The Existential Comforts of Cyberpunk

Welcome to The Queue — your every day distraction of curated video content material sourced from throughout the net. Immediately, we’re watching a video essay that appears on the consolation issue of cyberpunk.

There isn’t a succinct definition of cyberpunk. Its origins may be traced again to the late Nineteen Sixties and the New Wave sci-fi motion, with writers like J.G. Ballard, William Gibson, and Harlan Ellison. As a sci-fi sub-genre, cyberpunk is keenly serious about speculative expertise and concrete dystopias; which collectively present fertile breeding grounds for vice, medication, nefarious companies, corruption, and social upheaval.

On-screen, cyberpunk takes a wide range of shapes, from The Matrix to Escape From New York (yep, combat me). However no movie has come to outline the sub-genre extra fervently within the in style consciousness than Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, with its neon-noir, globalist imaginative and prescient of a futuristic Los Angeles.

I can consider numerous methods to explain how cyberpunk worlds make me really feel (unhappy, synthetic, and lonely spring to thoughts). However “comforting” isn’t one among them. The next video essay argues that, in the event you tilt your head the correct approach, cyberpunk cities provide a sort of reduction. Someplace, on the opposite aspect of all that existential anxiousness and angst … there’s a way of bliss and reduction. Amidst all of the city bustle and the ocean of cables, you don’t imply a factor. Thank god.

Watch “The Comforts Of Cyberpunk | Escape Into Which means”

Who made this?

This video essay on why cyberpunk is snug to some viewers was created by The Nerdwriter, a.ok.a. Evan Puschak. The Nerdwriter covers every little thing from artwork to tradition, to philosophy and politics. Which is to say, uh, absolutely anything. You may take a look at The Nerdwriter’s eclectic again catalog and subscribe to their YouTube channel right here. And you’ll observe Puschak on Twitter here.

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Meg Shields is the common-or-garden farm boy of your goals and a senior contributor at Movie Faculty Rejects. She at present runs three columns at FSR: The Queue, How’d They Do That?, and Horrorscope. She can be a curator for One Good Shot and a contract author for rent. Meg may be discovered screaming about John Boorman’s ‘Excalibur’ on Twitter right here: @TheWorstNun. (She/Her).