Defining Barleypunk

A year ago, I called William Gibson a cunt.  I doubt the situation has since improved.

Gibson’s strength as a writer lay primarily in his art direction.  From Neuromancer onwards, his books featured enough brand names and referenced enough forms of music and art to make his works exude a distinctive whiff of verisimilitude.  While Cyberpunk was ostensibly a reaction to the hypercommercialisation that began in the 1980s, Gibson wrote about the process having absorbed its mores and values but, because he wrote about outsiders and the dispossessed and his works showed a certain degree of social awareness, they never came across as smug or unpleasant.  The crossroads of Gibson’s career was undeniably Pattern Recognition (2003), a work that took the style of Cyberpunk and applied it to a contemporary middle-class world’s emerging online culture.  In the four years between Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, the underground and countercultural elements of the online world became mainstream among the Western middle-classes, as a result, where Pattern Recognition mined an emerging culture, Spook Country (2007) felt like an extended love affair to hipsters.  A victim of his own success, Gibson defined Cyberculture and then made the mistake of writing about it again once it had sold out.


In my original piece on Spook Country, I pointed out the similarities between Gibson’s smug, urban, moneyed, post-intellectual middle class faux-bohemians and those that were mocked in Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker’s 2005 sitcom Nathan Barley, based on a fake TV series created by Brooker and called "Cunt".


Nathan Barley was prompted by a revulsion at an emerging counter-culture that appeared to be entirely devoid of any solid political, intellectual or artistic drive.  This is also a criticism that is leveled at the Hipster subculture in an article in Adbusters by Douglas Haddow.  In fact, as the decidedly Barley-esque Momus points out in his apologia for hipsterism, Haddow even copies the prose style of Nathan Barley’s protagonist Dan Ashcroft who opens the show with a blistering attack upon the fin-headed Nathans that surround and come to worship him.

    “Once the idiots were just the fools gawping in through the windows. Now they’ve entered the building. You can hear them everywhere. They use the word ‘cool’. It is their favourite word. The idiot doesn’t think about what it is saying. Thinking is rubbish, and rubbish isn’t cool. Stuff and shit is cool.  The idiots are self-regarding consumer slaves, oblivious to the paradox of their uniform individuality. They sculpt their hair to casual perfection. They wear their waistbands below their balls. They babble into handheld twit machines about that cool e-mail of the woman being bummed by a wolf. Their cool friend made it. He’s an idiot too.

    Welcome to the age of stupidity.”

Regardless of what you think about Hipsterism and the moneyed goons mocked in the series, it is worth noting that critiques of these sub-cultures have tended to fail because of their unwillingness to seek out a higher intellectual ground.  Ashcroft’s rant, much like the complaints of Haddow, are amusing but directionless.  They rely for their impact upon their withering put-downs.

Haddow bemoans the narcissism of the hipsters :

“In many ways, the lifestyle promoted by hipsterdom is highly ritualized. Many of the party-goers who are subject to the photoblogger’s snapshots no doubt crawl out of bed the next afternoon and immediately re-experience the previous night’s debauchery. Red-eyed and bleary, they sit hunched over their laptops, wading through a sea of similarity to find their own (momentarily) thrilling instant of perfected hipster-ness.”

He also quotes Christian Lorentzen from a Time Out New York article:

“These hipster zombies… are the idols of the style pages, the darlings of viral marketers and the marks of predatory real-estate agents, […] and they must be buried for cool to be reborn.”

Ashcroft, Haddow, Lorentzen as well as Brooker and Morris criticise vapid sub-cultures by flinging cool insults, instantly descending to their level.  This is cultural criticism reduced to the status of infantile tribal warfare.  “Girls smell” written on the blackboard before the teacher comes in.  This form of tribal warfare drags us all down to the lowest possible level.  Proof of this can be found in the fact that the publishers of AdBusters define themselves as :

"a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age."

Or, in other words, cunts.


The root cause of this trading away of insight for impact and accessibility is that we are in a late capitalist society.  Our historical vision has been reduced to barely an arm’s length.  We are so utterly wedded to free-market capitalism and the politics of identity through consumerism that when we want to express displeasure at the way society has turned out we are out of ammunition and reduced to slinging insults.  When elections come around we have no interest in parties that would change the nature of our society and so we vote for the one who seems nicest or whose tastes and opinions on small issues most closely watch ours.  Consider Bill Moyers' excellent interview of Thomas Frank for more on this issue.


In America Jimmy Carter, facing his own oil crisis, realised that something was wrong and attempted to articulate those feelings in his infamous “Malaise Speech” :

    “I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy.... I do not refer to the outward strength of America, a nation that is at peace tonight everywhere in the world, with unmatched economic power and military might. ...

    The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.

    In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.”

For his troubles, the American people booted him out of office and Ronald Reagan’s “Morning In America” message of mindless hope, greed and consumerism would eventually go on to dominate American politics right up until today.


Science Fiction also reflects this generalised malaise.  Where Golden Age SF explored the can-do technophilia of post-War America and the New Wave embodied the inward-looking optimism of the 1960s, modern SF struggles to find a coherent framework for looking at the future.  Indeed, one could argue that the Singularity - the point at which the rate of cultural change becomes infinite - is an open admission of failure by SF authors who realise that they lack any kind of vision of change, let alone a coherent image of the future.

This trouble with the future and the abandonment of cultural narratives has also coincided with an unprecedented explosion in the popularity of science fiction.  Every summer, people who would not identify as genre fans line up to watch blockbusters full of SF tropes.  In fact, 2007’s Arthur C. Clarke awards were even covered by the BBC’s flagship morning news show The Today Programme.

The growing acceptability of genre has had a knock-on effect upon mainstream publishing.

Recent years have seen a rise in works of near-future SF that are released mostly by non-genre publishers.  The trend was picked up upon by Martin Lewis who first saw the similarities between Nathan Barley and some contemporary British SF in his Strange Horizons review of the Arthur C. Clarke award-nominated The Red Men by Matthew de Abaitua.  Lewis then saw links between Mark Wernham’s Martin Martin’s On The Other Side (reviewed by me for Strange Horizons) and Everything is Sinister by David Llewellyn as well as The Heritage by Will Ashon (both again reviewed at Strange Horizons).  I would also, tentatively, add to this list the beautifully foul-mouthed but ultimately unsatisfying High John the Conqueror by Jim Younger (again reviewed by me at Strange Horizons).

According to Martin, the books share a :

“disgust directed primarily at the vapidity of the world that surrounds it. At the same time a fair portion is directed inwards: we are all fiddling whilst Rome burns. For some writers this reaction to the world is so strong it can only be fully articulated by looking at a near future that is even worse.”

“Disgust” is the perfect choice of words as it captures the physiological and largely non-intellectual character of the anger and frustration that motivates the creation of these works.  The writers all sense that there is something deeply wrong with our society but, lacking any kind of framework for expressing those failings, they tilt at the windmills of pop culture or the grotesque straw men of hyperbole.

To the extent that these books form a commercial trend, I think that we can call them an emerging sub-genre which, for want of a better term, could well be called Barleypunk.

The Barleypunk Manifesto :

Be a 30-something British Male.

Be published by a mainstream publisher.

Have a near-future setting.

Lack any interest in political context.

Target broad social trends and archetypes.

Use humor and troubling imagery to get your points across.