/lit/ - Literature

Cyberpunk is dead. There won't be any innovation in the genre, just endless rehashing. The next trend will be modemwave, nostalgia for the period between 9/11 and the first iphone, combined with the anxieties of modern times. Basically bloomer fiction taking place in bright, cheerful settings, celebrating a bygone era of discrete electronics designed for singular purposes, each with it's own unique design and style. Something like:
>2027, five years after The Burn
>some anonymous hacker group managed to compile and release every bit of personal data ever entered into the internet
>browsing history, financial info, private messages, pornography habits, message board posts
>all organized and collated by name, cross-searchable by topic and keyword
>chaos ensued as people fled rather than face the consequences of having their private secrets revealed
>mobs attacked corporate headquarters of tech titans such Google, Facebook, and Amazon, utterly destroying their servers
>criminals seized the opportunity to commit fraud on a mass scale, draining bank accounts and opening new credit cards
>society barely managed to survive the ensuing famine, infrastructure failure, and refugee crisis
>civilization has pulled back from the brink, with Tiger Electronics buying out Apple Computers and Lycos being the largest search engine to survive with servers intact
>internet mostly replaced by cable television info-nets, offering personalized weather, communication, shopping, and news
>but scraps and pieces of the old web survive, on discs and hard drives, if you know where to look
>fragments of old secrets, some of which can be very valuable indeed...