Hacking: check. Cybernetic enhancements: check. Street crime: check. Punk fashion: check. Urban sprawl: check. These are all just cool cyberpunk symbols, rather than allegorical systems that need to be challenged.
Jesus fucking Christ, how pretentious can you get.
It's the Guardian. What do you expect?
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/feb/09/in-defence-of-pretentiousness
I think it's pretty clear that they don't understand what Cyberpunk is. Corporate Dystopia is kind of what separates it from other forms of Sci-Fi
Like, was this article written by a fucking bot still in the middle of its learning iterations and they decided to let an editor clean it up and publish it? Its so fucking nonsensical and idiotic.
Well that's like complaining about all the Westerns that take place in the old west with cowboys, bandits, horses, and revolvers.
And also downright straight Postcyberpunk, which author didn’t realize that genre already for filling it.
Perhaps the overuse of some specific cyberpunk features has made it too rigid against any new changes to some other aspects of cyberpunk?
Unpopular Opinion - This article is correct.
Cyberpunk as a genre is fairly specifically about underdog resistance to authority and injustice in the future. The lowlife crime ridden neon consumerist future of the 1980s isn't lockstep with the future of 2018. More modern cyberpunk game would have more to do with environmental damage, information security, mass unemployment, invasion of privacy, loss of identity. You could call the 1927 movie "Metropolis" Cyberpunk, in it's own art-deco future way. Mirrors Edge is arguably a good contemporary cyberpunk game.
If you were to write a cyberpunk setting now, I'd argue that having the setting would essentially be a bunch of climate refugees huddled into our finest remaining urban centres being forced to endure being tagged, tracked, scrutinised and dehumanised while being forced to work as an amazon-drone or starve in the dusty streets while the wealthy and the middling classes of the cities continue to waste the planet and try to ignore the crushing reality outside via consumerism - while the haves and the have-nots battle it out in the infosphere with memetic warfare and deep attacks on privacy to try and influence and silence people. Heap on top of that a good portion of transhumanism where what it means to be human is starting to become ambiguous. Even just having phones has entire changed the way society works.
Getting hunk up on corporate consumerism and lowlife crime/drugs is just super 1980s.
Fuck the Guardian its a shit toilet rag
Its not Mail or Express level but its bad
The latest Bladerunner movie had all of your requirements for a more "modern" cyberpunk piece of media. It can be done still.
Which is why cyberpunk 2077 is such a fresh approach. No dark raining nights, but bright broken cities
And mirrors edge as well
cyberpunk's visuals are just to confuse the free market libertarians that think the world would be a better place if we let corporations do anything they want, for the rest of us we can see behind the facade and understand this is what happens when you let corporations do whatever they want. The giant wall keeping the sea out in bladerunner wasn't so much an allegory about our current immigration policies as it was a sign saying "hey this is what happens when you let the glaciers melt dummies!"
Mirror's edge is dystopian but not cyberpunk.
The social consequences of transhumanism/androids/self aware AIs being widely commercialised, and their impact on the definition of "human being" is core to cyberpunk, as well as the notion that advancement in technology doesnt mean advancement in the human condition, and will drive up social inequality - "high tech, low life". Every major cyberpunk world had a different take on theses themes.
This guardian journalist thinks pointing out similarities between different movies and games makes is enough to make a clever media analysis.
"UUGggh, I really wish that Steampunk would move on from the Victoria era and steam powered things! Uuuuugggh!"
Utterly absurd article that seemingly doesn't understand what Cyberpunk is. It's like saying "Swords? Magic? Dragons? Medieval technology? Why doesn't high-fantasy just move on?" Cyberpunk looks like it does because those are it's themes. It isn't meant to be some accurate vision of the future that gets updated as time goes on. It isn't meant to directly "challenge" anything, the term was used in a short story and then started getting applied to a variety of sci-fi novels with similar themes or aspects.
It's even more absurd to hold Cyberpunk 2077 to this idea when it's based on a specific piece of media and setting.
Do you not realize that the term "Cyberpunk" comes from a fairly literal combination of the themes of "Cyber" and "Punk"? A Hi-tech future dystopia that's bleack and dark, with groups of rebels/punks/antiheroes being a significant factor of the setting is the whole point of the genre, with heavy themes relating to the 80s/Punk styling because that's what the term was based around and what was going onat the time.
It wouldn't make sense to complain about the Raygun Gothic genre being 50s because we're past the 60s or Cassette Futurism using analogue technology (like Cassettes) because we have better stuff now. Those are some of the defining traits of the genres, 'updating' them makes them lose what they are.
Free market capitalism inevitably causes corporate dictatorship. With no regulations, companies will destroy their competitors and then do whatever they wish.
This is why we have regulations in place in every country worth mentioning nowadays.
Regulation just puts them in bed with the state. The problem is capitalism itself.
Only reason I can see for this mindset is the fact that Cyberpunk has moved from being somewhat of a statement or warning which looked analytically at contemporary political and cultural trends to now being a somewhat mundane and more traditional/mundane sci-fi which simply tries to predict the future. Cyberpunk was successful because it was rooted in the present while looking forward, now a lot of people misinterpret cyberpunk as being a type of futuristic sci-fi rather than something very much grounded in today. It is also a "punk" genre, meaning that exaggeration is key. The things that the original cyberpunk exaggerated are still the same things being exaggerated, but the difference between the real and the exaggerated has diminished. Technology is as pervasive in real life now as it is in a lot of cyberpunk media. Imo they need to start digging into the details of what a cyberpunk world would be, or start looking at the exaggerated conditions of now (I think Black Mirror does a great job of this).
For me cyberpunk has suffered a little inflation, with it's 70-80's gritty aesthetics and blatantly evil corporations are labeled as "today" and the "future".
I'm waiting for new -punk to evolve and emerge, but i doubt that will happen anytime soon before society's focus changes from computers to biotechnology in example.
For me a -punk that would describe 2000 - 2020 would be characterized by:
Dominating (evil) internet companies controlling everything, which'll attempt to look nice and loveable from surface.
Themes of mass surveilance, erosion of free will, behaviour manipulation, and etc.
Clean modern minimalist aesthetics in steroids, everywhere.
Without Blade Runner, would there even be a cyberpunk genre?
yes but probably not with so much neon. I'd say there were anime and movies that had a lot of the imagery of cyberpunk before that its just nobody ever stitched them all together. Like a lot of the 70s dystopian movies had parts of the look. Someone would have done it sooner or later.
Yes....Blade Runner didn't start the genre of Cyberpunk.
Typical far left corporate trash article by the guardian. Pretending that this image isn't our present or our future.
I don't think you understand how much of an oxymoron that is. Free market necessitates exploitation.
The goal of a company is to stay alive and grow. Growth can only happen expanding the market and gaining market share.
Your competition is one of the largest obstacles to growth. You need to get rid of the competition.
How do you get rid of competition? You undercut them so hard that you're making a loss on every sale, but that doesn't matter as long as the competition goes out of business before you do.
You also sign deals with other companies where you pay them to not buy from the competitor.
None of that is hypothetical, it literally happened already.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc._v._Intel_Corp.
After you have your market share and nobody can compete with you, you need to look into maximizing profits.
What's the best way to increase profits when industry growth starts hitting its limits? You minimize costs.
You move manufacturing to countries where people will work for a dollar per day, and you make your salaried employees work overtime without compensation.
You probably already know about manufacturing, but uncompensated overtime for salaried workers is an actual thing in America if you weren't aware.
Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) Coverage (Exempt vs. Non
Right now in America, a lot of IT workers are either exempt, or they're so dependent on the job that they're treated as exempt even though legally they are not.
Libertarianism is like communism. Great on paper but it doesn't fucking work when you introduce humans into it.
Libertarianism is very good when it comes to human rights issues, but when you start adding economics into it, it falls apart instantly. Free market libertarianism is nothing more than laissez-faire capitalist bullshit with a bow tie.
I think you need to go and read again what you replied to originally, he was talking about free market libertarianism.
I disagree with the article, but definitely wouldn't mind seeing more unique cyberpunk outside the neon lights and bad fashion. Stuff like 1984 and Half Life 2 and The Handmaid's Tale are what i want to see more of in the genre.
But a unique concept doesn't always mean it's gonna be good. Look at Westworld
It sounds like they are conflating cyber-punk with dystopian sci-fi.
Oh give me a fucking break. Let creators create the worlds and stories they fucking want.
Those aren't its themes, those are its window dressing.
And yeah, fantasy as a genre has moved on. Over the last few decades there have been plenty of fantasy novels that examine or criticize some of its common tropes- wise and fair kings, evil empires, black-and-white morality. The genre's been made stronger for it even while retaining the same themes. Swords, magic, dragons, and the middle ages might still be around as aesthetics and setting, but they've never been core themes, and even those have been played around with. People still write what amounts to Tolkein fanfic but that's not the entire genre.
Meanwhile cyberpunk started as a politically-focused criticism of the social and economic future of the '80s and stagnated into a bland collection of tired tropes slapped onto otherwise ordinary sci-fi settings. Get some neon, megacities, prosthetic limbs, and throw in an evil corporation or two and there you go, cyberpunk. It started as a genre and has been diluted into little more than an aesthetic.
Also to the people asking 'would we have cyberpunk if not for Blade Runner', yes, because Blade Runner was neither the originator of the genre nor even a particularly on-the-nose representation of it (being more a sci-fi take on film noir than anything else). Neuromancer by William Gibson is what started the genre and it's the work that nearly every cyberpunk story has been slavishly copying ever since.
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