We’ve inherited a vision of cyberspace that doesn’t fit the world anymore. It’s the old dream: jacking in, neon grids, haptic gloves, and datastreams that feel like a second world. That vision—iconic in its time—was built on pre-Bluetooth, pre-iPhone, pre-AI thinking. But we’re still clinging to it. Still telling stories as if cyberspace is a place we access, not something that already saturates every part of our lives.
The truth is, we live in cyberspace. It tracks our steps, manages our homes, listens in on our conversations, and gamifies our choices. Our interface with the digital isn’t jarring or cinematic—it’s seamless, quiet, and often invisible. There’s no need to “jack in” anymore. You’re already inside. And yet, so much speculative fiction and genre storytelling is still obsessed with VR suits and sense-glove metaphors. It’s nostalgic, yes—but creatively outdated.
Baudrillard warned us about hyperreality and simulacra: when simulations become more real than the real. But even he might not have predicted how normalized this redesign of our sensorium has become. Our devices now whisper to us while we sleep, curate our memories, and help us craft synthetic versions of ourselves for strangers to scroll. Our perception isn’t augmented—it’s being reprogrammed. But that doesn’t mean we’ve lost. It means it’s time to take the wheel.
And we have the tools. The average home is a graveyard of unused potential: old phones, dusty routers, outdated tablets—all with viable chipsets and modems that can be stitched into local networks, repurposed into air-gapped servers, or configured as nodes in a decentralized mesh. There’s more latent computing power in your junk drawer than in the mainframe that inspired Neuromancer. That’s not just trivia—it’s fuel for rebellion. Cyberspace isn’t only where corporations try to harvest attention; it can also be where their margins start to die.
This new cyberspace doesn’t exist to entertain us. It exists to be repurposed, fractured, and rebuilt. In the hands of creators, hackers, and everyday people with a bit of defiance, it becomes an interface for resistance. Disconnecting from dominant systems isn’t retreat—it’s redesign. Opting out of their infrastructure and narratives doesn’t mean going dark. It means lighting a different path. This is where creative work becomes more than speculative. It becomes strategic. Design fiction becomes tactical fiction.
That shift is where authors and artists matter most. It’s easy to mimic the grid of The Matrix or the streets of Night City. But what would it mean to design a cyberspace that feels like an emotional archive? A memory forest? A layered resonance of identities stored across fragments? What does rebellion look like when it’s not about breaking into the system, but rewriting the way we see ourselves inside it? That’s the leap speculative fiction should be making now—not into the distraction of better VR, but into stranger, truer reflections of the world we’re already entangled in.
Cyberspace is not a destination. It’s not even a spectacle anymore. It’s a shifting terrain, one that responds to who has access to tools, to language, to vision. We can’t keep writing stories where the future is something we plug into like a game. We’re already in it. The question is: what do we do now that we know the simulation is shallow—and the real rebellion is happening at the network level, just under the noise?
In the end, cyberspace isn’t about where we go. It’s about how we move through it, who controls the signals, and what stories we’re brave enough to write in the dark.
