Science Friction

Libertarianism is corporate fascism.

by Steven Wells

William Gibson (see A-List, facing page) is the godfather of the cyber-punk genre, which imagines a near-future libertarian wonderland where the corporations have thrown off the shackles of red tape and regulation. The result, inevitably, is a logo-infested fascist hell world where a tiny, super-rich minority live in paranoid enclaves while the rest of humanity languish under a new serfdom.

There are, of course, those people who argue that giving up all democratic regulation of the same multinational companies that run death squads and support military dictatorships in the Third World doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing would happen here. But those people are idiots.

Gibson’s new novel Spook Country is described by super-cool British comics writer Warren Ellis as “dictation from the zeitgeist.” It contains lines like “the windows of army surplus stores constitute hymns to male powerlessness.” And it features “a thinking man’s ninja” who wears Adidas GSG9 sneakers—named after the notoriously hyperviolent real-life German antiterrorist police squad.

Madly enough, these sneakers exist in real life. Madder still, the aforementioned super-sneakered German antiterrorist squad is featured in Brit writer Garth Ennis’ graphic novel Preacher, in which the incredibly handsome eponymous hero carves a scar resembling the opening of a urethra into the bald head of a renegade GSG9 officer.

This dickheaded theme (an oblique, astute and entirely accidental commentary on the nature of both brand loyalty and sneaker fetishism) is revisited in Ennis’ current comic creation Chronicles of Wormwood, in which the Antichrist gives a racist bartender a literal dickhead for making rude comments about the African-American Jesus. Wormwood also boasts a God addicted to constantly and frenziedly bashing the bishop (an English slang term for masturbation referencing the similarity between the head of the penis and a bishop’s hat). Which explains a lot when you think about it.

Meanwhile Warren Ellis also rocks all things cyber-punky in the comic Black Summer. In the first issue a superhero walks into a presidential press conference covered in blood, and calmly announces he’s just offed the leader of the free world for starting an illegal war. And there’s also an awesome to-die-for-on-sex-stilts double-page spread where amazing artist Juan Jose Ryp depicts a hot chick on a motorbike taking out an entire GSG9-style pig phalanx with guts, gats and gusto.

There isn’t a lot that connects these works other than a distrust of authority, a hatred of corporatism and a storytelling style that blips, zips and fizzes with appropriately dissonant 21st-century brio.

Consider this your August reading list. Class dismissed.