Mirrorshades question 7: Globalisation
In the preface, Sterling says:
The technical revolution reshaping our society is based not on hierarchy but in decentralization, not in rigidity but in fluidity.
The Eighties are an era of reassessment, of integration, of hybridizised influences, of old notions shaken loose an reinterpreted with a new sophistication, a broader perspective. The cyber punks aim for a wide-ranging, global point of view.
The tools of global integration—the satellite media net, the multinational corporation—fascinate the cyberpunks and figure constantly in their work. Cyberpunk has little patience with borders.
Cyberpunk made some predictions about what a globalised world would be like to live in. Decentralisation and movement, but also deregulation and the widening gap between the haves and have-nots. How much of these predictions came to pass? How does the freedom to travel balance against the freedom to starve?
Globalisation was reaching a high point in the 80s and 90s, but has receeded since then with a resurgence of nationalism and populism. How much of this is a reaction to the excesses predicted by cyberpunk?
Comments
I meant "deregulation" as part of the neoliberal project that started with Regan and Thatcher. Privatisation of previously-national assets and industries, scaling back of the state if favour of individual solutions, deregulation of corporations, including regulatory capture. That sort of thing.
It was hard to come up with questions about a collection: a lot of the usual questions don't apply. Sterling seemed to have done a good job analysing the stories, so why not see if his analysis holds up?
I think it is interesting how differently the different authors in the collection perceived future politics (to the extent that they tackled such wide-scale matters in their short stories) - some had a great deal of corporate intervention, some posited small-scale enclaves in rivalry with each other, some had kind of free-port locations where anything went in contrast with highly regulated states. I'm not sure there was much commonality of future vision other than a) there would be tech integrated into one's person and b) people were going to use drugs a great deal.
I suppose one area where I would see prescience is the huge role of the corporate entity - I think back in the 1980s, multinationals were only just starting to gain international power, and I remember quite vividly the first survey describing how many multinationals had just overtaken small countries in terms of GDP. So the concept that the world would be dominated by companies and not nations is definitely something we have learned to live with, for good or ill.
And nothing I can really add here.