A CYBERPUNK FUTURE AWAITS US...
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Interested in what the future will be like? One way to look into the future is to look at a sampling of futurist-oriented literature. Many of the current trends in civil society today point away from any vision of the future that involves utopia and more towards a future dystopia envisioned by the sub-genre of science fiction known as CyberPunk.

CYBERPUNK NIGHTMARE
The visions often found in CyberPunk see a civil society that has deteriorated to the point of practically being a left in a Hobbesian “state of nature”. Hobbes postulated in his book Leviathan (1651), that life in the true state of nature where complete anarchy reigns that life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Many CyberPunk authors see this old vision anew, seeing their world as an anarchical “state of nature” driven by technology and greed.

Often the power structure points towards an uncaring oligarchy supported by massive corporations that governments struggle to control. These transnational giants exist beyond any legal recourse due to their international mobility. Everything from manufacturing to DNA encoding is left to the brutish realities of the pure open market. Due to lack of regulation, the corporations have conglomerated into power hungry behemoths.

The corporations profit and grow rich at the expense not just of the lower level people who work for them, but at the expense of an increasingly blighted environment. With ineffective government regulations pollution takes on a whole new meaning. Animals are rare and in some stories treasured more than gold. Items we take for granted like clean air and drinkable water are for expensive commodities.

Mobility and power for the corporate entities also obviates any kind of labor organization, thus deteriorating working conditions and lowering wages. Usually there the divide between rich and poor has grown so fantastically wide that the middle class no longer exists. The rich are fantastically rich, while the poor wallow in hi-tech slums, have oppressive low paying jobs (if they are “lucky”), live in the midst of ferocious criminals and rabid gang wars. There is little social mobility for the individual.

Finally, with the cumulative effects of the impoverished lower classes, the untouchable super rich and elusive transnational corporations, there is little tax base left for any government to deliver social services let alone maintain order. There is no social safety net as the disenfranchised and marginalized struggle to survive in a Dickensian world. Order is left once again to the market bringing us to a very ugly “state of nature”.

CURRENT ISSUES OF TODAY
It is indeed a dark vision that one would hazard to guess would actually come about, yet in many ways we live in a world that has the seeds of the CyberPunk nightmare. We have an international economy with massive transnational corporations. Yet there still is a robust middle class and a fairly strong civil government. But keep in mind the trends in American civil society today.

Since the New Deal that mercifully drove the United States out of the depression of the 1930s, the trend in North America has been towards developing a welfare state where everyone was taken care of and the central civil government maintained order. But things slowly evolved away from the notion of a big government. By the 1980s, the Reaganites argued that this welfare state itself was responsible for slow economic growth and began the process to dismantle the welfare state. Beneficial social programs were beginning to be seen no longer be something that aided America but rather was holding it back. Finally, the North American Free Trade Association was signed in 1992. NAFTA essentially freed large business from US and Canadian labor and environmental laws, thus precipitating the movement out of country of skilled labor jobs of the middle class.

This trend continued with the Clinton administration. Even as the Democrats followed a policy of astute fiscal restraint that the Reaganites preached and even with a massive surplus, they still managed to obliterate the concept of the ever-present social safety net. Clintonites allowed for relaxation of the ownership rules for media outlets, which greatly reduces the independent sources for news and weakens the amount of objective information that the public consumes which effectively undermines democracy. They also weakened corporate oversight in loosening the accounting laws for big business, as well as allowing for extensions on trademark and copyright terms.

Today the current Bush Administration is pushing the most radical tax cut in US history in effort to spur economic growth. But in the process they are making tax cuts so radical as to severely hamper the social services. Some postulate that this is the end game for a group of the elite that really want the government to collapse under it’s own weight of deficit spending, lack of delivery of essential services and lack of public interest, leaving the country in a horrible state (of nature…).

CONCLUSION
Corporate mobility due to free trade and erosion of corporate oversight will make big business larger than ever imagined. In accordance with the growth of business in the power structure is media conglomeration, which further consolidates power by restricting the flow of information. Add the elements of the eroded middle-class, a lost of a tax base for governmental programs, lack of environmental regulations and a torn social safety net. We have a recipe for a very ugly world ahead of us. With everything being left up to the wilds of market it sounds like we are left in a very Hobbesian “state of affairs”.

Now does the CyberPunk nightmare look so off base? In the eighties, many CyberPunk authors assumed we would reach this horrid state through the post-apocalyptic nightmare of world war three or through technology running out of control. But with the above trends in mind, it is looking more like we will end up there more through greed and apathy. If the current anti-government, anti-social services trends continue, we might just end up in that hell, and we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves.

Thanks to Chip Young for a thorough proof reading, Tom Cronin for hjis excellent article "Moving into the Matrix" and W.R. Clement for his prescient book Quantum Jump.