Cyberpunk Summer
Cyberpunk — to riff on on a line by its original proponent William Gibson — is already here; it is just unevenly distributed.
Climate change is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. What might have been a bold statement not long ago is almost trite now. A problem we see is that it will always be unevenly distributed.
Cyberpunk is a genre close to our hearts at The Polycrisis. A quote from Gibson may as well serve as a motto for Polycrisis thought: “When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart”.
Here are six scenes from our Cyberpunk Summer. Please email us with other examples you have noticed!
Crowdstrike: Oh, so evil and dumb corporations control a machine civilization, your freedom is both squashed and expands as you walk through the detritus and wonder at the wasteland…? This is cyberpunk.
2. Bangladesh: Authoritarian party crushes student rebellion and cuts off the internet. Students counter by hacking into government websites of police and army. Websites graffitied in blood-red declare: “it’s not a protest anymore, it’s a war now”.
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3. Cyberpunk, the Petrodollar edition. Tim made a few (ok more than few) tweets critical of the United Arab Emirates for their role in Sudan, Gaza etc. And a swarm of clearly AI bots replied with garbage about MBZ munificence. Straight out of Cyberpunk.
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4. Caribbean hurricanes: A hurricane devastates an island but it is denied catastrophe bond insurance payout. Why? World Bank-Jamaica $150mn catastrophe bond divided the island into 19 grid squares:
Air pressure of the storm was ABOVE the contractual thresholds. That’s cyberpunk. (The country did however get a payout from the donor-backed regional pooled catastrophe fund.)
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5. Warring risk maps: The cat bond failure hints at a bigger problem of information asymmetry. With Hurricane Beryl, capital markets won their parametric bet against a sovereign. But insurers know they’re struggling to understand changing risks driven by burning fossil fuels and deforestation. Where there’s too much uncertainty they’ll withdraw coverage altogether (unless forced or subsidised to remain by governments). Everyone wants to know their climate risk, and for a price, a company will give you the answer. Or several companies will give you several answers. Bloomberg Green reporters drew on research and their own analysis to compare several different climate risk modelling maps generated by four different commercial providers. The agreement between pairs of maps was between 21% to 25% in many cases. A sense of precision from proprietary models that are inaccessible to the public is not a recipe for equitable adaptation.
6. California Wildfires: Orange Sky over the Allen radio telescope that is used in SETI search for alien life. While firefighters lasso the mammoth #ParkFire that has explosively grown in bone dry California. Burn fossils; get a burning alien planet. Scenes straight out of Bladerunner, written off a novel by Philip K Dick, another forerunner of cyberpunk
Cyberpunk was originally intended as a warning by the genres authors. But those warnings fell on deaf ears as our demented ruling classes treat cyberpunk as an instruction manual. In a memorable twist, William Gibson tweeted out our ‘Global Boiling’ essay and pointed out that his new trilogy is about our climate casino, and titled “Jackpot”…
Catch more Polycrisis: transcript of our panel with Carnegie; Tim’s interview on Hegemonicon on left internationalism, flows and chokepoints of the global economy. See you next week.