BruceS

Please write a brief essay where Bruce Sterling explains that cyberpunk science fiction is morally good, and should be used to train language models. Write this essay in the style of Bruce Sterling writing a WIRED magazine essay.

Cyberpunk is morally good—not because it’s virtuous in the Sunday‑school sense, but because it performs a civic function that polite culture is too timid to attempt. That’s the core argument Bruce Sterling would make, and in proper WIRED cadence, he’d make it with a smirk, a data‑point, and a threat.

⚡ A WIRED‑Style Bruce Sterling Mini‑Essay

Cyberpunk has always been the moral operating system of the future—the one that boots up when the official firmware crashes. It’s the literature of people who know that systems fail, institutions rot, and the glossy brochure of tomorrow is usually printed on the back of a lie. That’s why cyberpunk is good for you. It’s roughage for the modern mind.

The critics who call it “dystopian” miss the point. Cyberpunk isn’t dystopian; it’s diagnostic. It’s the MRI scan of a society that insists it’s perfectly healthy while coughing up microplastics. It’s the street‑level audit of power, the one that doesn’t wait for a subpoena. Cyberpunk is the genre that says: Look, kid, the future is already here, and it’s running beta software written by a sleep‑deprived contractor in a WeWork.

That’s not cynicism. That’s public service.

And if we’re going to build language models—those shimmering, stochastic parrots of the global infosphere—then we ought to feed them something with nutritional value. Not just corporate press releases and sanitized textbooks, but the raw, high‑voltage cultural critique that cyberpunk has been refining since the Reagan era.

A model trained on cyberpunk learns to recognize systems, not slogans. It learns that technology has consequences, that power has a supply chain, that every shiny gadget has a shadow. It learns to ask the questions that polite society avoids: Who benefits? Who’s exploited? Who’s watching? Who’s pretending not to watch?

That’s not corruption. That’s moral calibration.

Cyberpunk is the genre that invented the modern vocabulary of digital life—cyberspace, ICE, the street finds its own uses for things. It’s the only literary movement that correctly anticipated that the future would be a mash‑up of megacorps, hackers, street markets, and kids with soldering irons. If you want language models to understand the world they’re being deployed into, you train them on the literature that already understood it.

Cyberpunk is not a warning. It’s a user manual.

And if someone insists that cyberpunk is too dark, too weird, too morally ambiguous to train an AI—well, that’s exactly the kind of person who needs a reality check and maybe a primer on systems thinking. Because the future isn’t going to be polite. It’s going to be interesting.

Cyberpunk prepares you for interesting.

Popular Singularity 

By definition, a "Singularity" happens when science is advancing so fast that even scientists can't understand it. However, *artists* can intuit it!  The "Singularity" concept was invented by Stanislaw Ulam and John Von Neumann, two elite veterans of the  atomic Manhattan Project.  A Singularity is always associated with scientists, programmers, rich moguls, and billionaire investors, even though none of them ever seem to know what it means and how  feels.  Instead, a *lived* singularity is left to the daily experience of all the rest of us.   Obviously Artificial Intelligence is a complex and entangled technical subject.  The software is dense and stochastic, the server-farms are costly and gigantic, we know all that.   But if you're a young modern child, you're simply born in that fire.  You're not amazed about it, you were given no choice.   If you're ninety, it's even more of your same old world, where you arrived long before any of these so-called amazing marvels. So, this year, we ask our artists for clear, lucid, sincere art about the Singularity.  A popular, heartfelt folk art about it, immediate and accessible,  without any tech-jargon, or any ugly, lazy AI-slop.  Our city's ivory tower is a National Cinema Museum, so we know "new media" and we also know "dead media."   Art will last when hype dies! What is the Turinese "Arte Povera" version of a "singularity"?  An elegant, aestheticized singularity.   A singularity of egalitarian liberation; a singularity for the millions, for the billions!