ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Jean Baudrillard’s philosophy represents a kind of cyberpunk media theory, engaging with the philosophical issues of simulation and simulacra present in much of cyberpunk film and literature. The chapter explores Baudrillard’s influence upon the Wachowskis’s film The Matrix and addresses the interplay of cyberpunk novels with virtual worlds, such as Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and its influence on the development of Second Life. The chapter also goes on to show evolving depictions of cyberspace in William Gibson’s Spook Country, Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, the Black Mirror episode, “Nosedive,” and Cory Doctorow’s For the Win. Overall, this chapter argues that the move from digitization to hyperimmersion represents a turn away from the oral-to-literary trajectory observed by such media theorists as Walter Ong towards a more oral culture, and finds cyberpunk a key mode in interrogating this societal shift.
