Have you ever read a cyberpunk story and noticed all the characters of different races mixing together? Did you think the author was being progressive and forward thinking? Boy, did you miss the fucking point. Racial deregulation isn’t kumbaya. It’s a mother fucking warning.

Give me a hero, Give me Keanu

I’m talking about New Rose Hotel by William Gibson.  It’s one of the original cyberpunk stories that defined the genre. The title refers to some shitty hotel by the airport our hero hides out in after he gets betrayed by some femme fatale. That’s the ending. But like all great cyberpunk stories, it starts in a bar. 

Imagine this: some Keanu Reeves look-alike walking down a dark street under a polluted sky.  He walks through the rain and ducks under a bright neon sign into an underground bar.  The music is loud even from the street.  He bumps past the dark-skinned bouncer and worms his way through this large multi-racial blob of strangers talking, drinking, drugging, scheming.  He takes a seat at the bar.  He sits next to a slim, mid-twenties woman who is half Dutch and half Japanese.  They get to talking. To a liberal this might sound enticing – just think of all the possibilities – but it isn’t.  Because cyberpunk isn’t wish fulfillment. It’s a dystopia.  The racial mixing you see isn’t a feature; it’s a bug.

They Promised Gadgets and Bliss, But the Future Smells Like Piss

Cyberpunk isn’t about neon bars or jacking into the matrix or even cyberspace.  So, what is it about?  High and low.  High tech and low life is cyberpunk.  Nothing is nicely separated.  Everything and everyone is mixed together.  Long gone is the clean and sweet sci-fi of Star Trek where you are whizzing past other space ships around the galaxy.  In cyberpunk, you’re stuck on earth and can’t escape the blood and the guts and the piss and the shit.  Down here, if something is whizzing past you, it probably smells really fucking bad.  The real question is how did we get here?  How did we get to the point that 3 corporations run the world?  Deregulation, that’s how.  Once regulation is six feet under there isn’t anything to stop a few corporations from dividing and conquering and turning the world to shit.  And the racial mixing you see – what I call racial deregulation –  is just concrete visual evidence of that general economic deregulation. 

“Dark European eyes, Asian cheekbones.”

Her name is Sandii. Double I at the end. Quite unique. She’s a whore. Less unique. At any neon lit bar like this there has to be at least one fucking whore. This whore is “Eurasian, half gaijin, long-hipped and fluid in a Chinese knock-off of some Tokyo designer’s original.” Think about how the two parts of that sentence go together. The first part, about the Chinese knock-off of some Tokyo designer shows how nothing is safe, and secure. You could be a genius fashion designer, but your designs will just be copied and stolen, and mass produced by someone else to make Chinese knockoffs. Why? Why can’t the Tokyo designer prevent this? Why can some corporation just take a designer’s design and make a Chinese knockoff? Because of deregulation, that’s why. Whatever laws that should stop someone from stealing the Tokyo designer’s design has been deregulated the fuck away and now some corporation can do whatever they want.

But don’t forget about the first part of that sentence, the part about Sandii being “Eurasian and half-gaijin.” She’s Eurasian – in other words she is neither European nor Asian. She is neither here nor there, but something in between. Her name also clues you in on this. “Sandii” sounds European phonetically, but with the double ii at the end her name tells you that she is very much non-European. She uses this inbetweenness to her advantage and our boy Keanu’s detriment. She tells stories about a childhood in Amsterdam that lull Keanu into a soft sense of security. Her dark European eyes sell it. She also uses her pretty Asian cheekbones to cozy up to an Asian scientist, who Keanu wants to use her to target. Unfortunately for our boy, she double crosses him. He’s left with nothing but her old .22, while he pines away for her in the New Rose Hotel. None of that would have been possible without racial deregulation. The femme fatale can only play both sides of the fence because of racial ambiguity and racial mixing.

We used to be a proper country where you could flunk out of carpentry school and out-earn a lawyer.

Gibson hated deregulation. But some people like it. It makes some people richer. But Gibson’s point was that it makes the average guy – in particular the average white guy who was reading science fiction short stories in Omni magazine in 1984 – worse off. He wasn’t wrong.

Example. A few years before New Rose Hotel was published, Jimmy Carter and both parties in Congress passed a law to deregulate the trucking industry. Average pay in the industry dropped from $150,000 in today’s dollars to fifty grand a year. That’s deregulation for you. You personally couldn’t afford to work that job so the average trucker on the road is some guy from the other side of the world. So, a truck driver you went from a good union job to having to compete with a horde of people from the other side of the world. And if you were awesome and won that fucking competition, the grand prize is getting paid a third of what you did before deregulation.

Another example. This one is famous. Harrison Ford loves to tell a story about him making $500 dollars a week as a self-taught carpenter before American Graffiti and Star Wars in 1972. The way he tells it, it’s supposed to be a story of grit and determination and how perseverance pays off. But it’s only those things if you are too lazy to a goddamn google search and see how much in today’s dollars 500 bucks is. And it turns out it’s almost $4,000. Each week. So, Ford was making over $200,000 a year as a self-taught carpenter. The average private sector pay from graduates from my law school is less than $140,000. A carpenter would not make more than a lawyer now, because the employment market has been completely deregulated. There are way too many guys from Mexico or wherever, each of whom will work for $50,000 grand a year so now the $200,000 job vanishes. Mass migration deregulated it away. I want to point out how in each of these cases there’s a racial as well as economic aspect to it. The wages go down because of a zillion new people from the third world who enter the market. Just like in New Rose Hotel, you can’t separate the racial from the economic point.

You might wonder why am I talking about truck drivers and carpenters when our Cyberpunk hero is Keanu fucking Reaves – he’s some super smart hot shot hacker isn’t he? Let me break the bad news to you – it doesn’t fucking matter how smart our hero is. In this deregulated world he’s just another guy. That’s the point. That’s what it means to be high-tech and low life: everyone’s on the same playing field because everyone has the same tech. Everyone’s high tech and everyone’s a low life.

In fact, in Johnny Mnemonic, another classic story that was published around the same time, Keanu has a memory chip implanted into his head and he has to deliver it to his boss. He is literally delivering something from point A to point B. He’s just another fucking truck driver.

Hollywood swallowed the Blue Pill

Cyberpunk shows how dystopian society becomes once deregulation is the law of the land. One of the prime ways it shows that is through the racial deregulation of its characters. But don’t tell Hollywood that. If you had just watched the movies that pass for cyberpunk you would have no idea that cyberpunk is about the bad side of deregulation or even that it’s dystopian. Instead, Hollywood thinks cyberpunk is about some super smart guy saving the world along with his perfectly racially balanced coworkers. Hollywood really thinks cyberpunk is just another stupid marvel movie.

Having basically grown up on movies like The Matrix, Netrunner, Johnny Mnemonic, and Blade Runner I thought cyberpunk was cool gadgets centered around hacking into to something and, yes, a few corporations ran the world instead the of the Government like in Star Trek, but none of those movies captured the underlying reasons why the cyberpunk genre even exists. They get the aesthetic of neon bars and the Matrix as cyberspace but they don’t get what’s happening underneath the surface. And they ignore the racial element. And I guess they have to.

Even the Hollywood of 30 years ago wouldn’t dare criticize racial deregulation. Instead, Hollywood’s politics requires them to fully endorse it. That’s why in The Matrix, Morpheus is a black guy and there’s also a couple of Hispanic guys in the crew. Hollywood’s view is that the deregulation where every race is thrown together to combat the big bad villain is good. Hollywood tells a story about how only by all races working together can the big bad villain be defeated. But that’s not cyberpunk. Cyberpunk says that racial deregulation is bad. In fact, the “Eurasian, half gaijin” women is what gets the hero killed. He falls in love with her and then she backstabs him and he’s left to hide out from some corporate assassins in the New Rose Hotel. Racial deregulation won’t conquer the villain. Racial deregulation is the villain.

Actually going out and reading these original cyberpunk stories after growing up on Hollywood’s version is a hell of a wake up call. Almost like I had just taken Morpheus’s red pill. Because criticizing this racial deregulation goes against standard liberal thought, stories like New Rose Hotel are still deeply subversive in 2026. That’s what makes it Black Flag Literature.