I put climate change on my list of cyberpunk-adjacent topics, but this is the first time I’ve written about it. Here’s my take: Anthropogenic global warming is bad in terms of its effect on human environments and our access to natural resources. It’s not intrinsically bad because intrinsic badness doesn’t exist; ecosystems change over time and that includes extinction events.
Illustration by JD Reeves.
However, climate change could drastically change the trajectory of the next century or three. We might have to drop everything — especially industrialization — and rebuild from scratch. Maybe it’ll look like Snowpiercer (which I haven’t actually watched). Or maybe we’ll figure out an alternate fuel source quickly and things will stay relatively close to the way they are now. I don’t have the domain knowledge to make a confident guess.
I consider climate change a cyberpunk topic because I see cyberpunk as part of a long timeline of humans using technology to leverage economic and sociopolitical change. Or, to look at it from a different angle, a long timeline of humans inventing technologies that cause economic and sociopolitical change regardless of the inventors’ intent. I remain fascinated with the way human nature flows into whatever container it’s given.
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