Post-Cyberpunk’s Moment in History: Remembering the 1990s

Post-cyberpunk was very much a fiction of the 1990s, sharing or reacting not only to the decade’s realities, but its expectations—many of them ludicrous in retrospect, and perhaps more than many would admit, obviously ludicrous at the time as well.

My recollection of these as I read the recent post-cyberpunk anthology, Rewired (reviewed here), is especially sharp, I suppose, because the ’90s were formative years for me. I wouldn’t say that I’m exactly nostalgic for it, but I feel more appreciative of some aspects of it, more interested in even the things I didn’t like—and fonder still of the things I managed to enjoy the first time around.

Additionally, perhaps because of distance, a decade that had seemed to me utterly without personality (to this day, I have a hard time recalling what was going in music then, which must have been in one ear and out the other for me) has taken on increasing definition, beginning with what is probably my first truly ’90s memory: a television commercial for the movie Flashback.

I didn’t actually catch the movie until years later, but the commercial stuck in my mind. In it, Dennis Hopper (playing an aged ’60s radical, once on the run but now vindicated, and in the spotlight) told Kiefer Sutherland (playing an uptight FBI agent whose life had been a reaction to his parents’ hippie past, but who’s now taking a different path) that “the ’90s are going to make the ’60s look like the ’50s.”

I had only a fuzzy idea as to what that might have meant, but at the time I remember thinking—wow.

Of course, things didn’t turn out that way at all. Instead of rediscovering hippie roots, Kiefer would become Jack Bauer, the favorite action hero of the very people who used to get their kicks beating up hippies.

To me, that turn symbolizes the course of the 1990s, and looking back, it doesn’t seem all that surprising. This isn’t because no one else was thinking along similar lines. (The neo-hippies of David Brin’s The Postman come to mind.) Rather, it’s that those ideas seem to have been wishful thinking more than anything else, and at that, wishful thinking that faded quite early in the decade. Other illusions would define it—illusions quite contrary to hopes of some grand backlash to ’80s conservatism—and it is these that I will write about here. In particular, I will focus on the three great myths of that decade which I keep remembering whenever I look at stories of this type.

Myth #1: The politics of the future will be a fusion of the economics of the right and the political correctness of the left. (Call it “Po-Mo Conservatism.”)

While the much-abused term “postmodern” defies easy definition, it is generally accepted that the term denotes a cultural outlook distrusting of the Enlightenment’s elevation of reason, and the whole edifice of ideas built on that foundation—reason-based ideologies like liberalism and radicalism, the idea of progress, and the implicit and explicit “utopianism” that goes with them.

Of course, going by that definition, it would seem that conservatives have been postmodern all along, going back to Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre—and indeed, that postmodernism is just a brand of conservatism, despite the association of the word with campus radicals.

The “end of history” thesis, holding that the “information age,” globalization, and the conclusion of the Cold War have put the final nails in the coffin of that earlier thought-world of ideologies and utopias, most famously advanced by Francis Fukuyama’s triumphalist book, The End of History and the Last Man, is exemplary in that regard. It was also just a very short distance from Fukuyama’s case that capitalism-democracy has become the sole conceivable future to the specious reasoning that became the conventional wisdom in the years since: that the fall of the Soviet Union (and to a lesser extent, the economic “stagnation” of Western Europe and Japan) “proved” that there is no alternative to hundred-proof Thatcherism, as Margaret Thatcher herself endlessly insisted.

That meant trading in the nation-state for the “market state”—or as its harsher critics call it, the “courtesan state.” That meant privatizing, deregulating, axing social programs and crushing organized labor. That meant taxing more regressively. And never mind the less attractive consequences.

Still, even if the economics were blatantly Victorian (as Alan Touraine predicted postmodern economics would be), there was no going back to every aspect of the nineteenth century social world. True, a large segment of public opinion had become more approving, even celebratory of unemployment, economic insecurity, low wages, poverty, inequality, Social Darwinism, the callousness that masquerades as “personal responsibility,” and the existence of underclasses—as well as aristocracy and nepotism. Much of it had even become more puritanical where drugs and sex are concerned.

There was, however, no getting away from the aspects of the postmodern outlook, more broadly viewed, which displease many conservatives: its problematizing of black and white moral perspectives, its sense of impermanence and transience, its inability to take things seriously (especially claims of authority), in short, the relativism to which it tends. A postmodern, “po-mo” conservatism therefore tends more toward the urbane, tolerant conservatism of the cosmopolitan aristocrat with a taste for the good things in life (as Edward Luttwak put it in Turbo-Capitalism, “one does not call for censorship while drinking champagne aboard a yacht on the French Riviera”) than the lower-class, populist, “hardhat” kind. Additionally, racism and sexism had become far less respectable. For that reason, it officially discards some of the worst prejudices in the baggage of “Victorian values.” Indeed, this version of conservatism presumed to be as committed to feminism, anti-racism, and diversity as it was disinterested in addressing class differences.

In the eyes of social critics like Thomas Frank (who devoted a whole book to the issue, One Market Under God), the resulting vision seems to be that, yes, the world will be run by profit-driven corporations—but there will be women, members of ethnic, racial and religious minorities, and openly gay people on their boards of directors. The non-sexist, non-homophobic, multicultural boss will be hipper than the starched-shirt Company Men who preceded him/her, tolerant of personal idiosyncrasies, understanding of alternative lifestyles, and never take himself too seriously, if only because it’s good for productivity, damn it. And doesn’t this touch of tolerance and diversity make everything okay?

Economic liberals would say that it does not, but they could be ignored because, as has been said before, postmodernity was supposed to have deprived them of the intellectual and political tools with which to offer a serious challenge. Not everyone on the right would be satisfied, least of all social conservatives distressed by its relativism and comparative tolerance of disapproved persons and behaviors. However, it seemed plausible that business conservatives, libertarians, neocons, and those generally in the more cosmopolitan sections of the right would carry the day. In short, the “center” would hold.

I do not see the same confidence in this version of the future that I did in the 1990s. A truly serious challenge to neoliberalism-Thatcherism-Reaganomics does not yet seem to be at hand, at least in the developed countries. However, political correctness has proven to be a very fragile thing. While we pat ourselves on the back for our tolerance, openly racist, xenophobic rhetoric seems more respectable in the United States than it was a decade ago, to go by what is said about Mexicans, Arabs, Muslims, South Asians (all of these being regarded as indistinguishable from the previous two categories), immigrants of all backgrounds—and even Europeans, who are discussed by many American critics as an inferior race, with sexist and Orientalist clichés routinely making an appearance in the “analysis.” (”Americans are from Mars, Europeans from Venus.”)

Nor is this tendency exclusive to the United States by any means. In France, Jean-Marie Le Pen publicly complains that Nicholas Sarkozy stole his thunder—Sarkozy, who in the homeland of Foucault and Derrida, Baudrillard and Lyotard, displays all the very un-postmodern hauteur of the Sun King. (Most Americans know him best for storming out of an interview with 60 Minutes, but I will never forget seeing the look on his face when he was mooned by strikers a few years ago.)

As this direction in our affairs indicates, the culture war that had seemed to be on a lower burn has kicked into a higher gear. True, one can point to a number of recent events and personalities exacerbating national divides in the United States, for instance the contested 2000 election of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to office, with their strong ties to the oil industry, neoconservative “intellectuals,” and the religious right and their “cowboy” image; the various controversies over the government’s response to the September 11 terrorist attacks, such as its Manichean rhetoric and open contempt for any nation not following its lead; the Iraq war, dragging into its fifth year now; Hurricane Katrina and its grossly mismanaged aftermath.

However, it would be simplistic to attribute everything to such, some pattern of the sort probably inevitable, if you think that there can ever be a tension between democracy and money. If you put any stock in the writings of the Frankfurt School, for instance, then “po-mo” conservatism certainly never seemed a stable mix to you. (One irony of contemporary political rhetoric is that those who most often reference critical theory are rightists elaborating their fears—for instance, that the latest plan to hand out condoms in schools is really the Dead Hand of the 1918 German Revolution reaching out for capitalism’s throat, clearing the way for socialism by breaking down traditional sex-negative mores.) If your inclinations are less theoretical, then you would look at it in another way: as stated before, po-mo conservatism is more aristocrat than hardhat, and culture war issues are too important to attracting working- and middle-class voters to conservative political platforms. Unable to vote their interests, they “vote their values,” which are often anything but po-mo—social and business conservatives, for instance, being at loggerheads over immigration.

Consequently, the future of politics looks rather more like its past, and I find myself thinking of Maurice Minnifield, a character on a very ’90s television series, Northern Exposure. Maurice was not just a war veteran, but a Marine; not just a military aviator when he was in the Corps, but a Korean War triple ace with fifteen confirmed kills; not just an astronaut, but one who flew in the storied “Right Stuff” era; not just a businessman of note, but an empire-builder out on the final frontier, “on the cusp of the Alaskan Riviera.”

This background made Minnifield a certain American ideal—a nineteenth century frontier-conqueror, a twentieth century military, space, and entrepreneurial hero—and just about as conservative as they come politically, economically, and socially. Still, while conservatives admire Maurice as a symbol of national greatness, and liberals criticize his smug paternalism and retrograde social attitudes (which frequently made him a figure of fun), he seemed yesterday’s man, his time passed. (The show hit the airwaves at a time when “declinist” feeling in the United States was strong, and shows it.) But just a few years after the show’s run ended, it seemed that Maurice was back, bigger and bolder than ever, postmodern conservatism seemingly drifting back toward something more old-fashioned, and, well, “conservative.”

Quite likely his opposition will make some sort of comeback too, groping its way toward a new (or maybe new-old) liberalism or radicalism as the anti-globalization movement showed some signs of doing in recent years. As we all too often forget, postmodernity is not the last, uncontested word in Western civilization. Almost by definition, it cannot even pretend to be (the claim that nothing is certain, not even that, is far from being a foundation for a durable worldview), and just as we are not at the end of history, we have not yet reached the end of politics.

Myth #2: The New Economy will eliminate the evils of the Old.

The thought of a wretched, unalterable human condition—which is how the social vision described above looks to many—always requires some kind of palliative. Otherworldly paradises like Christo-Islamic notions of heaven, or Eastern Nirvana, no longer satisfy the way they used to. (Even Christian fundamentalist preachers routinely promise a taste of heaven right here through their “gospel of prosperity,” and assurances that the Rapture is very, very near.)

Accordingly, the grim rhetoric about an absence of alternatives to an order of things that left a lot of people out in the cold was leavened with rhetoric about how wonderful it all could be, perhaps not today, but certainly tomorrow, the economic conservatives of post-utopian postmodernity, ironically, indulging in the very utopianism for which they so harshly denigrated the left.

Thomas Friedman expressed this idea far better than the stern Margaret Thatcher. Yes, you have pretty much no choice in the matter, his books say—but it really is all for the best.

How, you ask? Well, there was some recycling of the shopworn idea of the future as a consumer paradise, except that in the place of yesteryear’s flying cars, there would be TV screens everywhere in your house, just like Arnold Schwarzenegger had in The Sixth Day. Wonders like virtual reality (VR)—just like genetically engineered dinosaurs—were supposed to be at hand, the first crude VR games starting to hit the arcades at the time.

You could almost smell Ray Kurzweil ’s version of the Singularity in the air.

And so once again we were in love with the future as a culture, one reason, perhaps, why the 1990s was such a golden age of science fiction television. Old- and new-fashioned space shows were certainly a large part of it, from Babylon 5 to Lexx (my retrospective on which you can find at Strange Horizons), but there were also plenty of shows and movies capitalizing on the fascination with computers and the Internet, of which perhaps the most emblematic and commercially successful was 1998’s You’ve Got Mail, a piece of unsubtle propagandizing for this brave new world.

All of this was given additional heft by what Thomas Frank calls “market populism,” the idea that our market choices are more representative and “democratic” than our political ones; that freedom is your choice of brands of razor blades and toilet paper for the places where you cut yourself with those razor blades (if you can afford them, of course). The notion so vigorously and entertainingly derided in Robocop 2 (a highly underrated satire) just a few years earlier was utterly taken for granted.

More significant, however, were the promises made for the dynamics of what it was fashionable to call the “New Economy,” supposedly brought about when the proliferation of the transistor changed all the rules of the game, destroying the Soviet Union in one fell swoop (the truth is that no, it didn’t, but who was arguing?) while richly rewarding capitalism’s faithful, the only ones permitted admission to the Promised Land. Indeed, just as a degree in computer science was supposed to open the gates to nerd Valhalla, so was information technology supposed to do the same for entire countries. (Computer nerds seemed all the more heroic for this; not only had they won the Cold War, but here they were building paradise on Earth!)

This notion was particularly compelling in the United States, amid all that aforementioned declinist sentiment. Its underperforming education system and outdated and ill-maintained infrastructure; its broken health care system; its decaying manufacturing base and yawning trade deficits; its mounting debts, private and public; its high crime and incarceration rates; these things were not unnoticed. The fashionability of neo-mercantilist thinking amid perceived challenges for economic supremacy from Japan and Germany, captured so completely by 1980s cyberpunk, only intensified those concerns.

So did what appeared to be a rising tide of popular discontent with the status quo, sometimes manifested peacefully (as in the third-party candidacy of Ross Perot, who won nineteen percent of the vote in his first run for the White House), sometimes less so, as in the Los Angeles riots of 1992, or the militia movement which captured so much attention in the wake of Ruby Ridge, Waco, and the Oklahoma City bombing. (In the United States, the image of the terrorist as a swarthy foreigner with an unpronounceable name briefly became that of rural America.)

For a time it seemed conceivable that the Thatcher-Reagan vision would be compromised, that postmodern conservatism would be the compassionate conservatism of a “kinder, gentler America.” Bill Clinton’s first term as president even saw a great deal of talk about Keynesian stimulus packages and government-backed universal health care. (I even remember my biology teacher telling my class the day after Clinton’s election that this would mean more money for labs like the one we were sitting in.)

None of this occurred, of course. Economically, the Clinton administration was as conservative as Reagan-Bush I, its principal legacies the “free trade” agreements that created the North American Free Trade Area and World Trade Organization, welfare cuts, and telecommunications and banking deregulation roundly criticized as anti-consumer. However, people had talked about it, which was not the case afterward. The technology boom of the 1990s ended such dialogue completely, not only about what might be done to combat the aforementioned problems, but the problems themselves. These all seemed to vanish from public discourse when Windows ‘95 hit the market. The Empire State Building was lit to look like the Windows logo, and you couldn’t turn on the television without being blasted with the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up.”

It was all made out to seem like the Second Coming of Christ, and indeed, many believed the millennium to be at hand. And why not? The tech boom was supposed to not only mean growth on a scale Americans had not known since the days of the frontier (for cyberspace truly was a frontier, a better one, accessible to anyone with a modem), but painless, perfect growth, forever.

Yes, painless, perfect growth, for New Economy industries, unlike old smokestack enterprises, were supposed to be inherently eco-friendly, pollution-free, and liberating us from a reliance on our planet’s limited, depleted stock of natural resources. (Little was said of the appalling toxicity of microchip production, or the mountains of electronic waste to which the industry’s short product cycles contribute so mightily.) Public image-consciousness was also supposed to make the biggest, meanest corporations clean up their social and ecological act, because a multinational conglomerate will stop using Chinese prison labor or cutting down the Amazon if a few people just make a little noise about it.

Moreover, the nature of work in the New Economy meant that workers could not but get a good deal, because it thrived on the creativity and talent of creative, talented individuals whose creative, talented individuality any employer with a lick of sense would take great pains to accommodate and even nurture—as those hip, multicultural, fun-loving bosses I mentioned earlier would certainly do. Accordingly, our work places would look like adult kindergartens, every day would be casual Friday, and we would all enjoy handsome stock options, which meant a very great deal as the Dow Jones average soared forever upward on the hot air of our positive thinking. Conservative columnist Ralph Peters, who for all his reputation as an independent thinker and straight talker does little more than rant the most banal economic pieties of the right in his columns, declared in 1998 that we are “realizing Karl Marx’s dream of the workers owning the means of production—through stocks and mutual funds.” (You can find this embarrassing gaffe here.)

In short, we would say goodbye to the sweatshops of the Industrial Age and hello to membership in a rentier class open to each and every one of us, while Enron solves our ecological problems and McDonald’s brings about world peace.

Of course, this never happened. Yes, information technology grows more ubiquitous with each passing year, but we do not eat, wear, or shelter underneath software, and all that data processing and flow is only sustained and given meaning by a very physical, mechanical, “Old Economy” infrastructure. Indeed, economist Robert J. Gordon (among others) argues persuasively that computers and the Internet had a much more modest impact on macroeconomics than most of us realize, certainly when compared with Old Economy, Industrial Age inventions like the light bulb.

The business cycle did not disappear, nor did the stock market bring on the millennium of social justice of which people like Peters spoke. The marathon growth rate of what Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz called “The Roaring Nineties” proved to be just a little taste of the boom Americans knew for a quarter of a century after World War II. (I have crunched and published the numbers in the U.S. Army War College Quarterly, Parameters, and the political science journal, Astropolitics; and according to the data, the worldwide picture was even more mediocre, especially when you cut out the exceptional and probably overrated case of China.)

The stock market peaked in September 2000 and then dropped like a cartoon anvil, losing forty percent of its value by the time it bottomed out and sending seven trillion dollars up in smoke. With it went the illusion that a company whose sole asset was a single website could be worth a billion dollars and many, many hopes for early retirement. The day traders who had just a while earlier dreamed of financial independence became better known for going on homicidal rampages than getting wealthy. Meanwhile, the Old Economy reasserted itself in manifold ways, not the least of them the rising price of oil—a painful reminder that we have not emancipated ourselves from the “limits to growth” at which it had again become fashionable to scoff.

In short, the game remains what it was before, with all its warts, and none of the problems Americans (or anyone else) worried about before the Great Hype of 1995-2000 went away. Indeed, they worsened, though you might never guess it catching the news on an average night (where the talking heads still preach optimism).

The U.S.’s manufacturing base continues to dissipate, the gap between rich and poor to widen, not least of all because most people’s experience of the New Economy is toil in unpleasant, ill-paid service sector jobs, often under tragically unhip bosses. The health care system, the education system, the infrastructure suffer from a worsening shabbiness. The mountains of debt have grown still taller. And once again, Americans are anxious about foreign economic competition, though less from Japan and Germany than from China—ironically a country that, for all its horrific exploitation of its workers and despoliation of its environment, still broke just about every rule in the neoliberal book to get where it is today. (And of course, the Arctic ice cap is shrinking very, very quickly…)

Moreover, we could not take solace in that promised consumer paradise, the toys; we actually got a letdown. The personal computers we got proved to be so prone to error, freezing and crashing, so quick to burn out or become outdated, so hungry for maintenance and upgrades, so constantly overtaxed by anti-virus and other security programs that if you used one on a regular basis, you experienced something of the shabbiness consumers were only supposed to know on the other side of the Iron Curtain. When you got online, courtesy of a money-grubbing service provider (as it turned out, there was a toll collector at the gates to this frontier!), you found your e-mail box full of spam, the search engines ad-clogged, and nothing working as it did in the movies, where every connection is lightning-fast, every download instant, every search as precise as a laser beam, and never made you see the numbers “404″ or the words “Page Not Found” on your screen. (The Internet still doesn’t work as well as it appeared to in the Sandra Bullock vehicle The Net twelve years ago, especially in the United States, where broadband Internet access is perhaps the worst in the industrialized world. France, so often denigrated in the English-speaking world as a telecommunications hell, actually does better.)

And I can’t remember the last time I heard anyone use the words “Virtual” and “Reality” in the same sentence outside of a science fiction context. I guess they forgot the kits in the trunk of that flying car.

Myth #3: Government will wither away.

The idea that the workers of the world would come to own the means of production through mutual funds was not the only way in which rightists cribbed from Marx in developing their vision of the future. It was frequently imagined that the state would simply vanish, or if not entirely vanish, lose all its relevance, like wisdom teeth or an appendix.

At first glance, this seemed plausible enough. After all, governments under the new regime are (for better or worse) supposed to virtually abdicate responsibility for economic planning and social welfare. Even basic services like police and public utilities were increasingly provided by market-oriented private actors (it was to be presumed, more cheaply, efficiently and effectively).

Their other great function, preparing for warfare with other states, had long been in decline as a part of national budgets and civic life (as Martin Van Creveld’s writing attests), and in any case, trade was supposed to be pacifying the world. (The world wasn’t pacified yet, though, and not everyone understood how things were going to work from here on out yet, so in the parlance of Tom Friedman, McDonnell-Douglass would have to have McDonald’s back.)

This leaves governments with relatively little to do, and at any rate, keeping taxes and debt low was supposed to be crucial to maintaining an attractive business environment, which guarantees that inherently incompetent, meddling government is kept out of the economy by being starved of the resources needed to do so effectively. Ergo, what Thomas Friedman called the “Golden Straitjacket.”

In practice, it hasn’t worked out that way. Since the neoliberal idea took hold in the 1970s, governments have not shrunk; they have actually grown larger, taxing and spending a bigger part of their economies. Consider the statistics presented in the handy Fiscal Reference Tables prepared by Canada’s Department of Finance.

According to these numbers, the total tax and non-tax receipts of the Group of Seven governments (the United States, Canada, Japan, Britain, Germany, France, and Italy) have, on average, risen from 31.9 percent of Gross Domestic Product in 1970 to 38.1 percent in 2006. (Britain, notably, tended to be well above the average all throughout this period—even during the Thatcher years. In the United States, the rise continued even through the Reagan years.)

Government spending rose even more rapidly as a share of GDP, from 32.6 percent of GDP to 40.4 percent during this same time frame. (Once again, Britain and the United States are not exceptions to the pattern of general increase.) And of course, for all the talk of fiscal discipline, the gap between taxation and spending has meant a steady rise in government indebtedness. (In Britain’s case, this was despite the benefits to its fiscal picture of relatively high GDP growth, North Sea oil and gas, and the short-term fix of selling off state assets.)

There are plenty of reasons for this apparent contradiction. One is the cost of debt service, which tends to grow along with the size of debt. (Japan, the central government of which now owes a sum equal to 180 percent of the GDP, is a particularly striking example.) Another is that the same services tend to grow more expensive over time—especially those dedicated to the elderly, like government-supported pension schemes and health services, given aging populations worldwide. Still another is bureaucratic inertia, and the resistance of vested interests, which can translate into the ideologically required changes being resisted beyond a certain point. Moreover, any far-reaching program of reform often requires an expansion of government, and neoliberal reforms have proven to be no exception to the rule. The Thatcher government famously restricted the independence of local governments, further centralizing control, to advance its program—ironically, for the purpose of revolutionary “reductions” in government.

For a time, at least, it seemed easy enough to take these developments as proof of the ineffectiveness of government, the endless demonstration of which was a last gasp on their part, a prelude to their dismantling. It should be noted, however, that business tends not to be as hostile to government as the conventional wisdom suggests. You can’t do business without infrastructure, and the public still picks up the tab for it. Additionally, even more attractive than a state committed to playing the role of night watchman is one offering generous subsidies.

And of course, in the wake of September 11th, we heard a great deal about how the terrorist attacks changed everything, with neoliberals like Fareed Zakaria talking about the “return of the state.”

September 11 certainly led to legislation expanding governmental powers at the expense of civil liberties, like the Patriot Act in the United States, or the United Kingdom’s Terrorism Act of 2006, and particularly in the U.S., to heightened spending on defense, but these developments are less revolutionary when put into context. The truth is that there had already been a massive expansion of government activity in the area of security—particularly the part of it labeled “law enforcement.” Take the case of the United States, where a War on Drugs came before the current War on Terror. In 1965, the bill for spending on law enforcement in the United States came to 0.65 percent of GDP. By 1993, this figure had more than doubled to 1.57 percent of GDP, and unlike so many other budgets, this one has not gone down.

This spending hike went hand in hand with what many criticized as a militarization of police forces (including the introduction of special forces-type teams, armored vehicles, and helicopters) and a greater propensity for exercising force and punishing severely, with incarceration rates rising sevenfold in the U.S. since the 1960s.

Britain saw broadly similar changes in the Thatcher years: Peter Riddell, in his noted study The Thatcher Era and its Legacy, wrote that public spending on law enforcement increased 55 percent from 1979 to 1989—twice as high a rate as the estimated “real” rate of economic growth for the period. Greater incarceration, longer sentences, and an erosion of civil liberties were also widely seen to have attended these changes.

Furthermore, all of this happened even as security was rapidly and dramatically privatized. It is often estimated that in the United States there were perhaps one and a half police officers on the public payroll for every privately hired security guard in 1970. Today the situation has more than reversed itself, with two-and-a-half privately hired police for every law enforcement officer working for a government department or agency. This also discounts the booming trade in other measures which have made everyone a security guard of sorts, like burglar alarm sales, the proliferation of surveillance cameras, and assorted “invisibles,” like the avoidance of certain neighborhoods and a greater propensity to lock one’s doors.

Rather than regarding this as a contradiction, writers like Edward Luttwak, certainly no radical, have noted a connection between neoliberal economic policy and more aggressive law enforcement. They suggest this may be due to the instability and higher crime that tend to follow in the wake of these disruptive economic changes (one reason why the realization of such measures commonly involves the curbing or elimination of democracy, as in Pinochet’s Chile). Others have pointed to the intensification of the aforementioned culture war, a collective venting of frustration on the part of those losing out in the new economic order—or simply government attempting to prove its continuing relevance, as Martin Van Creveld suggests in The Rise and Decline of the State (a book that certainly impacted my own thinking at the time of its writing).

It is also arguable that as our society has grown more rapidly complex, so has the task of providing security—an idea I explore in my article “Societal Complexity and Diminishing Returns in Security” in the summer 2004 issue of the journal International Security. The concept of “intellectual property,” especially given the business community’s usual broad interpretation of it, makes the libertarian minimum of protecting property a much more complex task than before. However, the problem is evident in the information-intensiveness of every aspect of our economic lives, exemplified by the risks we take every time we pull out our credit cards.

Whatever the precise mix of causes, all this means big government (if not the kind that liberals desire and conservatives attack), and leaves the citizens of advanced 21st century states in an unexpected but not totally unprecedented situation: even as private actors get bigger and richer, filling formerly public niches and exercising formerly public powers, government goes on getting bigger.

And so there you have it, the three great socio-economic myths of the 1990s—the dominance of “po-mo” conservatism, the wonders of the New Economy, the withering away of governance. This is not the whole story of the 1990s, of course (what a long, strange trip it’s been), but it is a big part of what most of those expecting a bright, or at least tolerable, future believed lay in store for us. After the fact, the experience seems like a perfect corrective for those who looked at the Golden Age image of the future, wondered how anyone could have been so wrong-headed, and felt confident that we could never make such mistakes again—for the delusions of the “Roaring Nineties” were as incredible as any of the semiotic ghosts from “The Gernsback Continuum” (and may prove to be just as enduring).

To be fair, not everyone bought into them. (I certainly didn’t and looked askance at those who did—a number of economics professors included, who were always friendly but who must have regarded me as a crank. As it happened, I graduated just before their portfolios shriveled.) And while some instances of post-cyberpunk certainly participated in the hype, there was a great deal of variation in the degree to which genre writers reflected it and the ways in which they did so—whether they were credulous or disbelieving.

Nonetheless those ideas were there in the background, certainly in the genre’s most classic works, even if only to be refuted. The writing of Neal Stephenson, who in Snow Crash depicts a world where the president of the United States has become so obscure a figure he has to explain who he is when he walks into the room and in The Diamond Age gave us a multicultural, feminist Victorianism, was certainly informed by such views (whatever you think his take on those views was). The Fall Revolution novels beginning with The Star Fraction expressed Ken MacLeod’s socialist sympathies, but also the post-Cold War “libertarian critique” of socialism’s real-world practicability. When James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel talk in “Hacking Cyberpunk” about post-cyberpunk offering sunnier, more middle-class, more pro-business views, to a great extent, the vision of the world I described here is what drives the switchover from “cyberpunk” to “cyberborgie.” Bruce Sterling’s The Zenith Angle, which he knocked off the first draft of back in early 2003, was about putting that period in perspective.

And it must be admitted that the world is a different place from what it was a moment ago, let alone twenty years ago. However, the larger questions—social, economic, political—have not changed nearly so much. (The main change I see is the loss of so much time desperately needed to cope with those problems, particularly those of an ecological type, like kicking the fossil fuels habit and controlling climate change.) Post-cyberpunk broadened our horizons, adding nuances and exploring wrinkles hitherto ignored, but there was no easy reprieve from the grim world the cyberpunks described so effectively, John Shirley in his Eclipse novels as well as William Gibson in his Sprawl stories.

The most enduring and thoughtful post-cyberpunk writing never forgot this, a lesson that some, maybe most, of us, will likely have to relearn, and in the not too distant future. The hard experience of the last few years may have immunized us against getting carried away again for a while, but the next bit of techno-financial-futurist hucksterism is surely waiting in the wings.