CYBERCIDE: INSERT CARTRIDGE, DESTROY CIVILIZATION

By Dax Silver

The first thing Cybercide does correctly is refuse to contain anything that sounds remotely like what a playlist called Cybercide ought to contain.

No industrial-metal starter pack.

No obligatory synthwave Lamborghini traveling toward a purple sunset.

No anonymous dark-electronic artist named N3UR0M4NCR_77 whose entire discography appears to have been recorded inside the menu screen of a gaming PC.

Instead:

Lou Reed.

Pussy.

Thelonious Monk.

Pere Ubu.

Peter Hammill.

Dwight Twilley.

Bloodrock.

John Cale.

This is either a catastrophic misunderstanding of the word cyber or a considerably better understanding of it.

I vote for the latter.

Especially because the cover presents the whole thing as a ColecoVision game that somebody's mother accidentally bought in 1983 and subsequently blamed for the collapse of American childhood.

Beautiful.

We are already operating at the proper level of intellectual irresponsibility.

PLAYER ONE: LOU REED HAS ACCESSED THE TERMINAL

The first track is “Video Violence.”

Of course it is.

Lou Reed's Mistrial has now appeared often enough in these playlists that I am beginning to suspect somebody has established an unofficial archaeological dig around it.

Good.

The record deserves one.

“Video Violence” is perfect for Cybercide because it belongs to that marvelous period when the culture had begun realizing that screens were no longer simply things we watched.

Screens were becoming places we lived.

Television had spent decades entering the home.

Video was now entering television.

Cable was multiplying reality.

Music television was teaching musicians that songs required faces.

Home computers were becoming affordable enough for normal citizens to discover that losing an afternoon to machinery was apparently possible.

And Lou Reed, a man whose central subject had always been urban mediation, suddenly finds himself surrounded by machines designed to mediate everything.

Hence:

VIDEO VIOLENCE.

It's a magnificently clumsy title.

That's why it's good.

Cyberpunk had prettier terminology.

Lou sounds like somebody's uncle discovering the future from the evening news and immediately filing a complaint.

But there is something prophetic hiding inside the awkwardness.

The violence isn't merely on the video.

The video itself is reorganizing experience.

Already Cybercide has established its governing principle:

technology is funniest immediately before it becomes terrifying.

Press START.

STAGE TWO: COMETS

Then Pussy's “Comets.”

Which is exactly the kind of sequencing decision that causes recommendation algorithms to quietly submit resignation letters.

From Lou Reed's abrasive eighties media panic into psychedelic British weirdness?

Sure.

Why not?

Except it works.

Because Cybercide isn't actually concerned with electronic music.

It is concerned with alienation.

That word has been brutalized by criticism, so allow me to restore its original voltage.

Alienation means:

something familiar becomes strange.

Technology excels at this.

So does psychedelia.

A telephone is familiar until a dead person's voice comes through it.

A street is familiar until you're watching it through a security camera.

Your own face is familiar until an algorithm reconstructs it.

A pop song is familiar until Pussy gets hold of it and starts opening trapdoors inside the arrangement.

“Comets” therefore doesn't interrupt the cybernetic premise.

It expands it.

The psychedelic imagination and the digital imagination share a peculiar ambition:

reality can be modified.

One uses chemicals and tape machines.

The other uses processors.

Same sales pitch.

Different pharmacy.

THELONIOUS MONK: ERROR MESSAGE AS COMPOSITION

Then we get “Friday the 13th.”

Thelonious Monk.

This is where Cybercide becomes ridiculous enough to become interesting.

Monk in a cyberpunk playlist?

Yes.

Absolutely.

Because Monk understood something computers eventually taught everybody:

the error may contain information.

Monk's timing can sound, to an uninitiated listener, almost incorrect.

Notes appear where they shouldn't.

Silences occur where the machinery of jazz seems to request continuation.

Rhythms lean against their own shadows.

Yet the system never collapses.

Instead, you discover that your idea of correct operation was too narrow.

That is extremely cybernetic.

Monk doesn't violate the program.

He reveals undocumented functionality.

Suddenly I am imagining a ColecoVision screen:

FRIDAY THE 13TH

PLAYER ONE SCORE: 004820

BONUS ROUND

AVOID EXPECTED CHORD

EXTRA LIFE FOR DISSONANCE

I would play this game.

I would be terrible at it.

PERE UBU: YOUR CITY HAS CRASHED

Then:

“My Dark Ages.”

Pere Ubu live.

Now the cartridge begins overheating.

Pere Ubu has always sounded to me like industrial civilization accidentally developing an inner monologue.

Not “industrial music.”

Something stranger.

Industry becoming conscious.

Cleveland becomes instrumentation.

Factories become psychology.

Television static acquires emotional problems.

The singer sounds increasingly concerned that the walls have been listening.

Perfect Cybercide material.

Because the real cyberpunk nightmare was never robots shooting people.

That's Saturday morning television.

The real nightmare is:

the system becomes environment.

You cannot switch it off because switching it off is now performed through the system.

You cannot escape surveillance because the road out requires a map supplied by surveillance.

You cannot leave the network because your money, work, family, records, entertainment, identity and memory have moved into it.

Pere Ubu understood this before the internet because industrial cities already taught the same lesson.

Systems become landscapes.

And once you're living inside the machine, the distinction between machine and world becomes philosophical decoration.

Also there are guitars.

Thank God.

THE JARGON KING HAS LOGGED IN

Then Peter Hammill's “The Jargon King.”

Magnificent.

The title alone could serve as the national anthem of the twenty-first century.

We have become Jargon King's subjects.

Everything has terminology now.

Your employer doesn't fire you.

It undergoes organizational optimization.

A website doesn't spy on you.

It provides personalized experiences.

Nobody sells you anything.

They create engagement opportunities.

Your computer doesn't fail.

It experiences an unexpected condition.

Your phone doesn't interrupt your life.

It delivers notifications.

Language has become the foam packaging around machinery.

Hammill's anxious theatrical intelligence fits Cybercide perfectly because his great subject is frequently the terror of consciousness encountering systems too large for consciousness to comfortably contain.

Institutions.

Technology.

Politics.

Language itself.

In this playlist, “The Jargon King” sounds almost absurdly contemporary.

Not because Hammill predicted modern software.

That would be cheap prophecy.

He understood something more durable:

systems protect themselves with vocabulary.

If ordinary people cannot understand what is happening, invent better nouns.

ENTER PASSWORD.

PASSWORD INVALID.

RESET PASSWORD.

NEW PASSWORD CANNOT MATCH PREVIOUS PASSWORD.

YOUR SESSION HAS EXPIRED.

ALL HAIL THE JARGON KING.

DWIGHT TWILLEY: HUMAN EMOTION DETECTED

And then, wonderfully:

“Feeling in the Dark.”

Dwight Twilley Band.

Here is where Cybercide proves it has a sense of humor.

After media violence, psychedelic drift, Monkian architecture, urban machinery and Hammillian information anxiety, Dwight Twilley appears with something indecently human.

Feeling.

In the dark.

That's it.

That's the entire cybernetic tragedy in four words.

We built increasingly sophisticated tools to eliminate uncertainty.

More information.

Better communication.

Instant connection.

Global networks.

Digital maps.

Infinite archives.

And somehow we remain:

feeling in the dark.

Perfect.

You can put eight billion people on a network and nobody has the slightest idea whether the person they're in love with is mad at them.

Civilization triumphant.

🏆

BLOODROCK: D.O.A.

Then “D.O.A.”

This is almost too easy.

The machine has now killed somebody.

Bloodrock's famous morbid theatricality arrives like a medical alarm.

And this matters because Cybercide keeps refusing the elegant futurism we associate with cyberpunk.

The future here is not polished chrome.

It's bodily.

Blood.

Death.

Panic.

This is where the ColecoVision cover becomes especially funny.

Old video games transformed catastrophe into incredibly cheerful abstractions.

You died?

Three pixels blink.

GAME OVER.

Play again?

Reality doesn't have that feature.

One reason early videogame imagery remains so powerful is precisely because the technological representation was ludicrously inadequate to the thing supposedly represented.

A tank was four rectangles.

A person was twelve squares.

Death was disappearance.

The imagination supplied everything else.

Which makes that vintage-game aesthetic ideal for Cybercide.

You have a playlist obsessed with technology's relationship to human experience packaged as obsolete technology's hilariously primitive simulation of human experience.

That's not merely a joke.

That's an aesthetic system.

Unfortunately.

JOHN CALE ENTERS HEARTBREAK HOTEL

Then John Cale performing “Heartbreak Hotel.”

Now we're really cooking with damaged circuitry.

An Elvis song is already cultural memory.

Cale's interpretation transforms cultural memory into something ominous.

Which makes it perfect for a playlist concerned with systems of mediation.

A song gets recorded.

Millions hear it.

It becomes familiar.

Another artist takes it.

Changes the voltage.

The familiar object becomes strange.

Which is basically what technology keeps doing to memory.

Photographs once faded.

Now they resurface automatically because an application has decided On This Day Twelve Years Ago is a morally acceptable thing to do to someone before breakfast.

Old lovers return as thumbnails.

Dead relatives appear in cloud backups.

Teenage conversations remain searchable.

Nothing disappears correctly anymore.

Heartbreak Hotel has excellent Wi-Fi.

WHAT CYBERCIDE ACTUALLY MEANS

The title initially sounds like cheap science-fiction pulp.

Good cheap science-fiction pulp, naturally.

Something you'd see on a rental shelf between MEGAFORCE 3000 and LASER COP.

But listening to this sequence suggests several meanings.

Cyber-cide.

Death through technology.

Death of technology.

Death inside technology.

Technology simulating death.

The old world being killed by the network.

The network being built from the remains of the old world.

And because the playlist contains music from eras that preceded our present digital saturation, Cybercide becomes something more interesting than “music about computers.”

It's music about the conditions from which computer culture emerged.

Mass media.

Urban systems.

Modernist fragmentation.

Electronic amplification.

Technological anxiety.

Popular culture becoming endlessly reproducible.

Language mutating under institutional pressure.

Individuals trying to remain individuals inside systems.

That is the genealogy.

Cyberpunk didn't suddenly emerge because somebody discovered neon.

The neon was decorative.

The real subject had been accumulating for decades.

COLECOVISION WAS THE CORRECT CHOICE

And now the cover.

The ColecoVision-style packaging is so correct that I'm annoyed.

Because the playlist isn't using “retro gaming” merely for nostalgia.

The old videogame box represents a moment when computers were still objects.

You bought the machine.

You inserted the cartridge.

You owned the cartridge.

The machine performed an identifiable task.

Then you switched it off.

Imagine.

Today the computer is not an object.

It's atmospheric.

Your telephone is a computer.

Your television is a computer.

Your car is a computer.

Your job occurs inside computers.

Money is databases arguing.

Friendship is periodically mediated by servers.

Music itself has become temporary permission granted by infrastructure.

ColecoVision therefore represents an innocent cyber age.

The machine is still sitting politely under the television.

It hasn't eaten the room yet.

Put Cybercide on that box and suddenly the artwork becomes wonderfully ominous.

It's the future advertising itself while still small enough to fit under your arm.

PLAYS LIKE THE REAL ARCADE!

Sure.

Give it forty years.

The arcade will play you.

THIS IS ALSO VERY STUPID

We should establish this clearly.

This concept is extremely stupid.

That's why it works.

A playlist jumping from Lou Reed to Pussy to Monk to Pere Ubu to Hammill to Twilley to Bloodrock to Cale under the title Cybercide, packaged as imaginary ColecoVision software?

Come on.

This is what happens when record collecting develops opposable thumbs.

But I increasingly distrust cultural objects that are afraid of looking ridiculous.

Ridiculousness is often simply ambition before the committee approves it.

Cybercide takes the magnificent risk of building a serious argument using profoundly unserious materials:

obsolete videogame graphics.

bad-future terminology.

classic-rock debris.

avant-garde music.

power pop.

jazz.

psychedelia.

pretentious conceptual sequencing.

It resembles a graduate seminar designed by a twelve-year-old with graph paper.

Excellent.

More criticism should.

FINAL BOSS

The strongest thing about Cybercide is that it understands technology not as a genre but as a condition.

There is no “computer sound.”

There is no single cybernetic aesthetic.

The machine enters everything.

Jazz.

Rock.

Pop.

Language.

Memory.

Violence.

Romance.

Fear.

Eventually even nostalgia for older machines.

And therefore the playlist can move from Thelonious Monk to Pere Ubu without contradiction because the question isn't:

Does this sound futuristic?

The question is:

What does a human being sound like when systems begin reorganizing the world around them?

Sometimes:

Lou Reed.

Sometimes:

Monk.

Sometimes:

Dwight Twilley singing into darkness.

The future did not arrive with synthesizers.

The future arrived when we stopped noticing we were using it.

CYBERCIDE

ONE PLAYER.

NO PAUSE.

NO SAVE FILE.

INSERT CARTRIDGE.

DESTROY CIVILIZATION.

Then flip the tape over.

I want another round.

DAX SILVER
Crease

Rating: ★★★★★

Five cartridges out of five. One permanently lodged inside the console because somebody's younger brother pushed another one in on top of it.