ARCADE KID (3)
By:
October 18, 2023
We are pleased to present ARCADE KID, a ’90s “drivethru” written, illustrated, and soundtracked by HILOBROW friend Nikhil Singh. Our readers are urged to check out Nikhil’s dystopian psychedelic-noir novel Club Ded (Luna Press, 2020).
Sci-fi dominated the eighties, breeding niche interests. Complex technological aesthetics that had surfaced in countries like Japan finally began to find purchase in the West. At the time, I was an Arcade Kid. Mirror plastic shades. Iron Maiden t-shirts. Sorayama posters. Converse high-tops with day-glow laces. Cut-off skull gloves. Water-proof Sony Walkman. Hanging out in the Arcades. High on corporate caffeine. Airbrushed nights. Masumune Shirow. His Black Magic. When cyberpunk ‘emerged’ in the West, it had already gestated in the East, in various forms, for over a decade. Yet, even in William Gibson’s comparatively lacklustre Neuromancer, there was an overriding, mutually applicable concept (recognisable in titles). At the heart of cyberpunk lay a crypto-spiritual conceit. Techno-evolution. Exiting one’s body. Going virtual. Entering into, and operating within, a larger sphere of consciousness. A precursor for the internet avatar-hubs to come. Yet, this reality was existent, even in the early 90s. Feverish letter correspondence. Vampire girls, dice and figurine collecting gamers, phreaks, paperback enthusiasts, budding writers and artists. A global network. This post-D&D pen-pal era preconfigured the multimedia template of ‘intimate distance’. We would decorate our letters with garish stickers and magazine cut-ups. Just as people would later festoon posts and messages with gifs and emoticons. Online bulletin boards were starting to trend with the phreaks and hackers at school. Linux days. Nights in the computer faculty. Trawling school internet hook-ups. Watching the cowboys play. Hacking before hacking was coined. Clandestine bounce-backs. Off nearby university networks. Hospitals. Government webs. Green numeral glow. Not vivid enough for me. Waiting for holograms. Let the code-monkeys build their banana trees. 80’s revivalism continued unabated, seeming to outlast that of any other decade — perhaps because of the timing associated with the advent of certain technologies. Though, in many ways, the 40s was closer to ‘the future’. Futurists were then able to exist within an un-sentimentalized version of the HG Wells novels they had experienced as children — the reality that intruded, being the dystopian escapist fantasies of youth. How terrible, yet grimly energising it must have been to have been so rudely awoken from such delusions. All those young men, ushered into freshly built flying machines, straight out of high school. The spectacle of ruined cities. Great movements across the globe. A crushing burden of impending annihilation, foretelling the real future. All the new and terrible schools of thought germinating, spawning jungles from the ash. The 80s presented its own revivals, various acid-flashbacks of conflict passed. As war children recalculated their memory, in the gauzy hot-tubs of popular culture. War became replaced by a guilty hedonism. Faddy, masturbatory forces of rebellion. The pleasure principle had swung on its axis, from Hecate to Aphrodite.
More NIKHIL SINGH at HILOBROW: DREAMING MEDIA (Q&A) | JOURNEY TO IXTLAN | HASHTAG FASHION POLICE PROBLEMS | ILLUMINATE OR DISSIPATE? | HATE ISLAND. ALSO: HADRON AGE SF (2004–2023) | ORIGINAL FICTION at HILOBROW.