Cyberspace as a neoliberal dream

Abstract

Cyberpunk offers a vision into the consequences of neoliberal economic and social policies implemented since the Reagan and Thatcher administrations. The economic inequalities, lack of social safety nets, and restricted presence of state institutions reflect a neoliberal socio-economic order. In a cyberpunk reality, we also encounter cyberspace as a market order. It emerges from the proliferation of a ubiquitous cybereconomy that operates as a market economy, free from government intervention. The cyberpunk imaginary depicts cyberspace as a psychogeography in which individuals pursue their own goals and act in their self-interest. In cyberspace, individuals and corporations have dealings, interactions, and business relationships that follow the rules and norms that have emerged as part of the self-organising process of cyberspace. Therefore, cyberspace is a form of spontaneous order that entails complex selforganising systems and mechanisms that arise from the multitude of interactions that happen within it. This paper aims to use the imagery of cyberspace to show how cyberpunk literature formulates in tangible ways the realities of a market order as envisioned and proposed by neoliberal thinkers like Hayek, thus providing the public with a critique of the neoliberal dream of an unregulated market order.