NEW ARTICLE: Salt, Fat, Neon Hell (or, "Why open a cyberpunk-themed restaurant?") (Patreon)

I'm thrilled to share this article I wrote for the new issue of Maisonneuve Magazine. It's a review of NEOTOKYO, a self-described "cyberpunk noodle bar" that just opened in downtown Montreal. The restaurant is mediocre – it's basically one big Instagram backdrop, with the food a secondary concern – so I used my visit as an opportunity to examine how digital worlds are encroaching on the physical world, a phenomenon cyberpunk itself predicted 40 years ago. It's in the vein of "Everything Is Sludge", if you liked that. Here's a little snippet:

The working people of Blade Runner’s Los Angeles don’t inhabit the glossy skyscrapers of its aerial sequences; anyone who could afford to live in them has long since left the planet. Instead, most people live further down, in dilapidated  apartment blocks. There, the world’s futuristic tech does nothing to mask the decay. In the original movie, engineer J. F. Sebastian builds cyborgs in a regal old building with no lights and perpetually-wet floors. In the sequel, replicant Officer K’s neighbours burn garbage-can fires in the stairwell while he unwinds with his holographic AI girlfriend.

These poverty-afflicted spaces have little in common with the cyberpunk we often imagine, but they’re probably the most prescient elements of the whole genre. My friend’s place in Côte-des-Neiges has voice-controlled lights and a gaping hole in the ceiling. Other friends beg for rent money on dedicated begging apps. The tech isn’t inherently evil, but it underlines the absurdity of our conditions. These flashy technological advancements haven’t brought about a utopian future free of class inequality, they’ve just accumulated among the wreckage.

Maisonneuve is a print magazine, and The Technology Issue is on sale now all across Canada. I'm excited to say that top-tier patrons in the U.S. and Canada will receive a free copy of the magazine in the mail! I've been running around the city buying all the copies I can find so I can mail them out to you. Check your Patreon inbox if you want one!

(At the moment, I can't promise copies to patrons who upgrade after this post, or folks outside the US or Canada. It's a small publication and regrettably, I can't get my hands on enough copies!)