This week: Punk! Cyberpunk, that is. We talk generative A.I., aesthetics, and how old words acquire new uses. Come read along!
Core Punk
I went way down the rabbit hole this week.
Generative A.I.s fascinate me; a few weeks ago, I wrote about playing with Dall-E 2, this week, I spent some time playing with MidJourney. Both programs take text prompts and then generate an image, but they do so in very different ways. Dall-E tends to return images that mimic the real world, MidJourney returns flights of fancy. In other words, if you need a satiric photo-realistic image of a politician eating a hotdog, Dall-E has you covered. On the other hand, if you want a painting of "attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion," MidJourney is the engine for you.
But the most important difference is that MidJourney is hosted on the Discord social communication app, which means that when you play with the engine, you are playing in a collaborative, social space. Most notably, on Discord, you can have different channels and threads. Like, for example, one dedicated to using MidJourney to create images that match different aesthetics, in particular those that end in ~core, ~wave, and ~punk.
Let's back up a step: In this case, aesthetics means a shared group of ideas that can be taken together to create a recognizable theme. Think of Art Deco - painters, poets, writers, and other artists created work that bridged the gap between fine art and commercial design by collectively creating a palette of colors, textures, motifs, and geometries that are instantly recognizable as Art Deco. Modern aesthetics are the same - an evolving set of motifs and trends that congeal to form a recognizable genre, like gothcore1, vaporwave2, and, of course, cyberpunk3.
All three of these suffixes are fascinating and I'll probably look at ~core and ~wave a little deeper at this point, but, for this week, let's look at the word punk and its newest role as a suffix.
But, we need to start with definitions, because there are more of them than you'd think. Here's a list of things Merriam-Webster says it could mean:
a usually petty gangster, hoodlum, or ruffian
a punk rock musician
one who affects punk styles
a young inexperienced person
nonsense/foolishness
prostitute
wood so decayed as to be dry, crumbly, and useful for tinder
a preparation (as of a stick of coated wood) that burns slowly and is used to ignite fuses especially of fireworks
So, yeah. Lots of things4. Not all of them great. Interestingly enough, it's the last three that are the oldest and most obscure, in that we don't know where or how the word punk came to describe those things. Here's the Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins5 entry for Punk:
Punk was originally 16th-century slang for a prostitute or harlot, the word of unknown origin...punk in the sense of inferior or bad is said to be of 18th century British origin, deriving from "rotting wood" called punk.
And here's the Oxford Concise Dictionary of Etymology6:
prostitute. of unkn. orig.
rotten wood, touchwood. something worthless. person of no account. of unkn orig*.
But as noted in the introduction, punk is also going something of a semantic shift. From the Aesthetics Wiki7:
The punk suffix is usually either related to Punk, the movement characterized by rejecting social norms, or it is a subgenre of speculative fiction.
and
The origin of this suffix originated with the punk movement in the 1970s. It was then adapted for the Cyberpunk genre, thus cementing punk as a suffix.
From there, things kind of spiraled. Cyberpunk was followed by Steampunk in the mid-80s, and this set the pattern for the next several decades of science-fiction subgenres. Is your story full of post-industrial but pre-digital technology? Dieselpunk. Is your tech green, renewable, and used to to power a future city? Solarpunk. And so on and so forth. In fact, if you want yet another rabbit hole to disappear down, Wikipedia's list of cyberpunk derivatives will keep you up at night.
So where do we go from here? Cyberpunk has shifted from a subgenre to a full-on aesthetic. Not only are there written works, but there are video games, movies, and art that are recognizably cyberpunk8. In doing so, it has added to its list of definitions and grammatical uses, but, more importantly, has retained its core meaning of young, rebellious person. And that's pretty punk.
Down the Rabbit Hole
I didn't even mention punk rock music in the main article this week. There wasn't enough space. But, I went to my first punk show in 1991 and, as the saying goes, punk rock saved my life. Here are some of my favorite punk songs. Enjoy!
(NSFW language warning on most of these links.)
From the Archives
Aesthetics, as discussed in the main article, is a re-thinking of the word genre. To help clarify that, here’s a piece from back in June of 2020 about just that. Enjoy!
Goth meets metal, basically.
It's the 80s neon cool all over again, only with really chilled-out synth music. Like a Patrick Nagel painting come to life.
Neuromancer, by William Gibson, was the first major cyberpunk work. Published in 1984, it feels closer and closer to the real world with every passing day. And that's terrifying.
There is at least one definition missing: the word punk used to be used to describe a baby elephant. It has been replaced by the word calf, which is just...do better English. Do better.
Fourth Edition by Robert Hendrickson, Facts on File Inc., 2008
Edited by T.F. Hoad, Oxford University Press, 1996
The AW feels like the pre-Wikipedia internet, when thousands of pages were written just to archive bits of arcana or lore about anything and everything.
The fact that image sites like Unsplash actually return more than a few results if you search for cyberpunk should be prove enough of that.