Cyberpunk Bodies

Meat Puppets or Robopaths? Cyberpunk and the Question of Embodiment
This article looks at how the body is viewed within the cyberpunk movement. It also shows how science fiction can be used to look at the present instead of how it is normally interpreted to look at the future. It looks at how within the cyberpunk movement the flesh is viewed as a hinderance and that the goal is to get rid of the flesh or change it as much as possible. It also looks at the binary between human and machine or human and enhanced human and how this can change race relations and gender relations to be either create a greater gap or bring them closer together. One of the main things this article seems to explore is how the people whom are parts of more then one binary within the cyberpunk movement are viewed by themselves as outsiders.

Blade Runner
The movie Blade Runner is about a future world where Nexus a company has created replicants who are human like machine. After a mutiny by the replicants in an off world colony, replicants are banned from earth. The story is about Dex a blade runner, special police force used to hunt and “retire” replicants, whose job it is to catch a group of replicants who recently hijacked a ship and came to earth. The goal of these replicants is to find a way to length their life span which as it is for all replicants is a mere four years. Dex hunts the replicants down and kills them but as he is doing this he also falls in love with a different replicant. He appears to have qualms about killing being that are so close to humans and there is always the question of what if he accidently kills a human. In the end the groups of replicants all die the last one because his life span is up and Dex runs away with his replicant girlfriend who is shortly going to die.

Replicant- a human like being/machine made by Nexus corporation in the movie Blade Runner.
Blade Runner- A special police force used to hunt and “retire” replicants from the movie Blade Runner.
Meat puppet- a prostitute or someone who is not technologically enhanced.
Cyberpunk- a movement born in the late 1980’s that looks at how computer networks and cyberspacecan interfaced with human beings to be experienced by human beings.

Are the replicants living or none living beings?
Why is it acceptable to have a replicant that is purely made for sexual purposes and what is changed in her model to make her this way?
Whose property is a replicant?
What was this article trying to say about the way humans interact with their bodies?
When humans become technologically enhanced is it important to keep difference such as race and gender?