The Brooklyn Rail

In July 2025, Audrey Crews, paralyzed for two decades, wrote her name using only her thoughts. A Neuralink chip with thousands of microelectrodes decoded the electrical signals in her motor cortex, translating intention into digital text. “Just a normal day using telepathy,” she posted on X. The media celebrated the moment as if the future had finally arrived. Yet celebration alone obscures the contradiction. In that same present, biometric surveillance systems were cataloguing bodies and faces in the Shenzhen airport and Madison Square Garden, transforming human presence into endless data streams for algorithmic governance. One technology promised liberation from bodily constraint; the other rendered the body entirely legible to power. This is our condition: minds supposedly freed, bodies increasingly captured.

The categories that order our world—human/machine, nature/culture, public/private—appear neutral, even natural. Yet they operate as what Michel Foucault described as “technologies of power,” dictating not only what we perceive but what we can imagine. They don’t merely describe reality; they produce it. Gilles Deleuze reminds us that their force lies in repetition, in how contingency hardens into inevitability. To refuse these categories is to risk becoming illegible, an error in the code. It was against this architecture that cyberpunk emerged in the 1980s. William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix, Philip K. Dick’s paranoid labyrinths: not prophecies, but diagnoses. They stretched the logic of late capitalism until its seams split open. In Gibson’s Chiba City, bodies are hardware, psyches are monetized, and nothing escapes commodification. Molly’s mirrored lenses don’t herald a cyborg future; they reveal that the human was already an economic unit. The hacker doesn’t transcend the system but twists its code from within. Cyberpunk functions as glitch, the rupture that illuminates the machine’s hidden workings.

But something shifts when this aesthetic migrates from metropolitan centers to the periphery. Enter Ramiro Sanchiz’s Trashpunk, a novel that rewrites cyberpunk through Montevideo. The title itself signals departure: not the sleek glow of cyber-Tokyo, but the rust and salvage yards of the Global South. Here, hackers crowd into apartments cluttered with outdated monitors and tangled cables, where the future arrives secondhand. Cyberspace appears not as a pristine frontier but as a ruinous commons, unstable, fragmentary, perpetually at risk of collapse.

In this Montevideo, tunnels beneath the Palacio Salvo form arteries of an undercity. Bodies, altered by counterfeit designer drugs, drift through dim corridors. And the intelligence that flickers here does not emerge from Silicon Valley’s laboratories but from paleotechnological residue, machines discarded at the edges of global circuits, reassembled into something autonomous and strange. This AI does not speak optimization or efficiency; it murmurs in broken, indecipherable code, as if voicing the technological unconscious of the periphery. At the novel’s core is Federico Stahl, Sanchiz’s recurring protagonist. Through the Proyecto Stahl, writing becomes a feedback loop, not the inscription of stable identity but its disassembly. Stahl is no hero; he is a reverse translator, exposing that the human was always already posthuman, that the boundary between system and error was never secure. Trashpunk refuses the lure of purity or novelty. It insists that whatever is new must emerge from remainder, from what the system discards but cannot metabolize.

This is the crucial intervention of peripheral cyberpunk. Where Gibson and Sterling mapped the hidden architecture of late capitalism from its centers, Sanchiz reveals what that architecture cannot process: the uneven geographies of the Global South, where technology arrives not as seamless innovation but as salvage, residue, bricolage. In Montevideo, the future doesn’t gleam, it rusts. And it is precisely through this rust that another vision becomes possible. The paradox of our time is stark. Neuralink’s promise of thought-writing and the ubiquity of biometric tracking belong to the same continuum: technologies that promise freedom while binding us ever more tightly to the grid. Against this narrative of smooth progress, Trashpunk proposes friction. Its Montevideo is not a counterpoint to Silicon Valley, not its Other, but its remainder: the discarded fragment, the ruin, the irrepressible glitch.

Perhaps the task of critical art today lies not in celebrating new categories but in dwelling with what does not fit. The glitch, the residue, the waste: these are not errors to be erased but grounds from which the unexpected might surface. If Anglo-cyberpunk was the hacker of code, Trashpunk is the scavenger of ruins, recomposing the discarded into a language the system cannot contain. The true novelty, then, is not the Neuralink chip that lets Audrey Crews draw a heart on a screen, but the refusal to let that gesture be folded neatly into the triumphal story of techno-progress. Real disruption lives in the static between signals, in the fragments that resist assimilation.

Which is to say: our future may not be engineered in Palo Alto or Shenzhen, but hacked together in Montevideo’s rusting apartments, in tunnels beneath neglected cities, in stories that persist in speaking a language the system cannot translate.