While we’ve been waiting eight years since the announcement of Cyberpunk 2077, the genre has been around for much longer. Coalescing in the early 1980s and having roots in much earlier literature, we have to wonder if the genre still has much to tell us. It’s been exhausted, parodied, and spun off in numerous forms such as steampunk, atompunk, and solarpunk.
There have been several generations of movies that have defined and redefined the aesthetic, such as Blade Runner (and its sequel), Ghost in the Shell (and its remake) The Matrix, Ready: Player One, and Alita: Battle Angel. So is Cyberpunk 2077 a little too late? Not at all–there are many reasons why cyberpunk is still a relevant genre for today.
10 Megacorps Rule
There are many aspects of the cyberpunk world that haven’t been realized today, but one that is very true is the dominance of megacorporations in our daily life. While the original cyberpunk corporations seem horribly outdated (the game had one called EBM), there is no doubting that megacorporations dominate our daily lives.
9 Environmental Degradation
In cyberpunk, the environment has been destroyed by corporate and commercial excesses. Air that’s barely breathable. Land that’s completely built over. Synthetic foods to replace lost agriculture. These staples of cyberpunk are coming true today. You can look at the horrible smog making Chinese cities deadly, or the wildfires raging from California to Australia. Urban sprawl continues to eat up the land. And no matter how tasty the Impossible Burger might be, there’s no getting around the fact that meat replacements are necessary because our carbon-neutral future can’t support the beef industry.
8 Reagan’s America 2.0
Cyberpunk rose in a political climate that had swung back very far to the right, epitomized by Thatcher’s Britain and Reagan’s America. It’s hard not to feel deja vu with the election of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. Trump is particularly similar to Reagan, as a former entertainer whose off-the-cuff remarks hint at deep senility. He has also championed many of the favorite Reagan policies, including cutting regulations, gutting social welfare programs, and reducing taxes on the wealthy. This political environment gives cyberpunk powerful opportunities for insight and commentary.
7 Cyber-Espionage
Much of the world of cyberpunk revolves around jacking in to the net in order to infiltrate corporations and foreign governments. These types of attacks have become commonplace today. Now all major nations have cyber-espionage capabilities, and they regularly use them to target enemies in an ongoing low-grade war to promote their interests and undermine their rivals.
In particular, China, Iran, Russia, and North Korea see hacking as a way to target enemies on the virtual battlefield that they dare not fight in real-world theaters. On a smaller scale, ransomware often disables local organizations and agencies.
6 We Are All Cyborgs
In the world of cyberpunk, people are augmented with chipped-up skills and cybernetic limbs. While we haven’t yet achieved full integration with the “wetware,” modern people are all cyborgs. At least, those of us that carry smartphones are. And that’s most of us. In advanced economies, more than three-quarters of people have smartphones, and in many countries it’s higher than that. In South Korea, for example, 95% of people have smartphones. These devices act as augmented memory, direction finders, and entertainment centers. We may not be physically cybernetic, but we are cyborgs for all intents and purposes.
5 The Internet Shapes Our Lives
Another big trope of cyberpunk is the amount of time people spend jacked into the Net. While we can’t actually disappear into the Internet as a true virtual reality, we are spending an astounding amount of time online these days, an average of six hours a day in advanced economies. And not all of these places are the ones you’d expect. In the Philippines, for example, people spend four hours a day on social media. This means that our lives are shaped almost as much by our virtual experience as our physical experience. Cyberpunk gives us insight into what that does out our persons and our society.
4 Augmented Reality
Virtual experience is now spilling out into the real world thanks to the rise of augmented reality. You might point to smartphone navigation and the use of Google Streetview as early formative parts of this experience. We made a major jump in this direction with Google Glass, but the slow adoption of this technology might be deceptive.
More appropriate is the widespread popularity of games like Pokemon Go!, which has seen ups and downs, but still has tens of millions of regular players. That’s millions of people hunting virtual assets in real-world locations, a concept familiar to many cyberpunk fans.
3 New Prosthetic limbs
In cyberpunk, people don’t just use prosthetic limbs as replacements, but as a way to expand their capabilities and just for style. We are starting to see prosthetic limbs that offer the potential for people to not just replace a lost limb, but to improve their function. When Oscar Pistorius, a double-amputee running on carbon-fibre prosthetic legs, competed in the Olympics, he demonstrated that replacement limbs could match or even exceed the potential of natural limbs. When you add this to the development of intentionally visible (and stylish) replacement limbs, you can see the cyberpunk world coming to life around us. Cyberpunk can help us interpret these developments and live in this new world.
2 The Gig Economy
In the cyberpunk economy, few people have stable jobs. Instead, they live by taking gigs and running hustles to make money. If that sounds familiar, it’s also not a new experience. In the 1980s, we started to see what underemployment would look like for the nation.
The term McJob was coined in the early 80s, and while unemployment has dropped since the Great Recession, the jobs people are taking are jobs that offer lower compensation, fewer benefits, and, above all, little or no job security. That’s why gig economy games like Neo Cab fit so well into the cyberpunk theme.
1 It’s Still Cool
But the number one reason why cyberpunk is still relevant is that it’s still cool. As much as cyberpunk comments on the reality of the modern world, it’s still fantasy. And we’re drawn to fantasies that represent potentials that our actual life can’t match. While magic-based fantasies offer a lot of potential for giving heroes superhuman abilities, so does cyberpunk. The augmented heroes of cyberpunk are larger-than-life figures tackling epic problems and facing incredible odds. At the same time, they are often fragile, broken creatures. That link between these two disparate characteristics lets us dream that our broken selves can also become superhuman.
NEXT: 10 Games To Play In Preparation For Cyberpunk 2077
