Let me tell you a fictional story. It’s the story of a tribe of people, a bunch of weirdos, socially isolated teens and young adults who spent all of their time on the ol’ mighty internet.

Now, who the heck  spends all their time on the internet? What a bunch of losers, right! Wait, what do you mean, everyone? Fuck… Well, let’s pretend it’s 1990, or something like that. (This is an allegory not aiming at being a historic rundown of cyberpunk, I know it doesn't originate from the 90's.)

There, now our weirdoes are real weirdoes. Because no one spent their days on the big wide web, back then. Life happened in a real-time streaming flux, through nature’s vr goggles : the eyes. You wanted to see stuff happen? You had to step outside. But our weirdoes didn’t step outside. They rather stayed inside, sitting comfortably (or not) infront of their computer screen. Why, you ask? Who knows! They might have anxiety, health problems, chronic conditions, depression or some form of undiagnosed autism, because - remember - it’s the 90’s and the autism lore expansion wasn’t out yet.

Time gets long and dull through, alone inside a room with a computer, so our weirdoes have to make do with what they have. They might not be able, or be willing, to go outside, but they’d still like to see stuff happen. It’s human nature, it’s an instinct even. There is something powerful within us that will move us, almost unconsciously, towards finding a community. Finding other people, and knowing what these people are up to. What are they doing, how, why, when? Humans die if they are alone. They die if they are isolated, and most importantly, they die if stuff doesn’t happen. So our weirdoes miraculously find a way, as does life.

Animated by some sort of quasi-surnatural drive, looking desperately through the meanders of the internet, they find eachothers, they find people who are like them, they find people who are not like them, but the most important part is that they find people there. And that, my friends, is the birth of the Internet Society.

You might have heard of internet culture, such as internet memes and so on and so on - (mind you, what is known as internet culture today is by far more akin to popular culture than what it really is) - and I wonder, did you ever take the hint that for a thing to have a culture, it needs to also have its own regroupment of people who share and constitute it? Every culture has its society. But who owns the internet culture? Well, the Internet Society, of course. That’s you and me - but for now, it’s just the weirdoes I was talking about. They find eachother through the power of their sheer animal instinct, from the immaterial drive within, they create these connections with others - and surprisingly, with other groups that also exist - and they become the Internet Society.

Now, to be on the internet, and be part of the Internet Society wasn’t particularly easy back then. You’d need to know a bunch of stuff, go through IRC, P2P, know precise websites or even make your own websites, maybe even know how to use SSH and other complex-abreviated-protocols that make you sound smarter than you are to the average human. All of this to say that, existing online was hard. It was not asuser-friendly as it is today. If you wanted a page of your own, no one would hold your hand and give you facebook, instagram or X-formerly-known-as-twitter. You needed to make your own stuff. Heck, even myspace, when it came along, had a fair bit of DIY involved. The Internet society had to go through that. Every single weirdo out there had to find their community, their forum, their IRC chat, their little corner of the internet, or to make their own. And not every weirdo was a computer scientist, most were only kids from 15 to 20 years old. And can you guess what happened? Piracy.

Well, not exactly Piracy piracy. But when you don’t know how to make a website, or how to turn your background black on your custom myspace profile, or when you don’t have a single clue about how to connect to an IRC or how to make your own, you’d just… ask someone for help! And if you had no friends, you’d just jack the code or the software someone else made, and figure it out. Ah, the good ol’ days…! But, that’s not fair! - Nothing was fair back then! It wasn’t considered bad or good in any way - it was just how things were. People wanted to do stuff, and for things to happen, and only knew one way to get that done, so they did it.

It was almost expected that most people were somewhat script kiddies fiddling around with stuff they didn’t come up with and didn’t fully understand. That’s how trends started to emerge amongst groups of weirdoes. That’s why some myspace design became typical, why some ASCII art and emoji design, or expressions were passed around and became cult. No one really knows who came up with RawrXD, but all the emo kids shared it amongst themselves to the point where it became part of their cultural identity. The same goes with our little group of weirdoes.

After finding eachother online, they fiddle around and have a bunch of wired, cyber-fun on their cyber-land. They make a forum, they make a chatroom, and they find of other groups of people. And then, inevitably, conflict arises. Maybe some weirdo had a weak password, maybe some other-group-weirdo had a bruteforcer, but the forum gets hacked and spammed with blasphemities. Oh no! But not to worry, the weirdoes know who did it : the otherweirdoes ! And so the weirdoes start to seek revenge, and one weirdo comes up with this nice little .exe file that they found somewhere  on the internet. They call it a DDOSer, and apparently it just shuts down a server. It has something to do with the IP and the Internet, who knows how it works! So the weirdoes share the software amongst eachother and they begin DDOSSing the otherweirdoes’s website. And it works! Great! The feeling is exhilerating and the power is intense. The geopolitical microcosm of the Internet Society is in shambles, and little do they know, through that piracy, through that use of some random dude’s software, through code they didn’t even understand, little did they know, they invented something. Something that would later be known as Cyberpunk.

See, movies and videogames (cursed be 2077 for the false image it gave us) have portrayed cyberpunk as something very far from what it actually was, and still is at its core. It’s not about tall skyscrappers, mega-corporation, body augmentations or playing GTA in a futuristic setting (cursed be you, 2077). When Bruce Bethke wrote Cyberpunk, his short story that gave a name to the genre, he made up the term intentionally. He wanted it to be a buzzword, something that sounded good and that would stick in people’s head. It was an obvious combination of Cyber and Punk, because that’s what it was about. Reckless teenagers, little shits with no morals, no ethics, no future. Punks in the real sense of the term, back then. At least from the perspective of the non-punks. What do you get when little good-for-nothing lowlives stop going outside and stay in their room all day, wired up to the web? You get people stealing code left and right, using and tweaking softwares they’re not fully able to understand, and basically just doing shit because shit needs to happen. You get Cyber-Punks. Nolifes. Geeks. Weirdoes. (Who did not look at all like the traditional leather-jacket and dyed-hair punks (looking at you, 2077…))

Of course through time and enough blind-tweaking and playing around, most of the weirdoes would come to understand what the heck they were doing all along, and slowly but surely learn how to code. How to manage a network. To learn how the DDOS software actually worked, and how to make their own, and they’d move on to javascript injection and all sorts of jolly piracy. But that’s only a side effect of how things were back then on the web - inaccessible.

They only learned how to do it, and how to do it well, because there were no other way to do it. And they learned all of that through piracy. Copy and paste from other weirdoes, tweaking with advices from another weirdo, etc. It was a whole organic system, just as it should be. The Internet Society was feeding on itself, modifying its very DNA with each copy and paste, replicating and multiplicating and expanding itself. The culture was mutating, and thus, evolving. You see, i’m one to believe that our popular definition of living entities is very limited.

What is a living entity, anyway? Something that eats, something that acts on the world, something that has desires and a direction, something that evolves. To me, lots of things fill these criterias. Capitalism fills them. Depression fills them. Cyberpunk fills them. Not every edible thing is material. Anxiety feeds on your attention, for example. If you just stop paying attention to the things that worry you- they cease to be! and if you forget about them for long enough, the anxiety will simply starve to death in your brain as the neuron pathways it built to stay alive every time you think of Worrying-thing-number-five is mentioned up there, dies out from not being used anymore. And the next time you’ll think of that worrying thing, the anxiety won’t come up, because you starved it to death. The pathway dried. You killed your anxiety, and for it to die, it had to be alive in the first place.

Moving on to cyberpunk, that’s exactly what it is. An entity of its own, that mutates through self-interaction - and interaction with other entities as well, but mostly through self interaction. Members of the Internet Society copying each other, tweaking it, evolving themselves in the process and allowing the whole entity to evolve with these mutations.

But today - oh, today! The big old capital infiltrated almost every corner of the net, and in the process brought with it its cult of followers : the normies. That’s right weirdoes, move along, here comes a wave of normal people driven by the big entertainment industry. They will live with you now, online, right here, to consume media specifically designed to please them. The end goal? Money of course! The juicy business of selling stuff, selling user data, selling ads, all of that so they can scroll traditional media with a twist: they can do it from their bedrooms now! What once was the land of weirdoes, where the entities of the web spoke, has been invaded by other entities. The entities of capitalism and of popular media. And these entities dominated the web, so well that everything that was once only possible through Piracy became easy and accessible to everyone. You want your own webpage? Here is Instagram, facebook, twitter! All ready to use within 5 minutes, with no prior knowledge of anything. designed for you, not by you. Want music? Here is all the music possible. Don’t want to pay for it? go to youtube! Everything suddenly became more accessible to everyone and the need for piracy, the need for copy-and-paste tweaking, and the need for cyber-punks to be a part of the Internet Society vanished. Nowadays, people wouldn’t understand, they would ask : Why are you stealing that person’s code instead of learning how it works and doing it yourself? or why are you copying that person’s musical style instead of being original?

They would ask all these questions because now that everything is so accessible, ready to use, ready to consume, creation is no longer a necessity to them, but a luxury. Why would you need to create something so bad, you’d pick parts and bits from others until it works, instead of just taking all your time to learn and do it yourself? Back then, it was a necessity to create, not a luxury. People did with that they had. Nowadays, we have everything, so why do anything? And just like that, the weirdoes disappeared even deeper in the meanders of the web, so deep that barely any can survive down there, and in such a state, they can’t reproduce properly and evolve. Tiny communities of 3 or 5 people, suffocating in barren discord servers, waiting to fade and be forgotten about. Because hear me out - Culture is NOT diy. Culture is copy/paste and tweaking. It’s reproduce and mutate. Punks have mohawks because they saw one person do it and reproduced it. Industrial music is a genre because someone heard it and thought “I want to make that too”, and copied it.

The moral of the story is this : steal that code. Steal that sound. If someone does cool shit, do the same. You are entitled to your culture, so it’s not really stealing anyway. And if your subculture is nascent, new and doesn’t have any codes, you have to assimilate things to it anyway, you can’t hand-draw from nothing like you were a divinity or something, it has to come from somewhere, and that’s *okay*. And even if your subculture is not new, assimilate cool things anyway, or else it will die. It needs to eat. It needs to reproduce and mutate, and to evolve, or it will die.

DIY goes hand in hand with stealing from others. Hell, you probably did not invent any of the words you use to speak every day, and that speaks volume on the importance of *taking things* and making new stuff with it.

When everything becomes so convenient that you don’t need to create, you don’t need to steal. If you don’t steal, you don’t evolve. If you don’t evolve, you die.

The end of piracy is the end of culture, and the end of DIY. It’s also the end of cyberpunk.