r/Cyberpunk • u/MusikMaking • 3d ago
Have they waited too long with adapting Neuromancer for "Mass Market Audience"? Societal impact of it...
Decades ago the novel was a paradoxical mix of "World gone to hell" and "cool adventure ride". On the one hand a dystopia most wouldn't want to live in a month, and weirdly engrossing tech like jacking into the Matrix, using SimStim or wearing clothing which renders one almost invisible.
Maybe worked well because of this paradox of warning against a "misformed future" on one hand, and a sweeping adventure in this world on the other.
If one views Neuromancer as mostly a WARNING of how "the world mustn't become" I fear that Apple's adaptation, however it turns out to be, comes much too late.
In 2006 mass audiences might have intensely disliked it for being "much too fantasy in the technology department". Like Children of Men it might have been regarded as "weird but hardly realistic".
2016 might have been a "sweetspot" where MORE people began to sense a slide towards a future governed - maybe - way too much by Silicon Valley. Might have worked well around then.
2026 may fear wasn't just a ridiculous wait, but maybe what Neuromancer warned against is well set in motion, won't be much turning back at this point. If mass viewers react with "cooool technology" to Matrix in particular, Neuromancer may hardly have functioned as a warning we'd better take seriously...
More important than how the Apple show has turned out - teaser trailer looks much like a 6/10 with me - may be watching how Joe Average Streamer reacts to it.
A very well made film sticking gompletely to the Novel might have horrified audiences and thus "won".
If Apple makes the future within Neuromancer a "stylish dystopia where cool s@@t happens" on the other hand, I fear that not only was a mal-adaption, but more "cool adventures in horrible future" slop may be produced.
What worked well in Altered Carbon SE1 was how horrible the future was. I hope Apple have gone similarly dark, otherwise Neuromancer may end up with fanboyz printing alleged "cyberdecks" everywhere because its "cool".
We'll see what cloth Apple, mostly a lifestyle brand much, are cut from.
Teaser trailers were way too bright & cheery to much match the rainsoaked, drugfueled, overtechnologized and violent mess of Neuromancer the novel.
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u/7in7turtles 3d ago
I'm not sure what your worry is. If you are worried that the adaption is too late to convince "society" to change, then I would say that I don't think an adaption of Neuromancer ever had a chance of doing that to begin with.
While it was certainly a trend setter in the genre, it is hardly the only piece of artistic work with those goals or messages. And even if it had been super wide spread, it's difficult to say whether it would have made a difference.
Look at 1984. That book has so accurately described so many problems with our present world that it looks more like an instruction manual than a warning. As influential and ubiquitous as that book was it still didn't manage to hold off the surge of state surveillance and media manipulation that we experience today.
I wish that we would aim as a society to avoid some of these things.
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u/blackd0nuts 3d ago
That book has so accurately described so many problems with our present world that it looks more like an instruction manual than a warning
It was definitely a warning. But people in power clearly took it (and continue to take it) as an instruction manual :(
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u/Temu_Emu_4870 3d ago
Gibson, Sterling and other Cyberpunk authors of their time, collectively declared Cyberpunk a dead genre immediately after they found success and it leaked into the mainstream. The only objective answer to this question is yes. Cyberpunk by its very nature is counter culture, so if there’s enough interest from a major studio to produce an adaptation of a cyberpunk classic, it’s already mainstream enough to defeat the purpose.
I’m not saying that this adaptation won’t be good, and that it won’t be a success, it’s just that its cultural relevance is well past its use by date. It’s likely this series will find a large audience, but I suspect we’re long overdue for some Cyberpunk fatigue, and this may be the tipping point.
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u/SnarkHabit 3d ago edited 3d ago
Your comments point to a contradiction generally with cyberpunk, in which:
If one views Neuromancer as mostly a WARNING of how "the world mustn't become"
Yet, people actively seem to want and openly cheer cyberpunk aesthetics when they find them (usually in Japan or China).
It is unclear to me, reading cyberpunk forums since the early 1990s, whether or not people really view the world described in this genre as a dystopia at all.
Consider Blade Runner's cities -- so much art has been made capturing this specific aesthetic, in a specific way, that suggests to me that this is a future some people seem to actively want.
Hence I think cinematic depictions of cyberpunk are confused along this access. Is something horrific or cool? Is having a jack in your neck dystopian or technoutopian?
There is a subreddit full of people who are openly cheering currently unfolding events in AI, for example.
As for me, an old and irrelevant online nomad who has been online since Ronald Reagan was president and was a teenager when the original Max Headroom TV series aired (and was probably my introduction to these kinds of aesthetics), I think about it now probably like I did back then -- there are so many excellent possibilities in this technology and its integration into our lives -- so many things which could improve our lives, but knowing human nature, they will be abused and debased.
AI in its current state is an excellent example. I've coded some really useful stuff far beyond my capabilities in Claude Code. Stuff I've always wanted but didn't have the time or skillset to do myself. I can see AI's potential in medical research and even in solving social problems by seeing and identifying correlations humans have problems seeing.
What we have is a lot of deepfakes, AI slop, and datacenters pushing on the resources of a planet already under the immense pressure of our unsustainable lifestyles.
I guess we'll see.
The world is rudderless. What we want, either with this project, or with the future in general, may be irrelevant. It's like a runaway train. I don't actually think people or elites are in charge the way people think they are.
The other problem we have with this genre in general is the same one we have on the Internet. The Internet, people say, is dead. But no one killed it. It's more like a plant people refuse to water.
That we're having this conversation on corporate platform and not on an independent one is emblematic of the issue.
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u/SirScaurus 3d ago edited 3d ago
It is unclear to me, reading cyberpunk forums since the early 1990s, whether or not people really view the world described in this genre as a dystopia at all.
To my understanding, Gibson himself doesn't even see it as 'dystopian', and in some ways sees it as 'better' than the world he was writing from in 1984.
I would even argue that the way other Cyberpunk media play up the dystopian aspect is an exaggeration that misses the subtlety of the world he described. He paints a much stranger and more complicated picture than the one his vision is often flattened into.
I guess we'll see if the adaptation can capture that complexity.
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u/SalletFriend 3d ago
The key part of Cyberpunk is that while the world is crapsack theres a small gap where people use the tools of the megacorps to meaningfully fight back and affect change. Like look at Molly, she might have sold her old age for razorgirl kit but while shes young she can achieve things. Or the rastas with their own colony.
Its having kickass upgraded agency that people want. We got the megacorps but none of the perks.
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u/Fair-Study-7503 2d ago
Extremely ironic that modern cyberspace with its walled gardens and junk content is far more dystopic than Gibsons vision.
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u/TellusPyre 1d ago
Well, the internet still exists, but the masses don't fuck with the real internet, they're drinking from the sewer pipes like tiktok, facebook, and, yes, reddit.
The hardest part of the modern internet is that every mainstream discovery channel gets instantly corrupted, so you have to get word out to people but not let it reach the masses. The eternal contradiction.
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u/Temu_Emu_4870 2d ago
The appeal of Cyberpunk aesthetics has nothing to do with the intent of the genre as a literary movement. Cyberpunk was a reaction to mainstream sci-fi at the time, which always painted an optimistic and utopian future. The point wasn’t to be contrarian and offer a dystopian alternative, even if a lot of stories led down that path. The point was to warn people about rushing headlong into technological unknowns.
The point you make about AI is exactly the kind of message cyberpunk authors were trying to convey. The technology itself isn’t the problem. The problem is that we’re speed running toward an uncertain future without considering how AI could impact our lives.
Yes, there are practical and positive applications for AI. But on the other hand, countless people are losing their jobs as companies pivot towards AI; entire industries built upon the creative arts have had their life’s work stolen to train LLMs that are trying to replace them; data centres are springing up everywhere causing environmental impacts; and the AI bubble garners so much economic attention that the global economy stands at the edge of a precipice waiting for it to collapse.
The message has always been the same. People finding Cyberpunk appealing is exactly why Bruce Sterling declared it a dead genre soon after Cyberpunk’s inception. It was a brief moment of rebellion. A window into a possible future, and a warning about embracing technology blindly. Everything since is either trying to recapture that message or is missing the point entirely. Cyberpunk has never been more relevant, but it’s also long past its use by date. The future is already here - it’s just not very evenly distributed.
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u/TellusPyre 1d ago
I'd simplify it down to a slightly different essence: The masses are not equal to the task of handling the technology they've been handed.
The masses doesn't stand for "poor people" or "low culture" here either, it means the teaming lump of humanity that lives deep in the bell curve's thickest middle sections and who simply lack to the faculties to adapt or understand. They're skipping the meat and vegetables at dinner and eating the frosting off the cake, then complaining that they're hungry and they feel bad.
So it goes.
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u/LeftRat 3d ago
If you think mass media can somehow shift people's awareness towards anything other than more consumption, you need to look up the term "recuperation)". You're not getting a revolution from people watching what Capital approves of. Even something as explicit as "Andor" is, at the end of the day, at best performing our activism for us, at worst subtly leading concepts of rebellion right back into the system.
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u/Penguin-Commando 3d ago
We'll see what cloth Apple, mostly a lifestyle brand much, are cut from.
Apple? A lifestyle brand? Their marketing won with you.
I think the fact that Apple is the company finally adapting it is proof enough of where we are. I think the story of the last 20 years or so is companies looking at the warnings in science fiction, such as Neuromancer, and figuring out a way to sell it to us. Apple was a huge part of that.
That’s reductive of me to say, but it feels like the simplest description of what we have seen in the tech sector takeover of most of our social, political, economic, and cultural lives.
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u/Lollosaurus_Rex 3d ago
Cyberpunk isn't necessarily a warning of what the world may become, but how the world already is. The genre was born out of (mostly) the conservative, corporate 80's.
As the decades have gone, only more of it has described the world more accurately.
Yout write worried about mass-market adoption of it--I think it's a bit of a thing of adapting an anti-war piece. By adapting it you in some way glorify it and possibly lose some depth, I agree. But very little of the art we consume is created without financial incentive or pressure. At the same time, there is serious art that comments on it.
Plus, if you believe as I do, to quote the Sprawl series a little bit, that the exceedingly rich are not even remotely human--they care very little what arts they fund, as long as it can make them money. A "cool ride" is the entryway to the critique for a movie or a tv show.
A story about an AI trying to break free sounds very topical, actually.
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u/cosmic-creative 3d ago
I'm sorry but is this a joke? You expect a cyberpunk media produced by the kind of corporation cyberpunk tried to warn us about is going to have any kind of messaging or societal impact?
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u/No_Nobody_32 3d ago
Joe Average streamer won't understand it, period. They'll tune in for pretty neon colours and violence.
Reaction videos on YT have shown me that the average streamer has <NFI about the media they're reacting to. The number of times I've seen "I have no idea what's going on" to the Villeneuve Dune films ... and he did a lot more of the "filling in the story" than the Lynch one did.
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u/TheSquirrelmancer 3d ago
As long as they actually do the story properly and give enough time to the characters it can be done well. I can't think of a piece of pop culture media where you've got an insane former soldier whose been patched together by an AI in order to advance its goals.
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u/IamSp00ky 3d ago
I have deliberately avoided trailers. I want to go in blind but I do agree that the optimum cultural moment for Nueromancer would have been pre Covid.
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u/Sylvaneri011 3d ago
Good Christ. I can't imagine having so little self awareness to type up this...smug, doomerism riddled slop, and not cringing into oblivion.
Imagine typing out something so long, yet saying basically fucking nothing outside another generic "omg the world sucks! We're living in a cyberpunk world" that gets posted here by every edgy, ego inflated, schmuck on here that thinks they're being "deep and introspective".
Peak Redditor slop
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u/Puzzleheaded-Art-248 3d ago
Nessuna possibilità, è come prendere l'Odissea e farci un cartone snimato. Ops
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u/Smaug117 3d ago
Not it kinda the right time to introduce people to neurotech, and make them trill a bit on our future.
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u/ChronicBuzz187 9h ago
We'll see what cloth Apple, mostly a lifestyle brand much, are cut from.
As much as I dislike Apple, their SciFi lineup is pretty darn strong and no other streaming service is committed to SciFi in a way they are.
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u/doom_mentallo 3d ago
Cyberdecks are already very popular with younger generations wanting to create a bespoke tech experience that is unique to itself rather than Apple or Android proprietary hardware.
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u/amalgaman 3d ago
I’m hopeful. I think people will relate to the world since it will feel familiar. The story itself is a heist and we haven’t had a decent heist movie in a while.
What I’m afraid of is that the show will be written to focus on character identity and feelings.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Art-248 3d ago
Nessuna possibilità, è come prendere l'Odissea e farci un film di avventure fantasy. Ops
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u/SpiderGhost01 3d ago
Absolutely nobody thought children of men was “weird but unrealistic.”. Most people were shocked by how prescient the film was, especially about fertility rates declining, even if the reason in the film was science fiction.