Also a significant lack of hot ass murder babes.
I don’t get everyone’s obsession with cybernetic implants. If I needed a replacement, sure. But could you imagine today’s enshittified corporate structure making a cyberlimb? 100% a massive up front purchase and a hefty subscription, especially if it’s not a functional replacement.
Personally I want a functional metaverse. Full dive computing.
Yep cyberpunk still perpetuates the idea that corporations are highly competent and innovators, which just doesn’t seem to be true in our current reality. The MBA/financial people have taken over and people that actually want to make cool stuff are no longer in control
I had lunch with a co-worker that spoke with a stupid grin about shaving a couple of cents off of their production units in the manufacturing process. Our products costed hundreds to even thousands of dollars.
I can’t believe there are people alive that are proud of this kind of stuff. He didn’t even have a stock compensated position, or work in manufacturing. He was just a capitalist creep that loved the very concept of being a cheap dumpster fire.
The entire reason the cyberpunk genre was invented was to reflect what modern society looks like, and the inevitable outcome if technology improves, but government policy and power dynamics stayed the same.
The counter genres to cyberpunk are solarpunk (merging society and nature together) and sci-fi (Star Trek being the main example here, being a socialist, post-scarcity society)
This is actually kind of funny when you consider a lot of infrastructure refuses to use newer or better technology in the goal of maximizing profit, which the government also supports via lack of legislation.
Cyberpunk always shows some cool stuff around public transport, yet here we still are in 10 lane highway congested traffic with inefficient SUVs and Trucks since they even killed off sedans.
Cyberpunk public transport usually only exists because most people can’t afford cars though, and the routes pretty much exclusively go to the general locations of major employers, sometimes only being available to employees of those companies (they still have pay a fare too of course)
Uh, cyberpunk is a sub-genre of sci-fi or, as it’s also known, Science Fiction.
Science fiction usually carries with it a desire to rationalize and explain the technology it’s built upon, to try and paint a world plausible from a scientific standpoint. You see this a lot with the technobabble in Star Trek.
Cyberpunk has a lot of overlap with science fiction, but usually dives more into the social commentary on society and capitalism, using the technology within as a vehicle to amplify those criticisms. Some cyberpunk works seek to explain their technology and make it seem grounded in the same way sci-fi does, but that is usually secondary to the social and political themes.
Cyberpunk is not separate from Science Fiction. It is literally a genre of science fiction. citing the DEFINITION of it, available from a simple google search: 1. a genre of science fiction set in a lawless subculture of an oppressive society dominated by computer technology.
I guess it depends where, and when, you look? :-P
Yeah, but most places (within city limits) there tends to be at least one neon signage visible from somewhere - a nail salon, a barber shop, etc. Regardless, it’s a fair point that most places look more like the right than the left images (in the OP)… but not exclusively!
But it mostly comes out at night
