CHAPTER 2.4: VIRTUAL FAILURE AND THE VOODOO BOYS
The protagonist, named V, surrenders for a moment to the virtual confusion flaring across her augmented vision. Once V’s vision has stabilized, we see that she stands in a shadowy room. The sole source of light is a glowing tub filled with ice water, and a Black woman named Brigitte guides her into it. In fact, we see that excluding V herself who appears to be White, everyone in this room is Black. They are all members of the Voodoo Boys, a high-tech gang of climate refugees from the submerged island country of Haiti. Brigitte plugs a cord into V’s wrist, and another slew of glitches fly across the screen. By the time V has stabilized, Brigitte has joined the other people in the room, plugging herself in. V then focuses back on her own hands. Straight lines of color bleed from her palms to strike across the shadows, mimicking the visual effect of a pixel sort—another specific type of glitch aesthetic. This time, the glitch is attached to skin, to the player. It is not just a glimpse into another world; the pixel sort is a portal into the fully digital realm that the glitches in Cyberpunk 2077 hint at.
This distinction is important. In this game glitches are associated with the ethereal aspects of digital environments, with something uncontrollable found in binary pulses that remains defiant of reality’s rules. Outside of Cyberpunk 2077 though, in the physical, we do not always interpret glitches in the same way. Michael Betancourt makes a case against glitches being inherently disruptive in his essay “Critical Glitches and Glitch Art,” explaining that virtual failure depends on context—if a user expects disruption, then a glitch does not interrupt the process. Regardless, we have shrouded glitches and the virtual with ethereal qualities that used to be only associated with the supernatural. Betancourt claims that
By Betancourt’s logic, we could categorize the usage of glitches in Cyberpunk 2077 as a “mystification” of the virtual. If anything, the game’s obfuscation of digital technology’s machinations only serves to strengthen the tie between glitches and some type of unreachable parallel reality. Outside of the game, that space doesn’t exist in any real sense. In reality, glitches do not show us some kind of alternate world beneath the skin of a complex machine like a computer. Glitches are the flawed results of that machine, not an indicator to something more beyond the machine. In Cyberpunk 2077, there really is something else. An alternate reality roils beneath the game’s speculative version of the Internet. The digital “other side”, the space that glitches can only hint at but never lead us to, is given weight. In Night City, the virtual underworld is more than a collective fantasy. It is literally a glitch away.[the] use of ontology to define the 'glitch' does not clarify interpretation, it confuses it: what appears as 'glitch' is a product of the digital machine functioning properly (either at the level of hardware or software), but producing results that in a human readable form may appear anomalous—this fact remains true for all glitched works, perhaps most especially in those cases of 'glitch art' where the hardware (or software) has been specifically modified to 'short circuit' and generate the glitch form—it is producing what it is designed to create. The treatment of glitches as idiosyncratic ruptures with the mechanical functioning of the digital machine reflects the aura of the digital's mystification of digital technology as a magical realm beyond constraints and human control. (2014)
What does this realm look like in Cyberpunk 2077? How does the game decide to present an environment that is quickly becoming a part of our contemporary mythology? After the pixel sorting effect consumes the whole screen and CD Projekt Red flashes their title card, a new scene unfolds in an amorphous digital realm defined by corrupted visual artifacts. It would be inaccurate to call the imagery in this space to be filled with glitches, mainly because a glitch tends to be associated with disruption. Since a glitch is made to interrupt and complicate a virtual process, it cannot be the very foundation of that process. V approaches virtual doppelgangers of the people who plugged her into this parallel universe. Their bodies themselves are made of the same straying pixels as the rest of the environment. The only difference is their bright red coloration.
Unlike the distant, corporate tech that we have seen in Cyberpunk 2077, which consists of seamless holographs and sleek cybernetic implants lining facial contours, the technology here is all encompassing. It is an immersive experience, a mythological jaunt into the unaccepted and avoided side of cyberspace. More than anything, it is coded as Black. The Voodoo Boys’ virtual bodies are integrated with the space, and Brigitte lays claim to it all. When V asks where she is, Brigitte replies that this is the Voodoo Boys’ “data fortress” and their “[bridge] to de deep net” (CD Projekt Red). The subtitles in-game are spelled to mimic Brigitte’s heavy accent, a choice that is applied inconsistently across the dialogue.
The Voodoo Boys are guardians of a virtual underworld, they swathe themselves in the imagery of virtual failure, and they directly bring Haitian belief systems into the cloud. They are Blackness gone online, but also Blackness made unreal. The Voodoo Boys associate themselves with the truly incorporeal aspects of cyberspace. Canonically, their goal is to achieve a sort of posthuman experience through liberating a group of artificial superintelligences called the free AIs and merging consciousnesses. This cyberspace-obsessed gang has all the makings of being the catalyst for an Afrofuturist narrative within Cyberpunk 2077. As British-Ghanaian writer and theorist Kodwo Eshun says that “it has been necessary [for Black people] to assemble countermemories that contest the colonial archive” (288), the Voodoo Boys present a possible rebellious force in Night City that challenges corporate goals through distinctly Black cybernetic interactions.
