One of the stories I shared with Pondsmith was far more mundane but it helped me to get to the heart of what Cyberpunk means to him. We met at Gamelab in Barcelona and a couple of weeks earlier, right before E3, my phone had died. I had to buy a replacement in the airport before the flight out to Los Angeles and anyone who has been on the verge of a long trip and finds themselves suddenly without their most-treasured gadget can no doubt sympathise. Without it, I didn’t have access to maps, hotel details, contact numbers and emails for appointments, or even the boarding pass for my flight. It’s only when I’m suddenly without a phone that I realise how much I need it.
I mentioned this to Pondsmith as we were talking about anxieties around reliance on technology and I used my former phone as a convenient example.
“But what did you do?” He asked.
“I bought a new phone. I had to.”
“That’s cyberpunk. It’s not just about the tech, it’s about the ubiquity of the tech. If augmentations are rare, if they make the people who have them special, that’s not cyberpunk. It has to be street level. It has to be everywhere and available to almost everyone.”
The phone anecdote might have triggered this central idea about cyberpunk, but before we dug into body horror, the ubiquity of tech, and real world social and political parallels, we spent some time discussing exactly what CD Projekt Red are doing with Pondsmith’s fictional future, and how he’s contributing to the game.
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“I like a lot of the things that are going on there but the main characters are special because of the technology so it’s very far from street-level cyberpunk. The tech shouldn’t make you a hero, it should just be a part of ordinary life.”
This bring us back to my dead phone and the ubiquity of technologies that were so recently unimaginably powerful.
“If you lose your phone, or it dies, then you just replace it.” Pondsmith says, waving around his own smartphone, which is currently pinging him real-time information about seismic activity somewhere in South America. “I’m plugged into the planet with this thing. That’s how amazing it is, but the tech is everywhere. It took me about an hour at most to re-establish everything that had been on my old phone on this one when I bought it. Information and preferences are easily transferable.”
I think there’s a deeper issue though: even if I can replace the phone, I don’t control the networks and the satellites that allow the phone to operate. So much of the power isn’t in the phone, it’s in the access that the phone has, and that is not replaceable. Not by me at any rate. If my provider cuts me off from data and telecommunications networks, I own a very expensive brick that can play match-3 games.