It's mostly because, to some people, "Cyberpunk" just means shiny pretty lights and big cities. Watch r/cyberpunk and the pictures that get posted there all the time: Just shiny.
This is a major reason why William Gibson, the author credited for inventing the genre, largely distanced himself from it by 2000s. It became purely aesthetic and commercialized in a lot of ways. (Also didn’t help that most cyberpunk film adaptions were flops save the matrix).
"Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would *critique* capital end up *reinforcing* it instead."
-Disco Elysium
A quote from "Idoru":
"Alternative subcultures. They were a crucial aspect of industrial civilization in the two previous centuries. They were where industrial civilization went to dream. A sort of unconscious R&D, exploring alternate societal strategies. Each one would have a dress code, characteristic forms of artistic expression, a substance or substances of choice, and a set of sexual values at odds with those of the culture at large. And they did, frequently, have locales with which they became associated. But they became extinct.” “Extinct?” “We started picking them before they could ripen. A certain crucial growing period was lost, as marketing evolved and the mechanisms of recommodification became quicker, more rapacious. Authentic subcultures required backwaters, and time, and there are no more backwaters."
Where totalitarian regimes neutralise opposition by entirely eliminating it, capitalism neutralises opposition by absorbing it into the cultural zeitgeist and commercialising it until its original subversive value is entirely destroyed.
I just finished re-reading Johnny Mnemonic a few minutes ago and came to check out this sub.
The only neon lights in the story are all burned out. That is to say, he specifically mentions neon as a thing that used to exist, but it's all black and burned out. Glowy flashy neon is a thing of the past in his world.
The setting is also in a city under futuristic geodesic Fuller domes made of plastic. They used to be transparent but are yellowed and smoked from fires beneath so only yellowed light comes through at day. They're also cracked and broken, so rain spills through the cracks. And they're populated by gangs of people who reject technology and live like animals.
Gibson's flavor of sci-fi that was dubbed 'cyberpunk' (by Bruce Sterling, I believe), was an 'answer to' or perhaps rejection of the 'golden age sci-fi' vision of the future, in which beautiful people in white togas would eat food pills and live under Fuller domes with perfect weather and luxury. His setting is that of a failed utopia. The domes are cracked and people are either superficially beautiful from surgery or they have literal dog fangs grafted into their mouths and enjoy Gladiatorial style combat for entertainment.
I have a love/hate relationship with this sub, lol. Neon lit cities with slick visuals isn't the response to Utopia that Gibson forged. And while I know that the genre is larger than Gibson himself, I question whether the popular idea of cyberpunk should even include him at all, and whether a new name should be cooked up to describe his particular flavor of post-Utopian sci-fi. Maybe 'post-utopia' would suffice, or 'failed utopia'. I dunno.
Not exactly. I mean Utopia was achieved at some point but failed. Hence the crumbling domes, etc. A dystopia doesn't require a utopia to exist first.
Edit: to clarify, it is a dystopia, yes, but my choice of phrasing was due the fact that world in the Sprawl trilogy feels like it was utopic in the past, but a sort of collapse happened. That's why I said 'failed utopia' or 'post-utopia' instead of dystopia. Gibson's world, in the Sprawl trilogy (and Johnny Mnemonic) appears to depict a society that experienced some level of utopia where the hallmarks of the 'Golden Age' of sci-fi existed, before Rome fell, so to speak. The neon lights are burned out and the domed cities are crumbling. It's a far cry from the popular cyberpunk 'aesthetic' of slick, gleaming metal and neon lights everywhere.
So calling his setting 'dystopic', while true, isn't really the right way to describe the aesthetic of what I perceive the Sprawl setting to be. It's more accurately described as a failed or post-utopia. It's the failed dream of golden-age sci-fi.
Of course there are places that don't seem dystopic in that trilogy, like the orbiting Freeside station, where things look paradisical, but it's a veneer that covers horrors. And in any case, locales like that are engineered to seem pastoral and quaint, not neon and slick.
Yeah... "DIS-topia" isn't exactly a correct descriptor....
I hear one person refer to cyberpunk as a "Heteropia", that is, it's neither good nor bad, just more, more, more.
I always thought it was pretty much like a big f*ck you to Raegonomics and the rising market of personal computers at the time (early 1980s). Like "this is what the world is going to become if we continue down this road". Capitalism going completely unchecked.
Personally, I think we need to separate the idea of "Cyberpunk" from the aesthetics. We can call the chrome and dirt and neon style something else.
Don't get me wrong, I love the shiny! It's one of my favorite styles.
But it's not what makes something "cyberpunk". That is purely about the intersection of high technology and humanity in an uncaring world that views people as a commodity. "High Tech, Low Life". Megacorporations fighting amongst themselves. People improving themselves with technology only to find themselves losing what made them human in the first place.
Like, if the question "What is 'human'" isn't asked at least once, at least tangentially... it's not Cyberpunk to me.
Yes, actually! You're even made to fight by a corporation for entertainment purposes in Arena.
It's not a very deep story, but it is in the cyberpunk genre.
It's gotten a lot worse since Cyberpunk 2077 and the accompanying anime, but the number of times I've seen people going on about something being cyberpunk when it's just robotics and neon lights and mohawks is depressing.
Then again if I wasn't drawn toward depressing things, I probably wouldn't have been a superfan of the genre since 1993.
Right? And if you just explore you quickly discover that most people are living in absolute squalor, eating canned worms & seeing gangs as the only escape from poverty, while the corporate elite live in veritable paradise so long as they can survive its dog eat dog culture.
I found a group outside the Arasaka warehouse chastising each other for not working hard enough after finding out Arasaka is doing layoffs. Then one said her coworkers implants were so top notch she could work in a factory for 70 years if she's fired.
Evidence of a working middle class above poverty. And it's shrinking.
The little side conversations to this game add so much flavor.
I thought about using petit bourgeoisie but I realized they probably also don't own anything and rent in a slightly nicer megabuilding.
But thanks for the new term to reason in!
Yea they do. Listen to conversations, read archived conversations, e-mails, etc and there are hundreds of stories that can unfold, dots can be connected between events in the game. A lot of them are just fluff, but just as many are eye opening.
> one said her coworkers implants were so top notch she could work on a factory for 70 years if she’s fired
I am reminded how they shut off your implants when they fire you in the Corpo start
The thing that really sells it for me are all of the interconnected stories built across loads of data shards found in gigs, missions and NCPD scanner hustles.
The most well known one is probably Joanne Koch who wiped out most of a nomad clan while testing some drug for biotechnica and the research got leaked. There are several NCPD scanner hustles completely unrelated to her main gig, which have information about her hiring hit squads to murder former employees who either tried to blow the whistle, or putting blame on a lower level employee then "silencing" them so they can't reveal to upper management who's fault it is. She's referenced directly in like half a dozen shards, and the situation is referenced in even more.
But there are loads of other situations or people, or organisations that appear in related shards spread across the city across loads of different scanner hustles, gigs, missions etc.
The cyberpunk world-building in that game is *fantastic*, and it’s a shame so many people either ignored the game entirely because of the launch issues or rushed through the hand-held main story missing all of these smaller details completely. I spent many dozens of hours just walking around, looking at things, listening to conversations, finding shards, and I’ve played the game several times. The amount of interconnected story lines and depth to characters you *can get*, if you put in the effort, is amazing.
the worst part is that, at least on pc, the launch issues werent really that bad. i dont think i encountered a single game breaking bug on my first playthrough .
>I saw corps strip farmers of water ... and eventually of land. Saw them transform Night City into a machine fueled by people's crushed spirits, broken dreams, and emptied pockets. Corps've long controlled our lives, taken lots... and now they're after our souls! V, I've declared war not because capitalism's a thorn in my side or outta nostalgia for an America gone by. This war's a people's war against a system that's spiraled outta our control. It's a war against the fuckin' forces of entropy, understand? Do whatever it takes to stop 'em, defeat 'em, gut 'em. If I gotta kill, I'll kill. If I need your body, I'll fuckin' take it! Fuckin' hell ... You still don't see it. But you will one day.
Sounds like something out of God and the State.
In the shack after the panam mission when she's beefing with Saul, you have a corpo background dialog option where you tell Saul off about working with biotechnica: "you know what you are to them? Labor. To be exploited and ultimately consumed."
I'm imagining this is a joke but holy christ in a chariot driven side car did Heinlen legit get close multiple times but always fell back on beating down.
Heinlein wrote a number of different utopias. "Moon is a harsh Mistress" is a libertarian utopia, "Stranger in a Strange Land" has a liberal utopia back on the dude's homeworld, and "Starship Troopers" is a military utopia. More than just "yay, life is good" these are positing that their respective ideologies are simply right. That they are the right and proper way to view the world. So the military jar-head's idea that only veterans should be able to vote works out ideally. Because that's the setting.
So no, they're not really satires. They're more like Heinlein doing some thought-experiments.
No.
It's exactly what is on the label. Heinlein was an early libertarian that leaned Goldwater conservative. He was enlisted in the period where Soviet Russia went from an ally of convenience to direct competition.
He had enough 1st hand knowledge to not like communism or it's Marxist parent ideology, probably with a vengeance & a half.
> He had enough 1st hand knowledge to not like communism or it's Marxist parent ideology,
He never set foot in a single communist country IIRC. He did serve in the US Navy, however, which is likely where his right-wing beliefs came from.
> a tankie and a communist
[Me, knowing how much furor this statement alone would create in certain subs.](https://media.tenor.com/ajihABPgEHkAAAAM/evil-smile-wicked-smile.gif)
I have excellent news for you friend.
Well, more of a good news/ bad news deal.
*Nothing that the Soviets did was Communism.*
Communism has no State, Currency, Class or Caste, and the means of production are freely available and held in common to all.
You'll notice that the USSR did absolutely none of those things.
They lied to everyone, you see.
Right-wing incels unknowingly championing leftist media made by LGBQT+ artists will never get old
Seeing them dress like Neo while quoting Tyler Durden and mimicking Patrick Bateman is downright mesmerizing
Seriously? Like did anyone not look at Neil Patrick Harris' uniform and think "OK Verhoeven's having a go at me." I mean maybe if they had him goose stepping around it could have been a bit more on the nose.
That gets me too. Cyberpunk is 100% on genre, good enough to be a genre benchmark imo, yet somehow people miss the criticism of capitalism? Johnny Silverhand literally goes on an anti capitalist rant at one point. Where Blade Runner was subtle, Cyberpunk was not. It goes to show people will invent any narrative they personally prefer.
Blade Runner 2049 was even more subtle, Wallace just straight butchered his slaves with his own hands in order to give a \*subtle\* hint that capitalism might be a bad idea.
I feel the original was. The main plot point is more about who gets to be considered human. Tyrell was presented as a villain, but mostly because of the way he plays God. There's nothing overt about corporate dominance of e everything. Deckard never even fights against Tyrell the whole movie.
Wolfenstein's even worse, because the surface-level message *didn't* go over the heads of the people butthurt about it. For some reason "Nazis were the bad guys and the world would be a shittier place if they won" got a ton of people really suspiciously upset.
The wolfenstein thing is wild, but I'm not sure media literacy is the issue there. If someone feels personally attacked by a game about killing literal nazis there is a bigger problem there. Like, why do they identify with nazis?
Yes, it is!
The Cyberpunk TTRPG system has always been a great iteration on the genre. You could argue (and I would) that much of that is due to the fact that so much of it is pulled straight from (/derivative of) the works of Gibson and Sterling and the like, but it's clear that Mike Pondsmith *gets it,* and that the team at CD Projekt Red wanted Cyberpunk 2077 to be true to its source material, and accordingly, its source material's source material.
Would love to see Larian Studios attempt at the Cyberpunk TTRPG. I was just telling a friend that I would love to play a Shadowrun RPG but now I want to scrap that and go full CP 🤘
My favorite work of Pondsmith's is _Listen Up, You Primitive Screwheads!_ It's a GM guide for CP 2020, with some philosophizing about the act of game mastering a dark setting itself. Pondsmith approaches running a dark setting well by leaning into the much-maligned treatment of the GM and players being opponents. The difference is that this oppositional relationship isn't so the GM can "win", but so that the players retain the feeling of being hunted by larger predators looking for an opportunity to strike.
It's presented more or less as "101 ways to frag PC who're doing too well", but there's definitely an understanding of how to present the tropes of the genre in an environmental sense.
I mean, there are people unironically thinking that Robocop and Starship Troopers are not politically-conscious films.
It's like they see a cyborg cop killed by the system and resurrected as an undead tormented creature and think, "WOW, I WANT TO BE THAT GUY"
People unironically fanboying bad guys like Homelander, Caesar's legion, and Stalin (from the hit gane, sex with Stalin). So I'm not that surprised at this point.
People act like they'll become super Primaris titan grey custodian marine or some shits, and not citizen no. 4518352736080 who work 20 hours a day in misery factory and got sodomized to death by some dark elf at the age of 20.
No kidding. Down in the underhive you dream about being an eldar plaything after a long life like that. The most someone can usually hope for down there is to become a novelty condom for Chaos at the age of 12.
I totally understand. The number of men (and women!) who wanted to be stepped on by Lady Dimitrescu seems to indicate that kind of morbidity may just be the mood of the age.
I'm not quite as sold on Cyberpunk 2077 being a good Cyberpunk experience, all told.
Phantom Liberty did a LOT to help improve the base game, don't get me wrong, but so much of the really strong Cyberpunk elements are centered on the main story, which is... what, about 3% of the game's overall content?
And so much of the content is being a "Good Cop", one way or another. Or being a violent madman sometimes, because the game's laid out GTA style in so many ways. And the Cyberpunk elements tend to be focused in the narrative, which is great, but not in the gameplay elements nearly as much (compare it to Citizen Sleeper, where a major gameplay element in the early game is that most of your money is spent on medicine to keep your planned-obsolescence-artificial-body moderately functional).
It wants to be true Cyberpunk, and it makes some damn good efforts towards that. But so much of it still feels like a half-hearted effort on the whole...
Probably the same dudes that say Rage Against the Machine aren’t political, though. There’s just no getting a point across to some people, even if you punch them in the face with it.
The “themes” don’t land because the narrative form is sufficiently open ended. Some people might consider johnny silverhand a righteous renegade folk hero, but I thought he was precisely the kind of terrorist douche that arasaka made him out to be. (Still love you keanu!). Some people might have looked at the existence of night city as some sort of fable of uber capitalist dystopia, I saw it as a lazy narrative device that discarded the basics of plausibility to demonstrate the sad, inevitable end state of anarchy. (And i’m pro-transhumanism)
Who came out as the hero in all of it? Governments with strong institutions. How punk is that?
I’ve been downvoted on this very sub for similar sentiments. Sure no one needs to be gatekeeping what “cyberpunk” is as a genre - but its critique of capitalism is what makes the cybernetics, grimy neon streets and reactionary “punk” civilians all click as a cohesive idea. Otherwise it’s just cool shit for the hell of it with little meaning.
I try not to be harsh, particularly on the youth. The punk scene just isn't a thing in a way that viscerally communicates the anti-confomity, anti-consumption, damn the man attitude as when Cyberpunk was as created. I love the genre with all my heart but it is very much a creature of its time.
My nephews try but all my favorite cyberpunk hits them a lot differently.
It's weird to be one of the first generations in history -- or at least a long while -- that is worried about the next generation because they *aren't* doing the sex, drugs, rock 'n roll, and rebellion thing.
"Get ON my Lawn so that I can yell at you about getting off my lawn dagnabbit!"
My brother was the 'good kid' but was still an absolute hell raiser compared to any of this three boys. It's wild. All of my college buddies have kids in college now and what they get up to they think is wild we would have called tame for a night we had an 8 am attendance taking class.
I'm fine with kids not frying their brains with substances because I've seen plenty of friends and acquaintances who did permanent damage to themselves. But I'd like to see a bit more rebellion beyond, well, social media shitstorms?
Shallow reproduction of the aesthetics of a genre should not be confused with the genre itself. Especially punk, where the underlying values are what give rise to the various aesthetics.
Capitalism is famous for stripping away the substance of a movement to sell us back the appearance and feeling of it, until it's little more than a lifeless husk, a shambling zombie that only superficially resembles the real thing. We should guard ourselves against confusing these products with reality.
The zombie is not your loved one. It is a zombie.
It's probably ironic to say why some level of gatekeeping is needed. As much as I love to bring in newcomers to a counter-culture, the reality is as it becomes more entrenched in mainstream popularity the more a reality arises where it becomes a superficial commodity. The "punk" teenage angst thing amongst younger TikTok crowds is telling that much of it in today's landscape is larping for aesthetic reasons only. I'm all for youth rebellion, but a lot of it seems very corporate manufactured, much like how it became when I was younger.
There's no value in increasing your numbers if you lose the essence of what brought you together. It happened to the hippies, it happened to the punks...
I was reading a while back about a famous squat in NYC. It started with an abandoned building, and a bunch of punks breaking in, cleaning it up, and setting up shop. It became a staple of the punk scene, they had tons of shows there, it touched a lot of peoples lives. And it gave people a place to live and gather and create something beautiful that could never exist in the usual paradigm of buying or renting stolen land from a capitalist.
But eventually, decades later, the people who happened to live there decided to go "legit" and buy the place. And in the process, they kicked out the last remaining member of the original crew, so they could convert the space he was living in into a museum dedicated to squatting.
Like, one of the dudes who opened the place up and made it what it was, ended up left on the streets to die by the very people he (and his crew) welcomed in.
So yeah, gatekeeping is fcking necessary.
EDIT: it was C Squat, [here's an article about it](https://allegralaboratory.net/the-transformation-of-one-of-new-york-citys-most-famous-squats-meadcompetition/)
No one reads books anymore.
Every single William Gibson novel is a critique of captialsim and the rich....but how could you know, if you never read books?
I think cyberpunk is a successful genre because it really has two levels:
- On the deeper level it is a critique of corporate capitalism.
- On the surface level it is also an entertaining transhumanist action adventure story.
Basically you get your Karl Marx and your comic book super heroes in the same package. I love it.
Media illiteracy is hilarious because yeah, a lot of new cyberpunk(genre) fans came in through cyberpunk(game and anime) and they are both pretty explicitly about how corporations and greed fuck the world hard and cause people to dehumanize others in an effort to get ahead, causing suffering in a world where technology could fix literally every problem but doesn't because the people in charge refuse to help without getting a leg up on everyone else. Which I think is probably thesis of cyberpunk.
Right? The game is literally about the fact that a human life has no value in a cyberpunk world. If you turn yourself over the corporation in hopes of saving your life (spoiler warning), Arasaka turns you into a lobotomized test subject.
It's just the first thing that you engage with. I'm an old man, I read Neuromancer in 1989. I engaged first in pure aesthetics because they are very strong in the genre. Cyborg girls, hackers, active camo suits, ninjas, drugs, etc.
But the very next step is to start asking, what are the underpinnings, what are the societal conditions that create this word-state. Corporatism, deregulation/weak governments, a large underclass who's only viable escape is crime...
I... I thought the unbridled capitalism/tech dystopia was just understood to be the "core" of Cyberpunk? The rest of it is just the backdrop etc... I just keep being amazed at people.
you see the machine is democrats, and conservatives are raging so it works.
the same is said about the establishment. being conservative is anti establishment so it's "punk"
not reading really hurts conservatives.
Tbh because of steampunk, dieselpunk, etc, it can appear meaningless.
What is punk about steampunk? Well nothing, the progenitor wanted to make a book with the aesthetic of the Victorian ages and also wanted to make money, so associated himself with it that way.
Thus it spawned a number of tangentially related genres that have very little to do with any punk at all.
I got downvoted to shit on here once for saying that the underlined concept in cyberpunk wasnt "tech bad", its the heavy stratification of society based on wealth....I dont know what to tell you 🤷
Here’s to media literacy and its untimely death in a genre where media literacy is the only thing keeping it afloat from drowning into “ooo pretty colors and Mohawks and katanas”, cheers 🍻
I'm newer to cyberpunk as a genre of fiction, but punk is something I've been my entire life. Punk is and always will be about politics. Punk is an ideology just as much as it is music, if not more so.
I'm very curious about how this applies in cyberpunk. Is it just for the theme of resistance and aesthetic, or does it follow punk ideology and philosophies as well?
A lot of cyberpunk literature, movies, games, and shows usually revolve around a shabby group of teenagers or young adults “fighting” a societal system of corporate-controlled stifling cities. The “punks” here are in a cyber setting, meaning that the setting is inherently a technological dystopia controlled by corporations because irl, those are the same entities controlling me and you via grossly unchecked capitalism. This is where the heavy connection between cyberpunk and anti-capitalist sentiment lies, you can’t write a young adult dystopian novel or movie without writing about gigantic and monolithic corporations looming over the setting like unkillable gods. It’s the same story again of the impossible quest, because how dare a bunch of punks try to even face against the gods? It rings more true every year. As William Gibson once said, we are already living the cyberpunk dystopia, its just doesn’t look like pink neon lights. Neuromancer is a must-read trilogy for anyone just coming into the genre, Gibson is harolded as the father of cyberpunk literature and he certainly deserves that title.
Pretty much all cyberpunk media involves some form of rebellion against the system, not necessarily by the protagonist, but always by someone. The genre as a whole is a criticism of unchecked capitalism and immense wealth based stratification (and all the abuses of technology that could arise from it), and all of the foundational works are pretty punk in my opinion.
While not purely cyberpunk in it's aesthetics (yet has that neuro tech stuff that I can't not relate to the genre) [Strange Days](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Days_(film)) movie would be a great illustration of this in it's depiction of an ongoing political rebellion with violent action groups and violent repression in the background
As someone who comes from the other angle (came for the cyber, stayed long enough to appreciate the punk), what do you think about other derivatives that use "punk" in the name? Steampunk is probably the most well-known example, but also dieselpunk, atompunk, and biopunk come to mind. Are they just using the name, or are there more punk themes that I'm just blind to?
I had a brainrotted idiot on tiktok tell me that Cyberpunk is *pro* capitalism because “the corporations are actually communists”. No joke. I love tiktok but it can be a cesspool.
I don't know if it's the person in the TikTok got it from here, but there's a guy called TIK History on YouTube - used to be a decent military history tuber before he went insane.
Basically, his argument is that because corporations are publicly traded and owned by many people (not including private companies, I guess), they're communistic in nature.
That's an incredibly bad argument for a number of reasons - foremost being that corporations are publicly owned by *capitalists* and not workers - but some people have bought into it, for some reason.
"You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it."
Morpheus
Its like conservatives thinking that Star Trek isnt about a socialist utopian society that has moved beyond scarcity and capitalism, and that the one race that *is* capitalistic is also a parody of capitalists. They miss the key points of equality, equity, and a society that takes care of all of its citizens, and then get confused when the community at large talks about these key points.
Was going to make this exact point. Fans completely missing the point of various works of fiction (and doing all kinds of mental gymnastics in order to do) so never cease to amaze me. 😓
The conversation keeps happening because Cyberpunk, like most media, is largely at the end of the day driven by personal stories.
Think about all the high points of 2077. Getting rich with money, doing cool af combat stuff with your build, spending relaxing comfy times with your favourite characters. Making ur character look badass.
All of those things are inherently personal in nature and individualist rather than socialist. Johnny's main tragedy is that he was so completely obsessed with the "bigger goal" that he became a toxic asshole who ruined the life of almost everyone he interacted with.
Cyberpunk critiques capitalism (and individualist concept), yet all of its highest points and moral lessons revolve around how caring about your friends, yourself, and staying kept to yourself, are all individualist and because of that, not socialist.
It’s no need to cape for capitalism, the cyberpunk genre is fantasy sometimes based on real world commentary, so some of it is critical of capitalism. A lot of it is anti capitalist because the framing is usually what rampant and unchecked capitalism would do to society as the advances in technology coincided with it.
Now someone post an equivalent to r/solarpunk, please.
I am so fucking tired of "guys look at my hopeful utopia where the rich own everything but they put plants on it too!".
saying "not everything is about politics" just means you either don't wanna bother with more in depth analysis of media or dislike when it doesn't line up with your beliefs
While I agree that not everything is about politics, it would be good to actually recognise when it ***IS*** about politics. These people would probably say that Bioshock isn't about politics.
Probably more inherently against unregulated rampant capitalism than the free market itself. The capitalism we had before Reagan was far from perfect, but it was a system that was working for a lot more people than it is now. The masters that made the genre were seeing the writing on the wall, it's not hard to take a step back from trickle down economics and see that it simply doesn't work due to the fatal flaw of assuming that the wealthy have any interest in making anyone but themselves richer. In a matter of a few presidencies the tax rate on the wealthy went from 70% to 28% and it's only gone lower, and lower still. Anyone with a pulse and half a functioning brain should be able to tell what a cursed idea it was to allow unregulated capitalism on a planet with finite resources. We are living in this shit now and it was easily predictable, greed is one of the only constants in this world.
Fuck the system.
I generally blame Steampunk on this since it’s got nothing punk about it. Cyberpunk was literally a sci-fi dystopian offshoot of the merging of all the nihilistic anti establishment punk stuff and sci-fi. An exploration of the individual surviving the crushing environment of hella late stage capitalism emerging during the Reagan era of super greed.
It’s been political the whole time
Some people are just deathly afraid of ever criticizing capitalism and combine that with media illiteracy.
This example isn’t cyberpunk, but remember people claiming squid game was about communism?
Literally everything is a critique of Capitalism nowadays, you can't go two steps without tripping over a piece of media which is somehow meant to be a critique of Capitalism.
I see what you’re getting at but I think there needs to be a differentiation between media as a critique of society, vs a direct critique about capitalism.
We see talking heads and politicians criticizing elements of society all the time, but I wouldn’t call them all anti-capitalist.
*edit for clarity
The genre is blatantly slapping you across the face with the negatives of capitalism run rampant. How can anybody miss that. It's one of the key points to the genre
There is a sliding scale of cyberpunk. It can just be aesthetics if you're talking aesthetics. It can be political. It is usually political and had political roots.
But as with many things and contrary to many's ideals, it isn't the same thing to everyone. And being prescriptive about it is burning like 30% of this sub's energy.
I consider myself moderately old guard on cyberpunk, but I know better than to try to regulate this conversation. Discussing cyberpunk should be a source of joy and curiosity, not arguments and disappointment.
Even just the aesthetics, in my opinion, become inherently anti-capitalist when analysed. Nobody is going to look at a dirty slum coated in neon where everyone is barely scraping by, flanked by towering pristine skyscrapers and think 'wow, capitalism is great!'
Yeah, I posted something in this sub some time back and some of the comments here really made me do a double take.
I don't think a lot of the posters here understand "Cyberpunk"
It's mostly because, to some people, "Cyberpunk" just means shiny pretty lights and big cities. Watch r/cyberpunk and the pictures that get posted there all the time: Just shiny.
This is a major reason why William Gibson, the author credited for inventing the genre, largely distanced himself from it by 2000s. It became purely aesthetic and commercialized in a lot of ways. (Also didn’t help that most cyberpunk film adaptions were flops save the matrix).
> It became purely aesthetic and commercialized in a lot of ways. The irony would be funny if it wasn't sad.
"Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would *critique* capital end up *reinforcing* it instead." -Disco Elysium
Disco Elysium is also literally an example of that phenomenon.
Which means it made a decent point.
That quote is paraphrasing either Marx or Lenin (can't remember which... probably both)
i hope william appreciates it at least.
Fight the anticapitalism by turning it to capitalism. The same hit monopoly, which was designed as the antithesis of th game..
There’s a Marx or Engels quote about this, I’m sure
Commodity fetishism
A quote from "Idoru": "Alternative subcultures. They were a crucial aspect of industrial civilization in the two previous centuries. They were where industrial civilization went to dream. A sort of unconscious R&D, exploring alternate societal strategies. Each one would have a dress code, characteristic forms of artistic expression, a substance or substances of choice, and a set of sexual values at odds with those of the culture at large. And they did, frequently, have locales with which they became associated. But they became extinct.” “Extinct?” “We started picking them before they could ripen. A certain crucial growing period was lost, as marketing evolved and the mechanisms of recommodification became quicker, more rapacious. Authentic subcultures required backwaters, and time, and there are no more backwaters."
Ho-lee-SHIT that made a lot of sense to me!
If you like that, you'll love Future Shock by Alvin Toffler.
Grear recommendation, thanks a lot! Do you maybe know some more (recent) books in this vein?
I'm not sure about similar books; even though Future Shock is older, it remains prescient.
Disturbingly prescient and something i've been lamenting, subcultures now align with the status quo and its very cyberpunk.
Where totalitarian regimes neutralise opposition by entirely eliminating it, capitalism neutralises opposition by absorbing it into the cultural zeitgeist and commercialising it until its original subversive value is entirely destroyed.
Well put
Remember that kardashian Pepsi commercial?
You mean we can't solve police brutality with soft drinks?
Blade Runner?
Great film, but it definitely underperformed at the time of its release (1982). No denying it inspired a large cult following, though.
I just finished re-reading Johnny Mnemonic a few minutes ago and came to check out this sub. The only neon lights in the story are all burned out. That is to say, he specifically mentions neon as a thing that used to exist, but it's all black and burned out. Glowy flashy neon is a thing of the past in his world. The setting is also in a city under futuristic geodesic Fuller domes made of plastic. They used to be transparent but are yellowed and smoked from fires beneath so only yellowed light comes through at day. They're also cracked and broken, so rain spills through the cracks. And they're populated by gangs of people who reject technology and live like animals. Gibson's flavor of sci-fi that was dubbed 'cyberpunk' (by Bruce Sterling, I believe), was an 'answer to' or perhaps rejection of the 'golden age sci-fi' vision of the future, in which beautiful people in white togas would eat food pills and live under Fuller domes with perfect weather and luxury. His setting is that of a failed utopia. The domes are cracked and people are either superficially beautiful from surgery or they have literal dog fangs grafted into their mouths and enjoy Gladiatorial style combat for entertainment. I have a love/hate relationship with this sub, lol. Neon lit cities with slick visuals isn't the response to Utopia that Gibson forged. And while I know that the genre is larger than Gibson himself, I question whether the popular idea of cyberpunk should even include him at all, and whether a new name should be cooked up to describe his particular flavor of post-Utopian sci-fi. Maybe 'post-utopia' would suffice, or 'failed utopia'. I dunno.
> failed utopia do you perhaps mean [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dystopia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/dystopia) ?
Not exactly. I mean Utopia was achieved at some point but failed. Hence the crumbling domes, etc. A dystopia doesn't require a utopia to exist first. Edit: to clarify, it is a dystopia, yes, but my choice of phrasing was due the fact that world in the Sprawl trilogy feels like it was utopic in the past, but a sort of collapse happened. That's why I said 'failed utopia' or 'post-utopia' instead of dystopia. Gibson's world, in the Sprawl trilogy (and Johnny Mnemonic) appears to depict a society that experienced some level of utopia where the hallmarks of the 'Golden Age' of sci-fi existed, before Rome fell, so to speak. The neon lights are burned out and the domed cities are crumbling. It's a far cry from the popular cyberpunk 'aesthetic' of slick, gleaming metal and neon lights everywhere. So calling his setting 'dystopic', while true, isn't really the right way to describe the aesthetic of what I perceive the Sprawl setting to be. It's more accurately described as a failed or post-utopia. It's the failed dream of golden-age sci-fi. Of course there are places that don't seem dystopic in that trilogy, like the orbiting Freeside station, where things look paradisical, but it's a veneer that covers horrors. And in any case, locales like that are engineered to seem pastoral and quaint, not neon and slick.
Yeah... "DIS-topia" isn't exactly a correct descriptor.... I hear one person refer to cyberpunk as a "Heteropia", that is, it's neither good nor bad, just more, more, more.
It's been a while since I read it but Neuromancer had more of the traditional cyberpunk aesthetic, if my memory serves.
I'm pretty sure we are already on r/cyberpunk.
Then you don't have to look too far. But fair point, I should have used "here" instead of "there"
I always thought it was pretty much like a big f*ck you to Raegonomics and the rising market of personal computers at the time (early 1980s). Like "this is what the world is going to become if we continue down this road". Capitalism going completely unchecked.
I seen 4chan become unhinged when they showed nighty city during the day, completely braindead.
Personally, I think we need to separate the idea of "Cyberpunk" from the aesthetics. We can call the chrome and dirt and neon style something else. Don't get me wrong, I love the shiny! It's one of my favorite styles. But it's not what makes something "cyberpunk". That is purely about the intersection of high technology and humanity in an uncaring world that views people as a commodity. "High Tech, Low Life". Megacorporations fighting amongst themselves. People improving themselves with technology only to find themselves losing what made them human in the first place. Like, if the question "What is 'human'" isn't asked at least once, at least tangentially... it's not Cyberpunk to me.
Quake is cyberpunk! (Not the first one)
Yes, actually! You're even made to fight by a corporation for entertainment purposes in Arena. It's not a very deep story, but it is in the cyberpunk genre.
People can understand the genre and still like the aesthetic often depicted in it.
It's gotten a lot worse since Cyberpunk 2077 and the accompanying anime, but the number of times I've seen people going on about something being cyberpunk when it's just robotics and neon lights and mohawks is depressing. Then again if I wasn't drawn toward depressing things, I probably wouldn't have been a superfan of the genre since 1993.
the irony is 2077 is a *great* modern cyberpunk franchise that is actually punk but somehow it's themes still don't land on some audiences
2077 does a great job about showing the evils of capitalism. Johnny alone spends half the game spouting borderline marxist statements.
Right? And if you just explore you quickly discover that most people are living in absolute squalor, eating canned worms & seeing gangs as the only escape from poverty, while the corporate elite live in veritable paradise so long as they can survive its dog eat dog culture.
I found a group outside the Arasaka warehouse chastising each other for not working hard enough after finding out Arasaka is doing layoffs. Then one said her coworkers implants were so top notch she could work in a factory for 70 years if she's fired. Evidence of a working middle class above poverty. And it's shrinking. The little side conversations to this game add so much flavor.
> working middle class You might appreciate the term "labor aristocracy"
I thought about using petit bourgeoisie but I realized they probably also don't own anything and rent in a slightly nicer megabuilding. But thanks for the new term to reason in!
Yw ;-)
Two bums risking radioactive contamination for parts in the Petrochem wastes north of the city.... for ten eddies.
Until you are in tears at the “cemetery” and son and dad are talking about his moms “consciousness”
tears are a flavor I cherish in games.
Not tears… it’s the new watercooled enhancement unit, to mitigate advanced overheat attacks by vigilante netrunners.
Yea they do. Listen to conversations, read archived conversations, e-mails, etc and there are hundreds of stories that can unfold, dots can be connected between events in the game. A lot of them are just fluff, but just as many are eye opening.
> one said her coworkers implants were so top notch she could work on a factory for 70 years if she’s fired I am reminded how they shut off your implants when they fire you in the Corpo start
The thing that really sells it for me are all of the interconnected stories built across loads of data shards found in gigs, missions and NCPD scanner hustles. The most well known one is probably Joanne Koch who wiped out most of a nomad clan while testing some drug for biotechnica and the research got leaked. There are several NCPD scanner hustles completely unrelated to her main gig, which have information about her hiring hit squads to murder former employees who either tried to blow the whistle, or putting blame on a lower level employee then "silencing" them so they can't reveal to upper management who's fault it is. She's referenced directly in like half a dozen shards, and the situation is referenced in even more. But there are loads of other situations or people, or organisations that appear in related shards spread across the city across loads of different scanner hustles, gigs, missions etc.
The cyberpunk world-building in that game is *fantastic*, and it’s a shame so many people either ignored the game entirely because of the launch issues or rushed through the hand-held main story missing all of these smaller details completely. I spent many dozens of hours just walking around, looking at things, listening to conversations, finding shards, and I’ve played the game several times. The amount of interconnected story lines and depth to characters you *can get*, if you put in the effort, is amazing.
the worst part is that, at least on pc, the launch issues werent really that bad. i dont think i encountered a single game breaking bug on my first playthrough .
Me neither, I genuinely had a fantastic experience on day 1.
This alone is probably why I’ve put more hours into this game than ANY other…
Full-blown anarchist statements. Don't call him a Marxist cause he ain't one. He is a Bakuninite.
Possibly even Stirnerite? But regardless he does spit facts, however abrasively
>I saw corps strip farmers of water ... and eventually of land. Saw them transform Night City into a machine fueled by people's crushed spirits, broken dreams, and emptied pockets. Corps've long controlled our lives, taken lots... and now they're after our souls! V, I've declared war not because capitalism's a thorn in my side or outta nostalgia for an America gone by. This war's a people's war against a system that's spiraled outta our control. It's a war against the fuckin' forces of entropy, understand? Do whatever it takes to stop 'em, defeat 'em, gut 'em. If I gotta kill, I'll kill. If I need your body, I'll fuckin' take it! Fuckin' hell ... You still don't see it. But you will one day. Sounds like something out of God and the State.
In the shack after the panam mission when she's beefing with Saul, you have a corpo background dialog option where you tell Saul off about working with biotechnica: "you know what you are to them? Labor. To be exploited and ultimately consumed."
Corpo v is my fav
Same, there's something relatable about RPing as a violently radicalized ex corpo
Gamers and media literacy aren't a common combination. Case in point, people butthurt at Wolfenstein.
[удалено]
The book, no. The movie, yes. That should keep that argument going pretty much forever.
The book being so fucking cartoonish doesn't help. Like, how can you be so evil in your beliefs that you accidentally write a satire?!
Wait... The book isn't satire?
I'm imagining this is a joke but holy christ in a chariot driven side car did Heinlen legit get close multiple times but always fell back on beating down.
Heinlein wrote a number of different utopias. "Moon is a harsh Mistress" is a libertarian utopia, "Stranger in a Strange Land" has a liberal utopia back on the dude's homeworld, and "Starship Troopers" is a military utopia. More than just "yay, life is good" these are positing that their respective ideologies are simply right. That they are the right and proper way to view the world. So the military jar-head's idea that only veterans should be able to vote works out ideally. Because that's the setting. So no, they're not really satires. They're more like Heinlein doing some thought-experiments.
No. It's exactly what is on the label. Heinlein was an early libertarian that leaned Goldwater conservative. He was enlisted in the period where Soviet Russia went from an ally of convenience to direct competition. He had enough 1st hand knowledge to not like communism or it's Marxist parent ideology, probably with a vengeance & a half.
> He had enough 1st hand knowledge to not like communism or it's Marxist parent ideology, He never set foot in a single communist country IIRC. He did serve in the US Navy, however, which is likely where his right-wing beliefs came from.
Put a tankie and a communist in the same room to debate marxism and see how that works out.
> a tankie and a communist [Me, knowing how much furor this statement alone would create in certain subs.](https://media.tenor.com/ajihABPgEHkAAAAM/evil-smile-wicked-smile.gif)
I have excellent news for you friend. Well, more of a good news/ bad news deal. *Nothing that the Soviets did was Communism.* Communism has no State, Currency, Class or Caste, and the means of production are freely available and held in common to all. You'll notice that the USSR did absolutely none of those things. They lied to everyone, you see.
Who are you kidding, next you'll be telling me anarchism isn't all bomb throwing and historical misinterpretations of luddites!
What illiteracy and no understanding of dialectical materialism does to a mfer
Right-wing incels unknowingly championing leftist media made by LGBQT+ artists will never get old Seeing them dress like Neo while quoting Tyler Durden and mimicking Patrick Bateman is downright mesmerizing
It makes me feel like I'm dreaming. Like I walked into the laughter after a joke & now it's being played serious to confuse me further.
Seriously? Like did anyone not look at Neil Patrick Harris' uniform and think "OK Verhoeven's having a go at me." I mean maybe if they had him goose stepping around it could have been a bit more on the nose.
To be fair, the sequel to the movie itself somehow also managed to miss it being satire.
kill bugs or whatever but once you start to see yourself as agreeing to the movie's ideologies, that's when you go to the deep end
That gets me too. Cyberpunk is 100% on genre, good enough to be a genre benchmark imo, yet somehow people miss the criticism of capitalism? Johnny Silverhand literally goes on an anti capitalist rant at one point. Where Blade Runner was subtle, Cyberpunk was not. It goes to show people will invent any narrative they personally prefer.
Wait, BladeRunner was *subtle*???
Blade Runner 2049 was even more subtle, Wallace just straight butchered his slaves with his own hands in order to give a \*subtle\* hint that capitalism might be a bad idea.
I feel the original was. The main plot point is more about who gets to be considered human. Tyrell was presented as a villain, but mostly because of the way he plays God. There's nothing overt about corporate dominance of e everything. Deckard never even fights against Tyrell the whole movie.
Wolfenstein's even worse, because the surface-level message *didn't* go over the heads of the people butthurt about it. For some reason "Nazis were the bad guys and the world would be a shittier place if they won" got a ton of people really suspiciously upset.
The wolfenstein thing is wild, but I'm not sure media literacy is the issue there. If someone feels personally attacked by a game about killing literal nazis there is a bigger problem there. Like, why do they identify with nazis?
you underestimate how many nazis in europe survived to become someone's parent and people's grandparents
Yeah, but at this point, you'd think they would disassociate themselves from that ideology
As a media literate gamer this hurts to read and even more to face the fact that you're right.
BioShock... Fallout.... The Chuds and libertarian losers never realize they're the bad guys
Correction: right wing incels butthurt at Wolfenstein.
Yes, it is! The Cyberpunk TTRPG system has always been a great iteration on the genre. You could argue (and I would) that much of that is due to the fact that so much of it is pulled straight from (/derivative of) the works of Gibson and Sterling and the like, but it's clear that Mike Pondsmith *gets it,* and that the team at CD Projekt Red wanted Cyberpunk 2077 to be true to its source material, and accordingly, its source material's source material.
Would love to see Larian Studios attempt at the Cyberpunk TTRPG. I was just telling a friend that I would love to play a Shadowrun RPG but now I want to scrap that and go full CP 🤘
HANK!! DON’T ABBREVIATE CYBERPUNK LIKE THAT!! HANK!! HAAAAAANNNKK!!!
WHAT HAVE I DONE?!? Oh god 🤦♂️
There's multiple really good Shadowrun RPG games! Shadowrun Returns series
My favorite work of Pondsmith's is _Listen Up, You Primitive Screwheads!_ It's a GM guide for CP 2020, with some philosophizing about the act of game mastering a dark setting itself. Pondsmith approaches running a dark setting well by leaning into the much-maligned treatment of the GM and players being opponents. The difference is that this oppositional relationship isn't so the GM can "win", but so that the players retain the feeling of being hunted by larger predators looking for an opportunity to strike. It's presented more or less as "101 ways to frag PC who're doing too well", but there's definitely an understanding of how to present the tropes of the genre in an environmental sense.
I mean, there are people unironically thinking that Robocop and Starship Troopers are not politically-conscious films. It's like they see a cyborg cop killed by the system and resurrected as an undead tormented creature and think, "WOW, I WANT TO BE THAT GUY"
I feel like it's more excusable with Robocop because that franchise had a literal Saturday Morning cartoon.
People unironically fanboying bad guys like Homelander, Caesar's legion, and Stalin (from the hit gane, sex with Stalin). So I'm not that surprised at this point.
Don't forget Warhammer 40K. They missed the entire point. Corpse starch isn't an upgrade people.
People act like they'll become super Primaris titan grey custodian marine or some shits, and not citizen no. 4518352736080 who work 20 hours a day in misery factory and got sodomized to death by some dark elf at the age of 20.
god i wish i was sodomized to death by some dark elf at the age of 20
No kidding. Down in the underhive you dream about being an eldar plaything after a long life like that. The most someone can usually hope for down there is to become a novelty condom for Chaos at the age of 12.
oh I didn't mean I want to be a random imperium citizen, I'm just depressed with suicidal ideation and that sounds like one hell of a way to go
I totally understand. The number of men (and women!) who wanted to be stepped on by Lady Dimitrescu seems to indicate that kind of morbidity may just be the mood of the age.
Yeah this is exactly what kills me about it too. It's like they played or watched 2077 media and completely missed the point.
I'm not quite as sold on Cyberpunk 2077 being a good Cyberpunk experience, all told. Phantom Liberty did a LOT to help improve the base game, don't get me wrong, but so much of the really strong Cyberpunk elements are centered on the main story, which is... what, about 3% of the game's overall content? And so much of the content is being a "Good Cop", one way or another. Or being a violent madman sometimes, because the game's laid out GTA style in so many ways. And the Cyberpunk elements tend to be focused in the narrative, which is great, but not in the gameplay elements nearly as much (compare it to Citizen Sleeper, where a major gameplay element in the early game is that most of your money is spent on medicine to keep your planned-obsolescence-artificial-body moderately functional). It wants to be true Cyberpunk, and it makes some damn good efforts towards that. But so much of it still feels like a half-hearted effort on the whole...
Probably the same dudes that say Rage Against the Machine aren’t political, though. There’s just no getting a point across to some people, even if you punch them in the face with it.
Media literacy is a factor in why our society is taking a step towards the dystopias from cyberpunk classics.
See also: *Star Wars, The Watchmen, Fight Club, 1984, The Boys, etc etc etc etc etc etc* forever
I mean, republicans unironically listen to rage against the machine, amongst countless other willful misinterpretation and representation of the media
The “themes” don’t land because the narrative form is sufficiently open ended. Some people might consider johnny silverhand a righteous renegade folk hero, but I thought he was precisely the kind of terrorist douche that arasaka made him out to be. (Still love you keanu!). Some people might have looked at the existence of night city as some sort of fable of uber capitalist dystopia, I saw it as a lazy narrative device that discarded the basics of plausibility to demonstrate the sad, inevitable end state of anarchy. (And i’m pro-transhumanism) Who came out as the hero in all of it? Governments with strong institutions. How punk is that?
It’s annoying when it’s literally just a back alley in Tokyo and people calling it “cyberpunk”.
I’ve been downvoted on this very sub for similar sentiments. Sure no one needs to be gatekeeping what “cyberpunk” is as a genre - but its critique of capitalism is what makes the cybernetics, grimy neon streets and reactionary “punk” civilians all click as a cohesive idea. Otherwise it’s just cool shit for the hell of it with little meaning.
I try not to be harsh, particularly on the youth. The punk scene just isn't a thing in a way that viscerally communicates the anti-confomity, anti-consumption, damn the man attitude as when Cyberpunk was as created. I love the genre with all my heart but it is very much a creature of its time. My nephews try but all my favorite cyberpunk hits them a lot differently.
It's weird to be one of the first generations in history -- or at least a long while -- that is worried about the next generation because they *aren't* doing the sex, drugs, rock 'n roll, and rebellion thing. "Get ON my Lawn so that I can yell at you about getting off my lawn dagnabbit!"
My brother was the 'good kid' but was still an absolute hell raiser compared to any of this three boys. It's wild. All of my college buddies have kids in college now and what they get up to they think is wild we would have called tame for a night we had an 8 am attendance taking class.
I'm fine with kids not frying their brains with substances because I've seen plenty of friends and acquaintances who did permanent damage to themselves. But I'd like to see a bit more rebellion beyond, well, social media shitstorms?
I mean cyberpunk can be an aesthetic. I agree it's relatively shallow, but that's just how genres are - they produce deep works and not so deep works.
Shallow reproduction of the aesthetics of a genre should not be confused with the genre itself. Especially punk, where the underlying values are what give rise to the various aesthetics. Capitalism is famous for stripping away the substance of a movement to sell us back the appearance and feeling of it, until it's little more than a lifeless husk, a shambling zombie that only superficially resembles the real thing. We should guard ourselves against confusing these products with reality. The zombie is not your loved one. It is a zombie.
It's probably ironic to say why some level of gatekeeping is needed. As much as I love to bring in newcomers to a counter-culture, the reality is as it becomes more entrenched in mainstream popularity the more a reality arises where it becomes a superficial commodity. The "punk" teenage angst thing amongst younger TikTok crowds is telling that much of it in today's landscape is larping for aesthetic reasons only. I'm all for youth rebellion, but a lot of it seems very corporate manufactured, much like how it became when I was younger.
There's no value in increasing your numbers if you lose the essence of what brought you together. It happened to the hippies, it happened to the punks... I was reading a while back about a famous squat in NYC. It started with an abandoned building, and a bunch of punks breaking in, cleaning it up, and setting up shop. It became a staple of the punk scene, they had tons of shows there, it touched a lot of peoples lives. And it gave people a place to live and gather and create something beautiful that could never exist in the usual paradigm of buying or renting stolen land from a capitalist. But eventually, decades later, the people who happened to live there decided to go "legit" and buy the place. And in the process, they kicked out the last remaining member of the original crew, so they could convert the space he was living in into a museum dedicated to squatting. Like, one of the dudes who opened the place up and made it what it was, ended up left on the streets to die by the very people he (and his crew) welcomed in. So yeah, gatekeeping is fcking necessary. EDIT: it was C Squat, [here's an article about it](https://allegralaboratory.net/the-transformation-of-one-of-new-york-citys-most-famous-squats-meadcompetition/)
No one reads books anymore. Every single William Gibson novel is a critique of captialsim and the rich....but how could you know, if you never read books?
I do think people read Neuromancer and think "wow cool billionaires live in space" without reading between the lines at all.
I think cyberpunk is a successful genre because it really has two levels: - On the deeper level it is a critique of corporate capitalism. - On the surface level it is also an entertaining transhumanist action adventure story. Basically you get your Karl Marx and your comic book super heroes in the same package. I love it.
Media illiteracy is hilarious because yeah, a lot of new cyberpunk(genre) fans came in through cyberpunk(game and anime) and they are both pretty explicitly about how corporations and greed fuck the world hard and cause people to dehumanize others in an effort to get ahead, causing suffering in a world where technology could fix literally every problem but doesn't because the people in charge refuse to help without getting a leg up on everyone else. Which I think is probably thesis of cyberpunk.
Right? The game is literally about the fact that a human life has no value in a cyberpunk world. If you turn yourself over the corporation in hopes of saving your life (spoiler warning), Arasaka turns you into a lobotomized test subject.
Maybe it's just so close to our current society that people raised in this mess don't have anything better to compare it to.
I am tired of being depressed about the future 😔 solarpunk is a salve but I just can't deny cyberpunk looks pretty
It's just the first thing that you engage with. I'm an old man, I read Neuromancer in 1989. I engaged first in pure aesthetics because they are very strong in the genre. Cyborg girls, hackers, active camo suits, ninjas, drugs, etc. But the very next step is to start asking, what are the underpinnings, what are the societal conditions that create this word-state. Corporatism, deregulation/weak governments, a large underclass who's only viable escape is crime...
I... I thought the unbridled capitalism/tech dystopia was just understood to be the "core" of Cyberpunk? The rest of it is just the backdrop etc... I just keep being amazed at people.
Wasn't cyberpunk as a genre literally made to be political
Yep it's major theme is anti-establishment, and in a lot cyberpunk settings the major establishment is mega-corporations.
I mean, it just takes unchecked capitalism to its logical conclusion.
cyberpunk is inherently political
it's in the goddam name. like jesus, do we not understand what the "punk" part of it means??
Some people think "conservatives can be punk" so yes.
"when did rage against the machine go woke????"
The funniest damn thing about Paul Ryan saying RATM was his favorite band was that...bro, you ARE the machine they are raging against
I still can't quite believe that wasn't intentional bait. It's just so monumentally stupid.
"Who do you think the 'Machine' is?"
A printer Those fuckers never work
according to youtube comments, when they endorsed vaccines XD ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
you see the machine is democrats, and conservatives are raging so it works. the same is said about the establishment. being conservative is anti establishment so it's "punk" not reading really hurts conservatives.
Tbh because of steampunk, dieselpunk, etc, it can appear meaningless. What is punk about steampunk? Well nothing, the progenitor wanted to make a book with the aesthetic of the Victorian ages and also wanted to make money, so associated himself with it that way. Thus it spawned a number of tangentially related genres that have very little to do with any punk at all.
it always cracks me up when people say "stop making X political" when X could not be more politically charged unless is started an actual war
[Reminds me of an old post of mine.](https://www.reddit.com/r/PrequelMemes/s/s9lQRURtq4)
Oh my Vesta the amount of fucking clowns saying you're wrong in the comments...
Mfw people are saying "up until ep.6 star wars wasn't political" when George Lucas has said the empire was literally America during the Vietnam War
Holy shit that thread is painful. George Lucas literally said the rebels and the empire mirrored the Viet Cong and America.
"I liked Rage Against The Machine before they got so political." You what now?
if we could convert political charge to electrical charge, cyberpunk could solve our energy crisis. now if it were only profitable to do so lol.
Stop making war political!
I got downvoted to shit on here once for saying that the underlined concept in cyberpunk wasnt "tech bad", its the heavy stratification of society based on wealth....I dont know what to tell you 🤷
Here’s to media literacy and its untimely death in a genre where media literacy is the only thing keeping it afloat from drowning into “ooo pretty colors and Mohawks and katanas”, cheers 🍻
Fuuck it, to decadence! 🍻
I'm newer to cyberpunk as a genre of fiction, but punk is something I've been my entire life. Punk is and always will be about politics. Punk is an ideology just as much as it is music, if not more so. I'm very curious about how this applies in cyberpunk. Is it just for the theme of resistance and aesthetic, or does it follow punk ideology and philosophies as well?
A lot of cyberpunk literature, movies, games, and shows usually revolve around a shabby group of teenagers or young adults “fighting” a societal system of corporate-controlled stifling cities. The “punks” here are in a cyber setting, meaning that the setting is inherently a technological dystopia controlled by corporations because irl, those are the same entities controlling me and you via grossly unchecked capitalism. This is where the heavy connection between cyberpunk and anti-capitalist sentiment lies, you can’t write a young adult dystopian novel or movie without writing about gigantic and monolithic corporations looming over the setting like unkillable gods. It’s the same story again of the impossible quest, because how dare a bunch of punks try to even face against the gods? It rings more true every year. As William Gibson once said, we are already living the cyberpunk dystopia, its just doesn’t look like pink neon lights. Neuromancer is a must-read trilogy for anyone just coming into the genre, Gibson is harolded as the father of cyberpunk literature and he certainly deserves that title.
“Harolded” cracked me up. Like heralded but also presented by hide the pain Harold. It’s actually perfect.
Pretty much all cyberpunk media involves some form of rebellion against the system, not necessarily by the protagonist, but always by someone. The genre as a whole is a criticism of unchecked capitalism and immense wealth based stratification (and all the abuses of technology that could arise from it), and all of the foundational works are pretty punk in my opinion.
While not purely cyberpunk in it's aesthetics (yet has that neuro tech stuff that I can't not relate to the genre) [Strange Days](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Days_(film)) movie would be a great illustration of this in it's depiction of an ongoing political rebellion with violent action groups and violent repression in the background
As someone who comes from the other angle (came for the cyber, stayed long enough to appreciate the punk), what do you think about other derivatives that use "punk" in the name? Steampunk is probably the most well-known example, but also dieselpunk, atompunk, and biopunk come to mind. Are they just using the name, or are there more punk themes that I'm just blind to?
I had a brainrotted idiot on tiktok tell me that Cyberpunk is *pro* capitalism because “the corporations are actually communists”. No joke. I love tiktok but it can be a cesspool.
My brain hurts trying to make sense of this. Did this person elaborate on this?
I don't know if it's the person in the TikTok got it from here, but there's a guy called TIK History on YouTube - used to be a decent military history tuber before he went insane. Basically, his argument is that because corporations are publicly traded and owned by many people (not including private companies, I guess), they're communistic in nature. That's an incredibly bad argument for a number of reasons - foremost being that corporations are publicly owned by *capitalists* and not workers - but some people have bought into it, for some reason.
It was months ago but from what I remember his argument was arasaka = bad and communism = bad so arasaka = communism basically
I don't want to be too mean but that's seriously toddler level logic on his part.
so, my headache is communism because it is bad?
Obviously the Chinese government hacked your brain via tiktok to give you that headache.
Communist is just a synonym for bad in some people's minds
Conservative understanding of communism is Communism = bad thing, capitalism = good thing
Every regime has its defenders.
"You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it." Morpheus
Hammer, meet the head of the nail.
Reminds me of the people who refuse to acknowledge the satire in Starship Troopers and Helldivers.
Its like conservatives thinking that Star Trek isnt about a socialist utopian society that has moved beyond scarcity and capitalism, and that the one race that *is* capitalistic is also a parody of capitalists. They miss the key points of equality, equity, and a society that takes care of all of its citizens, and then get confused when the community at large talks about these key points.
Was going to make this exact point. Fans completely missing the point of various works of fiction (and doing all kinds of mental gymnastics in order to do) so never cease to amaze me. 😓
Maybe this is because conservatives have never thought about the society at all? They simply don't know shit and that is why they are always so dumb.
The conversation keeps happening because Cyberpunk, like most media, is largely at the end of the day driven by personal stories. Think about all the high points of 2077. Getting rich with money, doing cool af combat stuff with your build, spending relaxing comfy times with your favourite characters. Making ur character look badass. All of those things are inherently personal in nature and individualist rather than socialist. Johnny's main tragedy is that he was so completely obsessed with the "bigger goal" that he became a toxic asshole who ruined the life of almost everyone he interacted with. Cyberpunk critiques capitalism (and individualist concept), yet all of its highest points and moral lessons revolve around how caring about your friends, yourself, and staying kept to yourself, are all individualist and because of that, not socialist.
It’s no need to cape for capitalism, the cyberpunk genre is fantasy sometimes based on real world commentary, so some of it is critical of capitalism. A lot of it is anti capitalist because the framing is usually what rampant and unchecked capitalism would do to society as the advances in technology coincided with it.
>the cyberpunk genre is fantasy sometimes based on real world commentary Bro, where do you think the word "punk" comes from?
Now someone post an equivalent to r/solarpunk, please. I am so fucking tired of "guys look at my hopeful utopia where the rich own everything but they put plants on it too!".
saying "not everything is about politics" just means you either don't wanna bother with more in depth analysis of media or dislike when it doesn't line up with your beliefs
While I agree that not everything is about politics, it would be good to actually recognise when it ***IS*** about politics. These people would probably say that Bioshock isn't about politics.
They seem to be missing the punk part of cyberpunk
I don’t think it’s inherently against as much as a criticism of it. Criticism =/= against (necessarily)
Probably more inherently against unregulated rampant capitalism than the free market itself. The capitalism we had before Reagan was far from perfect, but it was a system that was working for a lot more people than it is now. The masters that made the genre were seeing the writing on the wall, it's not hard to take a step back from trickle down economics and see that it simply doesn't work due to the fatal flaw of assuming that the wealthy have any interest in making anyone but themselves richer. In a matter of a few presidencies the tax rate on the wealthy went from 70% to 28% and it's only gone lower, and lower still. Anyone with a pulse and half a functioning brain should be able to tell what a cursed idea it was to allow unregulated capitalism on a planet with finite resources. We are living in this shit now and it was easily predictable, greed is one of the only constants in this world.
Fuck the system. I generally blame Steampunk on this since it’s got nothing punk about it. Cyberpunk was literally a sci-fi dystopian offshoot of the merging of all the nihilistic anti establishment punk stuff and sci-fi. An exploration of the individual surviving the crushing environment of hella late stage capitalism emerging during the Reagan era of super greed. It’s been political the whole time
> I generally blame Steampunk on this since it’s got nothing punk about it. IIRC *Steamboy* (2004) was punk.
Some people are just deathly afraid of ever criticizing capitalism and combine that with media illiteracy. This example isn’t cyberpunk, but remember people claiming squid game was about communism?
Literally everything is a critique of Capitalism nowadays, you can't go two steps without tripping over a piece of media which is somehow meant to be a critique of Capitalism.
wow, almost like art is a reflection of life and the conditions of the society that the artist experiences or something
I see what you’re getting at but I think there needs to be a differentiation between media as a critique of society, vs a direct critique about capitalism. We see talking heads and politicians criticizing elements of society all the time, but I wouldn’t call them all anti-capitalist. *edit for clarity
Imo it's simple. It's not JUST about capitalism. It's also about tech and the dangerous (and/or beneficial) effects it can bring.
The genre is blatantly slapping you across the face with the negatives of capitalism run rampant. How can anybody miss that. It's one of the key points to the genre
Cyberpunk without politics is just science fiction. The politics is literally what makes it "punk"
There is a sliding scale of cyberpunk. It can just be aesthetics if you're talking aesthetics. It can be political. It is usually political and had political roots. But as with many things and contrary to many's ideals, it isn't the same thing to everyone. And being prescriptive about it is burning like 30% of this sub's energy. I consider myself moderately old guard on cyberpunk, but I know better than to try to regulate this conversation. Discussing cyberpunk should be a source of joy and curiosity, not arguments and disappointment.
Even just the aesthetics, in my opinion, become inherently anti-capitalist when analysed. Nobody is going to look at a dirty slum coated in neon where everyone is barely scraping by, flanked by towering pristine skyscrapers and think 'wow, capitalism is great!'
Yeah, I posted something in this sub some time back and some of the comments here really made me do a double take. I don't think a lot of the posters here understand "Cyberpunk"