This is the first in a series of stories about Meatpunk, a game genre that includes titles like Extreme Meatpunks Forever and Cruelty Squad, but, as the author argues, goes much deeper than that.
The rich people not only had all the money, they had all the chance to get more; they had all the knowledge and the power, and so the poor man was down, and he had to stay down.
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
A Eulogy For The Dark Dream We All Shared
I think a lot of people in my generation are disappointed by how quickly cyberpunk as an aesthetic became commercialized and lost its critical edge. For me personally, things like The Matrix, RoboCop, Ghost in the Shell, and Akira were the first pieces of media I consumed which provided the language and ideas I could use to be critical of a world I felt was wrong in ways I just couldn’t otherwise describe. Millions of others clearly felt the same way as the cyberpunk aesthetic utterly dominated the last 30 years of critical popular culture and a means of expressing discontent.
Nevertheless, Cyberpunk 2077’s shaky landing confirmed what many already feared: Cyberpunk’s utility as a tool of criticism was drying up. At first I found it impossible to imagine any other set of aesthetics capable of describing the miasma of the present. Seeing cyberpunk’s limp body strangely reanimated by capitalist tendrils, I knew we needed something new. Early in my search for whatever was going to come next, I discovered solarpunk: an aesthetic brimming with greenery and hope for a better world. But something was missing. Solarpunk, while positive and aspirational, lacked the tenacity required to break us out of the hellish now. Thus I dove deeper into the dark depths of the Internet, where I would find the tenacity I was looking for in a new kind of sci-fi. Through an accident of science, I glimpsed a fleshy future in meatpunk. Meatpunk was poised to beat cyberpunk to death with its gross limbs. I found this weirdly comforting.
They use everything about the hog except the squeal.
What Is Meatpunk?
Meatpunk is a relatively new genre of fiction defined by gross human meat being used in new and macabre ways. Games like Extreme Meatpunks Forever, Cruelty Squad, Wrought Flesh, and Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator rely on organic body parts, and their subsequent destruction, to outline horrifying and sublime truths about the world, our economic system and the horrors of having a body at all. For example, Cruelty Squad tasks the player with assassinating CEOs using grapple-hooks made from your internal organs, eating guts on the floor in order to regain health, and trading livers on the open market to catch a big break. In these worlds, meat is everything from currency to health, and the world feels ill because of it.
Cyberpunk, on the other hand, was defined by a fear of/fascination with technology as well as the growing influence of Asian economic powerhouses (not to mention a fair bit of attendant Orientalism). Much of what cyberpunk envisioned, like cyber-augmentation or neural computers, never came to pass–at least, at least not in the ways envisioned. Meatpunk then insists that we are primarily still composed of meat and will most likely be so for the foreseeable future. Instead of a dreary television-grey techno-future, innovation lurched in a different, wetter direction. CRISPR, GMOs, pig heart transplants and mRNA vaccines define modern scientific innovation. While new technology has offered glimpses of a hopeful future in some ways, like watching productivity increase by over 400% since the 1960s, wages have stagnated, homelessness is endemic, and any hopes for universal healthcare have been quashed. It is increasingly obvious that tech-oligarchies have led us to some vision of the future, but is it a good one? On balance, no.
How then does meatpunk propose making meaningful change where cyberpunk failed? It’s all in the meat. Despite the technology fetishism of people like Elon Musk, nothing has thus far changed the fact that we are primarily made of meat, and this is both horrifying and full of hopeful possibility. Meat is both fragile and incredibly resilient. Capitalism destroys meat extremely easily; but as games like Extreme Meatpunks Forever, with its anti-capitalist, fascist-punching meat-mechs, demonstrate, the right amount of meat in the right place can do wonderful, liberatory things.
There is a benefit to reducing us all to flesh and sinew, muscle and gristle. Every person is meat. It is a unifying factor in our lives missing across most other ideologies. The universality of recognizing that another soul shares the same kind of tendons and fat and neurons as you creates an infection of intersectionality across class, race, religion, gender, and even species. This cross sectional appeal of meat as an identity mixes the inherent body horror of existing with a powerful togetherness stemming almost to the root beauty of just being alive at all. We may all be stuck in bodies which are gross and hurt and die, yet somehow there’s a rousing sentiment in the idea that we all fundamentally share that experience. Living, working, dying in the same tactile creation. Having this knowledge creates a more caring person towards other bodies. When we see other people being abused, someone with this new understanding cannot walk away. Through this togetherness, meatpunk represents one of the most powerful engines for creating solidarity that we have ever uncovered.
…and the wild beast rose up within him and screamed, as it had screamed in the Jungle from the dawn of time.
Why Did Meatpunk Have To Happen?
In a way, it was inevitable. See Exhibit 1 for examples of what the Wachowski sisters had to do when creating The Matrix sequels just to show fascists that the first one wasn’t meant for them. Observe Exhibit 2: How the Dead Kennedys had to write “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” after fascists had picked up on their music. Puke in the kiosk behind Exhibit 3: Where conservatives get upset when they realize Rage Against The Machine was political the whole time. Despite how much I and many of you love cyberpunk, most people’s interpretation of cyberpunk misses the broadest side of the biggest barn there is. Meatpunk exists to crush this cycle.
Games like Extreme Meatpunks Forever tackle this issue head-on by advocating directly for LGBTQ+ characters, avoiding metaphor in favor of being direct, and punching fascists in the face. Meatpunk throws cyberpunk world-building and lore-based revolutionary politics out the window in favor of leaving no room for anything other than antifascist, antiracist, and anticapitalist substance.
Through its directness, I believe Meatpunk to be the most suitable replacement for cyberpunk that we currently have. Solarpunk, while wonderful in its elegance, tries to reinvent what we imagine our future looks like without prying us out of the one we are already in. Despite tremendous passion and direction, Solarpunk is a kid daydreaming about renewable energy while in a boxing ring with an angry Nazi who still wants to commit murder against them. Meatpunk, on the other hand, is a hateful, spiteful, rage-minded God from beyond, here to crush the co-opting forces of neoliberalism and white supremacy alike. While not obvious from its ghastly aura or the sound of its hellish shriek, Meatpunk is here to do combat against Nazi’s and fascists until such time when it is no longer needed.
Relentless, remorseless, all his protests, his screams were nothing to it. It did its cruel will with him, as if his wishes, his feelings, had simply no existence at all; it cut his throat and watched him gasp out his life.
Where Did This Meat-monster Come From?
Meatpunk is still relatively fresh, only springing into life with the 2018 release of Extreme Meatpunks Forever, yet the beastly guts of the genre go back to early critiques of capitalism. Most noticeably, the modern incarnation of this new sublime expression of rage shares a doomsday-glacier sized chunk of its sentiment with Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906). While traces of modern meatpunk can be found littered throughout cyberpunk staples, like William Gibson’s Count Zero (1986) or David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999), the main legwork of analyzing labor, economics, and violence through the lens of meat was performed by the bones and tendons of Sinclair’s grotesque novel. After reading this book, this ancient ancestor to meatpunk, I felt sick: How is it possible that a novel containing the best possible metaphor with which to critique capitalism made so little of an impact in the ensuing century? Why hadn’t there been glistening, putrescent, belligerent imitators in the dozens over the decades since The Jungle had been published?
The Jungle details the piecemeal downfall of a Lithuanian immigrant family through every agonizing moment of their new lives in the United States, from their arrival in the meatpacking district of Chicago through their descent into debt and death. Despite the gravity of the tale, somehow this is not what The Jungle is remembered for today. In the modern cultural consciousness, nothing about the book seems to be remembered at all other than for the effect it had on establishing the FDA and improving food quality standards. The Jungle was one of the most fervent and rage-filled anti-capitalist works ever committed to paper, but its legacy has been recuperated by capitalism so extensively that all anyone remembers it for is how the meatpacking industry was reformed after its publication.
The Jungle paints a bloody picture of the capitalist world as nothing but a slaughterhouse, with the roles of workers and cattle intertwining. The brutality of our current regime is represented succinctly in how each of us will go into the slaughterhouse, and no matter how wonderful our time is inside, we only ever leave in a can. Every part of us, be it the body as physical labor, or the brain as creative work, will be cleaved by a team of precise butchers. After this, the bled carcasses are hung up on meathooks while the organs, skin, body fluids, feet, and teeth are removed to make products like beer, plastic, or fertilizer. Truly the horror of The Jungle is that this message, along with the messages of cyberpunk later, would be unilaterally ignored. In the pile of tissue left untended on the floor, our new demon is born.
If we are the greatest nation the sun ever shone upon, it would seem to be mainly because we have been able to goad our wage-earners to this pitch of frenzy.
What Should We Expect From The God Of Punishment?
Cyberpunk, as a genre, made a mistake. By casting all the myriad problems its authors were writing about into the future, no matter how near that future was, it left room for misinterpretation. Either people got the point, or they didn’t, but the gulf in understanding between those two groups is way wider than it should be. Should we then regard cyberpunk as a failure for not revolutionizing the world and pushing us into utopia? I’ll leave that question to be answered elsewhere. However, all I know is that I wouldn’t be here writing anything at all without cyberpunk.
Even though cyberpunk’s day in the sun has come to a close, I find the stock of what we are left with to be pleasantly up to task. Solarpunk most likely will last another 40 years, but meatpunk represents fully our fury at the situation we are currently in. This genre may be limited by that fury, but hopefully the power and intensity of our hatred of capital and fascism can be vulcanized into fuel to explode us into a space where something new can exist. Meatpunk exists then to shock us into realizing the predicament we are in, coagulate some sort of resistance, and offer us the energy to create a world where something peaceful like solarpunk can thrive.
There should be no more tears and no more tenderness; he had had enough of them – they had sold him into slavery! Now he was going to be free, to tear off his shackles, to rise up and fight.