Beware — navel-gazing ahead! I calculated Exolymph’s growth rate(s) and it prompted me to reflect on this endeavor.

Exolymph is billed as a cyberpunk newsletter, but it’s not actually very cyberpunk. At least not in the traditional sense. I don’t cover pop culture like Neon Dystopia does, and I don’t report on concrete happenings like Motherboard.

No one would mistake my commentary on current events for Gibsonian fiction — except to the extent to which they mistake the reality of living on the internet for Gibsonian fiction. And yeah, that’s sort of the point.

Still, I worry that people think they’re signing up for one thing and end up getting something else. I’ve never been chastened, so I guess those people just unsubscribe without mentioning their disappointment.

In my essay about cyberpunk as a sensibility, I wrote:

Cyberpunk is a type of “taste in ideas” that weds aesthetics with politics. It is not a framework with a specific hypothesis or clearly defined rules. Rather, cyberpunk is an assemblage of loosely related themes, tropes, and aesthetics. […] Noticing the moments of techno-dystopia in our world can jolt people awake, causing them to realize how computing — especially the internet — is impacting their lives on every scale.

The events or ideas that trigger the mental switch-flip are usually exotic, […] but the deeper level of using the cyberpunk mental model is looking at mundane things like commerce and subculture formation and seeing how computers and the internet change the dynamics that we used to be used to.

From what I can tell, this attitude isn’t widespread. I like sci-fi aesthetics, but I get tired of the superficiality. Prestige TV (think Black Mirror) does a decent job of incorporating cynical futurism into conventional cyberpunk, but it feels scarce online.

/r/Cyberpunk users upvote cityscapes that combine a Jenny Holzer installation with /r/UrbanHell. In the Cyberpunk Science Fiction & Culture group on Facebook, they share memes, “is [thing] cyberpunk?” posts, and unsourced artwork. /r/DarkFuturology gets a little closer to interrogating the present. A splash of Hacker News ties it back to capitalism.

I feel more of an alliance with Glitchet, the meanderings of Adam Elkus or The Grugq, Breaking Smart, and Circuit Breaker back when it was active.

I hope this is a niche that other people care about, and that they’ll keep paying attention to. We probably don’t qualify as an egregore yet — too fragile — but I think the cyberpunk sensibility is worth maintaining.

Image via ▓▒░ TORLEY ░▒▓.