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I think that what makes Cyberpunk appealing has changed over time; it once reflected the concerns of the day, it invited you to reflect about the present and the future looking forward, now it offers solace in familiarity, with the social problems it presented being something that people are used to coping with, it invites you to look into a familiar past. Back then, it explored the mystery of what the surge of computer technology in daily life meant, and what their makers would become as they grew more powerful. We know how that played out now. It speculated on what the direction taken by the hegemon of the West, the United States, meant for common people in the future, as it vested itself on the idea that removing fetters on large businesses would deliver boons on the far less powerful, entirely atomized individual. We're well into that now. The architectural aesthetic was familiar then, more so now. Fear over Japanese investments in the US seem quaint and innocuous, though the wealth transfer from West to East took that was prognosticated was as difficult as portrayed. That's all forecasting from the state of affairs of the early 80s. Reading cyberpunk today is done more an act of escapism from the struggles tearing at the seams of society today than exploring current or new ones. Cyberware and bioware aren't part of the transhumanist experience that cyberpunk primed you for; instead, we have the polemics surrounding the transgender experience, with an intense debate and division on what it means to accept it, going as far as questioning if society should accept it. Renegades working outside the law aren't clad in anything derived from Punk, that British subculture of rowdy youths espousing familiar ideologies in unsophisticated ways; what we got instead is the aesthetic created by the racial minorities of the US and their feedback loop with the countries of origin of the gangers proper, or their parents, or grandparents, which have more elements that are difficult to deal with for onlookers or people affected by them, from their origin, to consequences, and biases. These people give no space to the rugged individualist, the cartel will demand the submission of individuals to it like a fief, the liberty that the cyberpunk protagonist enjoyed at the margins of society doesn't exist. |