You know what I love about film people who claim they’re “over” cyberpunk? They’ll roll their eyes at another Blade Runner discussion, dismiss Ghost in the Shell as dated anime, complain that every cyberpunk story is just “corpo bad, hacker good” – and then spend three hours dissecting why the lighting in Akira still looks better than anything Marvel’s cranking out. I’ve had this exact conversation at least fifty times over beers after industry screenings, and it always ends the same way: someone inevitably admits they’ve rewatched The Matrix trilogy more recently than they’d care to confess.
Here’s the thing – I get it. On paper, cyberpunk should feel stale by now. We’ve seen the rain-slicked streets, the towering corporate arcologies, the leather-clad hackers with their glowing implants about a thousand times. But when I’m cutting footage for tech commercials or corporate videos, watching how we light glass surfaces and chrome, seeing how digital interfaces are designed… man, we’re living in a cyberpunk film. We just don’t have the courtesy to make it look as cool as Ridley Scott did in ’82.
I was at SXSW a couple years back – had to edit some behind-the-scenes stuff for a client – and ended up at this VR demo booth running Ghost in the Shell experiences. The line was ridiculous. Hour-long wait minimum. These weren’t teenagers either; mostly people my age and older, industry folks who should theoretically know better. But I watched their faces when they came out of those headsets. That wide-eyed look, like they’d just glimpsed something they’d been waiting their whole lives to see. Same expression I probably had watching Tron: Legacy in IMAX, even though I knew the story was garbage and the de-aging effects on Jeff Bridges looked like melted wax.
The dirty secret about cyberpunk is that it gives us permission to want the future we’re afraid of. Those sprawling megacities everyone pretends to hate? They’re just dense urban environments with better lighting design. The omnipresent surveillance networks? We already have those, except they’re run by social media algorithms instead of shadowy government AIs. At least in cyberpunk, you can hack back.
What keeps pulling me back to these films – and trust me, I’ve tried to branch out – is how they handle technology as character rather than just gadget. The computers in cyberpunk movies aren’t tools, they’re environments, personalities, threats, lovers, gods. When Neuromancer talks about cyberspace as a “consensual hallucination,” that’s not just William Gibson being poetic. That’s recognizing that our relationship with digital technology is fundamentally psychological, not mechanical.
I’ve been editing video for almost twenty years now, working with digital tools that would’ve seemed like magic to filmmakers in the 80s. But somehow, the computers in Blade Runner still feel more advanced than my MacBook Pro. It’s not about processing power – it’s about interface design, about the tactile relationship between human and machine. Those clunky keyboards and monochrome displays in 80s cyberpunk films have more personality than any sleek touchscreen interface Apple’s ever designed.
Take the rogue AI trope everyone loves to hate. Yeah, it’s been done to death – HAL 9000, Skynet, Agent Smith, GLaDOS, every AI antagonist since 1968. But when Ex Machina came out, suddenly everyone was a cyberpunk expert again. I must’ve heard a dozen conversations about Turing tests and consciousness after that film, usually from the same people who’d been dismissing AI stories as played out. The difference? Ex Machina grounded its tech concepts in recognizable reality, made them feel immediate instead of distant.
And that’s what cyberpunk has always done best – taken contemporary anxieties and cranked them up until they become almost beautiful in their extremity. The genre emerged in the 80s when personal computers were becoming mainstream, when corporate culture was reaching peak Gordon Gekko excess, when MTV was turning everything into neon-soaked visual overload. Cyberpunk took those trends and asked: what if this, but more? What if corporate power was absolute? What if human identity became malleable? What if reality itself became programmable?
These questions feel less hypothetical every year. I spend my workdays manipulating digital reality – adjusting colors, compositing impossible shots, making products look more appealing than they actually are. It’s literally what cyberpunk warned us about, except it pays my rent and nobody’s trying to stop me. The rebellion got co-opted so smoothly we didn’t even notice.
Cyberpunk 2077’s launch was fascinating to watch from an industry perspective. All the discourse about bugs and broken promises, but people kept playing anyway. Why? Because walking around Night City felt like finally visiting somewhere you’d been dreaming about for decades. The technical problems were secondary to the experience of existing in that world, even briefly. That’s the power of good production design – it makes you want to live there despite knowing it would probably kill you.
I went to CES last year for work – had to document some client meetings with tech vendors. The whole event felt like a cyberpunk convention that had forgotten it was supposed to be fiction. Augmented reality contact lenses, brain-computer interfaces, AI assistants that could mimic dead relatives’ voices… all presented as consumer products with cheerful marketing copy. The only thing missing was the rain and the moral ambiguity.
But maybe that’s the point. Cyberpunk never promised us moral clarity – it promised us power and asked if we were willing to pay the price. The protagonists aren’t heroes in any traditional sense; they’re survivors navigating systems too large and complex to defeat. They can’t tear down the corporate oligarchy, but they can carve out small spaces of autonomy within it. They can’t escape surveillance, but they can turn it into art or weapon.
That resonates because it feels achievable. We can’t overthrow Google or Amazon, but we can root our phones and run ad blockers. We can’t opt out of digital capitalism, but we can choose which compromises we make and how we make them. The cyberpunk fantasy isn’t about winning – it’s about maintaining agency in systems designed to eliminate it.
Altered Carbon understood this better than most recent attempts at the genre. The technology was horrifying and liberating in equal measure – immortality through consciousness transfer, but only for those who could afford it. Body-swapping as both ultimate freedom and ultimate commodification. The show got cancelled after two seasons, probably because it was too weird for mainstream audiences, but it captured something essential about cyberpunk’s appeal: the simultaneous attraction and revulsion of transcending human limitations.
I was at a hacker meetup in Austin last month – friend of mine runs a cybersecurity company, invited me to document their presentation. Warehouse space, exposed brick, laptops everywhere… basically a cyberpunk film set that happened naturally. The irony wasn’t lost on anyone there. These people spend their days protecting corporate networks from the exact kind of digital infiltration that cyberpunk celebrates. But they still decorated the space with Akira posters and played Perturbator between presentations.
That’s the beautiful contradiction at the heart of cyberpunk’s enduring appeal. We know the future it depicts is dystopian, but we can’t help finding it seductive. The neon lights, the leather coats, the knowledge that you can rewrite reality if you’re smart enough and desperate enough… it beats the hell out of commuting to an office job and arguing with health insurance companies.
Maybe that’s why the genre won’t die despite repeated declarations of its obsolescence. As long as technology continues reshaping human experience faster than we can process the implications, we’ll need stories that help us imagine what we’re becoming. Cyberpunk provides that service, even when – especially when – the visions it offers are more warning than promise. It’s a mirror that shows us our reflection in chrome and shadow, rain-slicked and neon-lit, asking whether we recognize the person looking back.
And honestly? Sometimes that person looks pretty cool, even if they’re probably doomed.
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