The Bed of Neon Roses - Cyberpunk's Lessons for the Future of Privacy
by Sark and Zelig
In a previous article ("The Garden of Privacy," 41:1), we compared our relationship to digital privacy to nurturing a garden. As gardeners strive to protect the health of their garden from changing conditions, so we must also work to secure our private data from the challenging and inescapable forces of nature, corporate and political.
Each person will protect their own information ecosystem from inclement conditions in their own way. It's up to you, of course, how little or much you shore up your privacy. But let us not be overconfident. Bad weather is inevitable. Many people and entities want your data. How we think about and prepare for the rain storms that will some day strike our garden of privacy is what we want to discuss today.
If we want to protect our privacy into the future, we need to inhabit more than just the role of gardener; we also have to play weather forecaster. We must sense sharply the changing winds. We must discern acutely the shifting clouds. We must know confidently what the signs in the sky portend. In short, we have to anticipate change. We have to predict the future as best we can in order to take meaningful steps to preserve the sanctuary of our privacy in the long term.
Our article here is about this imperative. We divide our discussion into two big subjects: anticipation and preparation. First, we start by ascending to a vantage point to anticipate the future. How can we know what lies ahead? What are the risks to our information ecosystem in the years or decades ahead? Then, second, with the knowledge that we have found, we descend back to earth to find useful, tangible action to prepare ourselves and our ecosystem for the changes ahead. How can we react to what we see? How can we assuage our fears with hope and pragmatism? Let us now turn to the first big subject, anticipating the future.
Anticipation - Finding a Perspective
Futurologists speculate about what will happen as a result of current trends and circumstances.
Some present their speculations as scientific reports, basing their conclusions on data. Others do so in the form of art, leaning strongly on their intuitions. Today we will concentrate on the latter. A speculative genre in easy reach for us is Science Fiction (SF).
SF is popular for a reason. We like to talk about how likely it is that something will happen or how exactly an extraordinary scenario might unfold. How would an extraterrestrial encounter happen? What if humans became interplanetary? What if we are living in a simulation? SF playfully feeds our appetite for speculation. Because many works in the genre reflect on our relationship with technology, SF is useful for us here, helping us anticipate the future of digital privacy.
Even though SF is artistically free - having no serious responsibility to get the future right - the genre provokes productive contemplation about what lies ahead of us. In its fantastic imaginings, SF stimulates discussion about technological change. It allows us to rehearse the future before it arrives, enabling us to plan and adapt in preparation for change. Through this rehearsal, moreover, SF organizes and confronts our anxieties. It provides a satisfying release, a productive outlet for our uncertainties. For us, the value of SF lies in its power to generate conversation, to provide catharsis, and to contemplate the unknown.
For these reasons, we adopt SF as a lens to observe our future. SF enables us to focus on technological aspects of the present that unsettle us, challenging us to develop solutions before those fears manifest. This may seem outlandish at first, but we read George Orwell's 1984 for exactly this reason. Orwell's vision of a totalitarian society may not have materialized exactly as he penned it, but it helped readers understand the fragility of freedom.
Orwell's work provided readers a vocabulary and framework (e.g., "Big Brother," "Doublethink," and "Newspeak") to identify and talk about totalitarian systems. Ideally, readers are more engaged in society as a result: They are more familiar with the dangers of surveillance and propaganda; more tuned in to the importance of protecting democratic values like freedom; more likely to actively participate in, rather than passively accept, the political system they inhabit. We regard SF in a similar way. We turn to them not because their visions are perfect, but because they help us contemplate and manage our freedom in the digital age.
The threat of technology to our freedoms is a specific concern of a SF subgenre called cyberpunk. Cyberpunk coalesced into a coherent literary sensibility in the 1980s, a few years before the publication of the "Hacker Manifesto." Cyberpunk books, films, comics, and art have attempted to reflect upon the rapid and destabilizing progress of computer technology. The more famous works of the cyberpunk canon include books like Neuromancer (1984), films like Blade Runner (1982), and comics like The Long Tomorrow (1976). Cyberpunk has given voice to, and stimulated discussions about, specific fears with radical technological developments. It focuses on the wide-ranging negative impact of technology, from the mind to the body; the individual to society; and the virtual to the real. Cyberpunk is about alienation, dependency, domination, counter-culture, surveillance, and the small question of what it means to be human.
Make no mistake, cyberpunk is a dark vision of the future. If it were weather approaching our garden, we would witness a hellish cloudburst of razor-sharp 1s and 0s blasting our efforts to protect privacy in the great neon deluge. The question is, can we landscape our ecosystem to manage the flood of corporate control, technological overwhelm, and data surveillance? Let us now examine specifically what cyberpunk predicts, starting with how technology shapes society.
Prediction: Technology and Society
The high and the low; the rich and the poor; the orbitals and the sprawl - this is how society is split between the haves and have-nots in the hypertechnological, future cyberpunk universe.
Rich families live in luxury while megacorporations dominate the universe through control of advanced technologies. Meanwhile, those on "the Street" - who work daily in the complex, overpopulated, and dehumanizing concrete kingdom - simply do what they can to survive. Cruel and competitive, there is no social mobility, no political representation, and no moral justice for the poor. Cyberpunk is a universe of hegemonic lords and repressed serfs. It is a neo(n)-feudal age.
Technological progress did not have to recreate feudalism. Everyone could have been empowered. It could have opened up new worlds of opportunity, liberty, and felicity. It could have cured illness and improved life. But, in cyberpunk, technology turned the world toxic. Technology became an unstoppable virus. It infected place, body, and mind with holographic advertising and cybernetic augmentations. It caused a powerful and chronic complication at the heart of the cyberpunk universe: dependency. From Night City to the Sprawl, people need expensive technology to earn a living. People need virtual reality to escape. People need the city, in all its sprawling infinity and for all its corporate order, to exist. Without embracing technology and accepting the systems that support its production, how else can someone compete and survive? And if you foolishly try to disrupt the system, there's corporate and state surveillance - the security cameras, AIs, drones, and tracking of data and biology - to monitor your illicit off-piste wandering. How does someone in this environment react?
Prediction: Technology and the Individual
Shaped as it is by unavoidable dependency and unassailable feudalism, the life of your average cyberpunk is claustrophobic.
Theirs is a life of intense iniquity and fraught freedom. As misfits, they are often socially alienated and ineluctably sucked into cybercrime. They live a chromatic blur between the real and the virtual. In the real world, they search for their next hustle, narcotic, or augmentation, meandering around the electric lights of the dense, benighted, and rain-soaked city.
In the virtual world, they connect with faraway castoffs and incomprehensible artificial intelligences to hack, steal, and spy, exploring the fringes of cyberspace when they can to satisfy their curiosity of the unknown.
But there is also something else that our cyberpunk protagonist is interested in: Justice. Like Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlow, when they see injustice in the world, they just have to intervene. Though they hide it behind a veil of cynicism, the cyberpunk's instincts compel them to try to change things, to right wrongs. Justice, in their thinking, is acquired only through freedom. With a reasonable amount of agency, people can "[find one's] own use for things" (Gibson, Burning Chrome).
And when they grasp power, they can "change something," even if they have "no idea at all what'll happen." This attitude towards justice and freedom reflects the punk in cyberpunk: the quest for individual liberty in the face of an overbearing establishment. And while they realize that such freedom will be messy, they hope that these foundations create a more just world. With broader freedoms, so the argument goes, justice settles in the hands of the many rather than the few.
In sum, the actions of the protagonist in cyberpunk are fueled by their desires for justice and freedom. Justice and freedom motivate the resistance against the dominance of megacorporations. They inspire the reaction against the toxic, claustrophobic, and bifurcated social system. They are why the downtrodden low take on the powerful high. They are what inspires the revolution for liberty. They are the ideals that challenge the techno-dystopia. But what happens next, after they resist?
Prediction: The Unknown Revolution
The revolution, however, is often minimized.
Despite big dreams, our cyberpunk protagonist can only achieve so much. In works like Neuromancer and Blade Runner, their victories are usually partial and personal. Their successes unveil secrets about the world, but only to them. And rather than changing the world itself, it often leads to the protagonist recognizing their true, often tiny, role within the great machine. Despite the protagonist's efforts, the nature of the world remains pretty much the same. The earth shook violently for a time, but the underlying tectonics remained essentially unmoved.
Think of Neuromancer's protagonist, Case, the console cowboy (spoiler alert). Case's journey in Neuromancer leads him to the cliff edge of human technological progress. This precipice takes the form of a merger between two AIs. This fusion creates a super powerful entity, which has capabilities far surpassing that of humanity's. Operating on an incomprehensible, ethereal plane, this über-AI explains to Case that he is talking to his own kind in different star systems. The über-AI claims that it is "Nowhere. Everywhere." and "the sum total of the works, the whole show." (Gibson, Neuromancer).
In contrast, Case is left to stare dumbly over the cliff edge of technological progress. He is incapable of clearly seeing or controlling what exists beyond the precipice that the über-AI has overcome, unable to follow their path into the great unknown. Case asks the über-AI, "How are things different?" It replies, "Things aren't different. Things are things." Indeed, not much changes in general. Case himself simply returns to the Sprawl. Paid handsomely for his services to fuse the AIs, he heals his injuries and restarts his life, doing work similar to that which he did before. Similarly, the rest of humanity, also blind to the singularity event, marches on like usual. People and systems stayed the same. A heavy stillness followed the quake.
Preparation
Having ascended the luminous tower of cyberpunk, and taken in its panoramic and dystopian view, let us now descend back down to the ground, considering what we may learn about how to best contemplate the future of technological progress.
Lesson One: Know Limits
The disquieting stillness after the quake provides the first lesson we should take from cyberpunk about managing future uncertainties: Knowing our limits.
We do not always have all the answers. We do not always have everything under control. Such is life, of course, but it is important to have the self-awareness and humility to admit it. It is important to keep our limits in mind when thinking about the practicalities of protecting privacy. Honest introspection is key to shoring up pragmatism. It grounds how we think about success. It tethers us tightly to what is directly important in our own lives.
Self-reflection is thus useful for personalizing action to our circumstances. It is about making our own small world better, regardless of the chaos that may be happening in the surrounding Sprawl. The pragmatic ending results from the introspective beginning, knowing our limits.
Lesson Two: Believe Cautionary Tales
The second lesson from cyberpunk is about the importance of listening to cautionary tales.
Some fears come true. Though cyberpunk was created in the 1980s and reflects the fears of the time, the world has since moved closer to - not away from - its dystopian themes. In the 1980s, cyberpunk creators worried about three specific trends:
- The growing importance of computer technology.
- The increasing size, wealth, and power of corporations.
- Neoliberal deregulation.
Cyberpunk creators found these three trends worrying because they suggested something about the distribution of power. Wealth, technology, and political influence were being controlled by a small number of corporations.
It begged the question: Were these corporations on the road to becoming something like the East India Company, who, in its heyday around 1800, amassed immense wealth, ruled over vast territories, controlled its own large military, and were accountable to very few? The same fears persist today. Worse, some fears have become real.
Think about the old Wild West of the early years of the Internet, which has been corporately tamed in the last few decades. The Internet's chaos of indie developers coalesced into an order of a handful of trillion dollar companies that own almost everything. These companies accumulate power through the collection of private information and wield power by controlling free speech. They algorithmically curate one's understanding of the world, manufacturing addiction by encouraging users to endlessly scroll through limitless content. The act of doom scrolling - continually cycling through content even though it is unpleasant and uncomfortable - is a signal of the unhealthy relationship that has developed between user and algorithm.
If this is not a manifestation of cyberpunk - specifically, our dependency on technology and our acceptance of corporate dominance - then we cannot say that anything can be. If you still have doubts, the cyberpunk is in the process of materializing in other more tangible ways.
For example, backed by the ultra-wealthy, advocacy groups have been meeting the U.S. president recently to bring legislation forward that would create "Startup Nations" or "Free Cities" (Haskins and Elliott). The Freedom Cities Coalition wants territory to build new settlements, which would be free of certain federal laws, placing governance in the hands of corporations. Critics claim "Free Cities" would be "cities without democracy," where "the owners of the city, the corporations, the billionaires have all the power and everyone else has no power." Rather than a flight of fancy, it turns out that Night City was a blueprint for the hyper-wealthy.
As has become increasingly clear over the last decade, Western societies are more, not less, iniquitous. The rich are richer. The poor are poorer. One of the reasons for this is that the checks and balances on the accumulation of power have struggled to keep up with the pace of technological change. It is apt that we listen to cautionary tales in order to prepare for the arrival of their visions. Cyberpunk might seem like hyperbolic space opera, constructed to entertain and present social criticism, but the genre's fears are not otherworldly; they have considerable substance. We should listen and believe.
Lesson Three: Pursue Cyberminimalism
Following on from these first two lessons, the third lesson from cyberpunk is about cyberminimalism.
Cyberminimalism, in our definition, is about adopting technology thoughtfully in our lives. It is about resisting excessive consumption, particularly in relation to social media, mobile apps, Internet-of-Things devices, cloud services, and other technology that can be used by businesses and state actors for surveillance.
Cyberminimalism is about big-picture thinking, asking ourselves what value technology provides us and whether our use of technology is consistent with our existing beliefs about justice and freedom, the motivations of our cyberpunk protagonist. As Nicholas Carr wrote, "If you don't live by your own code, you'll live by another's." Being thoughtful about technology is about nurturing your freedom, your code. In short, cyberminimalism promotes this thoughtfulness through three imperatives: Beware dependency. Prioritize values. Pursue minimalism.
The worlds that cyberpunk envisage are generally anathema to minimalism. Night City and the Sprawl are wild jungles of mayhem, penury, and excess. In this chaos, citizens are dependent on both technology and corporations to order their lives. This dependency recreates feudalism, sustains iniquity, and restricts freedom. Dependency grows expedience, not liberty. Citizens compromise their values to survive. Our conclusion: Dependency may provide order in a messy universe, but it comes at a great cost to democratic values and individual freedoms.
To resist this expense, we must chip away at the dystopian foundation stone of dependency. Think of cyberminimalism as a tool to accomplish this. Cyberminimalism undermines a future in which corporations and technology dominate. It reconstructs our thinking in the present, demanding we think about and why we use technology. It is a scythe that cuts through oppressive clutter, removing the weeds of dependency and providing space for freedom to grow.
Think of cyberminimalism as privileging quality over quantity, privacy over passivity, and values over consumption. Used in our information ecosystem, cyberminimalism is an attitude to keep privacy healthy. It is about remembering to cut back digital overgrowth to sustain our garden of privacy.
Conclusion: The Bed of Neon Roses
Let us bring these lessons from cyberpunk together.
We generated them to help anticipate and prepare for future storms that would damage our own information ecosystems. We have advocated for consciousness of personal limits (Lesson One), attentiveness to cautionary tales (Lesson Two), and adoption of cyberminimalism (Lesson Three). These lessons enable us to come to terms with our fears about the future. They help us make choices, generating paths towards a future that is more free and fair.
More widely, these lessons indicate the power of Science Fiction. SF helps us talk about the future impact of technology on individuals and society, making the complex accessible. SF creates space to engage with our fears and prototype our visions of the future. Creative speculation energizes conversation about the future.
Today, in 2025, we need to think carefully about the future more than ever. The world is pivoting on an inflection point. With the U.S. divesting its global leadership, the international order that has existed for nearly a century is in transformation. With businesses and oligarchs wielding profound political and social power, the relationship between people and society is in revolution. The storm clouds of change are approaching. Its thunder will resonate far and wide. And the light is beginning to dim around us, making it harder to see what lies ahead.
Our garden of privacy is currently situated in this twilight. We see the ominous signs in the sky. Dense clouds obscure the sun. The atmosphere is cooling. The wind is picking up. Sensing these warnings, we refocus our attention to what is right next to us, our garden. We look at our own flowers and crops and think about how to prepare for the future.
In these gloomy times, in this particular environment, a certain flower can bloom in our sanctuary. The flower is the neon rose. We planted a bed of neon roses to remind us of our lessons from cyberpunk. And we see them this day; the neon roses have come alive in color, their petals pulsing softly in electric pink, iridescent blue, and fluorescent green.
The neon glows brightly in the twilight. Its radiance helps us navigate the rest of the garden.
Remembering our lessons in the neon glow, we set to work, as we always must do, to protect the sanctuary of our privacy from the coming rains.
Bibliography
Carr, Nicholas. Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart W. W. Norton & Company, 2025.
Gibson, William. Neuromancer Gollancz, 1984.
Gibson, William. Burning Chrome Gollancz, 2016.
Haskins, Caroline and Vittoria Elliott. "'Startup Nation' Groups Say They're Meeting Trump Officials to Push for Deregulated 'Freedom Cities'" Wired, 7 March 2025.
O'Bannon, Dan. The Long Tomorrow Les Humanoïdes Associés, 1998
Orwell, George. 1984 Penguin, 2000.
Scott, Ridley. Blade Runner Warner Bros., 1982.