待翻译：The Importance of Reading (and Teaching) Cyberpunk in the Age of AI

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The Importance of Reading (and Teaching) Cyberpunk in the Age of AI - Reactor 0 Share Featured Essays Cyberpunk The Importance of Reading (and Teaching) Cyberpunk in the Age of AI Looking for answers — and finding hope —in the cyberpunk of the past, present, and future. By Joanna Nelius-Free | Published on August 26, 2026 Image by Steve A Johnson [via Unsplash] 0 Share Image by Steve A Johnson [via Unsplash] A year after I left tech journalism to pursue a full-time career in education, I taught a class on cyberpunk. I’ve been teaching creative writing and literature courses to high school students for nearly a decade now, so this was actually my second time teaching cyberpunk, but my first seeing the same material in a way that was haunting and prophetic—this time around, I couldn’t ignore the disquieting connections between my reasons for leaving tech journalism, my students’ bleak views on the future, and the tech-obsessed world we now inhabit, all driven by the feeling that big tech is gradually destroying humanity instead of saving it, as it once promised. I also couldn’t ignore what Lewis Shiner, one of cyberpunk’s founders, said about the genre in his 1991 New York Times op-ed: it was dead. “Cyberpunk in its new incarnation had turned technology into an end in itself and lost its original impulse,” Shiner wrote. It became a cliché. Its aesthetics became tropes. If a story had neon lights, hackers, and characters who never took off their sunglasses, then it was “cyberpunk.” While I agree that plenty of surface-level literature and media has easily made its way into the mass market, I don’t agree that cyberpunk is dead. Therein lay my challenge, or so I thought: how would I teach my students about the history and meaning of cyberpunk while equipping them with the tools to analyze the stories they read? But my real challenge was keeping my students—and myself—from getting lost in the hopelessness many cyberpunk stories carry through their pages. It can be a jarring experience seeing multiple reflections of the world you’re living in texts that were written 10, 30, or even 100 years ago. So, I needed to find at least one story that did the opposite—a story that took our fears of the future and reflected them back to us as hope. Victorian-era Cyberpunk Most of the stories I had my students read have little or none of the flashy cyberpunk aesthetics we’ve seen jam-packed into movies and video games for the last 30-plus years. There are some bio-mods, an AI-powered computer, and the odd hallucination, but these elements are woven into the stories instead of simply accessorizing it. One of those stories is E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops.” Published in 1909, this was Forster’s only foray into science fiction. What makes it a classic piece of dystopian literature is that it was the first to explore technology as the creator and controller of humanity. It gave sci-fi the concept of the “hive mind.” Its technological elements and themes aren’t often recognized as cyberpunk, yet their resemblance is strong; Forster feared the Industrial Revolution would strip humanity of its curiosity, creativity, and agency. In Forster’s story, everyone lives alone underground, each in their own small rooms, each of which is shaped like a honeycomb cell. Every room is equipped with a machine that can literally do anything. If someone feels unwell, it can take their temperature. If someone wants to socialize, they can call a friend by pressing one of the machine’s buttons. If someone needs ideas or inspiration, it will generate literature. My high school students, the majority of whom were born between 2011 and 2012, found the similarities between Forster’s imagined technology and the real technology of today unnerving. The isolation of the honeycomb-shaped dwellings reminded them of being quarantined during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Characters speaking through a mirror-like device reminded them of Apple’s FaceTime. The machine’s ability to generate art on demand reminded them of ChatGPT. As central to the story as the machine itself is what Forster dubbed “The Book of The Machine,” a tome over 1,000 pages long that explained how to use the machine in every possible scenario: “If she was hot or cold or dyspeptic or at a loss of a word, she went to the book, and it told her what button to press.” I asked my students if the book reminded them of anything. One of my students raised his hand. “Google,” he answered. All search engines are designed to do the same thing: find information on the internet. Forster’s Book of The Machine is our internet. We use it when we’re sick, to get directions, to find the lyrics to our favorite song, or learn how to unclog our shower. With the advent of AI search summaries, the Internet has grown even closer to Forster’s Book of The Machine: one text, same information (usually) available to all at the press of a (few) buttons. This story made me realize that my time as a tech journalist made me surprisingly receptive to certain traditional Victorian reservations about technology: Like Forster, I began to question how the technology I wrote about was affecting our social and spiritual needs, our personal autonomy, and the ability to think for ourselves. I saw something of myself in Kuno, one of the two main characters in the story, desperate to escape a system of control, and all too aware that the techno-optimistic publication I wrote for didn’t like the questions I was asking—especially when it came to questioning generative AI. Broken Promises of the Future William Gibson’s first professional publication, “The Gernsback Continuum,” was a call for science fiction to take a new direction—to stop hoping that mid-20th century promises of space exploration and perfect futures would come true. It’s a “coolly accurate perception of the wrongheaded elements of the past,” as Gibson’s contemporary Bruce Sterling notes in his 1986 cyberpunk anthology, Mirrorshades. This story paved the way for the genre that would later be christened cyberpunk “The Gernsback Continuum” is unlike the bio-chipped, street-wise characters living in the high-tech, low-life worlds of Gibson’s later works. Most of Gibson’s story is set in ’80s Burbank, California, and centers around a photographer taking pictures of old, chrome-wrapped buildings and winged statues—much like the cover art on many of the magazines Hugo Gernsback edited or published. The editor he works for is putting together an illustrative history book called The Airstream Futuropolis: The Tomorrow That Never Was. Before reading this story, I posed a question to my students: “Is it possible to have nostalgia for a broken promise of the future?” “I think you can be fascinated with the past,” one of my students said. That’s certainly true. I’m fascinated with early 20th-century tech, but I also go out of my way to collect ’90s gadgets, the tech of my childhood. I’m not sure if Gibson intended “The Gernsback Continuum” to read like this, but the class discussion that followed explored what we saw as a both a fascination with and nostalgia for the past, and the key difference between the two. Anyone can be fascinated by the past, but nostalgia requires an emotional connection to a personal, past experience. But is it possible for someone to feel both at the same time for the same thing? Absolutely. I used Disneyland’s Innoventions Dream Home as an example. It was an attraction in Tomorrowland from 2008 to 2015 that envisioned what a smart home could look like. The kitchen talked and suggested recipes. You could play card games or look through photographs on the dining room table’s touch screens. A bedroom mirror showed you what you’d look like in different outfits without physically putting them on. Then the smartphone caught on, and suddenly everyone could do all that from a pocket-sized device. The Innoventions Dream Home still tickles the part of my brain that is fascinated with the past, but being 45 years removed from the setting of “The Gernsback Continuum,” I can’t help but feel like my present is in some ways worse than the story’s ending. It’s why that long gone Disneyland attraction makes me feel nostalgic for the same past. It promised something better than what exists now. Techno-colonialism In Bruce Sterling’s aforementioned anthology is the story from which it takes its name: “Mozart in Mirrorshades,” written by Sterling and Lewis Shiner. Unlike “The Gernsback Continuum,” a quiet reflective admonishment of bygone techno utopia ideals, “Mozart in Mirrorshades” channels the chaotic, unfiltered commentary of ’80s punk music—and the era’s obsession with Amadeus Mozart. Set in Salzburg during the 1700s, Sterling and Shiner’s story follows two main characters: Rice, a higher-up at a company that time travels into the past to take works of art and geological resources into the present; and Mozart himself, who by the end of the story is nothing like the historical version of the Classical composer (and that includes his music). The story drips with political satire, thinly veiled commentary on colonization and exploitation—the dark side of capitalism and materialism. My students were particularly amused with an ironic appearance by Thomas Jefferson, furious with Rice: “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.” As recompense for taking the culture of the past, Rice’s company had given Jefferson’s era radios, magazines, cassette tapes, and sequined tubed tops. One of my students exclaimed, “He’s saying the future has no culture!” Another chimed in, “It’s like AI! They’re stealing from artists!” They made a connection between the machine-controlled future dystopia of Forster’s “The Machine Stops” and Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum”: when we look to the future and see no hope, we have to look to the past to find hope in the future—but not colonize or appropriate it. History is an amazing teacher if we truly listen to it. Tech: The Great (Un)Equalizer Moving from the ’80s and into the 2010s, Cat Rambo’s “Memories of Moments, Bright as Falling Stars” digs deeper into the materialism mentality explored in “Mozart in Mirrorshades.” It explores how inequitable access to technology affects social status, interpersonal relationships, and a personal sense of freedom through the use of bio-mods. When we first meet the main characters, teenagers Jonny and Grizz, they are in an electronic recycling yard unwinding coils of computer memory wire and pressing them into each other’s backs. Grizz wants the upgrade to do well on her exams. If she does, she’ll be placed into a good job. Jonny gets the same upgrade, but his anti-establishment sentiments come across loud and clear early on in the story. While Grizz downloads entire databases of information in the library, Jonny numbs his grim view of reality with drugs instead of studying for his exams. The rich kids get most of the jobs, he says. It’s like a skill-based job market from a deeper level of hell, but instead of needing five years of experience for an entry level job you need a bio-mod that you can’t afford: “They tell you you’re the dregs, just like everyone else, but sometimes your mods and someone’s listing match up and you find yourself with a chance. The more mods you have, the more likely it is.” Jonny’s not willing to “play the game” to get ahead in life. He wants to do things his way, on his terms, even if the world around him makes him feel hopeless. It’s a sentiment that some of my students relate to, but especially myself. Every time someone told me I should learn to code instead of learning to write, it steeled my resolve to prove them wrong, and I did. When I first became a journalist, I felt like I was able to make real emotiona [truncated for AI cost control]