The Cultural Significance of Cyberpunk

We're all cyber and no punk. The very systems that could have been our liberation were subsumed at their outset by their state and corporate origins. Cyberpunk exists now only as an aesthetic because the present is essentially that vision of the future stripped of any aesthetic. And so Cyberpunk joins the milieu of nostalgic futures which haunt us in a present that can't escape a past smeared out into eternity, which can't imagine new futures to finally break the tension.

becoming a god in vr might not be possible, but becoming an anime girl is

cyberpunk's not dead, it's just real now. dress for the dystopia you're in

Not only we already live in a dystopia, but it's a boring dystopia as well

You've already vaguely touched upon this in the hauntology video, but I like to think of the Vaporwave phenomenon that happened a few years ago as a strong reaction to or revival of cyberpunk. A lot of what that movement grips back on, the aesthetics, the obsession with japan, the music itself, all of it is nostalgia to a time when the future wasn't cancelled, even though the future seemed bleak even then. Vaporwave as well as cyberpunk had some explicit capitalist dystopia themes, the main difference being that while cyberpunk is inherently prospective and had what you call an utopian impulse, vaporwave was in my opinion retrospective and deeply defeatist. Probably telling of the times.

“You teach them very little?” “Why should we? It only leads to trouble and discontent. We amuse them." Its incredible how accurate was HG Wells in his "sci-fi" predictions, especially in the social relations

The most interesting and depressing video yet. Nice work on this one.

"Cyberpunk's quick decline" Bro, have you ever considered that cyberpunk fell off because we now live in a post cyberpunk age? Think about your smart phone; 35 years ago it was some fantastic prop in an outlandish vision of the future. Now it's so banal, your grandparents navigate it. What can cyberpunk tell us that we're not already living? Cyberpunk literature went from being Gibson and Stephenson to the Post and the New York Times.

I am not whole without my smartphone, thus google has the property rights to part of myself. They can sell me piece by piece, and auction room in my mind for advertisers. This channels videos are part of me too. No matter if I just opened my mind to the idea of self as a cyborg, it still is part of my persona in this moment. I truly am part of internert, part of real life - if one can even draw such boundaries anymore. My future food is bits in my bank-account, my books are files on computer. My words are comments on a webpage. None of those are any less real for me than physical food, books or words. They keep me fed, interessed and expressing, just like "real" food, books and talk. They are not not real, merely different. And these aspects blur the boundaries between my body and mind, your body and mind, and things that have no body nor mind.

“The Net is vast and infinite.” - Motoko Kusanagi

Baudrillard looks like Danny DeVito in the episode of Its Always Sunny when he fakes being an art critic

This video aged better than cyberpunk did. The release of cyberpunk 2077 just goes to show a massive corporation can't produce cyberpunk without becoming a parody of itself

The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet. -william gibson

Beep beep Nothing is wrong. Return to your desk, wage jockey. Boop

Maybe there is no point in imagining some faraway future. There has been a steady contraction of the time that SF has looked ahead, from hundreds to multiple hundreds of years in the late 1800s to just decades or years in cyberpunk. The problems of our world are immediate, and the whole nostalgia thing maybe gets reinforced by the steadily increasing awareness of how screwed things are at this point. It is a kind of crisis mode, the house is on fire, and we're not imagining anymore which piece of furniture is going to catch on fire next and what color the flame is gonna be, but how to put out the fire that's already going on. And I would argue that the world Gibson and his peers predicted has come to pass, except it is much more mundane and boring to look at from the inside. But there is everything: general cyberfication of everything, automated house appliances, killer drones, ubiqitous surveillance, hacker groups attacking anything from personal bank accounts to national infrastructure, wars over water instead of oil, mass refugee streams due to climate change and failed policies in the economically strong countries, and if you look deep enough into the web, you can even hire an assassin to get rid of your spouse so you can cash in the life insurance and move to the bahamas. The world of neuromancer would probably have looked very banale and boring for the average joe living in it too.

I find it interesting that when we imagine future, we imagine it looking badass, alternative, with styles inspired by technology and chaos, the thing that at the time both amazes us and scares us, while in reality it gets more minimal as the "future" approaches. I don't know if it is the outcome of us rejecting and denying the clutter and overwhelming influence of technology and social media influence or the alienation from the complexity of our inner worlds, just trying to suppress the anxiety that both the present and the future give us.

I like the idea of authentic communities being made up of people who only have in common their choice to belong to the same community, rather than some common underlying "nature". Solidarity on the basis of difference, not sameness. I think that's still a valid or accurate vision of the future.

"Cyberpunk today is not so much alive as undead" Bro BROOOOOOOOOOO.

LETS ALL LOVE LAIN !

Love the video but I don't think it's fair to group Blade Runner 2049 with other media pushing detached 80s aesthetics to profit off nostalgia and our cultural stagnation. I thought the story was very true to the cyberpunk tradition while progressive in exploring how capitalism deteriorates or pushes the limits of what we understand as social relationships, questions of group and self identities etc. If a weird loner desperate to feel part of a greater narrative - in possession of a holographic waifu - isn't a fitting tale for our times I don't know what is.