It’s become fashionable for anyone claiming to be a sci-fi fan to declare they’ve “Gotten beyond all that” neon and rain-soaked alleyways of cyberpunk dystopias. ‘Ugh, you could never pay me to relocate there,’ they groan and roll their eyes at yet more shadowy megacity business where everyone is accredited by some multi-corp every which way-from-SkyNet in the event of Twitter fraud. And yet, if we are truly honest with ourselves… at the end of day cyberpunk is that dark angsty phase in our lives some of us never really grew out — like cliched rebellious teenager forever on loop.
Back then, it was all the dystopian future 90s-angst picked up by neon-glow exclamation points and serifed synthwave beats delivered to tech-savvy antiheroes whose ethereal emo chill somehow transcended death. We have outgrown it, yes that is another claim of the 21st century but our browsing history tells a different story. Cause look & locate your — I guarantee you got at least 1 of these Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition downloads now in there.
Let’s break it down. The dystopian megacity — the sprawling, overcrowded and smoggy megalopolis that fans love to hate. They scoff, bored and clutching their copy of Neuromancer. Yet I watch the exact same people line up at events like CyberCon where they get excited and anxious to engage in behaviors represented in these environments. I probably have one from a VR booth, where you could jack into a simulation of Ghost in the Shell’s Tokyo. The line around the building, people anticipating like they were about to explode. When they put on the VR there was a spark in their eyes, and when they took off that headset you could tell: see now somethin’ had lit up inside them — it was like maybe just saw way everything played out at least enough times smiling while staring into abyss.
If they’re so overplayed, why do we love seeing these grungy landscapes that are filled to capacity with tech? That one is simple: because they feed off that most primal of needs for escapism — only not the variety where you teleport to a distant galaxy full of talking trees. More generally, cyberpunk delights in presenting a dirtier but just presentable enough reality to us — one where you can hack your way through the barriers that exist between/me against life itself, knowledge isn’t power it’s survival. Our world, with the volume turned up and the shadows backed off. It is the darkness that we, in fact, relish stepping into.
Cyberpunk flourishes in this territory, it feels too recognizable and on point to truly taunt but its potential keeps us engaged.
But enough about that, the reason people like cyberpunk is TECH. Having been written in a time where technology was advancing faster than we could understand it, cyberpunk comes across as almost soothingly prescient. In this genre, technology can change in unthinkable ways—saving us one minute while dooming the next—and its our duty to take a hard look at these possibilities. Sure, we could all chuckle and roll our eyes when yet another narrative about a lone hacker vs. mega-corp lands on the streaming platforms — but then watch every frame of the trailer in rapt fascination over those newly rendered neon skylines and augmented reality interfaces.
One such trope is the rogue AI, which you see in virtually every cyberpunk tale ever told. It went from being the ideal of a scifi concept in 80s films to a refined yet omnipotent menace. Cliché as it may be, but who doesn’t love a good list?! Remember when Ex Machina was the buzz about. Everyone was on board for fans of the genre, so much that some post-release players would call “AI-gone-awry” novels too predictable. When Cyberpunk 2077 launched, it wasn’t even necessarily what was wrong with the game or where Keanu Reeves showed up; but rather its digital world, capable of transforming AI from a material to use into an actual participant in history and interaction inside.
Hours were spent by adventure gamers skinning their avatars and taking them on slightly twisted journeys in a dark, dangerous but incredibly alive technological landscape.
Perhaps the real delight of cyberpunk is that it extrapolates from actual tech into something sexy as hell. In other words, these days all the time we see self-driving cars and smart homes in our daily lives that are capable of chatbots really good conversation (Yes eerie). All this adds up to a gradual slide toward something that feels… actually pretty fucking cyberpunk. Except in the neon-drenched realm of sci-fi, where everything is turned up to 11. They are elements of the human experience, no longer just for convenience but also as a means to stay alive in a world where humans and machines commingling is as blurred an interpretation seen through rain-slicked panes.
It’s all too easy to draw lines between current tech trends and cyberpunk visions at conventions like FutureTech ExpoIn developer-speak, a ‘technology trend section’ is what separates out real or science from fiction. People, many of them people who say they grew up past the flashy aesthetic of cyberpunk, wait in hushed awe around demonstrations showing off advanced prosthetics and exoskeletons that will make you faster / stronger; VR suits. It is a little bit more than just being drawn in by the new and shiny, however — it feels as if we are watching out childhood/adolescent lived sci-fi be made real unto us (or at least what has long appeared to be our futures courtesy of films like The Matrix).
We like to pretend otherwise, but there’s a thrill in picturing them as us.
Cyberpunk itself, some contend, is in a rut — always dystopic, choked with a tech-fueled class division and the lone rogue trying to bring it all crashing down. Ultimately, if you dive really deep into it the themes that tend to emerge are somewhat lucrative because they reflect actual things people fear and desire. In our modern age of consumer privacy as a commodity and rampant commercial surveillance, the world depicted in the pages of Cyberpunk feels less like fiction and more like an exaggerated mirror reflecting back at us. And that’s what makes it charming; we can see a world full of both terror and wonder, where technology is as much the bad guy as well-intentioned do-gooder.
Ah, the endless dystopian appeal. It’s a black hole of our own making that is impossible to escape — no matter how many times we proclaim otherwise and try to move elsewhere, WE ARE ALWAYS PULLED BACK IN. Why? Because cyberpunk does not merely forecast a possible future, but also reflects the one we are constructing. High-fidelity 80s-style sci-fi may be its most visible artifact, but the genre endures not because it yokes our entertainment to a retro futurism (hi Cyberpunk) or is bound by canon that must occasionally shuffle onscreen. It changes as we change, responding to the anxieties of its day in precisely the way our contemporary tech debates still do.
Let face it, beneath the surface there is a perverse side of us which takes pleasure in imagining an even more dystopian world than ours where technology gone awry tragically makes life any worse can free itself.
Remember Altered Carbon? This was inevitably followed by the same “I saw this a couple years ago on Netflix” responses and yet, in no time at all it went from being dismissed as empty intellectual junkfood to high-concept populist art that could inspire long think-pieces arguing everything from what truly defines human consciousness or identity right down to whether something like digital immortality is essentially amoral. Fans tore through it, then took to message boards that weekend and picked apart the story, in between flights of fancy on what it would be like for you if you could just “resleeve” into another body and run death itself out.
This is a great example of or love/hate relationship with it. The gripe, of course–part and parcel with the ritual that involves bitching about how everything looks ripped-off or mimicked to be vapid in commonality vs. most people yammering-and-gershawndy is we’re just suckers for watching tech-fueled society go scorched-Earth on itself at its finest. It’s the sort of horror that is engaging, one part truly inquisitive while being repelled just as equally — like watching a train wreck through an HTC Vive.
However, nostalgia or not, there is something about cyberpunk that keeps us from moving completely? The genre, in a manner of speaking, grants us permission to meditate our worst thoughts into the future without actually pulling out here. It’s a sandbox for us to experiment with is the whole “megacorps run our lives, AIs have taken over society and humanity only has one hope left: outwit! The show provides a space for catharsis, allowing us to think and debate on the morality of such surveillance, how faaaaaar we can take privacy where it might be replaced with Marauder’s Maps or BDSM dungeons …but all that could well lead us into an unplaceable digital utopia 5 tweaks in its algorithm away from dystopialandencedence etc.
I witnessed it directly at a hacker meetup in an old Brooklyn warehouse where the organizers had concocted some pop-up Akira-esque sensory-overloading tent. The crowd? A stew of hackers, bitcoin zealots and VR junkies—presumably all too sophisticated for cyberpunks old bag of tricks. Sure enough, they were talking about how blockchain could empower the Megacorps we so often are warned of in cyberpunk to be just as shady — while taking Instagram selfies with a neon-lit vision of Night City from Cyberpunk 2077 behind them. There is that thing in the back of our mind where we don’t just put up with cyberpunk, but rather want and sometimes even crave a world like this because it invites us to see ourselves as walking those dimlit streets much in the same way they wish video games would take them down shadowy alleys avoiding pursuit from an evil AI entity while also hacking their way towards some improved better new frontier or at least something cooler.
Agree or disagree, this is where the real magic of the genre works its black-magic mojo: it lets us play at rebellion without actually doing anything about that. The term “cyberpunk” itself encapsulates this duality; it is a construction of the technical (“cyber”) as well as the rebellious spirit (akin to Punk). We’re currently still on the “cyber” side in terms of what we use for our daily life while there is some resistence, and want to think of ourselves as closer to punk. We inhabit a world ruled over by Big Tech, and data is the new oil; in this sense, the cyberpunk narrative may have been an attractive from of digital escapism.
That we might be — lowly, flawed creatures that we are perhaps just a hacked firmware update away from the antiheros of our own narrative.
Of course, it is easy to dismiss the thought that there will be anything truly new to say within a genre and then along comes another title like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided or series such as Love Death & Robots and we are back looking for what else can they explore. At this point, the plot twist is kind of like when you spot it a mile away but in spite of yourself still enjoy watching it roll out. With the genre’s tropes thoroughly trodden on, these ‘tropenames‘ are a mantra as repetitive and soothing as any prayer beads.
They allow us a glimpse into the void of what could be coming, wish or fear as any may do, then we can pull ourselves back to our own fantastic paranoia state.
In the end, cyberpunk is not just a genre but also an active reflection of where we are going as people. It’s a study of the consequences when the lines between man and machine are crossed, society magnified by technology to its breaking-point. Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you… The closer we edge toward a future of AI-driven decision making, AR overlays, and the omnipresent buzz of all things digital — it feels less like an escapist’s rest stop than a burlesque show sneak peak. And maybe that is why we continue to return for more, no matter how much it makes us roll our eyes.
Besides, who among us wouldn’t wish we live in a world where you could splash about the net and alter reality even if only for some time?
