The Neon Queen: Cebu as a Cyberpunk Landscape

The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.

—William Gibson

A darkened street slicked with rain and refuse. Rush-hour commuters milling past storefronts, pawnshops, and low-rate gyms like ants along a monotonous column. Their heads are partially concealed by hoodies and jacket collars, but their dour faces, soaked with sweat and drizzle, reflect one of either two kinds of radiance: the green, red, and yellow lights given off by the aforementioned establishments, which are doubly brightened by the muddy water that has pooled over uneven concrete; or the blue-white brilliance of their smartphones hovering at stomach-level. The barks emanating from transport conductors and street-vending merchants resonate across old, grime-ridden buildings and newer, more pristine facades alike. Tires whir, smoke billows from mufflers, loudspeakers from nearby malls boom with news of bargains, and chats among friends and companions are reduced to indiscernible babbles.

Meanwhile, here I am, walking past all these sensations, in the midst of fellow city-dwellers whose names I will never know, whose lives I will never delve deeper into. I hitch the straps of my bag, wary and watchful of my surroundings, well-aware of the repute of this bustling part of town, and I walk up the street, where the barking of conductors looms loudest, so I can catch the next ride home.

What may be construed as an atmospheric opening to a cyberpunk story may very well be a personal account of a post-downpour trek down Pelaez Street and into the heart of Colon. Such writing goes to show just how much a gritty description of Metro Cebu’s storied downtown district could very well overlap with the “high-tech, low life” theme many science-fiction authors of the 1980s wrote about, and which many filmmakers have since made more tangible. These writings, marked by a “world-weary cynicism” while at the same time being hailed by more jaded, like-minded critics as “the future of SF” (Harris-Fain, 42), clearly took inspiration from the rise of corporatism and mass privatization that was the hallmark of the aforementioned decade in the capitalist West, and propagated throughout much of the developing world. The imagery of the universes so intricately crafted by the likes of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson were equally emulated by Hollywood, with directors like Ridley Scott, Mamoru Oshii, and the Wachowskis producing films that took on this “black-leather-and-chrome surface gloss” of a sci-fi literary genre, as Lawrence Person put it, adapting it into a more “uniquely suited” medium that had the distinct advantage of melding the visual and the auditory.

Before proceeding any further, though, it’s worth examining first what exactly is cyberpunk—or more specifically, what constitutes its aesthetic?

This science fiction sub-genre originally takes its name from the Bruce Bethke short story “Cyberpunk,” but it was William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer that really gave this noir-inspired branch of science fiction its literary archetype. Two years prior, however, in 1982, the Harrison Ford–starring Blade Runner, itself an adaptation (albeit a loose one) of a seminal sci-fi Philip K. Dick novel, practically breathed life into this sci-fi genre that set itself apart with its alienated and gritty settings and architecture (or as Puschak specifies, “its giant archologies, neon-laced storefronts, probing lights, and rain”), which was a stark contrast to the utopian, operatic visions many other past sci-fi works imagined. The dominance of corporations and a well-imagined hyperbolic peak in cybernetics allowed storytellers of this genre to create characters who were not totally human, partially machine, and therefore inextricably a cog in the corporate mechanism. This explains why a lot of cyberpunk works like to explore the question of what it is exactly that makes us human.

For the purposes of brevity and expediency required of this write-up, I shall restrict my description of Metro Cebu’s “cyberpunk-ness” to the select pop culture category of advertisements—a category that otherwise would not exist and is heavily reliant on the preponderance of consumerism and commodification, both of which are the delinquent offspring of modern global capitalism. Throughout this write-up and to fit the purposes thereof, I shall frequently refer to cyberpunk as an aesthetic of film, thereby linking the two forms of ads and film.

Ads

One of Blade Runner’s earliest scenes features an ad blimp hovering over a futuristic 2019 Los Angeles layered with smoke stacks, neon lights, and shadowed buildings. A glum, trench coat­–sporting Harrison Ford looks up at it. He is a stiff, immovable rock in a sea of Angelenos babbling in multiple tongues and dressed in equally drab garb. The voiceover accompanying the brilliant blimp ad proclaims, “A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure…” This clip, while brief, is just one of several others like it peppered throughout the sci-fi masterpiece. The pervasiveness of ads brings to the fore the uncontested dominance of consumerism and commodification, which are often critiqued and satirized through exaggeration in many cyberpunk narratives. The city-dweller, living an existence that is dwarfed and rendered insignificant by the many high-rise buildings that mark his urban habitat, is bombarded with an overwhelming amount of commercial information and detail, intent on goading him into shelling out money in exchange for an ostensibly better life. In this sense then, does the future as depicted in Blade Runner not mirror our own?

Apart from the many billboards that cast shadows over significant swathes of our city, a similar—though maybe not as blatant—proliferation of advertisements is well on display along Pelaez Street, one of Cebu City’s oldest commercial avenues, and a thoroughfare I frequent on a near-weekly basis. Along this route, there is a veritable hodgepodge of commercial establishments and signs that virtually bear no relation with each other. Banks, bakeshops, and bars set up shop right next to or within a stone’s throw of one another. The signboards marking these more noticeable establishments are placed alongside smaller ads and fixtures as well: cheap rates for love motels, pictures of siomai or siopao for food-stall tarps, and even the ever-ubiquitous ATM (automatic tubig machine). In a better-regulated world, some of these establishments wouldn’t even be together in the same district, let along the same street. Take PS Bank, for example, which is situated just a few meters away from a streetside gym.

Consequently, the waste produced from such areas ends up being rather eclectic: withdrawal receipts, candy wrappers, expectorated gum, crumpled flyers, and discarded ATM plastics litter the gutters and sidewalks, and reduce the maws of drain holes to less than half of their intended size. As a result, floods are a common occurrence in downtown Cebu.

And this is all just at street level. If one were to gaze upward, even more ads in the form of billboards and mall logos pierce the polluted sky, providing much temptation for the minds more susceptible to the most insidious modes of consumerism.

Mark Bould sums up such a situation rather aptly:

[T]he nation-state withers away while global economic systems serve the interests of corporations and their compradors; massive ecological disaster is just part of the background noise; the marginalized, precarious majority scrabble a hard living in the ruins; and collective resistance is replaced by the privatized dissent of subcultural posturing and dabbling in grey and black economies. (92)

If we are unable to see a similarity in his description of the typical cyberpunk milieu, and in our observations of hive-like downtown avenues like Pelaez and Colon, then we have already arrived at the grimmest of futures that the sci-fi authors of three decades ago had warned us about.

Continuums

In the following section, I shall discuss the cyberpunk genre and some common types of ads the modern Cebuano is typically exposed to, and relate these to the ranges of choice in a text (or “continuums,” to use the terminology we employed in our Pop Culture classes). Should my interpretations seem dubious or shoddy from the reader’s perspective, this is ultimately because of the multiple ways one can read and evaluate a text. Occasionally, the location of such texts in the continuums I shall further elaborate on below may shift or interchange, depending on the individual critic.  

The cyberpunk genre in itself tends to be a discreet sort of text, given its distinct boundaries as a sci-fi sub-genre. While numerous other “sub-sub-genres” have since stemmed from (as well as rooted their nomenclature in) cyberpunk—namely steampunk, dieselpunk, biopunk—the noir-inspired conventions are still there, particularly in the rendering of the cynical loner protagonist whose body is enhanced by cybernetics. While the numerous gadgets many currently use (cell phones, tablets, laptops, etc.) may not be as built-in as those of the conventional cyberpunk characters, this does not mean we are free of the influence of electronic technology altogether. Our smartphones, for instance, have since become such an integral part of our lives that it’s near-impossible to imagine going a whole day without them. Being the more urban sort of Filipino, Cebuanos are especially glued to their phones and are even willing to check online updates daily or even by the minute. Such checking is done anywhere—in cafes, on the street, in clunky public transport—even at the risk of the personal device being swiped right out of one’s hands. The pervasiveness of phones is made even more pronounced by phone ads of the more diffuse sort, which typically don’t address an individual’s need for a phone per se, but rather capitalize on the urge to feel modern, hip, and ahead of everyone else. Ads of more high-end phone brands are typically guilty of this: an ad for the iPhone 4, for instance, incorporates the phrase “This changes everything. Again.” Local brands like Cherry Mobile, on the other hand, reach out to the lower strata of society by employing trendy Filipino celebrities as endorsers, in the hopes of reeling in emulative fans.

While cyberpunk narratives may appear pretty similar in aesthetic, they nevertheless explore broad themes of “politics, corruption, and social upheaval” in such a way that the worlds of the “powerful mega-corporations and private security forces” and “the dark and gritty underworld of illegal trade, gangs, drugs, and vice” can converge; if not in terms of space, then at least through the interactions between characters. On the other hand, while the whole medium of advertisement is just as broad, the manners in which many ads are tailored can be pretty narrowed down by comparison. I return to my example of smartphones in the previous paragraph. Smartphone marketing is typically centered on the consumer’s need to own something so he can keep abreast of current trends. Higher-end brands employ slogans, such as the Samsung Galaxy 8’s “Unbox your phone,” to evoke that ostensible need for ownership. Local brands, meanwhile, bring their affordability to the fore, specifically by enumerating the device’s specs and less-than-10K prices in their ads, thereby in essence informing the consumer, “You too can own a smartphone, even on a shoestring budget.”

Cell phone ads, though, may be taken in their original form as Cebuanos are barraged on a daily basis by some version of promotional material. Tarps advertising phone models at bargain prices, or signboards situated in front of gadget stores announcing the arrival of the latest models, are a common sight across Cebu City, more so in commercial hubs like the downtown area and malls. By comparison, however, the cyberpunk aesthetic, having undergone numerous iterations and treatments with every new film being released, leans more toward the newer side of the continuum. Every filmmaker (or novelist, in the case of novels) takes his liberties with the genre; however, if they wish for their movie to still fall squarely beneath the cyberpunk umbrella, they will have to adhere to previously set conventions and aesthetics laid down by artists who have contributed to the genre in the past—chief among these being the dystopic metropolitan setting, the isolated and jaded characters, and themes of humanity versus machinery.

Cyberpunk works are meant to be reactive in nature. In fact, the cyberpunk genre itself is a “reaction to the information age—the age of the personal computer,” thereby making it even more relevant and relatable to folks of our time. As I’ve mentioned above, many of us are now more reliant than ever on our personal devices. At the same time, however, there’s still a good chunk of our population that is homeless, underpaid, and suffering numerous other ills perpetrated by corporations and the complicit state. Simultaneously, several condominium projects and similar amenities, which are usually quite expensive and unaffordable to the general public, continue to rise and alter our skyline, further alienating the wealthy from the destitute folks at ground-level. It’s quite plain how ads—particularly in the form of massive tarps looming over our city’s major highways—contribute to the proliferation of such costly real estate projects, with a number of them depicting happy families relishing their well-trimmed lawns and air-conditioned interiors. Developers even work in slogans like “Every day is a holiday” (Amisa) and “Maayo ang kinabuhi diri” (32 Sanson), and “Life on Top Is Now Yours, Cebu” (Horizons 101), glossing over the alienating effects with the brush of solitude. All the while they ignore the societal and environmental impacts of these infrastructure projects: gentrification, congestion, soil erosion, et cetera. In a sense then, condo ads are rather proactive in nature, creating their own context of “a better life” for the potential buyer.

Conclusion

While writing this piece, I couldn’t help but recall a discussion I had with an old high school friend of mine and fellow science-fiction enthusiast a little over a year ago. Just like me, this friend of mine was once partial toward private corporations. Such a stance isn’t surprising, especially among Filipinos, given how seemingly organized and efficient a number of private-sector services and projects are when compared to government-backed ones. (IT Park, the place where we met up, and the surrounding Apas-Lahug area, is a perfect microcosm of this contrast; take a look at said park’s interior and compare it with the sidewalks and roads of the two adjacent barangays.) In fact, his initial utopian vision of Cebu was one where a private developer like AboitizLand would take over every square meter of public road and sidewalk and rehabilitate these.

But on that particular night of our meeting, he told me that one of the reasons why he has since gone over to the side advocating for more proactive government regulation was because of some cyberpunk-spurred reflections of his. “I imagine cyberpunk is the future where the free market has basically taken over every inch of society,” he told me, “and government has largely taken a back seat.” And I could see his point. The cyberpunk world is one where commodity fetishism is placed front and center in the form of a slew of flashy ads, and the wealthy who benefit from the profits of these advertised products isolate themselves from the rest of the populace, residing on the highest floors of sky-high condominiums, commuting in expensive cars, and fixing their attentions on high-end gadgetry.

Had I known better then, or perhaps had I a bit more time to ruminate, I would have corrected my friend and replied, “But aren’t we already living in a cyberpunk world…or at least a scarily close approximation of it?”

Works Cited

Bould, Mark. “The Futures Market: American Utopias.” Eds. Eric Carl Link and Gerry Canavan. The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Fancher, Hampton, et al. Blade Runner. Warner Bros., 1982.

Harris-Fain, Darren. “Dangerous Visions: New Wave and Post-New Wave Science Fiction.” Eds. Eric Carl Link and Gerry Canavan. The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Person, Lawrence. “Notes toward a Postcyberpunk Manifesto.” Slashdot, BizX, 9 Oct. 1999, 10:00 a.m., slashdot.org/story/99/10/08/2123255/notes-toward-a-postcyberpunk-manifesto.

Puschak, Evan. Blade Runner: The Other Side of Modernity. The Nerdwriter, 28 Oct. 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXRlGULqHxg.

---. Vlog #40 - Cyberpunk. The Nerdwriter, 24 Oct. 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=XX_jd28swh8.

“What Is Cyberpunk?” Neon Dystopia, www.neondystopia.com/what-is-cyberpunk/.