Cyberpunk has nothing to do with actual punk you mongs
Except it used to, and then big corporations coopted the aesthetic and watered down the message.
We’re talking about a genre where a content creator (Steve Jackson Games) was raided by the Secret Service—an event which helped lead to the foundation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represented SJG in their federal court case against the Secret Service.
We’re talking about a genre that gave us The Matrix, a film whose plot has been confirmed by the writers to be a metaphor for transness.
Or in the Japanese cyberpunk scene‡, where one of the first cyberpunk filmmakers, Sogo Ishii, was a member of a punk rock band, and his film works were certainly an influence on Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira, a manga and later anime movie about a telekinetic biker gang that fights a corrupt government.
Or what of William Gibson’s (who coined the definition “lowlife and high-tech”) attempted film collaboration with Soviet punk musician Victor Tsoi—cut short by the latter’s death? Or his attempt to collaborate with Sogo Ishii in a film that was to be shot in the Walled City of Kowloon, prior to that city’s demolition? It’s clear that the early cyberpunk authors thought cyberpunk had something to do with actual punk.
Because in fact, cyberpunk has everything to do with actual punk. The genre, in its original form, takes a punk-influenced analysis of today’s society (particularly intellectual property, technological progress, and Capitalism as a whole), and pictures the near-future dystopia that might logically follow.
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‡which, let’s be honest, a lot of the aesthetic part of cyberpunk boils down to “modern Japanese cities at night"—William Gibson has even said something to the same effect himself
[Image: A tweet by @MarionNatik that says "In other news, I’ve been informed that this "punk” game that everyone is talking about has gender restricted hairstyles which officially makes it less “punk” than Animal Crossing. End Image]
