“Got a Cyberpsycho”: Control Societies and Spiritual Misery

Introduction

Colonel James Norris, a ‘Cyberpsycho,’ in the opening scene of *Cyberpunk: Edgerunners*.[1]

When human beings are controlled, and when this control deprives them of their desire… they become bestial and furious… their drives are unleashed, until eventually they become radically uncontrollable.

Bernard Stiegler, Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected Individuals.[2]

Hiroyuki Imaishi’s 2022 anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, opens with Colonel Norris’ technologically enhanced rampage through Night City. The scene sets the tone for a show that will allow me to explore how the conditions of the city— a Deleuzian control society[3] and the epitome of what I will call ‘cybercapitalism’— push its subjects to the state of ‘spiritual misery’ that they call cyberpsychosis.[4]

Cybercapitalism and Spiritual Misery

In his Postscript on the Societies of Control, Deleuze theorises a new mode of power replacing Foucauldian disciplinary societies.[5] In control societies, corporations use computer systems to unite ‘the family, the school, the army, the factory,’ into a ‘continuous network’ of power.[6] This allows both surveillance and capital to penetrate the lives of subjects at every level.[7] Deleuze stresses that this evolution entails ‘a mutation of capitalism’ also, as economies shift from production to consumption as the primary means of producing surplus value.[8] These societies dominate the so-called ‘First’ World, because they rely on the fact of relegating production to the ‘Third’ World.[9] In Deleuze’s terms: ‘this is no longer a capitalism for production but for the product,’ ‘for being sold or marketed’; ‘what it wants to sell is services.’[10] The final development has been in the way capital/ the corporation views its consumers: people are no longer ‘individuals,’ but rather ‘masses, samples, data, markets’— patterns of behaviour to be manipulated for profit.[11]

Cybercapitalist is the word I have chosen to describe these control societies. The OED defines ‘cybernetic’ as of or relating to ‘electric technology… cyberspace or the internet,’ ‘the integration of living organisms’ with this technology, and, significantly, ‘relating to or exhibiting automatic control.’[12] Indeed, the phrase is derived from the ancient Greek word for ‘steersman,’ which could be used figuratively to mean guide or leader, indicating its etymological associations with behavioural control.[13] Harraway, in her Cyborg Manifesto, writes that ‘a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet.’[14] Thus, cybercapitalism describes the mode of power that permeates living subjects with information technology to impose Deleuzian control and maximise surplus value through consumption.

In Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected Individuals, Stiegler argues that ‘control societies’ have become ‘irrational’ as individuals have lost ‘every motive for living’ and sunk into ‘despair,’ making them ‘uncontrollable.’[15] The focus of this essay, then, is to explore how living under cybercapitalism brings about what Stiegler calls ‘spiritual misery’ amongst its subjects.[16] For Stiegler, ‘spirit’ is a ‘noetic process’ of ‘psychic and collective individuation’ enacted through the sublimation of libidinal energy into the pursuit of ‘objects of desire’ or ‘belief’ such as love, justice and knowledge.[17] Spiritual misery results from the ‘blockage or destruction of psychic and social circuits through which the objects of spirit are constituted,’ and ‘induces, in the desiring beings that we are, the reign of the drives.’[18] This in turn leads to ‘destruction’ and the proliferation of addictions.’[19]

McQueen writes that ‘control societies are those of late capitalism and cyberpunk,’ while William Gibson, in his ‘definitive’[20] cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, describes the humans of his world as “data made flesh,” recalling Deleuze.[21] Accordingly, I will examine cybercapitalist spirtual misery through reference to a recent iteration of the genre: Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. In 2016, McQueen insisted that ‘the consensus among science fiction scholars is that the cyberpunk movement has come to an end’ due to its consistent inability to criticise the technologized control systems it depicted.[22] Cyberpunk often involved an ‘uncritical embrace of high technology,’[23] while its titular punks, according to Jim McGuigan, came to represent “cool capitalism,” the “marriage of counter-culture and corporate business,” due to “their subterranean lifestyle, hedonistic pleasure-seeking” and “illicit drug-taking.”[24] As I will demonstrate, Edgerunners categorically subverts this trend— its central conceit is the threat of cyberpsychosis that looms over those that allow technology and capitalist consumption to overcome them in the addictive installation of cybernetic enhancements. In this sense, Edgerunners demonstrates the potential that Caroline Alphin sees in the genre to connect ‘the proliferation of… information technologies,’ to the development of ‘a borderless… informationalized market economy,’ and to defamiliarize the ‘taken-for-grantedness’ of a cybercapitalist system that pushes people to the edge of sanity.[25]

Cybernetics and Consumption

Marx writes that ‘the chief end and aim’ of capitalism is ‘the production of surplus-value.’[26] As such, the aim of cybercapitalism is the same: lowering production costs and maximising profit. In the production economies this necessitates the lowering of labour costs through disciplining workers— ‘the impersonation of labour-power,’ and, by extension, ‘surplus labour.’[27] However, in the cybercapitalist, consumption economies, man is not embodied labour but embodied data; capital ‘lives’ not by ‘sucking living labour,’[28] but living data, making it necessary to maximise the production of data. Shoshana Zuboff calls this ‘new logic of accumulation… surveillance capitalism,’ which ‘aims to predict and modify human behaviour as a means to produce revenue and market control.’[29] This system relies on information technology to produce data through ‘computer-mediated transactions,’ media consumption, and ‘sensors’ such as cameras, microphones and ‘smart devices.’[30] These forms of data production revolve around consumption (online shopping, social media etc.) and/ or seek to enforce further consumption (surveillance), as this data is sold to advertising or Big Tech companies that use the data to create ‘personalized search results and ads,’ that hope to influence user behaviour and modify data patterns.[31] A White House report admits that ‘there is a growing potential for big data analytics to have an immediate effect on… decisions being made about [a person’s] life.’[32]

Significantly, this system relies on computer algorithms or code. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun invokes Austin on ‘performative utterances’ (‘to utter the sentence… is to do it’)[33] and Agamben’s theory of sovereignty to argue that code-based ‘software is word become action: a replacement of process with inscription that makes writing a live power by conflating force and law.’[34] Since code functions by textual commands that are necessarily carried out, it functions as both ‘law’ and ‘police’, and here we begin to glimpse the centrality of the ‘cyber’ to society’s capacity to move from discipline to control. This code-based control might be seen as the final step in the capitalist process that Stiegler calls ‘grammatization.’[35] Put simply, grammatization is a process by which the development of technology facilitates greater automation and calculation of production and consumption behaviour.[36] Stiegler gives the example of how printing facilitated the proto-capitalist use of calculating instruments, and how ‘tool-bearing machines’ automated industry.[37] Today, we have reached the stage of grammatization involving ‘industrial temporal objects’ (ITOs) such as televisions, mobile phones and computers that alter our perception of time and aim to capture our ‘available brain time.’[38] Stiegler suggests these objects are the ‘basis of control technologies,’[39] and— recalling Zuboff and Chun— he asserts that they ‘capture our retentions and protentions by performatively outstripping and overtaking them in light-time.’[40] In other words, ITOs capture data regarding our behavioural history (retentions) and use code to performatively predict our future behaviour (protentions) infinitely faster than we can dictate this behaviour ourselves.

Stiegler follows Antoinette Rouvroy in calling this system ‘algorithmic governmentality,’ and suggests that it resembles ‘a giant digital Leviathan.’[41] The allusion to Hobbes is telling, as his political theory proposed that societies or ‘commonwealths,’ united the ‘multitude’ in one person, the ‘Leviathan’ or ‘soveriegn,’ who controlled them.[42] Recalling Deleuze’s assertion that control societies view people as ‘masses, data,’ we might suggest that under the ‘algorithmic governmentality’ of cybercapitalism, the population becomes a multitudinous mass of data to be controlled by the sovereign through performative code. Carl Schmitt— whose theory of sovereign exceptionality was influenced by Hobbes and itself influenced Agamben (and by extension Chun)— argues that the sovereign’s power resides in their monopolisation of the decision regarding if, when and how to apply the law.[43] Under the corporate control of cybercapitalism the sovereign is pure capital. Capital monopolises the decision of how to apply the law through code, and thus the decision on the behaviour of the data Leviathan. Since capital’s sole aim is surplus value, the sovereign decision is always already made: the Leviathan consumes more and produces more data. Of course, by this logic, in the discplinary societies the decision on the law was also always already made— the Leviathan would produce for lower costs and higher profits— only then the force of the law was enacted through Foucauldian methods. In fact, ironically, John Perry Barlow’s 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace insisted that the ‘governments of the industrial world… have no sovereignty’ in the virtual world due to the impossibility of physical coercion.[44] In reality, Zuboff asserts, physically enforced conformity to the law of capital has been replaced by ‘a new kind of automaticity’: ‘anticipatory conformity.’[45] Cybercapitalism precludes the possibility of individual sovereignty by removing the coerced decision to conform and replacing it with a ‘path [that] is already shaped by the financial… interests that… invade every aspect of ‘one’s own’ life’ through the proliferation of ITOs.[46] It is for this reason, Chun argues, that Microsoft advertised its search engine Bing as a “decision engine,” to overcome “search engine overload syndrome,” in which users respond to a queries such as needing to find a place to eat with ‘hours of tangential surfing.’[47] In this ‘semi-volitional wandering,’ users are ‘unable to… make a decision,’ and thus the algorithm enacts capital’s sovereign decision for them, dictating where and when to consume.[48]

Edgerunners depicts cybercapitalism’s algorithmic enforcement of consumerist, data-producing behaviour semi-metaphorically through the motif of cybernetics. Hayles defines virtuality as the ‘cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns,’[49] and Zuboff’s insistence that ‘habitats inside and outside the human body are saturated with data,’[50] suggests that we exist in a state of virtuality. Of course, this virtuality relies on the penetration of our lives with ITOs, and this, no doubt, is what leads Harraway to assert that ‘we are all… hybrids of machine and organism… cyborgs.’[51] Thus, the increasing mechanisation of Edgerunners’ protagonist David Martinez (which I will examine throughout this essay) can be read as a metaphor for the real-life infection of ‘reality’ by virtuality, and the datafication of humanity. Moreover, the show explicitly depicts numerous aspects of cybercapitalism that lead to the proliferation of virtuality:

These images depict a surveillance capitalism in which sensors extract data on the behavioural patterns of Night City’s inhabitants while targeted advertisements seek to influence these patterns. The metatextuality of these inclusions become apparent when we recognise that this essay is itself the result of cybercapitalist surveillance, as my semi-volitional decision to consume Edgerunners was no doubt influenced by Netflix’s algorithm pandering to my anime-loaded watch history. Crucially, the adverts are for the ‘strong arms’ brand of cybernetics and this speaks to how, in Dag’s terms, ‘the body itself becomes the ultimate consumer product in cyberpunk.’[54] More subtly though, it indicates the self-perpetuating nature of the compulsion to consume, as cybernetics incorporate the ‘machineries of consumption,’[55] into the body, allowing market capitalism to penetrate further still.[56] When a back-alley cybernetics specialist named Doc installs David’s first implant— the military-grade Sandevistan— he warns him that it will begin ‘poaching [his] brain,’ and he will soon want it uninstalled.[57] Here, Doc means ‘poaching’ in the sense of boiling, alluding to the looming threat of cyberpsychosis. However, the double entendre plays on ‘poach’ as catch or hunt, recalling Stiegler’s assertion that ITOs seek to capture our ‘available brain time’ in consumption. Thus, Doc’s words also warn the viewer that the permeation of our lives with ITOs can only lead to more of our brain time being hunted by predatory advertising and caught in media consumption. Still, the more apparent meaning— boiling— is the dimension of Doc’s threat that receives the most attention. Edgerunners is less concerned with representing how technologized societies function than its ‘uncritical’ generic predecessors,[58] and perhaps this is because its audience is already familiar with the machinations of control societies. Indeed, most are aware that their status as audience members is dependent on corporate surveillance and code. As such, the anime focuses on why David’s mind— and our own— might be poached to a point of insanity by cybercapitalism.

Irrationality: Precarity and Desire

You either lose your mind or die… No in-between.

Jimmy Kurosaki, Edgerunners.[59]

As mentioned, Stiegler suggests that individuation is attained through the pursuit of objects of belief. He writes of the capacity to ‘elevate oneself through one’s dreams,’[60] and in Edgerunners, David is offered two opposing dreams through which to give his life spiritual meaning. His mother, Gloria, provides the first, telling him: “I just wanna give you a… good education… I want you to work hard, rise up, and get to the top floor of Arasaka Tower!”[61] Arasaka is the world’s largest megacorporation in Edgerunners, and so this dream consists in climbing its ladder through the consumption of corporate education services. Alternatively, later in the show, David is captured by a band of mercenaries led by Maine. In awe, David asks: “You guys… are cyberpunks?”, before begging to join the crew.[62] The second dream, then, is to “make a name as a cyberpunk” like Maine, by earning money to spend on the consumption of more and more cybernetics.[63] The problem, however, is that Stiegler insists only rational dreams can bring individuation, because ‘reason is… intrinsically tied to hope.’[64] For Stiegler, the system that I have called cybercapitalism is inherently irrational, because those who participate in it no longer have ‘a reason to expect something from the functioning… of the system’; there is no ‘expectation of a better future,’ no rational dream.[65] In this section, I will examine how Edgerunners highlights the irrationality of cybercapitalism dreams that— as Kurosaki suggests— either end in death or insanity.

It is made apparent from the first episode that Gloria’s corporate dream inevitably ends in death, or at least the perpetual threat of death. Gloria works as a paramedic for Night City’s ‘trauma team’, selling cybernetics that she salvages from cyberpsycho corpses to Maine’s cyberpunks to fund David’s studies at Arasaka academy.[66] In Stiegler’s terms, the pair live in a state of ‘symbolic misery… an endemic precariousness,’ due to the immensity of David’s tuition fees.[67] The first episode is consistently punctuated with jarring reminders of their misery, as informationalized technology repeatedly tells David he cannot afford basic services. He sits dejectedly by his washing machine as it tells him: “Cycle suspended due to insufficient funds”; his apartment door flashes with a red warning: “ACCESS DENIED, RENT PAST DUE”; he receives an automated call telling him: “If you are unable to make the payment, your utilities will be shut down.”[68]

Their struggles exemplify the how, according to Alphin, the cyberpunk genre can point to ‘the way neoliberal governmentalities, which function partly through the economization of everyday life, produce and benefit from increased precarity within contemporary cities.’[71] Judith Butler has written extensively on the issue of ‘precarity’ that Stiegler and Alphin allude to, which means a position in which ‘employment, shelter, health care, and food’ are not guaranteed.[72] In Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, they argue that ‘neoliberal rationality’— neoliberalism being the ideology behind contemporary (cyber)capitalism— contains a ‘contradiction that can easily drive one mad’: it ‘demands self- sufficiency,’ whilst simultaneously destroying that possibility by rendering its subjects ‘potentially or actually precarious.’[73] They give the example, pertinent to Edgerunners— of the precarity of ‘those who seek to gain an education at the cost of unpayable debt.’[74] Notably, Deleuze even described the ‘man’ of the control society as ‘man in debt.’[75]

For Butler, central to this precaritization is a ‘performative form of power’ that ‘circumscribes ‘the people.”[76] The ‘people’ are those capable of ‘conforming to the norm of self-sufficiency,’ i.e. by paying one’s innumerable service bills; those unable are precarious non-people. Butler’s ‘people’ is translated into Edgerunners’ ‘corpo,’ (someone in a position of corporate power) as David tells Gloria: “Anyone who’s not a true blue corpo gets shit on constantly.”[77] Edgerunners points to the centrality of algorithmic performativity in the designation of precarity, as it relies on the ‘continuous network’[78] of corporate power facilitated by informationalized technology such as David’s washing machine and apartment door. Capital-as-soveriegn receives data regarding their unprofitable non-conformity and always already decides to designate them non-people. It does so through an algorithm that literalises capital’s performative utterance by restricting their access to essential services. Butler suggests that precaritization culminates in ‘market rationality… deciding whose health and life should be protected and whose… should not,’ as those incapable of paying for health care become ‘potentially dispensable.’[79] Likewise, the Martinez’s precaritization reaches its peak in the climax of the first episode, as Gloria is severely injured in a random car accident. David awakens still strapped to his seat in the flipped-over car and, greeted with the sight the trauma team, whispers “thank God.”[80] However, after scanning his mother’s body, they announce that she’s “not a client” and should be left to “the city meat wagons,” their technology performatively designating her dispensable ‘meat.’[81]

Trauma team scan Gloria’s wounded body.[82]

The inversion of the above image speaks to the irrational, ‘upside-down’ nature of a system in which a trauma team employee devoted to a corporate dream is left for dead by her employer. The irony of this scene taking place moments after she has relayed her corporate dream for David is unmissable. Gloria’s subsequent death after “discount package” treatment in a back-alley hospital shows how the pursuit of corporate success through education places one under an unpayable debt that makes the consumption other services necessary to life impossible.[83] Later in the show, David’s love interest Lucy reveals that she was part of an Arasaka programme to raise skilled ‘net-runners’ (hackers).[84] She tells David that she was told she would “serve the world’s most powerful megacorp one day,” and that that was “the dream we were given, the dream we never questioned.”[85] Many of those involved in the programme died, leading Lucy to declare that “we were being killed to live someone else’s dream.”[86] These words encapsulate the irrationality of Gloria’s corporate dream as she subjects David and herself to a symbolic misery that inevitably culminates in death while pursuing a dream that is not her own, but capital’s.

However, Stiegler argues that while ‘those without access to consumption,’ (non-people) face the ‘liquidation of every reason for hope:’ the symbolic misery of precarity, ‘the consumers’ (people) face the ‘liquidation of libidinal energy’: the spirtual misery of a life devoid of desire.[87] For Steigler, ‘objects of belief are not existent,’ they are infinitely regressing ‘singularities’ which we aspire to, and which only ‘consist’ in our desirous pursuit of them.[88] He gives the example of the distinction between justice and law: ‘law is the positive and finite existence of that of which justice is the consistence’; ‘justice can only consist as an object of desire.’[89] Thus, ‘calculating these objects of belief… ruins them, because one can only calculate what is existent.’[90] As such, commodities and services, which capitalism gives a calculable value, cannot be objects of desire. This becomes all the more problematic in the context of cybercapitalism since, as we have seen, its algorithmic governmentality strips us of the capacity to decide whether to consume. In Stiegler’s terms, the algorithmic ‘short-circuiting’ (c.f. ‘destruction of… circuits through which the objects of spirit are constituted’[91]) of our ‘protentions’— ‘replaced by automatically generated protentions’— ‘impedes dreaming, wanting,’ ‘deciding’ and ‘thinking.’[92] Indeed, if ‘hope’ is ‘intrinsically tied’ to ‘reason’ or rational desire, then an algorithm that ‘overtakes reason’ attempts to calculate this desire, ‘dissolving… singularities,’ and by extension ‘all ends and all reasons hope.’[93] In her diagnosis of the cyborg condition of humanity, Harraway declares: ‘organisms have ceased to exist as objects of knowledge, giving way to… information processing devices.’[94] Thus, it is no surprise that a corporate fixer tells the cyborg Maine: “You are not being paid to think.”[95]

Under cybercapitalism, the rational desire for objects of belief is replaced by an automated compulsion to consume commodities of calculable value, which cannot be desired in any case. According to Stiegler, ‘when desire is liquidated’ it can ‘no longer accomplish’ its purpose of ‘sublimation’, that is, ‘the binding of the drives.’[96] As such, under cybercapitalism ‘it is the drives’— the urges of the id governed by the automated pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of unpleasure— ‘that rule.’[97] He calls this ‘desublimation.’[98] Stiegler continues: ‘since it remains necessary to continue selling the objects of industrial production,’ and the media of ITOs, capital ‘incites what remains when all desire is gone,’ ‘liberating the drives in the service of consumption.’[99] As such, capital’s algorithmic decision to enforce consumption is compounded by our drive-based decision to pursue pleasure ‘in over-consuming subsistence items, or in addictions, either of which may anaesthetize us to the loss of individuation.’[100] This phenomenon is apparent in Maine and David’s consumption of cybernetics, which itself becomes addictive. Dorio, Maine’s girlfriend, tells him: “All that chrome’s messing with your nerves… you gotta… reduce your load,” to which he responds: “Ain’t no way I’m gonna downgrade now… can’t stop running now,” before injecting himself with a stimulant drug.[101] The metaphor of ‘running’ elucidates how the consumer drive becomes an endless pursuit of a satisfaction that cannot reside in calculable commodities. Meanwhile, his drug consumption serves to show that, just as a drug addict does not decide to take more drugs, due to the exploitation of the drives by capital, the consumer no longer decides to consume, compounding the problem of decision-making algorithms. Likewise, when Lucy tells David to “scale back [his] cyberware,” he refuses, saying: “Mom and Maine, they all left me something to do.”[102]

Maine’s last words to David are: “keep running”— he bestows upon David the dream of endless cybernetic consumption, and he accepts. The problem is that consumption is not a dream but a drive. Early in the show, Lucy tells David that “Edgerunner” is “another word for cyberpunk,” suggesting that this consumerist ‘running’ is the inevitable fate of a cyberpunk.[104] ‘Edge’ is equally important, however, as Jimmy Kurosaki— a producer of virtual reality media— tells David:

Some metal’s simply not meant to mix with meat. Your organic body, your soul, gets pushed to the edge.[105]

The ‘edge’ on which cyberpunks run, then, is that between ‘metal’ and ‘meat,’ a process that necessarily culminates in the subordination of the ‘soul,’ or the spirit. Kurosaki’s position as digital media producer makes his words all the more applicable to our reality. Like cyberpunks, we allow ‘metal’ to permeate our lives through the consumption of ITO media, and our spirit will suffer for it. If Kurosaki’s warning of death applies to the precaritizing ‘dream’ of corporate success, then the alternative portends to the inexorable fall off the edge; the cyberpsychosis brought about by irrational consumer capitalism.

Cyberpsychosis

Cybercapitalism offers its subjects two ‘dreams’— epitomised by those of Gloria and Maine— both of which are irrational. Indeed, often a confrontation with the precarious, irrational consumption of the former leads to the adoption of the equally irrational, compulsive consumption of the latter: ‘symbolic misery leads irresistibly to spiritual misery.’[106] Stiegler argues that miserable subjects are ‘placed under control,’ which is worse than being ‘merely subjugated,’ alluding to the evolution of Deleuzian societies from Foucauldian.[107] As parts of the data Leviathan, subjects are controlled by algorithms that liquidate desire, and by the drives that reign in its place. The problem for cybercapitalism, then, lies in the possibility that subjects might be controlled by a drive other than the pleasure of consumption, namely ‘a pure death drive.’[108]

The pure death drive that emerges from the desublimation of spiritual misery is manifest Edgerunners’ phenomenon of cyberpsychosis. The connection between cyberpsychosis and technological consumption is hinted at from the opening, as the first victim of Colonel’s Norris’ rampage alludes to how his “mama [goes] on and on about online shopping.”[109] In fact, we only witness the rampage through David’s consumption of a virtual reality recording of massacre, solidifying the connection. This is affirmed when, in spite of Dorio’s warning, Maine is overcome by his cybernetics and retreats to a virtual dream-world.[110] The dream is the ‘royal road’ to the ‘unconscious mind,’[111] the domain of the drives, and so we might read his retreat as a symbolic possession by the death drive. He begins indiscriminately massacring the military police, before detonating numerous explosives, epitomising the kind of ‘drive-based and suicidal act’ Stiegler sees resulting from desublimation.[112] Maine, smeared with blood, asks an officer: “Was this my fault?” [113] The rhetorical question calls attention to the fact that a subject incapable of decision cannot be at fault, insinuating that the fault lies with cybercapital’s sovereign decision to control Maine’s consumption.

David’s cyberpsychosis begins after Maine’s death drives him to ‘keep running.’ While on a mission, David shoots a corporate employee in the head, then hallucinates mechanical structures erupting from the cavity:

Here, David seems to displace onto his victim the awareness that his own brain is being poached by technology. Recalling the moment later, David sees images of the deceased Gloria and Maine.[116] This detail implies that the cause of his technological consumption and resulting psychosis lies in the symbolic ‘death’ of his two dreams. Indeed, his cybernetic addiction begins when he is confronted by Gloria’s precaritization and intensifies after Maine’s cyberpsychotic suicide.

David reels from Gloria’s death before installing the Sandevistan.[117]

In both situations, faced with the symbolic misery of an irrational existence conveyed in his lifeless stare, David turns to the consumption that capital demands of him. In the final episode, this consumption, like Maine’s, drives him to cyberpsychosis, as he rampages through Night City. David scales Arasaka tower, saying: “Mom, look,” before jumping off the edge— of the tower and of sanity— literally fulfilling Gloria and Maine’s dreams.[119] The implication is clear: their cybercapitalist dreams are fraudulent and the consumption necessary to pursue them leads inexorably to the same thing: the misery and death-driven violence of cyberpsychosis.

Conclusion: Hope

Stiegler titles the final chapter of Societies ‘Hope and Politics.’ He argues that ‘the question of politics is… that of justice,’ the ‘social rationality’ by which ‘human beings… can and must desire to live together.’[121] Our only hope in the struggle against cybercapitalist misery is to sublimate our emerging drives by pursuing an object of desire, its very singularity and non-existence resisting capital’s grammatizing tendency. In Edgerunners, this object is not justice but David and Lucy’s love. Lucy’s full name— Lucyna[122]— means moon, and she tells David that it is her “dream” to visit the moon in order to escape the “prison” of Night City.[123] The pair spend their first evening together in a virtual simulation of the moon’s surface and later share their first kiss under its light:

Stiegler calls sublimation a ‘sublime acting out that expresses a desire,’ and indeed the sublime quality of the moon comes to characterize their romantic interactions.[125] He writes that sublimation is ‘above all… critique, of the order of transgression,’ [126] and so the sublime nature of Lucy’s dream becomes a transgressive act of political resistance, a means of escaping the ‘grid of control’ Harraway feels is imposed on a cyborg planet.[127] For Stiegler, ‘taking care of a love ‘object,’ that is, of a person,’ is ‘the most exquisite form of’ that ‘savoir-vivire’ (knowing how to live) that is necessary for individuation.[128] It is no surprise, then, that David overcomes his cyberpsychosis long enough to give his life in order to buy time for Lucy to escape the fallout of his rampage, leaving her with the message: “wish we could go to the moon together.”[129] David sublimates his death drive into the spiritually enriching “wish” for the love that Lucy’s dream represents, allowing her to reach the moon in the show’s final scene and testifying to the possibility of resistance. Significantly, the pair first reach the moon through the consumption of technology, betraying a hint of traditional cyberpunk ‘optimism about virtual reality’ and the potential utility of technology in the pursuit of objects of desire.[130] Nonetheless, the amalgamation of cybernetics— that is, computers and control— and capital has made cyberpsychosis the norm; that the basic psychological function of sublimation has become a transgressive act betrays the success of control and the depth of our misery.

Endnotes

[1] Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, ‘Let You Down,’ dir. Hiroyuki Imaishi, Netflix video, September 13, 2022, https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81054853?s=i&trkid=255639042&vlang=en&clip=81612906.

[2] Bernard Stiegler, Disbelief and Discredit, trans. Daniel Ross, volume 2: Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected Individuals (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 11.

[3] Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control,’ October 59 (1992): 3-7. 3.

[4] Stiegler, Societies, 2.

[5] Deleuze, 3-4.

[6] Deleuze, 3, 5-6.

[7] Deleuze, 6.

[8] Deleuze, 6.

[9] Deleuze, 6.

[10] Deleuze, 6.

[11] Deleuze, 5.

[12] ‘Cybernetic, adj.’, OED Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), https://www-oed-com.ezproxy.st-andrews.ac.uk/view/Entry/273740, (accessed April 12, 2023).

[13] ‘Cybernetic, adj.’, OED Online.

[14] Donna Harraway, A Cyborg Manifesto (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 15.

[15] Stiegler, Societies, 8.

[16] Stiegler, Societies, 2.

[17] Steigler, Societies, 2-4, 67.

[18] Steigler, Societies, 3-4.

[19] Steigler, Societies, 4.

[20] Sean McQueen, Deleuze and Baudrillard: From Cyberpunk to Biopunk (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 4-5.

[21] William Gibson, Neuromancer, quoted in N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 5.

[22] McQueen, 1.

[23] McQueen, 5.

[24] Jim McGuigan, Cool Capitalism, quoted in McQueen, 5.

[25] Caroline Alphin, Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction (Oxon: Routledge, 2021).

[26] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1887), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/index.htm.

[27] Marx.

[28] Marx.

[29] Shoshana Zuboff, ‘Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization,’ Journal of Information Technology 30 (2015): 75-89. 75.

[30] Zuboff, 78.

[31] Zuboff, 83.

[32] White House, Big Data: seizing opportunities, preserving values (Report for the President), quoted in Zuboff, 84.

[33] J. L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words: The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 6.

[34] Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, ‘Crisis, Crisis, Crisis; or, The Temporality of Networks’ in The Nonhuman Turn, eds. Richard Gruisin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 139-166. 152.

[35] Stiegler, Societies, 64.

[36] Stiegler, Societies, 64.

[37] Stiegler, Societies, 64.

[38] Stiegler, Societies, 64.

[39] Stiegler, Societies, 65.

[40] Bernard Stiegler, The Neganthropocene, trans. Daniel Ross (London: Open Humanities Press, 2018), 177 [My emphasis].

[41] Stiegler, Neganthropocene, 47.

[42] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Hamilton: McMaster University, n.d), 106.

[43] Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 13.

[44] John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, quoted in Chun, 141.

[45] Zuboff, 82.

[46] Zuboff, 82.

[47] Chun, 147.

[48] Chun, 147.

[49] Hayles, 13-14.

[50] Zuboff, 82.

[51] Harraway, 6.

[52] Edgerunners, ‘Let You Down.’

[53] Edgerunners, ‘Let You Down.’

[54] Gul Dag, ‘The Body Project: Transhumanism, Posthumanism and Modification in Twentieth Century Cyberpunk,’ PhD diss., (University of Hull, 2020), 130.

[55] Robert Latham, Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs, and the Culture of Consumption, quoted in McQueen 6.

[56] McQueen, 6.

[57] Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, ‘Like a Boy,’ dir. Hiroyuki Imaishi, Netflix video, September 13, 2022, https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81054853?s=i&trkid=255639042&vlang=en&clip=81612906.

[58] McQueen, 5.

[59] Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, ‘All Eyez on Me,’ dir. Hiroyuki Imaishi, Netflix video, September 13, 2022, https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81054853?s=i&trkid=255639042&vlang=en&clip=81612906.

[60] Stiegler, Societies, 67.

[61] Edgerunners, ‘Let you Down.’

[62] Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, ‘Smooth Criminal,’ dir. Hiroyuki Imaishi, Netflix video, September 13, 2022, https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81054853?s=i&trkid=255639042&vlang=en&clip=81612906.

[63] Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, ‘Lucky You,’ dir. Hiroyuki Imaishi, Netflix video, September 13, 2022, https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81054853?s=i&trkid=255639042&vlang=en&clip=81612906.

[64] Steigler, Societies, 4.

[65] Stiegler, Societies, 17.

[66] Edgerunners, ‘Let You Down.’

[67] Stiegler, Societies, 41.

[68] Edgerunners, ‘Let You Down.’

[69] Edgerunners, ‘Let You Down.’

[70] Edgerunners, ‘Let You Down.’

[71] Alphin.

[72] Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 10.

[73] Butler, 14.

[74] Butler, 17.

[75] Deleuze, 6.

[76] Butler, 3, 6.

[77] Edgerunners, ‘Let You Down.’

[78] Deleuze, 7.

[79] Butler, 11-12, 14.

[80] Edgerunners, ‘Let You Down.’

[81] Edgerunners, ‘Let You Down.’

[82] Edgerunners, ‘Let You Down.’

[83] Edgerunners, ‘Let You Down.’

[84] Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, ‘Stronger,’ dir. Hiroyuki Imaishi, Netflix video, September 13, 2022, https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81054853?s=i&trkid=255639042&vlang=en&clip=81612906.

[85] Edgerunners, ‘Stronger.’

[86] Edgerunners, ‘Stronger.’

[87] Stiegler, Societies, 65-66.

[88] Stiegler, Societies, 9, 22.

[89] Stiegler, Societies, 8-9.

[90] Stiegler, Societies, 67.

[91] Stiegler, Societies, 3-4.

[92] Stiegler, Neganthropocene, 46.

[93] Stiegler, Societies, 4 and Stiegler, Neganthropocene, 94, 95, 100.

[94] Harraway, 35.

[95] Edgerunners, ‘Smooth Criminal.’

[96] Steigler, Societies, 24.

[97] Stiegler, Societies, 24,

[98] Stiegler, Societies, 8.

[99] Stiegler, Societies, 23.

[100] Stiegler, Societies, 53.

[101] Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, ‘Girl on Fire,’ dir. Hiroyuki Imaishi, Netflix video, September 13, 2022, https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81054853?s=i&trkid=255639042&vlang=en&clip=81612906.

[102] Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, ‘Stay,’ dir. Hiroyuki Imaishi, Netflix video, September 13, 2022, https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81054853?s=i&trkid=255639042&vlang=en&clip=81612906.

[103] Edgerunners, ‘Stronger’ [Both images].

[104] Edgerunners, ‘Like a Boy.’

[105] Edgerunners, ‘All Eyez on Me.’

[106] Stiegler, Societies, 2.

[107] Stiegler, Societies, 11.

[108] Stiegler, Societies, 6.

[109] Edgerunners, ‘Let You Down.’

[110] Edgerunners, ‘Girl on Fire.’

[111] Sigmund Freud, “The Interpretation of Dreams,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, volume 5: The Interpretation of Dreams (SECOND PART) and On Dreams (London: Hogarth Press, 1910), 339-626. 608.

[112] Stiegler, Societies, 9.

[113] Edgerunners, ‘Girl on Fire.’

[114] Edgerunners, ‘Girl on Fire.’

[115] Edgerunners, ‘Stay.’

[116] Edgerunners, ‘Stay.’

[117] Edgerunners, ‘Let You Down.’

[118] Edgerunners, ‘Girl on Fire.’

[119] Edgerunners, ‘My Moon My Man.’

[120] Edgerunners, ‘My Moon My Man.’

[121] Stiegler, Societies, 9, 18.

[122] ‘Lucina, n.’, OED Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), https://www-oed-com.ezproxy.st-andrews.ac.uk/view/Entry/273740, (accessed April 13, 2023).

[123] Edgerunners, ‘Like a Boy.’

[124] Edgerunners, ‘Lucky You.’

[125] Stiegler, Societies, 31.

[126] Stiegler, Societies, 31.

[127] Harraway, 15.

[128] Stiegler, Societies, 68, 82.

[129] Edgerunners, ‘My Moon My Man.’

[130] McQueen, 12.

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