Cyberflunk 2077

Is one of sci-fi's most iconic sub-genres still relevant?

Two years ago, after much hype, anticipation, and delays, the sci-fi RPC Cyberpunk 2077 finally shipped. It was a disaster.

The game was filled with bugs, the vehicle controls were atrocious, the game would randomly crash for anyone with a PlayStation 4 or Xbox One, and the game would just stop working entirely if your save file became bigger than eight megabytes.

Over the next two years, developer CD Projekt Red would release patches, fixing bugs and implementing unfinished features. The game may be in a playable state today, but no amount of bug fixes can fix the root issue of the game: the cyberpunk genre, as popularly understood, is completely irrelevant in today’s world. At best, cyberpunk is to the 1980s what Fallout is to the 1950s — an exaggerated version of that society, projected into the future.

In this article, we discuss why cyberpunk has become irrelevant, and an alternative take on the genre that’s more fitting of our world.

Japan Failed to Take Over the World

The Arasaka Corporation is the most powerful organization in the world in Cyberpunk 2077. In the world of Neuromancer, the Yakuza have spread beyond Japan and run rackets in every country in the world. While the Tyrell Corporation in Blade Runner was American, the streets of Los Angeles are lit up with advertisements in Japanese.

In the 1980s, Japan’s rapidly (re-)developing economy was establishing a beachhead in the United States. Sony, Nintendo, and Toyota were household names. In 1983, when Disney built their first theme park outside the US, they chose Japan. Around 1985, Japan even passed the US in per capita income. A Japanese-dominated future seemed like a reasonable prediction.

Via WolframAlpha

Japan didn’t just fail to take over the world. Japanese GDP has barely grown any since 1995, while the US has pulled away. High technology, once a key industry of Japan, is now dominated by America. The Sony Walkman was replaced by the Apple iPod and the iPhone thereafter. Nintendo and Sony’s PlayStation now directly compete with the Microsoft Xbox, and indirectly compete with personal computer gaming dominated by Microsoft and Valve.

What about China? Is there any real difference between seeing neon Mandarin characters and neon kanji characters? China’s economy and businesses are certainly growing. But while China is the world’s factory, there are no Chinese brands in American life comparable to Toyota or Sony. Chinese car manufacturers have tried and failed to enter the US car market. Western countries are banning Huawei telecoms equipment.

The cyberpunk genre imagined East and West fusing together. Instead, it seems as if the US and China will decouple over the coming decades.

Welcoming Our Corporate Overlords

In Cyberpunk, the villain is usually The Corporation, a massive conglomerate that owns a diversified portfolio of businesses, but is very non-diversified when it comes to being evil. Examples include:

1. Arasaka in Cyberpunk 2077

2. E Corp in Mr. Robot

3. Tyrell in Blade Runner

Amazon looks a lot like one of these companies. It’s relatively diversified, selling web services, physical devices like Kindle and Alexa, and just about anything else that fits in a cardboard box. Amazon is also massive, employing 1.5M people in its engineering offices and warehouses. Amazon is the eleventh-biggest employer in the world.

It’s also the most trusted institution in America after the military.

Big Tech is unpopular with politically active Republicans for ideological bias, and unpopular with politically active Democrats because of anti-union and monopolistic activities. But with the normie public, Big Tech companies are popular. Joe Average in Utaskaho likes free shipping and iMessage.

The cyberpunk genre correctly predicted the rise of massive technology conglomerates. It failed to conceive of a world where people would actually like them.

The Hacker is No More

The protagonist of a cyberpunk story is usually The Hacker. He’s normally male, aged 18-34, from a lower or middle-class background, and good with computers. Really good. As a matter of fact, it’s usually his computer skills that allow him to defeat the Big Business Villains. Examples of this archetype include:

1. Neo, from The Matrix.

2. Henry Case, from Neuromancer.

3. V, from Cyberpunk 2077.

4. Elliot, from Mr. Robot.

This archetype is an amalgam of many things. It’s inspired by the “hacker ethic” of young MIT computer scientists, who believed that computing should be a force for liberation and empowerment. Ergo, The Hacker usually gets involved with some underground collective of likeminded misfits who are looking to bring down the system they live in, whether it’s a corporation, a government, or robots enslaving the human race with artificial intelligence.

The Hacker archetype is also inspired by the youth culture of the 1960s-1970s, the formative years of many computing pioneers. The Hacker is young, and the corporate bad guys are typically old. It’s an expression of the idea found in the lyrics to “The Times, They Are A Changing” — that generational turnover naturally improves the world.

It turns out that this archetype is now totally irrelevant.

The dream of the Internet as a new world free from corporations and governments is dead. The Internet is now dominated by large corporations such as Facebook and Amazon, and is now the biggest mass surveillance tool in history.

But at least young people still know their computers, right? Generation Z is less computer-literate than their Millennial older siblings. Raised on smartphones and Google Docs, many of today’s young people do not know what files and folders are.

An Alternative Vision?

Is the cyberpunk genre completely irrelevant? In a world dominated by technology and technology corporations, it can’t be. But the vision of a world of “slicers” “jacking in” and American cities lit by neon kanji signs certainly seems to be.

But there is an alternative riff on the cyberpunk genre that has only grown in relevancy. It’s the world presented by the Spike Jonze movie Her, where a man falls in love with his personal artificial intelligence “Samantha.”

Both Her and Blade Runner are set in a Los Angeles of towering skyscrapers and high-tech gadgets. The difference: Her actually seems to be a nice place to live! The streets are clean, the air and water quality seem to be fine, and the trains run on time. The protagonist, Theodore, doesn’t work a flashy job, but is able to afford a spacious apartment with a great view. The shots of towering glass buildings imply that basically everyone in LA can afford this luxurious lifestyle.

For a movie about our relationship with technology, there are barely any “high tech” characters or jargon. The closest thing to a computer hacker in the film is Amy Adams’s character, who is a garden-variety software engineer. Instead of furiously typing green terminal lines, she uses an integrated trackpad on her desk. Technology is seamlessly integrated into our world through voice commands and gestures.

But as nice as it is, this is not a utopian vision of the future. Theodore, recently divorced, has friends and coworkers, but is shown to have an atomized and unfulfilling life despite his standard of living that would be the envy of most today.

Cyberpunk stories like Neuromancer and Blade Runner implicitly take on a hyper-materialist view of the world. “Everybody is edgy because of poverty and neon lights, and the more poverty and neon lights there are the more edgy we become.”

Her takes the opposite position, suggesting that a rich, high-tech society can still be one a bad one. In the years since the movie was released, this position has been vindicated. Three in ten millennials report feeling lonely “often” in 2019 — and this has only gotten worse since the pandemic. Young Americans are less likely to form romantic partnerships, partly because pornography and sex toys offer a chemical hit nearly as good at a significantly lower cost.

If there is a future for the cyberpunk genre, it lies in the micro, not the macro. Instead of asking the effects of technology on society, we should be asking how technology affects our lives and relationships.