(This is the seventh article in our What is Cyberpunk? series, in which we’re examining the various perspectives and arguments that influence the definition of the Cyberpunk genre. If you’d like to start with the first article, click here.)
Hope is not optimism.
As we make our way back to the United States, we open social media and see a comment about cyberpunk:
“Enjoy the cyberpunk stories, but let’s not make dystopia our reality.”
We’ve already discussed cyberpunk as reality in several articles, and while there are certainly similarities, we’re still a long way from living in the dark dystopias of our favorite genre.
Having just spent a week listening to some of the world’s brightest minds, United Nations experts, astronauts, authors, speakers, tech visionaries, we’re reminded of the optimism simmering within society.
That undercurrent, like so many of its darker-minded cousins, is a subculture.
Most of the world is filled with people in motion. Observationally, most of those people live within small perspectives and smaller meanings. Some happy. Some unhappy. Many somewhere in between, looking for distraction, escape, or opportunity.
A great many cling to hope.
Work harder. Make more money. Get promoted. Buy comforts. Chase excitement. This is perhaps one of the deepest veins in cyberpunk and broader dystopian fiction. People pursue modern ideals that failed decades ago and wonder why life still feels hollow.
It’s an easy thing to describe but a difficult emotion to truly feel.
We’re coming back from an international trip. Part vacation. A lot of work. We’re looking forward to being home. In a few short weeks or months, we’ll probably feel quite differently… returned to the fold of normality.
That is the problem with treating circumstances as hope.
Utopian idealism, imagining how things should be, is easy to sell. It’s one of the reasons we focus on dystopia at Arkhelian. We aren’t doing easy. We want sharp, smart editorial insights wrapped up in difficulty. The easy path forward isn’t enough realism for us or our audience, but dystopia can push meaning into a very small, survival-first corner.
That said, utopia has its own problem with meaning.
When abundance and peace exist uniformly, conflict becomes harder to locate. Individualism becomes harder to define. Complacency becomes easier. A perfect world might be wonderful to live in, but perfection can flatten expression. Human beings make meaning through challenge, contradiction, desire, and limitation.
Utopia can feel like staring at the sun. Look away and you’ve been blinded.
Dystopia doesn’t overpromise. In many ways, it’s used to motivate.
In utopia, we spend so much time considering what could be that we’ve started confusing hope with optimism.
Are utopias really synonymous with optimism?
We don’t think so.
There are still systems and rules. There are still boundaries, tradeoffs, and areas that remain out of bounds, figuratively and physically. Even genuinely better societies contain structures that determine who can go where, who can do what, and how people participate within them.
Hope, real hope, gets presented as believing things will improve.
Looking toward the utopia instead of the dystopia. Choosing something brighter. Happier. More comforting. It might be a lie we tell ourselves because the challenge of today has overcome the challenge of the future.
“Dystopia is dark” is a symptom.
“Dystopia is too dark” is a coping mechanism.
Because hope is not optimism.
Hope is participation.
We won’t begrudge anyone their utopian vision. But having just spent a week with three thousand people interested in creating a better world, one reaction to utopian depictions of the future kept resurfacing:
- Everyone understands the goal.
- Almost no one can describe how we get there together.
The people who can explain the steps usually describe something smaller. Local. A monument designed around healing. Architecture intended for reconciliation. Technology repurposed toward public good. Economics led by community. A community solving a single problem it can actually touch.
Scale is critical to solving the challenges of the world and making hope actionable.
Large systems are extraordinarily good at preserving themselves. Political systems. Corporate systems. Economic systems. Technological systems. They absorb criticism, redirect pressure, and continue moving. If they get unwieldy, leaders shift to propaganda, surveillance, pruning attacks, and misinformation to bridge the news cycle and shift public attention.
Real change often begins somewhere much smaller.
Leadership at the level of a neighborhood. A community. A group of artists. A handful of people willing to build something useful rather than merely describe something better. Utopia and dystopia are simply different languages for thinking about where choices, or the lack of choices, lead.
The similarities between cyberpunk and contemporary life are not evidence that cyberpunk has already arrived. They are evidence that some of the forces cyberpunk warned us about are real. That the predictions were accurate.
- Concentrated wealth
- Technological dependency
- Corporate influence
- Alienation
- People increasingly separated from the systems governing their lives
The cleanest and healthiest neighborhoods becoming havens for the wealthy while everyone else is pushed somewhere else. That’s a system, an economy built around the appreciation of investment and the management of personal debt—which rewards wealth.
Cyberpunk exaggerates these forces so we can see them. That is what dystopia is useful for. Not surrender. Not hopelessness. Recognition. This is also why we find the hero’s journey so fantastical. Victories are small, but they can hit hard… and often come at a price.
Arkhelian will continue to build community. Indie authors. Real artists. Sharp critiques. Thought-starter articles. New projects and voices. New places for people to contribute something worthwhile. And we’ll keep expanding our community into new areas.
If you want hope, participate. The invitation is here.
Bring the best you have. Improve what you can do. Improve what others can do. Build something.
Stop being a wishful optimist. Forget the old argument of hope versus hopelessness.
Understand the settings. Learn the visual language. Listen to what the stories are warning us about. Then look for the solutions, the roadmaps, and the places where participation is still possible.
That’s where hope lives.