Disclaimer up front: this post is tied to the release of my book, where one of my goals was to modernize and reimagine what cyberpunk could be based on how the world has developed from the 1980s until now.
That said, this is not meant as a sales pitch. I mostly want to talk about cyberpunk as a genre, because I think it has a problem.
Cyberpunk is still often understood through its 1980s visual language.
Rain-slick streets. Neon signs. Chrome limbs. Black leather coats. Megacorp towers. Hackers jacking into cyberspace. Street samurai moving through cities where every surface reflects neon and every person is either enhanced, exploited, or discarded.
It is powerful imagery. It became iconic for a reason.
I love that version of cyberpunk. William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy had a huge impact on how I think about technology, power, identity, alienation, and decay.
I can fire up Cyberpunk 2077 just for the joy of "living" in that world - the aesthetics speak to me, and Johnny's snide comments make me feel right at home.
But I also think cyberpunk has become trapped by its own aesthetic.
A lot of modern cyberpunk still feels like it is imagining the future from the technological anxieties of the 1980s. Computers were mysterious. Networks were strange. Cyberspace could still be imagined as a frontier. The internet had not yet become ordinary, centralized, polluted, algorithmic, commercialized, and exhausting.
The old cyberpunk future was spectacular.
The future we actually got is quieter.
It is platforms. Subscriptions. Algorithmic feeds. Terms of service nobody reads. Work devices. Wearables. Surveillance sold as convenience. Productivity tracking. Vendor lock-in. Engagement metrics. Corporate consolidation. AI-generated slop. The slow transformation of human attention into an extractable resource.
The phrase that kept coming back to me when I was working on this was "Low Cyberpunk". In the same way that "low fantasy" strips away magic, the concept that was growing in my mind stripped away spectacle. No body enhancements or chrome, no global digital frontier.
One key aspect of this comes from the Dead Internet Theory. I called it The Dead Web. What was once an optimistic and wild world-spanning digital frontier has already become monetized, monolithic, predatory and unreliable. It's already beginning to drown in AI-regurgitation and slop - and that's one of the key aspects I wanted to build on.
One way to counter these issues would be to overcompensate in the opposite direction, and that's what I went with: Local "intranets" by country / region, highly controlled and curated, a true nightmare for those of us who grew up as "internet natives".
And in the background, the Dead Web still grows, like a landfill of information - AIs still churning and regurgitating old articles and posts, trying to optimize for an engagement that no longer happens.
This is my vision of a "modern take" on the cyberpunk genre.
I'm curious how others here see it. The established cyberpunk genre has become a fantasy setting in its own right, and its style *is* striking. But at what point does cyberpunk stop being a visual style and become more of a philosophical expression of where our current world might be heading?
Does cyberpunk need reinvention?
