2010: Cyberpunk World

Speaking as a neutral observer with exactly zero opinion on any political question, and not even a cyberpunk reader given that I’ve read about two such novels in my life: Is it just me, or do the last few months’ global news headlines read like they were ghostwritten by Neal Stephenson?

I wonder if we may look back on 2010 as the year it became widely understood that we now live in a cyberpunk world. Many of 2010’s top stories read like sci-fi:

• Stuxnet: Sovereign nations (apparently) carry out successful attacks on each other with surgically crafted malware — viruses and worms that target specific nuclear facilities, possibly causing more damage and delay to their targets’ weapons programs than might have been achieved with a conventional military strike.
• Wikileaks: Stateless ‘Net organizations operating outside national laws fight information battles with major governments, up to and including the strongest industrial and military superpowers. The governments react by applying political pressure to powerful multinational corporations to try to force the stateless organizations off the ‘Net and cut off their support and funding, but these efforts succeed only temporarily as the target keeps moving and reappearing.
• Anonymous: Small vigilante groups of private cybergunners retaliate by (or just latch onto a handy excuse to go) carrying out global attacks on the websites of multinational corporations, inflicting enough damage on Visa and Mastercard to temporarily take them off the ‘Net, while being repelled by cyberfortresses like Amazon and Paypal that have stronger digital defenses. But before we get too confident about Amazon’s strength, remember that this definitely ain’t the biggest attack they’ll ever see, just a 21st-century-cyberwar hors d’oeuvre: Who were these global attackers? About 100 people, many of them teenagers.
• Assange: Charismatic cyberpersonalities operating principally on the ‘Net live as permanent residents of no nation, and roam the world (until arrested) wherever they can jack in, amid calls for their arrest and/or assassination.
• Kinect: Your benevolent (you hope) living room game console can see you. Insert obligatory Minority Report UIs no longer sci-fi line here, with optional reference to Nineteen Eighty-Four.
• Other: Never mind that organized crime has for years now been well-known to be behind much of the phishing, spam, card skimming, and other electronic and ‘Net crimes. Not new to 2010, but seeing a significant uptick in the continued transition from boutique crime to serious organization and spear-phishing targeting specific high-profile organizations including the U.S. military.

Over the coming months and years, it will be interesting to see how multinational corporations and sovereign governments react to what some of them no doubt view as a new stateless — transnational? extranational? supernational? — and therefore global threat to their normal way of doing business.