[keiferski]

I generally agree with you, even though I have a soft spot for the 80s-inspired aesthetic that cyberpunk refuses to leave behind. Part of its staying power, I think, is because there simply hasn’t been an alternative “tech aesthetic” with as much appeal since. Devices themselves are no longer sculptural forms but just basic slabs of glass. Nor does there seem to be a relationship between computers and fashion style, as there sort of used to be.

This can also probably be placed in context with the general “death of genre” that has happened since the early 2000s.

[throwaway33381]

Personally I don't think Cyberpunk as a genre has died but rather that it had failed to adapt, by the early 00s we weren't as sure as to how technology would progress into the future and many of the existing assumptions they had made were wrong. Publishers were tending to become less interested in continuing it as many parts of the writing world sort of just began to shift to a field of disrepair.

With science fiction as a whole as a genre sort of just wavering off, the problems with writing a systemic whole and how authorship works making it impossible for any progress to really be made. Comic books as well during this period began to waver off sales slumping as progressively all genres have begun to collapse.

I know that several artists and writers are barely even struggling to get by. Essentially being screwed by the industry they had trusted to take care of them. Neil Gaiman talked about it, how he was paid $40 dollars per comic at times. Those rates are still the exact same today, not exactly 40 dollars but not livable. The same happened to Clarke's World and various other science fiction magazines like Asimov. I'd argue the genre did not die, the entire writing community supporting it has died.

[AnonymousPlanet]

> Personally I don't think Cyberpunk as a genre has died but rather that it had failed to adapt, by the early 00s we weren't as sure as to how technology would progress into the future and many of the existing assumptions they had made were wrong.

I think some of it has just moved on. William Gibson's novels from the 2000s are set in the present. There's no Ono Sendai and the Matrix, instead there are iPods, Google, and weird art is discussed in obsucure web forums.

The TV show Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex had a much more updated setting than the original manga. That show has dated quite well since it first aired 20 years ago.

[throwaway33381]

It's true there are but even these examples are in my opinion too small scale. I had hopes with the reboot of Cyberpunk 2077 but it was largely a miss. It had the cybernetics but not anything else. Personally I think that when Cyberpunk is done well it acts as a metacommentary of how our world runs the people that are often left behind and the stories of others.

Communities for this just don't exist. And they won't. The lives of the average writer in every part of the world just hasn't gotten better, you need groups of people working on things, not just experts but people who can interpret and work together on things. And it doesn't exist. A market could exist but there's no one willing to invest in a venture like this, talking about these complex issues and the lives that people live. A living world. Well, I doubt anyone's really interested.

[AnonymousPlanet]

If you do an online search for "cyberpunk", you will notice that Cyberpunk 2077 has nearly made the word synonymous with a video game. This was probably the last stepping stone that made "cyberpunk" fully mainstream.

It appears to me that the word "cyberpunk" is now stuck to mean some kind of entertainment dressed in something from Bladerunner, with a few glowing lines from Tron, riding the remnants of the last 80s retro futurism wave.

In its heyday, cyberpunk as a literary genre was very far from being mainstream. Mostly, because it wasn't easy to get into. A major ingredient of cyberpunk is an ever changing world that has everybody in it on the edge of being overtaken and alienated by technological advance and cultural change. Often the reader would just be dropped into it, get a few paragraphs of background, and then was left to figure out the rest by themselves.

What changed is: Most of it happended and is here now and is also part of our news. You can see people around you being left behind if they don't adapt to smart phones or the internet. It's not an exciting rollercoaster of a novel anymore if the backdrop isn't a hypothetic low-life street hustle but could be set in a major city near you. Or if a documentary on the opioid crisis or tent cities of homeless looks like it could be part of Gibson's Bridge trilogy, but it isn't. It's reality.

In the 70s and 80s, technology was the path to bright utopias. The 90s had an even brighter outlook on the future after the cold war ended. That was the mainstream. Cyberpunk was the edgy punk who told you the near future might not be so bright. Nowadays you won't have anyone argue with that. All of that is mainstream now. It's not edgy anymore. It's just the sad reality.

Anyone who wants to talk about these societal issues needs to find a different vehicle for it. At least by name. "Cyberpunk" is someone's brand now.

[throwaway33381]

Yep. This is pretty well said.

[pnw]

I thought CP2077 had lots of interesting character stories, for a video game. Not only were there four or five interesting sidekicks/romantic interests, but several missions and literally hundreds of shards, each a short story.

[throwaway33381]

That's it's problem it never really want any further. It's just a generic rpg game. Which is fine for a lot of people, but it wasn't a world. It didn't feel alive or real. Nothing really connected to each other. It was a linear narrative with a simple set of endings. Don't get me wrong there's nothing wrong with it. It's just not anything new or really good. What some of the developers promised was a universe a world that was alive, it wasn't that.

There was no human connection besides in the same NPCs. No real drastic changes and nothing that would necessitate what would immerse you into a cyberpunk world. Just a high budget linear AAA title.

[JKCalhoun]

Or the smart phone killed Cyberpunk.

[samstave]

Personally, I think that all the nostolgia with cyberpunk, at least for me, is that I grew up in the 80s and Neuromancer was a formitave book for me... and the thing is, as someone who has helped build the tech world we live in --

"Wouldnt it be cool if" was inspired in me and my ilk that we saw these opportunities in tech, and though "wouldnt it be cool if we did XYZ"

And then, as tech nerds from the 80s - we brought as much sci-fi and cyberpunk as we could to how we built out the technoscape.

While being too young to understand the consequences of "what if"... and thus we have Snowden and Wikileaks, and 100% surveillance state... and now we have FN UAP confirmation in the USG...

Cyberpunk has basically molded modern society even if one may not want to acknowledge it.

[swiftcoder]

I'm absolutely here for retro hacking aesthetic inspired by the late 90's candy-coloured iMac phase

[qbasic_forever]

Cybergoth culture: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybergoth

[anthk]

That happened in 2004, were even Unix users with fluxbox mimicked Aqua with good copycat themes and metallic icons a la OSX Tiger's QuickTime.

[JKCalhoun]

Prefer the Compaq Portable phase, ha ha.