course, to social media. Just like an online store, social media keeps the essential aspects of the real-life system—talking to friends, meeting new people, and showing them things—but presents it in a clean, organized format without all the trappings of real life. The cyberpunk authors were right that it would be an enormous time suck, but otherwise, their vision of the future of the internet is pretty much unrecognizable.

A much better prediction, I think, came not from cyberpunk but from space opera. Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep came out in 1992, the same year as Snow Crash. Set in a Milky Way filled with millions of sentient species and inhabited worlds, the primary form of communication is the Net, where endless numbers of primarily text-based short missives are shared and propagated across different groups. Here he describes the reaction to a viral video:

Judging from the flames and contradictions, the signal-to-noise ratio was very low…And some messages were patent nonsense. One thing about the Net: the multiple, automatic translations often disguised the fundamental alienness of participants. Behind the chatty, colloquial postings, there were faraway realms, so misted by distance and difference that communication was impossible—even though it might take a while to realize the fact. (pp. 224, 226)

It seems safe to guess that Vernor Vinge was on Usenet at the time. But he correctly divined the fundamental elements that made it such a powerful form of communication, and how those elements would endure in a vastly larger and more diverse setting. As a result, this vision of the future feels immediately recognizable.

Perhaps the virtual worlds of cyberpunk will someday come to pass and surprise me. Maybe augmented reality will expand beyond games and novelties to become a part of daily life***. Or maybe the future of electronic communication will head in some completely unforeseen direction that will defy our predictions just as the internet defied the predictions of cyberpunk authors.

Until then, there’s always Second Life.

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*William Gibson probably made a smart choice to move to contemporary, where being intensely of one’s own time is a virtue. Pattern Recognition is one of the most true-to-life representations of the early 2000s.

**Microsoft Bob also gave us Comic Sans. Truly, its sins are many.

***Augmented reality was predicted by William Gibson in his 2007 book Spook Country.