Research in Progress (2026)
Plastic People:
A Cyberpunk Critique of O(i)ligarchism
This book begins from the premise that science fiction largely divides into two traditions:
• A Frankensteinian, anxiety-charged lineage called Cyberpunk that is foreshadowed
by Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick and crystallized in William Gibson’s 1984 work.
• A utopian current of technosolutionism, rooted in the futurism of the 1950s,
which can be called “Retrofuturism.”
Aesthetically, this divide parallels a contrast in two kinds of materials:
Concrete and Plastic.
The study approaches Cyberpunk through the architectural philosophy of Brutalism, which emerged alongside it and remains deeply entangled with its sensibility. Across Cyberpunk films, novels, and games, rough concrete surfaces recur with striking persistence. Brutalism can be understood as proto-Cyberpunk architecture.
Blade runner 2049
Historically, Cyberpunk stands in opposition to the buoyant faith in a bright, technicized future that permeated American science fiction of the 1930s and 1940s. Magazines such as Amazing Stories and Astounding Science Fiction, that were shaped in part by the optimism of Russian and Italian Futurism, helped establish the aesthetic vocabulary later carried forward in works like Star Trek (1966). Star Trek also created the “space-age” visual language that would dominate the genre for decades. It was, in essence, a plastic aesthetic.
Star Trek interior
Cyberpunk is set in a dystopian future featuring futuristic technology in claustrophobic urban environments combined with narratives of societal collapse and decay. Yet it is not reducible to dystopia alone. Taken together, Cyberpunk and Brutalism articulate an ironic critique of earlier, failed economic and aesthetic paradigms that may be called Plastic Modernity, and which some now seek to revive.
This book explores the philosophical affinities between Brutalism and Cyberpunk, setting them against the “plastic philosophy” of the twentieth century and its afterlife in Retrofuturism, whose influence extends well into the twenty-first.
Plastic can be intuitively perceived as modern and future-oriented, yet today’s “plastic modernity” is, in fact, the futurism of the past. It embodies the bright, chromatic optimism of the Oil Age.
At the start of his second term, Donald Trump reversed the gradual plastic straw ban introduced by Biden, recasting paper straws as “liberal” and marketing Trump-branded plastic straws.
When Trump decorated the Oval Office fireplace with ornate appliques, social media critics quickly found that the decorations resemble polyurethane moldings sold on the Home Depot website. Trump denied this and said that they were authentic high-end materials.
Retrofuturists are “Plastic People,”
figures oriented toward a revived imaginary of the Oil Age who have, in recent years, become increasingly visible. Plastic Retrofuturism is aligned with today’s Trumpism and a whole slew of tech overlords and media oligarchs who want to build artificial cities on other planets, or who have signed up for cryogenic freezing to continue life after death in plasticized bodies. Plastic surgery and silicone implants have come to signify a mode of superficial enhancement, mirrored in what is often described as a “MAGA aesthetic."
Brutalist architecture emerged in the 1950s, at a moment when popular, optimistic futurism was at its height. Its aim was to strip away the smooth, softened forms of early modernist design. Cyberpunk does not stage sleek, luminous plastic environments but typically presents somber atmospheres shaped by dim neon light and harsh urban settings. Over the course of the twentieth century, concrete acquired a largely negative reputation, associated with rigidity, dirt, and bleakness, whereas plastic signified color, optimism, and progress. Brutalist philosophy inverts this hierarchy: concrete becomes the medium of honesty, while plastic appears as kitsch. To approach cyberpunk through Brutalism, then, is to recognize that its dystopian imagery operates less as ideology than as irony.
Throughout the twentieth century, science fiction repeatedly cast plastic as a material of progress—a substance that signaled the arrival of the future. In 1924, Karel Čapek introduced artificial, quasi-plastic beings in his play R.U.R., while in the same year Percy Marks coined the term “Plastic Age” to describe the post–World War I era.
Matsubara Civic Library Osaka MARU architects 2020, photo Paul Tulett
This book does not claim that Cyberpunk offers the “correct” vision of the future, nor that the most desirable world would resemble a dystopia of crumbling concrete. I am not opposing “retro” futurism to a presumably “forward-looking” Cyberpunk. Cyberpunk simply articulates a sensibility able to critique the "plastic mind."
One might be tempted to regard figures such as Peter Thiel, the apocalyptic conspiracy theorist who preaches the virtues of Megacorporations, or Sam Altman, who wants his brain be posthumously simulated by a computer, or Elon Musk, a self-professed admirer of Deus Ex who even sought a cameo in Cyberpunk 2077, as exemplary representatives of Cyberpunk.
Yet the opposite is the case.
These people are from the Plastic Age. Altman plans to pump his brain full of embalming chemicals when dying, and Thiel takes growth pills (synthetic HGH) and the antidiabetic metformin, which is loaded into polymer-based nanoparticles or nanofibers when absorbed by the body.
The Atlantic staff writer Ellen Cushing describes Elon Musk’s “Tesla Diner” in Los Angeles, which she visited in 2025, as “smooth and clean” where “every surface is covered in slick plastic” evoking “retro-futuristic references and curvilinear shape.” The restaurant is sleek like those living spaces that we know from classical Sci-Fi movies.
Cushing characterizes the diner as an odd fusion of accelerationism and retrofuturism: white plastic furniture, hamburgers and pie, and classic rock are presented as emblems of the future. She concludes that both Musk and Trump appear “less interested in earnestly trying to imagine a new world than in sloppily re-creating an old one.”
Tesla Diner
One might expect that a restaurant representing a car brand committed to overcoming oil dependence would privilege ecological materials over oil-derived plastics. Instead, Elon Musk’s project exemplifies the Retrofuturism described here: a nostalgic and escapist libertarian utopia. Its aesthetic and ideological orientation stands in marked contrast to the “realism” and the melancholia - rather than nostalgia - characteristic of Cyberpunk grounded in Brutalist concrete environments.
Bill Curry Stemlite Lamp
(compare with Tesla Diner stools)
Brutalism emerged in the 1950 in England as a counterreaction to a romantic “William Morris Revival” Arts & Crafts movement. However, a new “space age” aesthetic was developed in America at exactly that time. While England’s Brutalism attempted to erode the Arts & Crafts Movement by means of rough concrete, Los Angeles went in another direction: it created “LA Space-Pop.” Modernist designer Bill Curry operated from this city where design and futurist space engineering have always encountered each other. He invented the Stemlite lamp that would be extensively featured in the series Star Trek. Star Trek defined the plastic-dominated futuristic style to come, from Spandex costumes in intense colors to plastic chess pieces. Star Trek was released in 1966, in the same year in which Banham published his important book The New Brutalism.
Brutalist architecture has been present in Cyberpunk of all ages. Denis Villeneuve, director of Blade Runner 2049, confirms that he wanted his film to “feel brutalist, [meaning] that severe concrete architecture that started in the 1950s.” Cyberpunk stories like J. G. Ballard’s “The Terminal Beach” (1964) take place in front of oppressive abandoned concrete installations called “The “Blocks.” They are “particularly disturbing” concrete monsters, 2000 of them, “each a perfect cube fifteen feet in height, regularly spaced at ten-yard intervals” (147) and create a labyrinth. The blocks constitute a system that has an effect on the mind of those who are in the labyrinth. Traven, the main protagonist, finds that without the blocks he loses his “sense of reality.”
Blade runner 2049
Critique beyond Left and Right
Mike Pondsmith, creator of games like Cyberpunk (1988 and 2020) and CyberGeneration (1993), has argued that Cyberpunk is inherently political, though not in the conventional sense of left versus right, or conservative versus liberal. The matter is intricate. If one turns to cyberpunk’s architectural cousin, Brutalist architecture, it becomes clear that this aesthetic is historically aligned with leftist orientations: through Brutalism, it is tied to egalitarian, utilitarian, and socialist ambitions, particularly in the provision of affordable housing and public infrastructure. This m can even be associated with the ethos of punk, which is anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment, and resistant to centralized power. Unlike Retrofuturism, it does not regard oligarchic or authoritarian structures as viable alternatives.
Brutalist architecture is not fascist
Fascist architecture is typically neoclassical, emphasizing symmetry, columns, and polished stone façades, and is designed to project intimidation and permanence. It is an aesthetic of excess in the service of state power and nationalist ideology.
Brutalism is not to be conflated with Italian Futurism either, which, despite its avant-garde posture, was often politically conservative and closely entangled with fascist tendencies. The Futurists’ celebration of machinery, speed, violence, and virile nationalism finds a more recognizable echo in certain strands of contemporary Retrofuturism.
Even at the level of form, these continuities become visible. The Tesla Cybertruck, often described as futuristic, draws not only on 1970s science-fiction design but also recalls, in its sharp, angular geometry, the dynamic visual language of Giacomo Balla whose “lines of force”—intended to render speed and movement visible—were a hallmark of Italian Futurist art. Their reappearance in contemporary design signals an unexpected convergence between historical Futurism and present-day retrofuturist aesthetics.
Cybertrucks are commonly treated with plastic-based paint protection films (PPF) or vinyl wraps to protect the stainless steel from fingerprints, rust spots, and scratches.
Giacomo Balla
Velocity Of An Automobile, 1913
Plastic and Space Adventures
Cyberpunk stands in opposition to the Retrofuturism promoted by oligarchs and the political right. Within this contrast, concrete assumes a particular significance. It possesses a contemplative quality insofar as it creates distance, whereas plastic is verbose, saturated with signifiers, and insistently communicative. Plastic attracts the eye, invites commentary, and generates a continuous flow of reactions; but such constant discursivity ultimately undermines thought. Plastic talks us into an environment. Thinking, by contrast, requires a certain withdrawal. Brutalist architecture, with its austere use of concrete, evokes precisely this distancing effect. In a world dominated by the immediacy and emptiness of social media, Brutalism does not offer “fullness” but rather a reflective, ironic form of emptiness.
“Plastic relieves us of our obligations to the earth, to place” (Heather Davis, Plastic Matter).
In films and gaming one speaks of the aesthetics of “space plastic.” Plastic is light and suitable for aviation.
Fischer Technic
