My most recent album, The Future’s Void, deals with topics such as corporate data mining and surveillance, feeling vulnerable and estranged by my feminized online self, and an examination of post-Soviet geo-political fallout. In interviews journalists often used the word "paranoid" and asked me about dystopian visions of the future. Some reviewers were uncomfortable with my casual use of common internet language as lyrical content.
From the time that the record was finished in late 2013, to now, one year later, the world has changed into a very different place.
Constant surveillance is no longer dismissed as "paranoid", it is regarded as fact. #Gamergate rawly exposes that yes, being a woman online is a different experience. And the tremors of Cold War fault lines are reverberating as Russia re-annexes parts of the Ukraine.
I take it back, the future is not void. The future is now, our distance from it is the only thing that is no longer valid.
When I started to make art about my relationship to pervasive technology I felt very alone and very uncool. The language that later made journalists nervous made me nervous too. But my thoughts and feelings were overwhelming and real. Despite initially feeling isolated in exploring the dark depths of online life, it turns out I was far from alone. Multiple films and music came out this year filled with critiques of our present and not-so-distant future. Perhaps 2014 was the year cyberpunk broke.
For the uninitiated, cyberpunk started 30 years ago as a literary movement rooted in sci-fi, tech and hard drugs. The tone was typically dystopian and critical about the consequences of a marriage of technology and corporate power. In the cyberpunk future, shadowy multi-national corporations trafficked in big data, humans often augmented themselves with wearable tech and there was a massive wealth gap between the rich and the poor. Sound familiar?
Cyberpunk took its name and ethos from the punk movement, which sprung up among disenfranchised working class youths with little economic prospect. Young punks felt like the previous generation had failed them and grown bloated with excess. Punk’s genesis was, in part, about calling out an older Bay Area-based counter-culture that rose to dominance while preaching free-love and disruption of old systems in the name of making the world a better place. Now that sounds very familiar…
Today’s Silicon Valley sits a few miles away from the original Haight Ashbury/People’s Park, but still spouts an ethos of "making the world a better place" through a "sharing economy". It’s a utopian dream that may have started with the aim of revolution but we have since become well aware of its ugly side. And like the original punks, we are beginning to call bullshit.
In 2012 a Vice Magazine article interviewed original cyberpunk authors about its legacy. Most distanced themselves from it, declared it dead or reduced it to a fashion statement. The major players seemed disengaged and embarrassed by it. They shouldn’t be. We need their skepticism now, perhaps more than ever.
Erika M. Anderson records under the name EMA. Her latest album The Future's Void was released earlier this year.