In February 2020, Adafruit’s blog started featuring a series on Cyberpunk written by Gareth Branwyn. The first article, “What is Cyberpunk? #cyberpunk” is a good primer on the genre and movement for the uninitiated and touched on a few of the big highlights. Branwyn’s own definition of Cyberpunk is still a strong one.
The text of my post is a little dated, but here’s the gist of what I was trying to encapsulate:
What is Cyberpunk? #cyberpunk
- In a cyberpunk world, global megacorporations are more powerful than governments.
- Individual hackers and “high-tech low lifes” can wield disproportionate amounts of power within cyberspace and beyond.
- The new “stage” for the human drama has shifted from the “real world” to a virtual one, one inside our networks and our minds. The new frontiers for human society–technology, art, culture, and warfare– have moved into cyberspace.
- The “street finds its own uses for things” (Gibson). In a tech-saturated world, high-technology becomes folk technology, is present at every level of society and culture, and ends up being used in ways its creators never could have foreseen.
- We are all becoming cyborgs. Our technology daily grows smaller and smaller, ever closer to our person, and soon it will disappear inside of us.
- “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet” (Gibson) — how rapidly stratifying economic and class divisions are creating a post-human world where the survival advantages of high-technology and bleeding edge science are only available to the rich and powerful.
- The world is splintering into a trillion subcultures with their own beliefs, languages, and lifestyles.