Virtual culture, urban social polarisation and social science fiction

In our hyper-aestheticised world it is perhaps no surprise that we are increasingly coming to know ourselves through ideal types derived not through analytic social science but through the discourses of social science fiction. In this brief chapter I attempt to frame contemporary issues of urban governance through the genre of cyberpunk, the literary concomitant of much of cyberculture. My contention (Burrows, 1996), although certainly not an original one (Kellner, 1995), is that with the demise of the meta-narrative many of the themes and processes which a symptomatic reading of cyberpunk reveal are a good deal more insightful than are those offered by what now passes for the theoretical and empirical mainstream (Hamnett, 1994; Mollenkopf and Castells, 1991; Sassen, 1991).