I've been thinking a lot recently about something Ben Brown wrote: "my two goals in life: be cool, be cyberpunk." It's a short line and it has stuck with me. I think it's how I should be living too.
To me, being cyberpunk is about ownership of your data and your devices. If you can't change the software or change the hardware, do you really own it? Can you repair the device yourself, or pay a third party to do it? Can you swap components? Can you replace the firmware? Do you really own your data if it can't be moved between systems?
This is why I've been enjoying hacking on my own todo.txt service and clients so much. Sure, I'm a programmer and it scratches the itch I have to create things. But I also love that the whole stack is built on an open standard, that the data is a flat text file I can move anywhere, and that the system fits precisely the shape of my own life. Nothing about it depends on a vendor staying in business or staying friendly.
That, to me, is being cyberpunk. Not leather jackets and neon -- just refusing to be a tenant in your own digital life.
The coolest people I've known have all been people who understood their own passions and had an openness about it -- a willingness to share what they cared about without performing it. I'll meet someone like that and think, "damn, she's dope as hell, I love what she's doing with XYZ." It isn't about taste or aesthetics. It's about being honest about what moves you and generous about letting other people in on it.
The test I try to hold myself to is the simple one: does this make me happy as a person and who I am? Am I being kind? Compassionate? Welcoming? I hope so. I'm going to keep striving for it.
I first found Ben in the mid-to-late 1990s on his website flabjab.com. He was a college kid experimenting with the early web and the site was such an amazing and fresh experience -- the kind of thing that made you understand the web was a medium and not just a distribution channel. I recently refound him on Mastodon, and damn, that guy is still living the cool ethos. Three decades in and he's still building strange small things on his own terms.
Be cool. Be cyberpunk. I'm going to keep trying.