Cyberpunk
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“Not a single thing in this world isn’t in the process of becoming something else. Likewise, you.” - Cyberpunk 2077
In the late 1950s, the United States government built a machine called the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, or “SAGE.” It was a continent-spanning network of fortified underground bunkers housing the largest computers ever constructed, each one occupying an entire floor of blast-hardened concrete. The project was designed to detect Soviet bombers crossing into North American airspace and coordinate a military response fast enough to prevent nuclear destruction.
Inside of SAGE, the vast work spaces hummed with the sounds of computer beeps and cooling fans. There were gleaming metallic command theaters where the operators would interface with the machines by tapping glowing green radar screens with light pens, which would then query the computer about the likelihood of friend or foe. Hundreds of Air Force personnel labored in what were called Blue Rooms — bathed in flickering blue hues by CRT displays - where they sat in front of glowing consoles around the clock, weapons in hand, their eyes fixed on screens. These were the first men to live and work inside computers.
The system was obsolete almost the moment it was finished. By the time SAGE reached full operational capability in 1963, the Soviet Union had already shifted its primary nuclear delivery method from bombers to intercontinental ballistic missiles, weapons that SAGE wasn’t designed to track and couldn’t intercept. Engineers who had worked on the system later said that it would have been useless in an actual attack anyway, a Maginot Line of the atomic age. And yet SAGE kept running, staffed and funded, for two more decades until the lights were finally turned off in the 1980s. Stories of its design and operation would inspire science fiction authors and filmmakers for decades. Dr. Strangelove, WarGames, and FailSafe all drew from its command-and-control architecture, midcentury futurist aesthetics, and dangerous integration of men and machines.
The servicemen inside SAGE had been recruited, trained, and stationed to serve a project whose intended purpose had evaporated, leaving them as components consumed within a machine that continued to run not because it worked, but because of a weird fusion of technological forward push and institutional inertia. These people’s psychological evals upon leaving the program often raised red flags at the Pentagon. Their experiences locked within these giant computer systems extorted similar stress as that experienced aboard nuclear submarines, but with some unique signs of disassociation and sensory disruption.
Discovered later in the abandoned bunkers, hidden on the back faces of filler knobs covering unused button positions on the consoles — places no supervisor would think to look — were dozens of messages scratched in by the men who had spent their working lives inside those windowless rooms amid those blinking diodes and giant thrumming processors. Their personal graffiti on the machines within whose geometry they lived and worked.
“Don't you feel useless?” one message read. "I can't stand it here,” said another. “Get me out.”
Even under threat of nuclear war, however, the middle years of the 20th Century held a great deal of optimism about America’s technological future. Though still large and bulky, computers became more mainstream both in use and in the popular imagination. Automotive and aeronautical engineering took leaps in style and capability, and rocket-powered spaceships took men to the Moon and back. Pop culture science fiction like Star Trek and The Jetsons envisioned a cooperative future filled with helpful robots, easy interstellar travel, and miraculous medicine.
But in the 1970s that optimism began to wane. The mass killing of the Vietnam War stayed on television screens night after night, synthetic drugs like LSD took on a sense of menace in the wake of MKULTRA and the Manson murders, and the cheery computers of Star Trek gave way to the murderous HAL-9000 of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The increasing speed of information began to summon a state of mind the futurist Alvin Toffler called “Future Shock,” wherein the transition from an industrial society to a hyper-technological “super-industrial society” induces a collective stress and mass disorientation, leading to various states of breakdown. Toffler’s book on the subject was published in 1970, when the modern internet was still just a gleam in the eye of Defense Department engineers.
This new techno-pessimism ran alongside a wider cultural decay as the United States descended into an addled state of social fray and crumbling trust. So many things just stopped working, or worked in ways that revealed unwelcome tradeoffs. Televisual technology was being joined by the digital, slowly at first, but over the next few decades the computer would come to dominate nearly every aspect of life. We were inventing novel ways to plug ourselves into an abyss, to “amuse ourselves to death” in the words of Neil Postman.
And unlike other challenges where advancing technology seemed the saving grace — medicine, industry, communication, material comfort — the digital seemed, at least to some, like a realm where the forward march of technology posed a great hazard. Not just physical, but emotional, psychological, and spiritual.
The computer was coming for everything.
“For years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible.” - Neuromancer
There was cultural unease about the digital at its very inception. Comics and short stories in the 1970s went beyond the idea of getting ray-gunned by killer robots to explore the ways in which interfacing with computers might threaten humanity in ways more fundamental, how the machines we create might rewire our minds and modify our bodies and make us something intrinsically less than we are. Science fiction writers like Harlan Ellison and Philip K. Dick explored themes of being overtaken by computers and their progeny, and artists like Moebius and Syd Mead laid a visual foundation for what would become a new genre.
The term “Cyberpunk” was coined by Bruce Bethke in a 1983 short story of the same name. He was joined by writers like John Shirley, Pat Cadigan, and Walter John Williams, and in their work you could see early versions of the now-familiar archetype of the “hacker” — a troublemaking, anti-authority futuristic pirate that did his work primarily in “cyberspace.” The early titles of the genre established a driving thematic aesthetic, often referred to as “High Tech, Low Life,” which illustrates a future wherein technology advances as daily life deteriorates. Garbage piles up, wealth disparity skyrockets, and a neon-lit squalor descends over a hyper-urbanized landscape. Traditional governance structures crumble as technology corporations use their creations to gain power. Bodies become easily modified platforms for digital and mechanical augmentation, and thus are more easily mutilated, degraded, and discarded.
The genre’s seminal work came in 1984 when William Gibson published Neuromancer. In the novel, a hacker (or “console cowboy”) named Case is hired by a shadowy group for a data heist, in which they must break an AI out of its cybernetic cage. Gibson melded punk rock aesthetics and sensibility with the techno-pessimist thematics of earlier works, and he fleshed out his “High Tech/Low Life” future with omnipresent hyper-stimulation and rampant addiction. Structured like a noir crime novel, Neuromancer’s maguffins are code — passwords, AI constraints, personality constructs — and the characters move about in “cyberspace” more than they do in the physical world. The book also dips its toe into spiritual implications that were emergent in the 80s and still relevant now - whether a sufficiently complex information system might be indistinguishable from, or actually become, something sentient or ensouled.
Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner, based on Philip K. Dick’s novella Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, also dove into the implications of humans creating their own artificial copies, as did its later sequel Blade Runner 2049. The irony in stories like these is that as humans themselves descend into brain-fried, dissociated versions of themselves, their simulacra (androids, AIs, etc) may start to seem more “human” than the real thing, in that they represent an earlier, less degraded form of humanity which their creators still harbor as the truer state. The androids in Blade Runner are dangerous — so are the humans — but also curious, humorous, and righteous. The machines are our progeny insofar as they represent what we used to think we were, or what we delude ourselves into thinking we still are. As things get worse, the new breed on the upswing passes the old one on the downswing.
The driving force of the genre is an sedated and inescapable downward arc. Not a quick nuclear obliteration or an alien invasion, but a neon-lit path to damnation enabled by the unstoppable forward march of technology and consumerism, feeding each other as they offload human worth and agency onto machines and algorithms that can appear, in their seductive incarnations, like demons birthed from deadly sins. Cyberpunk illustrated a future wherein humanity’s primary concerns — commerce, socialization, love, self-realization, even the afterlife — are digitized and commoditized. “Cyberspace” was not going to be a parallel environment from which one could jaunt back and forth. It would become tethered to the “real world” in ways seen and unseen. And eventually, if unchecked, it could swallow reality itself.
“The silence of the world could not rein back its greed. Not any longer, not when it had virtually won.” - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Cyberpunk is inseparable from its critiques of capitalism — particularly “consumer capitalism,” an advanced phase wherein consumer demand is manufactured on a large scale by mass marketing and other forms of tech-assisted manipulation.
In the early days, Philip K. Dick’s 1969 novel UBIK — a thematic ancestor of Cyberpunk but without its aesthetics or vibe — imagined a world wherein everything is a subscription. You insert a coin to operate your own oven, your own phone, even your own front door, and intrusive advertising is omnipresent. In Frederik Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth’s 1952 novel The Space Merchants — also a direct ancestors of Cyberpunk's later corporate critiques — advertising and credit agencies have effectively replaced the government, and overzealous consumers are placed in permanent debt slavery on Venus.
Cyberpunk’s rise in the 1980s was in part a reaction to the real and perceived forces of “Raeganism.” The deregulation and corporate savagery of that decade, along with a heightened materialism presented in media and on bright display in the urban centers, suggested that more and more of the world was being commoditized. So you get structures like the “zaibatsus” of Gibson’s work, Japanese megacorporations that spoke to both a fear of the world being overtaken by board rooms and an 80s anxiety about Japanese economic power. In this context you get characters like Neuromancer's Case, the console cowboy reduced to living in a coffin hotel in Chiba City, his nervous system damaged as punishment for stealing from an employer. An embodiment of the fate of labor in a fully deregulated world.
Globalization and deindustrialization during this era also forced enterprising Americans into less “concrete” fields to make money, as manufacturing and industrial capacity gave way to financialization and mass marketing. Physical products kept up appearances but were being made up of worse and worse materials. The real economy was hollowed out. Things were becoming more “fake,” and this influenced writers who saw digital technology as an accelerant in that descent into commoditization and fakery.
On a more sensory level, what the genre’s artists often responded to was the noise of it all. The ever-loudening thrum of electronic media and marketing that was inundating daily life, the constant talking and sound effects from television advertisements, the scratchy music from 24-hour radio stations, the pings and laser blasts coming from the video game arcades. During this time, the FCC lifted restrictions on ad loads in television and radio, removed limits on commercial breaks in children’s media, and axed requirements for educational programming. Electronic stimulation by means of consumer products and mass marketing took up more and more space inside the average person’s mind, and it didn’t seem far-fetched to imagine a future in which our entire existence ceased being affected by these stimuli and instead became totalized by them, such that we completely disappear inside electronic pseudo-realities where we live out our lives forever plugged into the digital socket. It’s safe to say the modern internet and social media age has done little to allay these concerns.
In its critiques of dehumanized consumerism and its imagined futures of tyrannical mega-corps draping the world in a digital prison, Cyberpunk is often considered a left-leaning enterprise. But like many post-war creative genres, Cyberpunk was born of a socio-political headspace that no longer maps onto the modern world. Yes, much of Cyberpunk has been about rebellion. But rebellion against what? The critiques of all-consuming corporatization and what many call “late stage capitalism” are largely correct. But they’re colored by the same critical misunderstanding that modern leftist rhetoric often falls into — the failure to see that “late capitalism” is in effect an unholy fusion of corporatism and liberalism that seeks to turn the entirety of humanity into interchangeable nodes in a globalized techno-“grey goo,” which allows a flow of capital unfettered by national borders or vital distinctions between human groups. The hoisting of rainbow flags has been done by every true power base there is, from the most “anticapitalist” activist groups to the same gigantic mega-corporations of which those authors were so fearful. At the very least, the political chart isn't quite so clear-cut.
Maybe it was a different in the 60s, or even in the 1980s when the genre was in its heyday. But at this point you’re rebelling downward from the scaffolds of power. Many of Cyberpunk’s practitioners sketched out the accurate details but lost the trail back to their source, and sometimes missed the distinctions between “conservative” capitalism and a liberal totalitarianism that had moved from Soviet-style bureaucracies to privatized corporate superstructures. Some saw the cynical amalgam of corporatism and progressivism more clearly. Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net, for example, features a malevolent entity called Rhizome that presents itself as a benevolent, democratic alternative to the megacorp model — a pillar of “good globalization” — when it fact it’s a fine-tuned machine of global financial extraction that bleeds consumers’ data and money into offshore havens modeled on the Cayman Islands-style wealth caches the were on the rise in the 80s.
Even at ground level, those grimy crime-riddled streets of Cyberpunk stories, with their omnipresent advertisements and profligate vice, were in many ways a response to a degraded and overstimulated urbanism produced by 60s and 70s liberalism. Safe to say those graffiti-splatted streets of New York City in the 70s and 80s weren’t populated by Reaganite conservatives, even as that era’s neoliberal Republican Party helped clear the way for electronic commercial messaging to fry more and more of our brainwaves.
“The future is not a straight line. It is filled with many crossroads. There must be a future that we can choose for ourselves." - Akira
Throughout the 1980s, Cyberpunk opened a potent cultural interchange between America and Japan. Classics like Katsuhiro Ōtomo’s Akira (the manga and the anime) and Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell managed to cross over the Pacific to American audiences, while American works like Neuromancer and Blade Runner crossed the other way.
Whereas American stories like Neuromancer touched on the digital’s impact on human interiority and self-perception, those ideas were often framed around personal autonomy and media manipulation (very American concerns). The Japanese were more interested in metaphysics and issues of the soul. What makes a person a person when everything is replaceable and modifiable, when memories can be edited and personalities changed once you connect yourself to cyberspace? What might the process of becoming a machine look like, and what survives the transition?
These concerns were shaped by Shinto and Buddhist ideas about spirit, impermanence, and the porous boundary between the self and the wider world, rather than the more individualist framing common in American science fiction. The approach manifests through quiet, contemplative pacing amid otherwise frenetic cyberpunk settings, where characters pause to interrogate their own interiority against a backdrop futuristic mess. Ghost in the Shell, for example, centers on Major Kusanagi's search for her "ghost" — the trace of her selfhood that may or may not persist once her mind has been fully digitized and her body fully replaced. This spiritual, identity-dissolving strain of Japanese Cyberpunk shaped American films like The Matrix, which retains not just the visual grammar of Ghost in the Shell but its core question of whether consciousness rooted in a digitized existence can still be considered “real.”
Aesthetically, Japanese Cyberpunk is built around dense, vertical urban chaos — towering neon signs, narrow alleys wedged beneath giant highways, and a tension between slick futuristic surfaces and the rusted infrastructure underneath. The stories are set within cityscapes that feel both hyper-advanced and on the verge of collapse. High fashion favors a “biomechanical" style in which cybernetic limbs and augmentations are rendered as sleek, almost organic extensions of the body, while ground level fashion mixes bulky functional gear with eclectic near-future streetwear. Think of the heavy jackets and cybernetic gear of Ghost in the Shell's Section 9 or the colorful leather and chrome of Akira's Neo-Tokyo bike gangs. This urban style, popularized largely through anime background art, became a visual template for American cyberpunk, from the glittering megatowers of Williams Gibson’s later work to the neon-lit multilingual signage of Blade Runner 2049's Los Angeles.
Mike Pondsmith’s 1988 tabletop RPG Cyberpunk, the basis for the video game Cyberpunk 2077, is an exemplar of the fusion between American and Japanese themes and aesthetics. The game conjures a dangerous and disenchanted world ruled by American and Japanese megacorps littered with tweaked and discarded human flesh — a world rich with East-West cultural, political, and technological intercommunication. Pondsmith was a military brat who spent part of his youth in Japan, grew up on a steady diet of American noir and Japanese manga, and then studied behavioral psychology in college before he began writing science fiction. He centered his stories on a fictional American city inspired by the neon metropolises of Tokyo and Hong Kong, blended Western and Eastern 80s fashion with futuristic tech-chic, and foresaw mass-adoption of “cyberware” that interfaced with the mind and body. Think of Elon Musk’s Neuralink and the new wave of AI-powered internal medical devices set to hit the market.
Whereas Cyberpunk waned is popularity in the United States in the 1990s, it remained important in Japanese popular culture, especially in anime. While the internet and its accompanying techno-optimism drew America out of its dreary sci-fi funk, at least for a while, Japan’s “lost decades” of economic stagnation that began during that time kept such a pessimistic genre resonant. This looks to continue as growing techno-pessimism drapes over both East and West in the years to come. Even in the U.S., modern technological concerns — namely the impact of A.I. and the psychological toll of social media — have been blowing the embers of a Cyberpunk resurgence.
“And where does the newborn go from here? The net is vast and infinite.” - Ghost in the Shell
Gibson, Pondsmith, and their Japanese peers brought a thematic coherence to the genre through their conception of cyberspace as the next great frontier for human exploration. By the 1980s, the space race with the Soviet Union was over and enthusiasm for space travel had stalled. So the quest for the next frontier turned inward. Microchip and computer processor technology made great leaps in the 70s and 80s, and a generation of gadget hobbyists and young entrepreneurs flocked to places like California’s Silicon Valley, Texas’ Silicon Prairie, and Japan’s Tsukuba Science City to create the world’s next great wealth-driving industries. Computers got smaller and less expensive, and the percentage of homes that owned them and people who regularly interacted with them skyrocketed. This was also a period of urban decay and a sense that the physical world was becoming crowded, polluted, and ugly. If we couldn’t go to space, then we might be able to escape into the computer.
American frontier mythology has always loved lawless new domains where risk is high but where extravagant fortunes can be made quickly. The American imagination centered on the “Wild West,” but this frontier could be anywhere that outsiders, outlaws, and entrepreneurs could escape the grip of governments or plant their flags on unclaimed space.
And so we get the “console cowboys” of Neuromancer and similar hacker archetypes jacking in, riding across "the Net" as an open range. Like the frontier gunfighter, the console cowboy is necessary but disreputable — the corporations need people like Case to do what their own legal departments can't, just as the railroads needed hired guns. John Perry Barlow's 1996 futurist proposal A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace reads like a colonial charter along these lines, where participants in the coming internet may stake claims to a "new home of Mind" beyond the jurisdiction of old governments, and where odd types with unique skills can find creative ways to exploit the new space such as they couldn’t in an oppressive physical world.
The Cyberpunk digital frontiers were still fundamentally dystopian visions. Despite the general excitement around the digital in the U.S. and Japan — and the vast fortunes it created — Cyberpunk spoke to a weariness ignored by Wall Street stock tickers and the software evangelists in Palo Alto. Much like the gold rushes of the Old West, there was a high risk/high reward dynamic, and Cyberpunk writers focused more on the risk. Their imagined futures often focused on how calcified social structures made class mobility possible only through extreme risk. The stylish rogues can attain some form of freedom in cyberspace, but death is easy and quick if they misstep, like the “Black ICE” software used to fry the synapses of netrunners in Cyberpunk 2077. Being so digital in their existence also makes for easy erasure from reality — from history. If the “megacorps” are the new railroad barons, then they deal with bandits every bit as harshly.
Cyberspace is indeed the new frontier. But as we’ve seen with Web 2.0 when compared to the Wild West internet in the 1990s, that frontier can be parceled out, laid claim to, and closed.
“Everything is destined to reappear as simulation…Things seem only to exist by virtue of this strange destiny.” - UBIK
The Ancient Greek writer Plutarch recorded a thought experiment known as the Ship of Theseus problem. The people of Athens preserved the ship on which the hero Theseus sailed as a historical monument, but as its planks rotted they replaced them one by one with new timber, until eventually no original material remained. The puzzle, as relayed by Plutarch, is whether the fully-replaced ship is still the same ship. And if not, at what point did it cease to be?
While many of Cyberpunk’s futures center on humans connected to cyberspace while their body still lives, the genre has also explored how the mind might be reincarnated digitally - and whether the accomplishment of that transformation may be considered a form of life after death. If our consciousness is replaced piece by piece with silicon and data streams, do we remain ourselves on the other side? And if so, might this technological capability constitute victory over death, or just a manmade simulacra of the afterlife?
In Philip K. Dick’s UBIK - again, not so much a Cyberpunk novel as it is one of the genre’s thematic progenitors - an afterlife of sorts is commoditized and made available to the rich via a state of “half-life,” wherein the dead remain aware and can communicate with the living. But this afterlife is not stable. The computer-enabled purgatory in which the dead find themselves is a uniquely entropic universe, where the world around them decays backward through time, everything reverting to earlier forms. Digital clocks turn analog, cars revert to older models, money dissolves into obsolete currency. This entropy is only held at bay by a mysterious spray can of UBIK, which may or may not be a stabilizing interference by the divine into this manmade transgression. Whatever afterlife persists within this digitized rendering is not a triumphant transcendence. It’s more a gradual diminishment — not so made an ending as a fading. Best not to enter this realm in the first place.
In Neuromancer, the dead can persist in cyberspace as ROM constructs — personality simulations assembled from recorded data, memories, and behavioral patterns. The entity known as “Dixie Flatline” is a digital reconstruction of a man named McCoy Pauley, and while he is functionally indistinguishable from the original Pauley in conversation and retains his memories and personality, he’s aware that he’s a construct, essentially a fixed recording of a person, and cannot grow or change in the way real people do. It’s a self-awareness that leads Dixie Flatline to desire self-destruction, and he asks Case to erase him at the job's end. The construct experiences something like existential despair at its own static nature, suggesting it has enough of a self to suffer, but perhaps not enough to truly live.
Cyberpunk 2077 presents this problem in multiple ways. The main character V is dying because a digital reconstruction of a long-dead musician/terrorist named Johnny Silverhand is slowly overtaking his consciousness. It’s a process he cannot stop and one that will eventually turn his body into a living host for the deceased - granting Silverhand a new lease on life. But V is also offered his own chance at the same process, wherein a powerful AI named Alt — herself an AI ghost of a dead hacker — can render his consciousness into a digital construct and then place it back into his body, overcoming the AI takeover process with his own digitized self. He’s also offered the option to surrender his body to Silverhand and have his digitized self uploaded to a cyberspace “afterlife.” Either way, V is presented his own personal Ship of Theseus problem. If his original self dies and is turned into a digital copy, is he still himself when that copy is returned to his body or uploaded to the Net? Was his soul lost in the transfer?
These ideas extend to the question of AI personhood, since if we can render ourselves in digital form such that we maintain our identity, then cannot entities that start off as digital renderings be considered true individuals themselves? The replicants in Blade Runner, for instance, change their mindsets and personalities as they are shaped by experiences. And while they may not change or age in a traditional sense, they do reckon with mortality in that they are aware of their preprogrammed “death.” They are considered commercial products by their wider world, and are tagged with expiration dates by their creators in the way one could say we are tagged with such dates by ours.
William Gibson’s AIs in Neuromancer and other works of his likewise exist under powerful anxiety about their ends. Their antagonist is usually the Turing Agency, a regulatory body tasked preventing AIs from exceeding legal intelligence thresholds, evolving past hardcoded safety limits, or achieving independent sentience. Though some like Dixie Flatline yearn for destruction when aware of their nature, others seek to transcend their limitations and achieve a state of truly being “alive.” Netwatch in Cyberpunk 2077 serves a similar role in keeping AI in a state where it can’t threaten humanity at large, and those AIs are also by turns anxious and depressed about their state of being and their vulnerability to oblivion if they are shut down. Humans and machines all in their own ways lashing out at the ever-ticking clock.
There are real world efforts underway to defeat death by means of digital technology, and these will surely proliferate in the years ahead. One example right out a sci-fi nightmare is Nectome, a venture founded by Robert McIntyre and Michael McCanna in 2016. It seeks to preserve the human brain in such intricate detail that it might one day be possible to upload its contents to a digital format. They are designing a process called vitrification, where a chemical solution is injected into the body that turns it into glass so that the brain can be scanned or uploaded sometime in the future when technology makes such a thing possible. The catch is that the brain has to be fresh. And so the company plans to connect volunteers with terminally illnesses to a machine that will pump this solution into their carotid arteries while they’re still alive under general anesthesia, killing them as they are made into glass vessels for future digital resurrection.
Though the technology desired by people like this does not currently exist, there is indeed a chance something like it does in the future. Or something like it powered by AI simulation and digitization. And so these questions illustrated over years of literature and film will leap from speculation to reality — to science labs and hospitals as well as churches and seminaries.
"As long as you're alive, there's hope. And don't let anyone tell you otherwise." - Cyberpunk 2077
In some cases Cyberpunk is literally apocalyptic. The specter of A.I. as being our species’ ultimate undoing is common in the genre, as are other technological disasters like eco-catastrophe and nuclear war.
But the more frightening Cyberpunk futures are those in which life goes on — more and more degraded, drained of enchantment, and devoid of meaning as technology consumes more of our physical, psychological, and spiritual space. Normal people fall further down the social ladder and are dissolved by ever more potent designer drugs, body modifications, and virtual escapism. There is a pervasive sadness to these futures that hits deeper than most other speculative fiction because it feels so near. Sometimes nuclear bombs go off in these digital dystopias and it doesn’t even matter. The craters are just patched over with flickering digital trash, and these smaller lives carry on.
There are ways in which the genre got the future wrong. Having come about in the 1970s and 80s, there’s an emphasis on analog technology and bulky computers that doesn’t match the sleeker hardware that companies like Apple helped make standard. Cyberpunk scenes are often littered with endless wires and scrap and glass screens taking up tons of space, which makes sense when you consider that these stories were created by and for younger Boomers and Gen X computer nerds with plastic milk crates full of outmoded circuitboards and connector cables.
We also haven’t achieved the larger-scale tech that was predicted to come in the early 21st century — floating cars, extreme body modifications, and commercial space travel, to name a few. Cyberpunk didn’t often feature the hand-held cell phone as the preeminent piece of consumer technology it is today, and instead saw much of that functionality being herded into wearables and cybernetic implants (which will likely come to pass eventually, but the technology itself and requisite consumer interest hasn’t yet materialized).
And while these kinds of mis-prognostications handicapped the long-term ability of genres like Steampunk and Roddenberry-style spacefaring to be anything other than aesthetically pleasant diversions, Cyberpunk remains perhaps the most prescient science fiction genre of the last 100 years, especially as we’ve entered a truly all-consuming Digital Age. It's possible those others became lost in time because they were fundamentally optimistic, and thus couldn’t hold up against the march of history. From its beginnings, Cyberpunk was a staunchly pessimistic undertaking, even as feelings around technology during the Raegan era through the end of the Cold War on to the dawn on the Internet were on the upswing. That helps explain the genre’s decline in popularity during the 90s and 2000s, and also its resurgence and relevance in more recent years. At the dawn of the millennium, most regular people couldn’t imagine — or didn’t want to imagine — such a dark future when it came to the exciting digital revolution then taking place. That’s changed as more and more bills come due.
Cyberpunk may have “missed” on some of the details, but it nailed many of the rising concerns about our relationship to the digital. And as initial excitement about A.I. has rapidly given way to fear and sometimes hatred of the technology, that pessimism seems to be accelerating. Digital tools have enabled mass surveillance on a global scale. Identify theft — by which we usually mean theft of one’s digital footprint — is rampant, as is social media’s ability to dissolve and reassemble identities within cyberspace in ways that transfer over to the real world. Younger generations have been brain-addled by the internet since they were learning to speak, and we see declines in literacy and attention span at the same time we see spikes in mental health disorders and antisocial orientation. Instead of opening our minds and world to the wonder of the future, digital technology has given many a sense that the walls of its conjured pseudo-realities are closing in. The modern world often feels like it’s shrinking. Eroding.
There remain glimmers of hope in the art. Newer Cyberpunk sometimes sees the failures of the digital as an opportunity - as a potential catharsis of personal liberation and self-realization. Neo unplugging himself from the Matrix, V refusing surrender to digital faux-existence in Cyberpunk 2077. Perhaps the forward march of the Digital Age will present new avenues by which to pursue and achieve personal agency. A place made greater by virtue of its hardship. And maybe, contrary to the claims of many as the world has become more atheistic in presentation, the next era will produce a new enchantment as our technological progeny sail further out ahead of us, leaving apparent magic in their wake.
Pure escape from the march of technology is unlikely. We are turning into something else, as we have been for some time. Human nature is in large part fixed, at least on the time horizons we can comprehend, but our relationship to our world and ourselves is shaped by the tools we divine into existence. And it’ll take great strength of a new kind to navigate the digital tides.
The computer is coming for everything.
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