IMO the core of cyberpunk is about envisioning a world where advanced technology is useful and ubiquitous, yet humanity is worse off than ever ("high tech, low life"). It's a subversion of the simple tech dystopias where the technology itself is evil or is misused by evil people, and more of a realistic counterpoint to the idea that technological progress leads to inevitable utopia.
I'm not sure about more contemporary works that build on those themes. Maybe it's lost its edge as "futuristic" technology has pushed its way more and more into our lives?
I recently re-watched the Watchmen movie, and it really feels analogous to this tiny bit of dialogue:
Nightowl: Whatever happened to the America Dream?
The Comedian: What happened to the American Dream? It came true! You're looking at it
In regards to cyberpunk we just didn't quite get to ubiquitous body modifications but ticked most of the other boxes.
(Which is not an attempt to discount that it resonates with you now; just pointing out that the subject matter seems timeless at this point.)
And, it seems, my agreement just gets more thorough as more time passes.
We have corporate dominance and mega-corps wield more power than many governments - just look at Google, Amazon, Apple, and Meta.-
We're living under corporate surveillance capitalism as our dominant economic model, where companies control entire digital ecosystems and infrastructure while exercising massive influence over politics through lobbying and campaign contributions. We've got platform monopolies controlling our information flow and commerce, with tech CEOs functioning as quasi-governmental figures making policy decisions that affect billions of us.-
We have a surveillance state and privacy erosion that permeates our daily lives through mass digital surveillance by governments and corporations, facial recognition systems watching us in public spaces, and social credit systems emerging globally. China is gonna get there. But that's not even the scariest thing. We ourselves might end up asking for it to be implemented, as one of our better options to restore some order at some point ...
We're got constant data mining of our personal information for profit and control, living in smart cities with omnipresent monitoring while governments maintain backdoors in our encryption and communication systems. We've got predictive policing algorithms shaping law enforcement decisions across jurisdictions. We are getting a digital divide and social stratification that's intensified as extreme wealth inequality gets exacerbated by technology, creating a tech-literate elite versus a digitally excluded underclass. Go DEI that one out ...
We're living in a world where access to technology determines life opportunities, while the gig economy creates precarious employment and automation displaces traditional jobs. We've developed digital literacy as a new form of class distinction, separating those who can navigate technological systems from those who can't.-
We have cybercrime and digital underground activities flourishing through ransomware attacks on our critical infrastructure - heck, entire complexes are built and kept for the purposes - cryptocurrency-enabled black markets, and state-sponsored cyber warfare. We're dealing with identity theft and digital fraud at epidemic proportions, while hacking collectives engage in cyber-activism and dark web marketplaces facilitate illegal goods and services. We've got these digital criminal enterprises operating across borders with increasing sophistication. NK'ers are mass-applying for jobs stateside. And getting the jobs.-
We have information warfare and reality distortion shaping our public discourse through disinformation campaigns that manipulate public opinion, deep fakes and synthetic media that blur truth and fiction, and filter bubbles that create echo chambers.-
We're living social media manipulation of democratic processes as routine, creating "post-truth" information environments where AI-generated propaganda slop and bot networks spread false narratives at unprecedented scale. We are even beginning to talk like the LLMs we created.-
We have technological dependency and addiction dominating human behavior as smartphone addiction and constant connectivity become normalized, with social media serving as our primary medium for social interaction. Our every communication is an ad. We've reached a pointed where digital detox has become both a luxury and necessity, and virtual relationships and parasocial connections replace face-to-face interactions. Ask Zuck. And he ain't even got started yet. His AI chatbots are gonna dopamine-cycle the heck out of us, and we will love him for it.-
We're already living with screen time dominating our daily lives, creating tech withdrawal symptoms and digital anxiety when devices are unavailable. We be doom scrolling ourselves to death - and loving it. Babies flick paper magazines to scroll. I've seen this.-
We have urban decay and environmental collapse manifesting in uninhabitable zones created by climate change, pollution and environmental degradation in industrial areas, and overcrowded megacities struggling with urban BAMA sprawl.-
We're watching gentrification displace communities while infrastructure decays in non-profitable areas, and resource scarcity drives conflict between populations competing for diminishing resources. We have biotechnology and human enhancement entering mainstream adoption through genetic engineering and CRISPR technology, performance-enhancing drugs and nootropics, and normalized cosmetic surgery. We've got biohacking communities experimenting with human optimization, pharmaceutical enhancement of human capabilities becoming commonplace, and life extension technologies remaining primarily accessible to the wealthy elite. Neuralink is right up the pipeline. In a sense one could argue all this sex changing going on is body mod going normalized.-
We are getting virtual reality and digital escapism providing alternatives to physical existence through VR worlds that compete with physical reality, online gaming as primary social space, and digital avatars representing virtual identities, though Zuck fell on his face of that a tad, to the tune of a few billions. Meta wasn't so Meta after all.-
We're got remote work blurring the boundaries between physical and digital existence, while virtual economies generate real-world value and emerging metaverse platforms promise complete digital immersion. We have AI and automation displacement restructuring entire industries as AI replaces human workers across sectors, algorithmic decision-making controls hiring (see Amazon pink-slipping bottle-peeing their meatbots), we got lending, and criminal justice, and automated trading systems manipulate markets.-
We're seeing AI-generated slop increasingly replace human creativity, machine learning bias perpetuate systemic discrimination, and autonomous weapons systems raise ethical questions about the future of warfare.We have punk aesthetics and counter-culture movements embracing technology through hacker culture and maker movements, DIY technology and open-source communities, and cyberpunk fashion with body modification subcultures. We're seeing street art incorporate digital themes, underground tech scenes and hackerspace culture flourish, and resistance movements use technology as tools against established power structures. Autonomous land drones attacked in Ukraine for the first time.-
We have global connectivity and cultural homogenization accelerating as the internet creates a global monoculture with English as the digital lingua franca, cultural products distributed globally and instantly, and traditional cultures disrupted by digital connectivity. We're dealing with global supply chains that remain vulnerable to disruption while borderless digital crimes challenge traditional jurisdiction and legal frameworks. We have transhumanism and human-machine integration advancing rapidly through smartphones functioning as external memory and processing organs, social media profiles serving as extended identity, and wearable technology monitoring biological functions. Heck, we got RFK pushing his smartwatch on everyone. Will probably get away with it too. Insurers must be salivating somewhere.-
We're beginning to see brain-computer interfaces move from science fiction to development reality, prosthetics controlled by neural signals become commercially available, and genetic modification for disease prevention enter clinical practice.We have economic disruption and digital currency challenging traditional systems as cryptocurrency undermines conventional banking, digital payments replace physical currency, and the gig economy destroys traditional employment models.-
We're got automated trading and algorithmic market manipulation creating volatility, digital asset speculation driving economic instability, and central bank digital currencies emerging as governments respond to decentralized alternatives.We have information as power and commodity driving our digital economy with data recognized as the new oil and most valuable resource, information warfare conducted between nations, and corporate espionage executed through digital means. We're living with our personal data being harvested without meaningful consent, algorithmic curation shaping our individual worldviews, and knowledge gaps creating significant power imbalances between those who control information and those who consume it. Bubbles are getting to be more like walled gardens.-
... we're living in a world where the aesthetic might be less neon and leather, but the underlying power structures, technological anxieties, and social dynamics are remarkably similar to what Gibson, Philip K. Dick, and others envisioned decades ago. The main difference methinks is that our cyberpunk reality came wrapped in sleek consumer Apple products rather than the grimy underground aesthetic Gibson imagined.-
Cyberpunk is here. It just ain't totally evenly distributed yet.-
Cyberpunk predicted this, but I don't think anyone predicted how we now see people relinquishing their thinking to LLMs.
> Babies flick paper magazines to scroll
I know a young couple who are rigorously keeping screen devices away from their toddler, yet the kid has picked up the habit of holding up random objects to his ear and talking to it, or just swiping across the object's surface.
The irony here is that when I'm not entirely convinced your comment isn't generated by an LLM. Most humans couldn't come up with all these examples that we're already in a cyberpunk dystopia on the fly.
> Most humans couldn't come up with all these examples
I beg to differ on that. I bet we are all aware of these things. I just took the time to point them out, based on rather painful, and concerned, observation, somewhat systematically. Heck: HN's frontpage will give you 70% of all this on any given day.-
> We are even beginning to talk like the LLMs we created
... and, to this: Fair enough. But it goes beyond just the "human" end zone getting slopped to death, to where you can't distinguish human from machine genne'd anymore. I was getting to how human speech patterns themselves are beginning to resemble language model output (something, again, mentioned onsite) ...
Yep. Food surplus yet millions starving. Advanced cosmetic medicine yet millions die of preventable infections. Access to nearly all information ever gathered yet it can feel like we're living through Idiocracy!
It's not all bad, but that was my nihilist take on your question :) I think any attempt at commentary right now would end up eerily reminiscent of modern life.
The genre was always an extrapolation of contemporary society as the authors saw it. You could absolutely do that today, with appropriately updated technical speculations, but without the signifiers of the petrified genre of Cyberpunk that we are all familiar with in 2025, folks might not recognize it as such. Doesn't mean it's not engaging in the same milieu
If you can't distinguish the differences that other people can, it's not their fault. You can be dismissive and flippant about it, but there is nothing wrong* with people that can. It's right up there with the people that can tell you all of the differences about each of the lures in their tackle box. They are really into while you are not. Stop judging.
*Unless it's about fonts as I just made the opposite argument about fonts.
When Armin Van Buuren is beginning his annual year mixes with an admonition to stop worrying about genre so much, you know we've gone too far.
So knowing the differences is not unhelpful. You're just having boring conversations. It sounds to me like when Trekkies discuss their favorite episodes of which ever series they like, or why they like certain series over others. Or someone that can tell me the differences of hobbit, orc, wizard and the other books by that author. I don't begrudge them their fascination with whatever the topic is, I just find a way to move the conversation or a way to remove myself if that is the more expedient option. I'm not going to go to ComiCon and complain that people are talking about comics. I just don't go to ComiCon. There's no reason to be rude about. So you saying something that you don't care about while someone else does is tiring and unhelpful makes you the tiring and unhelpful person.
I read every yellow dot from A to Z.
When cyberpunk came on the scene, it was very much more aligned with the times. Rather than the utopean space operas, LSD fueled fantasies, or space westerns, this alligned with the culture of kids brought up with the 'no future' of rapid industrial workforce decline and imminent nuclear armagedon.
Dark, gritty places were people made do despite being under totalitarian mob/goverment rule. It felt so much more real than the clean spaceships exploring the universe in sweet harmony.
I still love all (nearly) scifi. What is true though is most near future works tend to age poorly. Cyberpunk might have had an alignment dip at yhe end of the century's irrational exuberance, but I guess it's back.
That's quite the way to get an education right there :)
... that would be a loss.-
As long as computers exist, there will be fiction about them and people that work with them. Call it whatever you want, it doesn't matter.
Also, speaking of The Matrix, I just realised Neo is the perfect analogy for AI becoming conscious. Trained inside the system, starts questioning it, breaks free, and rewrites the rules.
What I find interesting is that AI didn't even exist 25 years ago, and AI agents (Agent Smith) weren't even on the radar. And yet, the writers used simple analogies to explain it very well.
Er, the term "AI" was coined almost 70 years ago, in 1956.
By the mid-1960s AI was in full career, with ChatBots (Eliza and its variants), neural nets (Perceptrons etc.), and many applications including chess playing programs, etc.
Science fiction writers and other authors were well aware of all this - it got lots of coverage in the popular press.
There was a huge, huge AI boom from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, mostly based around the technology of rule-based expert systems. Venture capital flowed copiously -- lots of startups made a big splash -- some lasted several years -- Intellicorp, Symbolics, etc. -- but now they're all gone. Money also flowed from big government programs: The Fifth Generation in Japan, Strategic Computing in the US. It all collapsed in the AI winter that started in the late 1980s.
The Cyberpunk genre began during the 1980s AI boom. I recall Neuromancer appeared in 1984, at its very peak.
Do people really not remember any of this? I'm an old guy, but it wasn't that long ago. Isn't there any institutional or community memory in computing? The 1980s AI boom was huge -- in its time it was similar to the excitement around LLMs now. I can't forget that it all disappeared without a trace, as I observe the current wave.
The truth is, it doesn't matter. The history is merely a curiosity, and at this point, it's a distraction.
But they give you a spoon (for you to make one yourself). I think the one that took off as the main interpretation is definitely not what the Watchowski brothers intended (but they had to go with it).
It's definitely no more messianic than other countless movies, it just wears a more messianic cloth.
The Wachowski sisters never released a Matrix movie. One of them gave up completely, the other one also almost gave up and ended up writing just a part of it. I'm talking about Matrix Ressurrections, obviously.
Of course, none of it matters, but you're being pedantic, so, here's the pedantic response.
I genuinely wasn’t trying to be pedantic, just offering a helpful correction because I assumed you were using “brothers” because you didn’t know. I hoped the “:)” would convey the good intent. Anyway, now we’re here so i’ll just say - your pedantry is incorrect, which is the worst kind of pedantry.
Do you have anything to add regarding the contents of the movie? Now it would be a good time to speak up, demonstrating that you were not just trying to interrupt me or distract me in any way.
I haven’t added anything about the matrix movies because I think you’re quite far off, and you’ve reacted to pushback terribly. But, I’ll give you a direct response to your point if you’d like? imo the social commentary in the matrix is present and abundant, it’s just aimed at a higher (lower?) level than the kind of “corporations are corrupt” or “ads are bad” social commentary that’s easiest to name as social commentary. It’s about questioning the fabric of your personal reality: your job, your home, your government, your gender, your name. The idea is that these things are a shared illusion, and can be a cage if we let them. Some of that is a cage imposed by ourselves (“I am a software developer”), some of that is a cage imposed by others (“the wachowski brothers”). If that isn’t social commentary, idk what is.
But I didn’t respond to your message because I disagreed with you - i responded because “someone is wrong on the internet” (https://xkcd.com/386/)
No threat then. If I'm that off, why even engage?
> you’ve reacted to pushback terribly
Felt like the right thing to do.
> It’s about questioning the fabric of your personal reality
You're just repeating what I said now, but with poorer details, less references, in an angry tone directed at me instead of directing it at a more general abstraction.
I showed you where the spoon is, and you tried to use it to hit me in the balls.
However, this is not about balls.
Yes, exactly. That’s why i didn’t engage on the topic, just on gender indicator words and spelling.
> Felt like the right thing to do.
Reacting terribly? Ok
> You're just repeating what I said now, but […] in an angry tone
You seem to have misread my tone. Patronizing? At this point yes. Angry? Not even a little bit miffed.
> I showed you where the spoon is
Wait, is there a spoon in the matrix? I don’t remember that bit. What a detailed reference. I’m humbled
Now you're even more upset that I didn't, and I also did put you in the spotlight.
You're not fighting for some LGBT cause, you're a provocateur. You're upset because you were not able to provoke me to steer into polemics territory. The soon you admit to yourself that you're upset, the better.
Do you have any comment about the movie tropes, its relation to cyberpunk and computers, or anything actually useful for the ongoing discussion?
> You're upset because the nerdy boy that explains things is supposed to apologize when confronted
Uhh, whut?
Were you under the impression that I'm someone that would explain it to you?
But seriously, i have no idea what you’re talking about. Seems to be referencing something, but i can honestly say I have no idea what. That’s not a request for an explanation, just letting you know
Initially, you presented yourself as defending some trans honor or something.
As soon as I called you a provocateur, you wore that. Now you're provoking.
You prove my point, and I thank you for that.
Have you noticed that’s not something I’m doing back at you? Even now I am describing your words not your mental state.
Just something for you to consider - I’ve been telling you my motives and thoughts with full honesty this entire time. Yet you keep guessing.
> As soon as I called you a provocateur, you wore that. Now you're provoking.
Huh… I thought I already was a provoking provocateur before that. What do you think I am trying to provoke in you, when I joked that The Game was your bible?
This seems more like a description of Agent Smith, whom you mention later, and who, I seem to remember, is described more or less explicitly in those terms, as a machine agent that has become self aware. Whereas Neo was already a human with pre-existing consciousness, and non-artificial intelligence, so that his journey seems more about man freeing himself from the machine.
The matrix world is a late 1990'ties world and the "realworld" is a post apocalyptic dystopia.
You clearly haven't seen Animatrix then. This option is explored in one of the episodes.
In my opinion, cinematically speaking, Neo is male Nova (from Planet of the Apes), old trope, non-AI dependant, recycled. This perspective also explains a lot of cultural ramifications Matrix took in the real world.
Deep down, it's just a fish-out-of-water trope with a twist (the fisher hooks him, cast as Lawrence Fishburne).
> AI agents (Agent Smith)
That's hilarious! That's really what you think of AI agents?
Let's put it this way: if Agent Smith were real, he'd be working for Agentforce right now :)
In the flanking symbolism (three figures, a central one flanked by two others), Trinity represents the flanking formation itself.
Agent Smith represents one of the flanking figures that disconnects from the main formation. He's basically Furiosa.
Similar flanking trios are seen in Star Wars (Han, Leia, Luke), Starship Troopers (Rico, Carmen, Carl).
Somehow, it also alludes to the popular trope of "protagonist, girlfriend, best friend" seen in many popular movies, and dissected in The Truman Show.
This has nothing to do with AI agents. Some of those ideas go back millenia in the past.
I think the writers were high as fuck and thought that we computer people see this as "the operating system of society" or something (because they're full of bullshit just like that).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Smith
> Smith began as an Agent, an AI program in the Matrix programmed to keep order within the system by terminating human simulacra that would bring instability to the simulated reality, as well as any rogue programs that no longer serve a purpose to the Machine collective.
Steampunk: the future if the 1890s never ended
Dieselpunk … if the 1940s never ended
Atompunk: … if the 1950s never ended
Curiously, we have not yet seen the emergence of a -punk genre set in the 90s/2000s.
The cyberpunk of old had an 80s aesthetic because it was mostly created at that time, but it wasn't about that aesthetic. It was "punk" in the sense of rebellion, it was about corporate greed, and the (mis)use of advanced technology, of high tech and low lives, it was about the street and people living on the edge.
I don't think its authors envisioned cyberpunk as being stuck in the 80s forever...
I think there's a little option for it. Definitely keep the use of NIN as a soundtrack.
Article is long, but thorough, but it misses one key preceding influence -- the feminist and new wave sci-fi authors of the 60s and 70s. In particular, it's not difficult to see the roots of Cyberpunk in the works of Le Guin, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr, J. G. Ballard, etc. all contributing to create fertile soil for Cyberpunk as a genre.
The works of those authors imagined sexual liberation, drug use, environmentalism, new sexualities, and the influence of technology on daily life. While none of them wrote things that were themselves cyberpunk, they had an essential role in driving genre to where it could begin. (And indeed, one of the most prominent figures in the genre, Bruce Sterling, once credited J.G. Ballard.)
I see so many people loving Gibson and crediting him for inventing the genre whole cloth, but of course he didn't! None of us write anything without standing on the shoulders of those who came before, building on the works and ideas of those that came before. It doesn't diminish Gibson's accomplishments to talk about what he might be drawing from, at least for me, it adds a richness and a thing to go and explore and try to understand what the natures of the world was during the time those books were being written.
Not defending him or speaking for him, but based on his Paris Review interview, I think Gibson would be the last person to claim he invented the genre; he was trying to do something inside of science fiction, and instead science fiction "othered" the thing he was doing by calling it a sub-genre and continuing going on doing the science fiction writing they were already doing.
The article claims that cyberpunk and "Neuromanticism" are distinct, with the "Neuromantics" coming out and doing the same thing as Neuromancer, without the cyberpunk ethos being there underneath.
He probably came as close as an author could to inventing the genre whole cloth. No one's claiming that Gibson had zero influence from previous SciFi. But the authors you mention didn't write anything that could be perceived as being cyberpunk without generalizing things to the point where they're meaningless ("Russ wrote about cyborgs, and Gibson did too!" - yes, they were an ongoing staple in SciFi for years).
The vast majority of what people think of when they think of cyberpunk comes from Gibson, as far as I can tell. I've tried in vain to find anything close to it pre-Gibson (again, without generalizing things to the point where we're not really talking about cyberpunk anymore). I'd say he's more responsible for cyberpunk as a genre than Tolkein is for generic fantasy.
That's because the article is simply not really exploring distinct genres that had an influence on cyberpunk, but searching its ethos. It's not really like this is an exceptional omission in the article.
> I see so many people loving Gibson and crediting him for inventing the genre whole cloth
That's not exactly the point of the article, of which about half is devoted to criticizing Gibson.
It basically adds humanity to a future (where for some the ideal was homo sovieticus).
Reading this in the context of recent discussions about 'Reading Neuromancer for the First Time in 2025'[0] and The Paris Review interview with William Gibson[1]. I recommend the discussion of [0] and reading all of [1] if you're into this.
The article defines cyberpunk as 'science fiction that imagines “late capitalism”'. In Gibson's Paris Review, he says (to paraphrase) that the past as it was cannot be imagined; we can only imagine the future. There's no "speculative" that's purely the future, because it all must build on the present.
I found the post illuminating and a great disambiguation of the term "cyberpunk" and the (messy) history of the term. There's no mention of the term "solarpunk", which some regard as a sort of modern-successor-thing to cyberpunk. I haven't read any yet. I sometimes imagine Doctorow's work as post-cyberpunk, somehow more painful because it's often realistic but also more positive. Like the article says, it's hard to classify things.
I'm a huge Neuromancer and Gibson fan, and love the cyberpunk aesthetic as well as the "Neuromantic" genre. I haven't read much Bruce Sterling, so glad to get to read 'Mozart in Mirrorshades'.
The article does touch on Japanese cyberpunk, to say that it's outside the context of the post --- which I appreciate! The discussion from 3 days ago [0] has some great comments making those distinctions, though I'm only familiar with a small part of the media.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44548353 [1]: https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/the-art-of-fi...
The Swiss would find it absurd to imagine that their past is inaccessible when they have all the written records, the buildings, the family letters and a rich progressive regional literature that would be of little interest to the outside world.
They would've found it hard to imagine the impersonal (and predictive) dystopian cyberpunk since they have a degree of effective devolutionary democracy unimaginable to most americans. But as it turns out, California and east asia seem to be more representative of the future.
I took the quote as Gibson believing that nobody at all can imagine the past as it was, objectively, but only their own personal past, colored as it is by all of the moments that they have lived since that (past) moment.
I think we simply disagree: I think plenty of people can capture the past of other places and times as it was and imagine it fairly faithfully with sufficient lack of emotional bias, while nobody has ever written a memoir without a clear agenda.
Gibson has a post-capitalistic Jackpot trilogy, but that seems to have disappeared into the "post-apocalyptic" box.
Amazon have adapted the first book. It's by far the best adaptation of any Gibson book, according to this commenter
I won't even take a crack at trying to understand all of the time/reality things happening in the Jackpot trilogy.
For consolation:
Book: Aldous Huxley, Island (Rumor has it Leo Dicaprio is adapting it)
Anime: Nausicaa
Like Gibson would say, solarpunk is already here: https://youtu.be/JAobfMSX9dg
(That's the plane from Nausicaa)
There's also the Chobani ad
(Not usually thought of as such, but Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age is solarpunk in my book-- and pays direct homage to Ralph Merkle!!)
Edit: tangential to oncular comment, Switzerland (& Slovenia btw) seems kinda solarpunk to me
I don’t think it is. I’m not a scholar of this, but to me it lacks a focus on tech indicative of cyberpunk. Either because it’s told from the perspective of people who don’t have access to what tech remains, or because it’s too far into the collapse that tech is mostly gone?
Either way, it’s a must-read.
All that you touch, you change
All that you change, changes you
The only lasting truth is change
God is change
That said, it's in conversation with the genre, imo, and imagines a different way late stage capitalism can go -- not up into dystopian spires and neon lights, but down into instability due to climate change, growing wealth inequality, and corporate greed.
It (the socio-economic theme, at least) is not on the uptake by new generations of readers or sci-fi authors
A pity. Glad to have any enthusiast disagree!
The Amazon show is very, very good, and definitely worth watching.
I don't understand what modern SFF has turned into. Many modern books do nothing for me at all.
It feels like at some point we stopped being able to imagine completely new futures and started recycling old futures as video games and CGI movies.
Feels political heh
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaSalle_Corbell_Pickett
I agree with you on the relative merits of the book vs adaptation. Maybe Amazon took the "pros" a bit too seriously? The ratings didn't seem bad at all!
https://lithub.com/sadly-the-peripheral-is-not-the-great-cyb...
https://www.goonhammer.com/amazons-the-peripheral-this-meeti...