Cyberpunk visions: Coping with converging technologies and transformations of human freedom (Wrye Sententia)

The visions of cyberpunk have staying power. Cyberpunk science fiction tells a story of our world bathed in pollution, 24/7 media penetration, accelerated data flows, simulations and advanced technologies applied on a most intimate scale. Unlike previous twentieth-century dystopic science fiction that tended to depict resistance to technological domination, cyberpunk accepts conditions of totalizing technology. Yet in embracing immersive technological and commercial properties of a near-future-now as inescapable givens, cyberpunk puts a new spin on concepts of 'human resistance' or 'agency.' With irony and intuition, cyberpunk posits new ways to think about, and consequently to cope, with technological ascendancy and integrated global capitalism.; The topic of this dissertation, drawn from an archive of cyberpunk, is an inquiry into human freedom, and in particular, cognitive freedom in an age of accelerating technologies. Freedom under conditions of near-total technological and commercial saturation may appear paradoxical. Partial, unintended compromise overtakes earnest and adamant opposition. A utopian dialectic falls away and is replaced by something different.; Cyberpunk science fiction emerged under the shadow of Reaganomics, in tandem with early advances in computer-aided communication, media, and data-memory storage technologies, at a time when novel medical and research technologies promised discoveries that would directly reshape humanity.; One early twenty-first-century outgrowth of these technological advances was a US National Science Foundation objective to facilitate the integration of innovations in science and the nanoscale engineering of matter for the stated purpose of improving human performance; or, "Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology, and Cognitive Science Convergence" (NBIC). Cyberpunk plays on military-industrial midwifery giving still-birth to corporatized cyborgs---nonetheless agents of their own destiny. Techno-human enhancement and its implications for global culture will be an important debate of this century. Cyberpunk localizes debates over key issues in bioethics and the emerging field of neurothics that are running subtexts to NBIC enthusiasm and malaise. With its normalization of body and brain modification, implants, prosthetics, neural jacks and pharmaceuticals, cyberpunk is neuro-science fiction. With technological convergence in mind, cyberpunk offers insights into how we might assess and manage this immersion.