The Arc of Our Destruction: Reversal and Erasure in Cyberpunk

Though cyberpunk’s proponents embrace it as a subversion of corporate culture, its images suggest exactly the opposite. In the work of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling most particularly Neuromancer and The Artificial Kid, two specific sorts of tropes inform the narrative—a neat reversal of the natural/artificial opposition and an erasure implied by that reversal: advanced technology erases human morality. The rhetorical figures in each of the novels turn on an appropriation of theology; the moral and corporeal are replaced by the mordant and the corporate: Logos is replaced by logo, an affirmation of great corporate houses that ushers in the inconsequence of individual will. Despite otherwise brilliant innovations, cyberpunk is most notable for its tropological evasions of ethical questions, its “virtual morality.” If only it were parody.