CHAPTER 2.5: TECH MYTHS FROM A HISTORICAL CONTEXT
There is historical precedence for Placide’s supernatural invocation. For centuries, revolution, ritual, and the building of Black diasporic identity have been at the forefront of Haiti’s socio-political stage. The Haitian Revolution is one of the major examples of these intersections, a monumental era in the country’s development which C. L. R. James went so far as to call the only successful slave revolt in history (x). Concepts of liberation among Black slaves during the Haitian Revolution were reinforced through multi-generational religious practices. This is not always apparent in mainstream, Western retellings of the revolution. While many “[writers]…turned Haiti as a land of conversion, where Africa could become France or a white man could become black” (Dayan xi), I must emphasize that the strains of rebellious thought that led to Haiti’s liberation were not a one-to-one reinterpretation of French concepts of political autonomy. Haitian identity and political agency are based in beliefs stemming from the existence of ancestral spirits, invocations of magic, and other religious practices. They are as indigenous as they are remixes of Western ideals.
This could explain why the writers of Cyberpunk 2077 are so willing to inject the Voodoo Boys’ technological interactions with religious/supernatural trappings. As Haitian characters—and as Black characters from the diaspora—the writers’ renditions of historicity blends well with a near-future setting centered around displacement, structural inequality, and the broiling potential for revolution. As Kodwo Eshun said on Afrofuturism, “Afrodiasporic subjects live the estrangement that science-fiction writers envision” (298). The themes of cyberpunk are themes that Black people have experienced time and again over the past half-millenium. Settler-colonial projects become distant, corporatized megacities. Balkanized European technology becomes mismatched, digital collages filled to the brim with glitches.
Voodoo Boys engage in fictional versions of the technological disruptions I covered in the previous chapter. Their appropriation of the Deep Net from corporate powers fall under a similar kind of intentional misuse of virtual space that gold farmers perform. Similar to the disruptive potential of the gold farmers’ actions, CD Projekt Red’s depiction of the Voodoo Boys could be an exciting way to explore how Black forms of revolution intersect with hypothetical futures—particularly futures modeled after cyberpunk sensibilities. But before we can crown the Voodoo Boys as the newest in a long line of innovative Afrofuturist visions of Blackness, and before we can categorize their fictional technological disruptions as solid examples of marginalized people’s online potential, let us not forget that Cyberpunk 2077 is not the story of Haitian cybernetic enthusiasts. It is the story of V, and the story of a player. CD Projekt Red seems to make some very specific assumptions about both of these narratives, and these assumptions make their depictions of race, glitches, and political agency a lot less straightforward.
