Defining Cyberpunk
Beyond Morality
The punk attitude and its relation to technology inevitably raise many important moral and philosophical questions. In earlier cyberpunk works, moral questions were usually ignored and left unanswered. Part of the reason for this is the fact that in cyberpunk fiction "advanced technology erases human morality" (Easterbrook 383). Cyberpunks, Easterbrook says, are "all characters with working class or underclass backgrounds, characters who exploit threshold technologies to escape from the dead-end despair of tenements and the mind-numbing boredom of television" (329).
In Hardwired, for instance, the main characters, Cowboy and Sarah, are criminals seeking to escape to a better life "off-planet". In order to achieve their goals, they must first amass a great amount of money. They accomplish this throughout the novel by assassination, bribery, and through the destruction of a large corporation and a shipment of vaccinations; by destroying the vaccinations, they effectively kill the millions of people who needed that drug. Their actions are never questioned in the novel, and they are not presented as evil. Their morality is ignored, perhaps left up to readers to decide; they are above right and wrong, and "beyond good and evil".
Another example of this lack of morality is in Gibson's Neuromancer. The main character, Case, is a computer hacker who specializes in computer crimes. He is hired by an unknown person to commit other crimes, and finally discovers that the person he works for is an AI (artificial intelligence). Paid for his crimes, he spends the money on "a new Ono-Sendai," a cyberspace deck (270). The purpose for the purchase is, undoubtedly, so he can continue his criminal activities in cyberspace on his own, and yet his actions go unquestioned by the narrator as well as his fellow companions.
Part of the reason for this noticeable lack of morality is that cyberpunk characters are traditionally seen as mired in a "godless" world, the world Nietzsche left them in when he declared that "God is dead." Throughout cyberpunk fiction, we see the notion that organized religion is fragmenting and becoming unimportant, leaving no organized morality. The religion that does remain is a twisted version of an earlier faith.
In Gibson's Virtual Light, the Christian faith remains, but it is broken into cults: "Aryan Nazarenes," for example, or a cult that believes that God speaks to them through television shows, and that "virtual reality's a medium of Satan, 'cause you don't watch enough tv after you start doing it" (312). Williams' Hardwired has "Ethical Nihilists" (150), who believe that you've only lived a moral life if you manage to die in a ball of flame, taking hundreds of others with you. Characters may call out "Jesus" or "Christ," but when they do it is only as an exclamation, not a prayer. There is no prayer in cyberpunk fiction because there is no real faith. Drawing from examples in "a society that has lost all connection to God" (Ostling 46), it is no wonder that cyberpunk fiction presents no God for its characters to worship. The few characters who do claim some faith are content to worship their televisions, it seems.