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1/27/2025

So I didnt post a blog yesterday. Why not? Well the truthful answer was I was busy, but I won't accept that as an excuse for not posting a blog unless I have to. Lucky for me I've not yet posted an update on a Sunday so now it's an official rule: no post on Sundays! That has always been the rule, because, as I said in my first blog post, I will post every day by the end of the day whatever that means to me, and it means not Sunday.

Ya'know what I find interesting? Cyberpunk. As in the artistic movement predominated by film, literature, digital art, and gaming. Cyberpunk is one of those things thats been really popular recently. Heck, we're kinda living in a cyberpunk distopia right now. A handful of megacorps have outsized power and political influance, Human interaction is mediated by networked devices, digital privacy is nearly dead, and so on. Of course this is because distopic futures aren't so much warnings of what could happen, but rather exaggerations of what is already happening. What exactly is cyberpunk though. As I've always understood the genre and movement cyberpunk is an anti-authoritarian cry against capital's control over technology. In other words, cyberpunk shows us an extrapolation of how unregulated capitalism, permitting the top of the economic hierarchy to control how we use technology, leads to authoritarian control, and how we might fight, or attempt to fight, against that. Common cyberpunk ideas like megacorps holding more power than the government, heavily surveilled public and private spaces as well as electronic communications, massive wealth inequality, and so on demonstrate the authoritarian effects of capitalism controlling technology. The archetypal cyberpunk protagonist while usually economically disenfranchised utilizes their knowledge of technology (cyber), and their anarchic ideology (punk) to fight against that authoritarian control, and thus we have "cyberpunk."

So why oh why do very few popular cyberpunk works actually feel "cyberpunk" to me? Especially videogames like Cyberpunk 2077 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution for example feel wrong. Too... shiny. The gameplay appeal of the games is in gaining and using super slick powerful high tech cybernetics and devices to accomplish objectives and accrue more power. It's kind of the nature of videogames to have player progression, and an in-game economy (of xp in Deus Ex, and money in Cyberpunk 2077) is a simple way of pacing that out. But isn't that just replicating and incentivising the very ideology that cyberpunk should oppose? What separates V (Cyberpunk's protagonist) or Adam Jensen (Deus Ex's) from the big tech CEOs that they're supposedly ideologically opposed to? Even the technology they have is essentially the same as the corpo bad guys V's cyberware are all pre-fab products they get at chainstores or on the black market. Jensen's augmentations are gifted to him by his employer.

Picture this instead. A cyberpunk protagonist who's working a soulless entry level corporate job, but has highly speciallized tech skills. They employ those skills on the side to make a bit of extra money, and through those connections they're contacted by a resistence group. Using scrap salvaged from corpo garbage they are able to assemble devices, augmentations, whatever that match, and (due to creativity and a lack of regulations) in some areas surpass the technology that the corporations have. They employ this technology to dismantle the powerstructures that keep the powerful in power and push everyone else down. Some of you reading that might have said that sounds familiar and come up with a specific title or franchise I'm alluding to. I don't have one specific in mind, but it does sound a lot like The Matrix to me. But the important thing is that, for me, the platonic ideal of a cyberpunk protagonist and story is much more punk than the genre seems to go. Economically disenfranchised protagonists who, with a great deal of skill, creativity, and disregard for authority take steal power from capital and dismantle, or attempt to dismantle the structures that enforce the hierarchy.