Our Cyberpunk World: 3D-Printing the Perfect Blonde (and Your Own Clones)

The article: 3-D printing of human body parts (Business Insider) Technology is overtaking cyberpunk science fiction yet again — and this time biopunk too. In this case, it's a process called bioprinting which uses 3D-printing techology to print living organs, whether to repair or transplant. As the speed 3D printing is advancing today, eventually we'll be able to print entire human bodies. I can see four uses for this:

1. Cloning your replacement body: As a matter of fact, this is how the replacement clones used in the clone-resurrection process are generated. Not vat-grown anymore as in classic cyberpunk, but 3D-printed like the anti-plasma bomb being printed in the background of Shira's opening videoblog post.
2. Organ replacement: what bioprinting is used for today, but naturally more advanced. Eventually the technology will get good and cheap enough that people will be able to replace organs at will, like replacement parts for machines.
3. Designer deformations: What if you're bored with your baseline human appearance? What if you want the latest fashionable deformations? There's pretty much no limit to how much the idle rich can pervert bioprinting technology. Some of them, of course, will make themselves superhuman or outright transhuman. The likes of Neuromancer's Lo-Teks won't be quite so low-tech anymore.
4. Printing the perfect blonde: Forget eugenics. Why wait on genetic engineering, gene doping, and old-fashioned breeding when you can design your human physical ideal in a CAD program and then print it? You can design in pretty much anything you want, including amazing superpowers, without having to rely on the hereditary luck of the draw. You can create bodies more beautiful than anything Nature can design, as living artworks.

Naturally, since in the cyberpunk universe (i.e. Spanner) technology requires the money that the rich are stealing from the poor and hoarding for themselves, like all medical technologies bioprinting will of course be a luxury for the rich, intended to turn them into a transhuman master race eventually able to overthrow even the American Empire's superhuman oligarchs known as the Liberators. For the natural-born newtype superhumans of Team Spanner, this means they have to race against yet another ticking clock and try to convince humanity to save themselves before the Tech Lords make their species obsolete.

Spanner R5 #amediting Update: Why Does the Future Keep Catching Up With Me?

In the Spanner comics script I did for Script Frenzy in 2008, I opened issue 2 with a Dalek-like security robot summarily executing a one-shot character. Then in Chapter 4 R3, I gave Corporate patriarch Dr. Lars Thorwald, chairman of Biotron, a more advanced production version of a prototype robot that uses an iPod as its head and brain.

And now this:

The article: <a href="http://rt.com/usa/207395-robocop-security-silicon-valley/">5-foot-tall 'Robocops' start patrolling Silicon Valley</a> (RT.com). The subject: a security robot now policing the streets of San Francisco — and it looks exactly like the one from the Script Frenzy 2008 version of Spanner #2.

Why does the future keep catching up with me?

One thing about speculative fiction is that an author must keep second-guessing the future. My second guesses involve "friendly fascism", the technology of oppression, the cyberpunk truism that the street makes its own uses for things, and the level of tolerance that masses of ordinary people have for tyranny before their desire to live forces them to revolt (and the eagerness of elites to push that tolerance to its limits). Not superheroes, not psychics, not vampires and werewolves and shapeshifters; those belong to my critique of superhero mythology.

My problem is that I've been delaying Spanner's publication for so long that history has started overtaking my speculation. This problem has become so bad that I actually moved the years in which the series takes place from 2014-16 to 2018-20, simply because 2014 had already arrived and thus was no longer speculative. I picked the 2014 date all the way back in 1994, when I aged Shira down from her original 25 down to the Standard Anime Protagonist Age of 15; now I've aged her back up to 19 while keeping her birthdate of September 9, 1999.

Some events that occurred in the middle of writing and editing Spanner:

1. the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the ensuing invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001-3, coupled with a "USA PATRIOT" Act that almost convinced me that the "future fascism" I'd been setting the series in since 1992 (if not 1989) had already arrived;
2. the death of Steve Jobs in 2011;
3. the "Arab Spring" revolutions and Occupy Wall Street movement, both also in 2011, and both of which failed; and
4. the anti-police-state protests going on as I write this.

On the technology front, progress in aircar, jetpack, hoverboard, and sexbot technology is such that all of them will be in commercial release by 2018. Despite the failure of Google Glass, augmented reality will become common and normal just as tablet computers, which were a pie-in-the-sky technology, have become today. Another new technology I borrowed toward the end of the plotting phase (late 2000s) was the smartphone; later, in the leadup to the NSA surveillance scandal, I gave my hackers and rebels generic smartphones without tracking devices; and now the PiPhone (made from one of those tiny Raspberry Pi computers) has convinced me that, under a Chinese-style phone company/ISP monopoly with massive supercomputers dedicated just to censorship, hackers must kludge up their own smartphones and use secure meshnets for calling without the monopoly's interference.

Even the particular manifestations of the reactionary politics I would later call "the Conservative Revolution" have largely come to pass. Apparently I didn't get dystopian enough to expect the British "panopticon" surveillance policy, the growth of Soviet-style "vote for the ruling-party candidate Or Else" elections in the US, or the return of the Gilded Age capitalist predators who tried in the 1890s to destroy American freedom and are trying yet again. I did throw in a tyrannical megacomputer, but that's almost a cliché of 1960s and '70s science fiction that — surprise! — turns out to have become a reality as well, along with The Terminator's Skynet. It also took me years to realize that the "Conservative Revolution" is really just the ultimate manifestation of the American Civil War that, despite the near universal assumption that it lasted only four years in the 1860s, really started in the seventeenth century (or even the thirteenth, the century of mother country England's Magna Carta) and has never ended.

Yeah, I know, science fiction has a reputation for making predictions that turn out to be not just wrong but impossible. I throw in some impossible things myself, usually to either critique the superhero mythology or pay homage to classic SF. But too much of the SFnal speculation I've put into Spanner since 1992 has already come to pass, and I'm certain a lot more of it will by the time the story begins in 2018.

Now to edit that second-issue opening back into the third chapter of the new Book 2...

Our Cyberpunk World: Your Brain Can Now Be Hacked

The article: Hackers backdoor the human brain, successfully extract sensitive data (Sebastian Anthony, ExtremeTech)

One technology that has become something of a cyberpunk cliché is the brain-computer interface. Recent developments have focused on sinister police uses. Now black-hat hackers have found a way to keep up with the secret police.

Yes, now the black hats can hack people's brains and even leave malware using BCIs. This will become especially dangerous in virtual reality. The defense is the same as that against interrogators and torturers: awareness, and refusal to give in.

Eventually I suspect enterprising programmers will start developing anti-malware systems for the brain...

On the Death of Steve Jobs

Since yesterday, the Internet and the old media news outlets have been all abuzz over the death of Steve Jobs, cofounder and recently retired chairman of Apple. (I almost said Apple Computer, but they dropped the "Computer" part after the iPod became all the rage roughly a decade ago.) You're probably wondering what I think of the man. Sure, he was a visionary and all that, but he adapted to the system more than nearly anyone knew. Over the years I found myself appalled to find a John Lennon turning into a Bill Gates (and I mean the hated, ruthless Gates of the '90s). I should mention that though the first computer I ever used was a Radio Shack TRS-80, the first I ever truly loved was the Apple II. From the fateful year of 1984 on, I was a confirmed Macintosh cultist. And yet I was this poor kid who could never afford a computer of my own until I got a hand-me-down IBM Personal System/2 from my grandfather. Running Windows 3.1. That was in 1998, when I was already in my twenties.

Why did Jobs and Gates end up blurring together in my fevered brain? It was their management style, which is of course business standard. Capitalism is a very dog-eat-dog system. "Social Darwinism" may not apply to humans, but it sure as hell applies to corporations. It's my opinion, probably idiosyncratic, that corporations are private governments. The corporate world is a world made up entirely of absolute monarchies, all eternally at war with all the rest. Business, as they say, is war. But this is a war with no end and no victory, I probably could never have made it in business. I may have a bit of a vindictive streak, but I'm no general.

Steve Jobs is being hailed as a genius and a visionary, and I don't doubt any of it. The President hails him. The stars hail him. His competitors, enemies, and ex-friends all hail him. If I were to add one more encomium, I would only be adding one more echo to an already deafening echo chamber.

During the middle of July last year, as I was failing once again to complete my 2007 NaNoWriMo novel during JulNoWriMo, I dropped it the moment the inspiration came to me. It turned out, of course, to be the "deadly distant beginning" to Chaos Angel Spanner, my long neglected manga project set (since 1994) in 2014, which was now morphing into a long five-volume novel. It now had a new name, thanks to TV Tropes: Press the Reset Button. The next thing I wrote was the first chapter, "Spanner in the Works". The chapter began as a story idea I worked on in my Project Notebooks in the years between 1999 and my discovery of NaNoWriMo in 2006. It was a riff on the 1984 Macintosh commercial. Then I remembered the entire history and development of Apple after 1984, and I realized — 2014 will be like "1984"! So I drafted the man himself into the novel, or more accurately his image, as if he were a fictional character (which in 2014 he now is). The rest was easy.

The chapter has expanded since then. The original chapter is now the fourth installment. It is now in its final form, now that the man whose face is on the screen has died. It's called "Enter the Monkeywrench". Read it here..

RIP STEVE JOBS 1955-2011

Our Cyberpunk World: LED Eyelashes

The article: New Beauty Product LED Eyelash

Here's the newest fad in tech-mad Japan: LED fake eyelashes! You can even use it as a weapon.

Here's a demonstration by the inventor, Soomi Park:

Our Cyberpunk World: Robot Rock!

The article: Robot Rock Bands Intend to Replace Human Musicians Forever

Forget that standardized synthpop that John Shirley called "minimono" in his Eclipse/A Song Called Youth trilogy from the last half of the 1980s, the great lost masterpiece of cyberpunk. At least the band in Eclipse, the first part of the trilogy (not to be confused with a certain far more famous, and far less competently written, paranormal romance), allowed itself to be fronted by an old-fashioned rock guitarist. The bands of the real cyberpunk future don't even have human players at all. Their instruments play themselves. You see, they're robot instruments.

The first of these robot bands is being built by a music collective called Expressive Machines Musical Instruments. But keep in mind the whole battle robot subculture that grew up in the '00s. Robot instruments and bands will likely be the Next Big Thing in homebrew robot design.

New Wave was an '80s thing. Rave was '90s. The cyberpunk near-future is already going beyond both. This time, the instruments are playing themselves.

We've sure come a long way from the player piano...

Our Cyberpunk World: Your iPad Is Now a Robot's Head!

The article: A robot lover's robot (iPad not included) (MSNBC Techolog)

Leave it to iRobot, the Roomba people. Their AVA concept robot is not planned for release yet. But it's one of the stars of CES 2011. Unlike their more famous cleaning robots, it's a general purpose robot. Your tablet computer, whether an iPad or an Android-based tablet, serves as its head. Just think of what you can do with an AVA, an augmented reality app like Layar, and your new cyberpunk mirrorshades...

EDIT: And a Kinect.

Our Cyberpunk World: Your New Cyberpunk Mirrorshades

The article: CES 2011: Your new cyberpunk mirrorshades (BoingBoing)

I've been saying since Layar became big on the iPhone last year that the one thing still lacking in 2010 that would make augmented reality popular was the right goggles. Guess what? Now they're here! And with Lady Gaga's paid endorsement!

These new Polaroid-branded sunglasses contain a camera to take pictures with and a display with which to view them. Only one thing is needed to make it useful, and that's AR. Once they converge, what was still future technology when I bookmarked wearcam.org in the early '00s will become a reality at last. You can be sure of one thing: Bruce Sterling will be keeping track of it here.

You can take a look at the announcement at CES 2011 here:

Our Cyberpunk World: Robot Waiters

It's not just in Star Wars or cyberpunk anime anymore. There's an actual restaurant in China with a mechanical wait staff. Just think of it: no wages to pay, no need for tips, no surly human employees. Sure, the restaurant in question may be robot-themed. But knowing American business types, it won't be long till it catches on big time...

Our Cyberpunk World: Now You See Me, Now You Don't

The article: Invisibility cloaks: Now you see me, but for how much longer?

Invisibility cloaks. Science fiction, right? Even better, fantasy! (see: The Arabian Nights or Harry Potter, etc., etc., etc....)

Think again.

Like the jetpack, aircar, and hoverboard, the invisibility cloak is now a reality. You can't buy them now, of course; the technology's still in the research stage, and the military and police demand first dibs Or Else. However, the cloaking device is more cyberpunk than those other sci-fi cliché technologies. Like teleportation as used in Alfred Bester's 1950s proto-cyberpunk classic Tiger, Tiger a.k.a. The Stars My Destination, cloaking is the wet dream of assassins and terrorists. Just look, for instance, at Spanner Chapter One...

Here's how it works. You're a terrorist, secret police agent, black ops super soldier, or serial killer. You put on an invisibility cloak (or your uniform is a cloak) and switch invisibility on. Now you can kill without anybody knowing you're there; your victim will look like Abu Alhazred being eaten alive in the middle of the souq by the demon Yog Sothoth.

There's three problems. One, no cloaking device will ever be able to hide your fingerprints or footprints. Observant Trackers and CSIs will still be able to see what you left behind and follow the clues all the way back to you. Two, cloaking involves materials that bend light rays, so it will never be perfect; you'll still be visible to the trained eye or special goggles. Third and worst of all, you never know if you yourself are being tracked...

Soon the cyberpunks and other science fiction writers will lose control of this technology. Very soon, it'll be all over the spy, terror, and police thrillers...

Sexbots 3: Sexbots of the Human Kind

To sum up the previous two posts, real sexbots are nearing mass production, and somebody will hack some into rapebots. There's already speculation about an even more dystopian scenario: in the future, there will be people implanted with some mind-control device that will turn them into human robots, or "meat puppets". I'll eventually post something about specifically that. But right now there's one particular use I'm concerned with. If people can be physically hacked into robots, some of them are bound to become human sexbots.

You know the Man will spin robotization of humans as the ideal way to dispense with criminals without killing them. To the corporations, they'll sell it as the ideal workforce; certainly the prison-industrial complex will try to profit huge from this. But some Corporates and political types will see through the spin...

What is the feminine ideal for the male power luster? Beautiful, insatiable, naked, and utterly obedient to his commands. Stereotypes are always misleading. Most women have at least some sense of dignity. But what the man of power wants is a harem of pliant beauties who worship his every sexual craving and bear his children unquestioningly. Since humans are as unreliable as they are sexy, the way to make them perfectly reliable (not to mention pliable) is to hardwire their brains so that they become soft-fleshed sexbots. Then they'll have no will but his own. He won't have to worry about them leaving him, much less turning feminist, ever again. If he's especially ruthless, he could do the same to his own wife, or even his daughters. Being Corporate, you know he'll get away with it. Turning your wife and daughters into your own personal sexbots could even become all the rage among the overclass, just like in Ira Levin's Stepford...

And of course you'll see rich women doing that to men. Human sexbots made out of dangerous criminals could become a hot commodity among Corporate women.

Sure enough, science fiction has dealt with this, even before The Stepford Wives. But now we're already living in the cyberpunk universe; so much of what we take for granted today was science fiction then. And most of science fiction has dealt with the dark side of technological advance. What makes the dark side so dark is that there are people the dark side strongly appeals to. Nuclear war? Generals masturbate over it. Panoptical surveillance? The voyeur's wet dream. Rapebots and human sexbots? Hentai manga's already running away with this kind of stuff.

You know I'll throw it into Spanner sometime...

Sexbots 2: The Rapebots Are Coming

Last post, I pointed out that, like jetpacks, aircars, and hoverboards, sex robots actually exist in the real world today. But this post is about the possible dark side. And I don't mean all those men who will be turning away from heterosexuality in favor of robosexuality, which will likely hit the economy pretty hard. I mean crime.

Now, take your typical Russian mafia/secret police (same thing) hacker. He tends to be consumed with his tribe's desire for revenge against the non-Russian world. He spends way too much time designing viruses, worms, and botnet assimilants. He gets a sexbot. Once sexbots are mass produced, every gangster will have to have at least one sexbot, partly as a status symbol and partly because gangsters hate women. What does our botnet master do with a sexbot? Well, maybe he keeps one for actual sex. Any extras, though, he hacks into rapebots. And he could hack any sexbot connected to the Internet into a rapebot.

Take a certain yakuza (Koji-kun's father in Spanner) whose favorite manga is the infamous Rapeman. By 2014, sexbots are being mass produced in Japan. He's going to turn a male sexbot into a robot Rapeman no matter what. Then he's going to send his Rapebot after that treacherous gaijin whore who stole his number one son away from him. Little does he know that the gaijin in question, one Shira Thomas, is enough of a hacker that she can use her smartphone to hack his rapebot so that it goes after, say, poor Koji-kun in order to rape him. And yes, she's yaoi fangirl enough to do it.

And then what about the malfunctioning sexbots that innocently rape any human female at hand due to some glitch?

Of course, when you talk about the dark side, you must mention potential military uses. No, not as (robo)sexual partners for lonely soldiers. No, as weapons. What if the US military decided it wanted to use rapebots as a weapon of war, especially against the hated "Wogs" in the Middle East? And some of those sexual combots get even further hacked because some psychopath has developed a fetish for serial killer rapebots? Now put one of those serial killer rapebots in the hands of angry power-seeking narcissist Drusilla Becket, and then you'll really have a cyberpunk story then...

And then how about the microchipped humans who get remotely mind-controlled into sexbots? The principle is the same as the ex-con soldiers mind-controlled by the military, or the "Manchurian candidates" who have long been the special darlings of all the spy agencies.

One of my planned major story threads in Spanner involves Shira's amazing ability to hack combots to do her will against their own masters (or just rip their own heads off). How did she learn this ability? By learning how to hack sexbots, especially the one she gets for Christmas from her adoring Aunt Willa in Book 2.

Black hat sexbot hacking? You know that idea's cyberpunk to the core. In fact, back in 1993 Mike Saenz of Shatter fame created an all-CGI cyberpunk comic book called Donna Matrix featuring a bondage sexbot whose brain is replaced by a combot's, so the idea's already part of the cyberpunk canon...

Next: meat puppets...

Our Cyberpunk World: The Sexbots Are Here

The article: Sexbots Will Give Us Longevity Orgasm (and many more linked from there)
[Update: Other relevant articles include The Future of Coitus: Life-Long Loving with a Sexbot, The Implications of Sexbots, and How Will Sexbots Change the World?]

You'd think sex robots are something out of a cyberpunk science fiction novel. Well, they were, back in the 1980s. Comes the Internet age around 1995 or so, and when the "cyborgasm" fad got boring, robot designers turned to more enduring cyberpleasures and began building sexbots. Fifteen years later, they're on the verge of entering mass production. They're also on the verge of being banned by puritanical tyrannies such as the United States of America. Ironically, it'll be because many feminists hate the idea — because it'll give some heterosexual men an excuse to abandon women altogether, to the point of declaring women obsolete. Of course, they conveniently forget to realize that women are using male sexbots engineered and programmed to give them sexual pleasures of a high level that no man, hand, dildo, or vibrator can pull off.

Sure, some men will get so addicted to their sexbots that women will seem sexually boring and merely human in comparison. The same goes for women in relation to men. Inevitably, some creative robot engineer will come up with sexbots specifically designed for same-sex robosex, particularly the male models with self-lubricating penises like seme characters in Japanese yaoi manga. And, of course, some people will be just plain robosexual and not even be attracted to other humans at all.

Now fast forward to 2014 and Spanner. Sexbots are now being mass produced in Japan and Europe. America is ruled by a dictatorship theocratic enough to ban sexbots on principle (i.e. because of the Christian Right's holy hatred of sex or anything else remotely fun). That makes sexbots highly prized contraband, and you bet the Mafias will quickly secure a lock on sexbot distribution in the New Confederacy. Strangely enough, the United Corporations' sex-fascist Eugenics Institute doesn't have a problem with people having sex with robots as long as sex between humans remains rigidly regulated "for the improvement of the race". A new way to bring down a high-ranking politician, cop, or pastor in an inferno of scandal? Catch him purchasing or using a sexbot. Meanwhile, sexbots become status symbols and fashion items among the "morality"-averse antiprohibitionists. You can buy one off the Mafias, or steal it from them (a favorite Team Spanner recreation), or kludge up one or a few of your own.

Sexbots aren't just something out of 1980s cyberpunk novels, or 1970s New Wave science fiction for that matter. Like jetpacks and aircars, they're already here; the only question is what they cost and when they'll go into mass production.

Next: the dark side...

Future Shock

Remember future shock? It's the shock that overcomes you when you can't handle what you perceive as too much change in too little time. The term was coined by futurist Alvin Toffler, and it's the subject of the book that made him famous. If anything, the speed of change has accelerated since the book came out in 1970, and the shock registered by those who can't handle it has become more extreme, to the point of madness. The ultimate expression of that madness is 9/11 — so far. But far more people have come to adapt to the accelerating rate of change; some of us can even be said to surf evolution. The 21st-century world we live in today was nothing but science fiction in the 20th century.

In this entry, I'll be dealing with fiction as well as society. We tell ourselves who we are through the stories we tell.

Our Cyberpunk World: Hoverboards Are Almost Here

The article: A Real, Working Hoverboard Exists (Gizmodo)

In Spanner (set in 2014-6), Shira rides a hoverboard. For all we know, she could be the future Tony Hawk or Stacy Peralta of hoverboarding, once that Corporate Empire thing is safely relegated to the trash compactor of history. Well, a French artist is bringing the hoverboard out of the realm of science fiction (and videogames) by building a workable prototype. It's not ridable yet (it's actually smaller than a standard skateboard; compare this to Shira's snowboard-sized sky racer), but that's the next step.

Our Cyberpunk World: Humans Infected by Computer Viruses!

One story currently causing a firestorm in Britain is the case of the computer scientist who infected himself with a computer virus. Dr. Mark Gasson of the University of Reading put an RFID (radio frequency identification) microchip into his wrist as a kind of lockout device so that only he can enter his lab and use his phone; since, as he explains, RFID technology has advanced to the point where the chips have become full-blown computers, they can now get infected by viruses. Gasson's chip is the first to be infected. But that's not all, unfortunately...

Gasson also proved that his infected chip can pass the virus on to any system, internal or external, that it connects to. Some cyberterrorist could even use RFID viruses to take control of entire corporate and national computer systems and either destroy them or hijack them in a computer-viral form of the hostile takeover. If microchips are implanted into brains, either for police surveillance or brain enhancement, computer viruses could even be used to hijack people and turn them zombies (in the original African magic-war sense) like the computers hijacked and controlled by botnets.

If there's any reason to stop our increasingly paranoid elites from forcibly microchipping us, this is it. But if you write cyberpunk science fiction or technothrillers — or if you're a malicious hacker or techno-guerrilla — you could run away with this idea. And so I'm going to make it a major plot element of Spanner.

Here's the original BBC interview of Dr. Mark Gasson: