/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.22072913]

What killed the cyberpunk genre?

[Anonymous No.22072918]

Writers that would have written novels now write posts on Social Media

[Anonymous No.22072931]

>>22072913
An aesthetic can only go so far before it becomes played out

[Anonymous No.22072965]

>dude high tech, but everyone is miserable
You're literally living in it.

[Anonymous No.22072966]

it's still alive in popular culture, but since it was based on the 80s idea of the future it is now a retrofuturist genre, more about nostalgia than trying to predict the future or social criticism

[Anonymous No.22072977]

>>22072913
I played Cyberpunk 2077 and watched Bladerunner 2049. I did not see the first one, but I did read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick. What are some good books in the genre, or even manga?

[Anonymous No.22073029]

>>22072913
It died because the real world became a cyberpunk dystopia. The lamest one imaginable, but one nevertheless.

[Anonymous No.22073065]

>>22072977
Neuromancer - Gibson
Snow Crash - Stephenson
Mirrorshades (short story collection) - Sterling

[Anonymous No.22073068]

>>22072977
There is a great short anime series on netflix based on Cyberpunk 2077

[Anonymous No.22073116]

>>22072977
>Bladerunner 2049. I did not see the first one,
Congratulations. You played yourself.

[Anonymous No.22073167]

>>22072913
It became real.

[Anonymous No.22073192]

>>22072977
Watch the original blade runner, christ bro.

[Anonymous No.22073449]

>>22073068
It's absolute dogshit

[Anonymous No.22073466]

>>22073068
>>22073449
Yeah I also thought it was overrated as fuck. Flat characters, the most predictable plot of all time, and the whole time I though to myself I should have just rewatched blade runner. Or at least pop squad, cuz that nailed the aesthetic even though the story was equally dumb.

[Anonymous No.22073486]

>>22072913
Read the first view pages of necromancer and it seemed like communist dogshit.

[Anonymous No.22073913]

>>22072913
Cryptonomicon

[Anonymous No.22073937]

>>22072913
Quite a few things. First, it is more a visual genre than a literary one. There's so much you can do in the genre with writing, but people know it because of the visual contrast cues like in your image (bright lights, shadowed character) Trying to evoke that with words leaves a film-addled consumer wanting.

There's also the evolution in societal tone. In the 80s and 90's when the genre started, the world was doing great but people could see it wasn't going to stay like that. So reading a story about overseas ninja assassins transporting the latest super computer processing code and killing everyone they hired to keept he secret safe read like a fantasy not like a suppressed news article you heard about on infowars. Modern life is a dystopia, not to mention the Hunger Games fad soured people on dystopia fiction. The genre needs to switch to hopeful if it wants to capture people, but would that really be cyberpunk?

Also, technology is surpassing a lot of cyberpunk staples. Turns out that yes, we can make prosthetic legs that run faster than human legs, but ain't nobody chopping off their human parts to get them. We all have super computers (comparitively) in our pockets. We even have rudimentary AI. Writing a cyberpunk book is now writing a book set next year.

I'll also argue that it's a genre that never really flourished in teh first place. There's Neuromancer, Snow Crash, Hardwired, Ghost in the Shell, Psycho Pass? and Blade Runner. When nobody can name an imitation worth a shit, it's not really a succesful genre in the first place.

>t. cyberpunk author fucking struggling

[Anonymous No.22073942]

Greg Egan but the real answer is it is becoming too real

[Anonymous No.22073944]

>>22073192
2077 is better tho

[Anonymous No.22074063]

>>22073116
>>22073192
>I seen thangs choo crackas wouldn't of believed
>Homeboys tossing salad off in a corner of dey crib
>I seen popo kneeling on da neck of a Minnesota dope fiend
>All dem bitches be lost and shiet now, like niggas carrying weight
>Time to rape

[Anonymous No.22074558]

>>22072913
Nothing. They just need to add more to the years.

It is a dystopian genre meant to warn us against technology. Someone can still write that, write Ted Kaczynski into it, ridicule the video gamers who think of it as a cool aesthetic to play shooters in, the unironic transhumanist freaks, work in burgerpunk even, and it’s a living genre still. Sales down? Oh boo fucking hoo.

[Anonymous No.22074575]

>>22073065
The Diamond Age is better

[Anonymous No.22074587]

>>22072913
I've read the first 40 pages of Neuromancer and so far there's really nothing other than the aesthetic. It has two things: the world and the impressionist style. Everything else - the protagonist, the characterization, the dialogue, the plotting, even a simple thing like a chase scene - is really not good.

[Anonymous No.22074641]

How is the Stars My Destination so much better than Neuromancer? That shit's unreadable.

[Anonymous No.22074994]

>>22073913
>Cryptonomicon
How readable is it, on a scale from 0 Neuromancers to 10?

[Anonymous No.22075013]

>>22073466
>the most predictable plot of all time,
the plot is literally Faust

[Anonymous No.22075049]

>>22072918
This. People underestimate the destructive force that is the modern internet.

Take me for example. Instead of writing the next genre defining novel series, I have a crippling pornography addiction and I’m writing replies to shitposts on 4chan instead of living my dreams. Life is a real bitch.

[Anonymous No.22075139]

>>22075049
Write erotica about your fetishes.

It will get you in the habit of writing at least.

[Anonymous No.22075148]

>>22075139
This. My coombrain is a real gifted writer, good lord.

[Anonymous No.22075164]

>>22072913
it isn't dead, we get new cyberpunk movies, tv shows and video games every year, if anything it has had a resurgence in popularity after declining in the 00s

[Anonymous No.22075182]

>>22075148
I cannot read this.

[Anonymous No.22075187]

>>22075139
No thanks. I’m already busy enough trying to break this addiction and write the stories I actually want.

[Anonymous No.22075219]

>>22072977
Watch the first blade runner. Androids is a great novel, but blade runner is very distinct and has its own vital message. You're missing out, just ignore the damned unicorn, it's a distraction inserted by an artist after he sold out and became beholden to the same system he once fought.

[Anonymous No.22075228]

>>22072977
Ghost in the shell, Bladerunner 1. Bookwise check out Neuromancer, though it's so 90s it comes across as really cringe and edgy in modern time.

[Anonymous No.22075242]

It was too optimistic

[Anonymous No.22075265]

>>22072977
Watch the original, dunce

[Anonymous No.22075325]

>>22075182
It's LoTR gay smut.

[Anonymous No.22075334]

>>22073944
It absolutely isn't.

[Anonymous No.22075375]

Only half the genre is dead. Cyberpunk is just social science fiction with a very particular aesthetic. The aesthetic is still popular -- visual mediums are still doing very well. The Cyberpunk game and anime have both been very popular, and a whole slew of indie games and films have relied on neon lights and air pollution almost as a kind of visual shorthand for "this setting is a dystopia, we're just not gonna talk about it all that much"
It is social science fiction that is becoming rarer. Dystopian fiction is currently dominated by YA and it has little to no valuable social commentary beyond "wouldn't it be bad if bad men had bad military powers?"
It might sound strange to say that Neuromancer was notable because of its social commentary, but it filled a particular niche. More than once I've seen Gibson make the claim that most mainstream science fiction of the time was 'reactionary' -- I think that's a little silly, but it's true that generally miserable dystopian fiction was the exception, I suppose. Even something like Star Trek, whilst very much progressive-leaning, was about clean upstanding people always striving to do the right thing. Cyberpunk is generally about washed up pieces of shit who don't like the world around them very much -- hence the punk label.
Cyberpunk is struggling for the same reason punk as a whole is struggling; few people have anything worthwhile to say, and those that do are constrained by an ever-shrinking Overton window where any kind of confrontational discourse is labelled as violence by elected officials from both parties.
The world today wouldn't have any fucking clue what to do with something as basic as classic punk shirts -- you know, an upside-down crucifixion with a swastika tattooed on the Baby Jesus' bleeding forehead or whatever.
Punk is just largely toothless these days, and any punk-adjacent science fiction is suffering as a result.
>>22073937
>So reading a story about overseas ninja assassins transporting the latest super computer processing code and killing everyone they hired to keept he secret safe read like a fantasy not like a suppressed news article you heard about on infowars. Modern life is a dystopia
This post hits the nail on the head, though I kind of disagree with the conclusion
>The genre needs to switch to hopeful
The genre definitely needs a switch in approach, but I don't think you can fix the problem with just a more hopeful tone.
If anything, empty optimism is part of the problem -- a scenario like "hacker man is special enough to hack the all-powerful corporation who apparently have no backup systems in place" is part of the reason older cyberpunk now seems utterly naïve.
I don't think there's anything stopping modern writers from making something really worthwhile in a cyberpunk setting, but it's going to take more effort than it once did.

[Anonymous No.22075510]

>>22075375
I call it hopeful, but what I try to do is focus stories on interpersonal conflicts between people inside the meta-organisms we call corporations, gangs, or the government. There's surface level conflicts and mystery, but by the end of the book it becomes apparent that the real conflict is happening at a level above humans. It's organizations people barely understand clashing against each other and trampling people underneath.

But hey, even in such a shit show, you can still be a good person, and you can still put a bullet in someone who deserves it.

[Anonymous No.22075539]

>>22075510
Legitimately a good/thoughtful response so I'd absolutely encourage you to keep going.
As long as you're not drifting off into that solar-punk direction of "If we just have love and friendship in our hearts we'll be fine in the long run" then you're already doing a lot better than most other modern dystopian writers.

[Anonymous No.22075597]

>>22075539
Thanks anon. I've got a long way to go right now, but the second book in the series will release later this summer. I'm just waiting on cover art right now. I'm pretty damn happy with the book.

[Anonymous No.22075601]

>>22073937

Agree with this.

I think the societal aspect cant be stressed enough, to me cyber punk seems almost like satire, the 80s was a time of rapidly evolving technology and saw a huge rise in business culture.

Cyberpunk takes both those things to their logical conclusion, businesses own everything and human cost is so ignored that people live in slums. Technology pervades every bit of peoples lives.

[Anonymous No.22075628]

>>22074994
4 but it contains some references so 5/10. Also it has nothing to do with cyberpunk, its a ww2 spy novel. Stephenson copied chunks of chunks from history books BC his own plot was fake and gay. However depicted [real] events were interesting enough for the book to became a bestseller.

[Anonymous No.22075629]

>>22073486
Where the hell did you get that idea?

[Anonymous No.22075806]

[Anonymous No.22075812]

>>22075806
>discworld on the shelves
kino kino kino

[Anonymous No.22075849]

>>22072977
Like the otheranons said, watch the ''original'' Bladerunner. Then re-read Androids paying particular attention to the differences between the book and the movie that was supposed to have been based upon it. Ask yourself why it deviated so hard from the supposed target. On an unrelated note, read Bruce Bethke's ''Headcrash''.

[Anonymous No.22075862]

>>22073029
Yeah, now the old-fashioned cyber dystopia is an object of nostalgic recollection.

[Anonymous No.22075872]

We basically live in a more mundane version of cyberpunk, the one thing they got wrong is cellphones are more important and its china on the rise not japan.

Anyways, if you are thinking of the future from 2023 you are thinking of climate change and the dying earth subgenre, thats what scifi is now

[Anonymous No.22075883]

>>22075049
If I knew who you were then I would blackmail you into writing under threat of doxxing.

[Anonymous No.22075891]

can we establish a general timeline?

i dont think im schizo ranting, i definitely thing there is a timeline
50s to 70s we are going to space, curing diseases, getting new trillion dollar industries such as semiconductors and nuclear, and so naturally sci fi of that era is full of optimism, progress (material progress, not moralfagging about feral minorities), future being great
then since like 70s up until 90s, this is where cyberpunk kicks in, we have virtually no real progress, we have massive communist regimes (soviet, chinese), censorship, lying, corporations, yeah we have internet too, this is where cyberpunk ends (i think)
since the 90s, what did we have? definitely no new significant advancements, we have... pandemics, global warming (i have no info on this), economic crisis, terrorism, wars, taliban btfoing american space force, a russian restaurant owner and some 10k convicts taking the n#1 city in nato media, and you have a bunch of trannies and 80 iq minorities popping up here and there, always about something negative...

CONCLUSION
next cyberpunk gotta be prepping/survivalism type setting where you are trying to survive the collapse, 1984 authoritarian propaganda regimes (but instead of the party you get diversity and genital mutilation?), and a whole bunch of terrorists winning globally

[Anonymous No.22075905]

>>22075872
>Anyways, if you are thinking of the future from 2023 you are thinking of climate change
Nah, that's worn out horseshit from the 1970s. Anyone that kept believing in global warming after the great cataclysmic crop failures and famines of the 1990s never happened is bonafide retarded.

[Anonymous No.22075927]

>>22075891
>so naturally sci fi of that era is full of optimism, progress (material progress, not moralfagging about feral minorities), future being great
No. There was a lot of stuff about aliens coming en masse to harvest us as food or just wipe us out to take over our planet.
>since the 90s, what did we have? definitely no new significant advancements, we have.. global warming
No. Global warming was the butt baby of Paul Ehrlich dating back to the early to mid 1970s. We were already supposed to be into massive crop failures and famine by 1994.

[Anonymous No.22075939]

>>22072913
A more positive vision of the future: 2YK.

[Anonymous No.22075948]

>>22075927
the point is that nuclear and semiconductors inspired people to predict we'd go all over the galaxy in the future
since then, screens got flatter but that is basically it, we had absolutely no new advancements

what we did have is terrorism, crisis, pandemics, economic ruin, diversity, violence and genital mutilation is in fashion too i guess

naturally next cyberpunk gotta be survivalism themed, and instead of corporations we could maybe also add bioluminescent government employees (snowden incident, assange incident, wikileaks incident) but i guess it doesnt matter if monopolistic, authoritarian boogeyman is corporate or government, there is no difference between corp and govt anyway since we dont even have capitalism, we have epstein island based economy where our economy is centrally planned from pedo island where all politicians gather

[Anonymous No.22075965]

>>22075905
no one cares you stupid faggot, climate change is real

[Anonymous No.22075970]

>>22072913
/tg/ discusses this a lot. The general consensus is that people dropped the "punk" aspect of fighting back during the rise of vaporwave and now everything is just "muh aesthetics"

[Anonymous No.22075979]

>>22073449
>>22073466
You've got a lot of bravery to be this wrong on a public forum

[Anonymous No.22076023]

>>22075965
I gave them their first run. When they failed to deliver as promised, I lost interest. It's not even a matter of whether or not it is real. They gave until 1994 for mass famines. It did not happen.

[Anonymous No.22076035]

>>22075948
Oh, yeah, I am just picking at details. I agree with the broad strokes. The world capital has been relocated to a new location. Epstein island is largely abandoned.

[Anonymous No.22076483]

>>22075883
Aww shucks, I appreciate the sentiment, Anon. Your belief in me has given me a brief jolt of motivation. Closing the tab.

[Anonymous No.22076500]

>>22075939
Frutiger Aero made me imagine the future as a pristine and colorful utopia with glossy white buildings and green gardens. Now I know better than to give in to such naive flights of over-indulgent optimism.

[Anonymous No.22076526]

>>22073065
Stop telling people to read Snow Crash, it's fucking garbage

[Anonymous No.22076569]

>>22076035
My sidebar with otheranon does stir something new. Anyone writing on this new euphoric dystopia needs to include Scientism in the plotline. The suspension of disbelief. The bow to authority. The conformance to normalcy.

[Anonymous No.22076632]

>>22073486
You are genuinly retarded

[Anonymous No.22077703]

>>22072913
What happens to all popular genres, corporate culture industrialists come in and flatten it into a cheap easily reproducible aesthetic which they can mass produce. There is no shortage of content marketed as cyberpunk today, but it doesn't resemble the spirit of the original. Cyberpunk 2077 epitomizes this trend of turning distinct genres and subcultures with their conventions and themes into a cheap aesthetic. The death of /cyber/ boards and forums probably had something to do with it too, since this is how cyber lit and content was distributed, discussed and spread, albeit it was a culture mocked as wannabe hackers. Go on social media dedicated to cyberpunk and all you'll find are AI generated images of a Hong Kong type city at night and trashy AI produced vaporwave, or maybe leftoids fapping to Deleuze. Cyberpunk literature, like all genres, will go through cycles of death and rebirth as a new generation discovers Gibson or Lain etc and corporations try their best to churn out cheap consumable trash. As for online cyberpunk imageboards, their pretty much dead and forgotten.

[Anonymous No.22077704]

>>22072913
>consume different things goy!

[Anonymous No.22077723]

>>22072913
It's a genre whose appeals aren't exciting anymore to market. Most people know how a computer works, they also know how corporations work and how foreign cultures like Japan are. There isn't anything unique to the cyberpunk genre that's still fashionable to the average consumer as society is 50 years away from the '70s. Maybe "superpower" implants and climate change?
Most of its themes also aren't very good. Nearly every prediction the punk genre made at the time fell flat and the writing has always read more like a crystal ball than an actual thought-out story. Which makes sense because the genre gained momentum from the TTRPG and the subsequent literature was heavily inspired by it.

[Anonymous No.22077765]

Nothing about social media, no phones, no global warming, no mass globalisation of society, no addressing the fact once everyone gets on social media you just realise the majority of the population is incredibly dumb and npc by default with no manipulation even being applied to them.
Cyberpunk created a possible cool future but now everything evolved in a totally diff direction it just feels a bit off. No matter the plot in the back of your mind you think somebody in this world is about to develop mobile phones and social media and turn the whole thing into our current boring dystopia.

[Anonymous No.22077995]

>>22072913
Me.

[Anonymous No.22078544]

>>22072913
Quantity over quality.

[Anonymous No.22078547]

>>22073065
>Mirrorshades (short story collection) - Sterling
Absolute shit!

[Anonymous No.22078565]

>>22077765
We've lived long enough to see cyberpunk turn into a utopia

[Anonymous No.22078624]

Anyone alive when Neuromancer came out knows it came out with a loud bang, a brazen fuck you note to all the Star Trek, Asimovian sci-fi's "Golden Age", its historical importance cannot be overstated

[Anonymous No.22078990]

>>22072931
Why has nobody acknowledged that this comment is /thread/

[Anonymous No.22079031]

>>22078990
As someone currently publishing cyberpunk, I don't think it's played out.

I just think midwits and trannies swarmed to it.

[Anonymous No.22079221]

>>22072913
Far too much requirements to write out the settings of neon lights, rain, and Chinese words

[Anonymous No.22079318]

>>22075148
Brazil, not even once.

[Anonymous No.22079332]

>>22079031
Personally I think near future sci-fi is still an unexplored land of plenty as far as plots are concerned. (Beyond cyberpunk. Which honestly could really use leaving the 80s behind. And yes I know its a nostalgia genre at this point but come on) Its just that the most normie acessible oases are oversaturated now.

[Anonymous No.22079639]

>>22072913
The aesthetic has been milked to death, most of the fictional tropes have been surpassed by mundane reality, and the deeper themes result in questions the general public REALLY doesn't like as of late.

>>22073449
>isekaifags still seething
Edgerunners is in the top 0.1% of anime: to be fair, to make it in the top 1% all you need is to begin and end a coherent story in a reasonable timeframe, but still.

[Anonymous No.22079725]

>>22079639
Tranime, not even once.
T. Wishes he could draw manga and reach enough success fot it tp be adapted into said tranime. Despite being shit at drawing, not being japanese and not liking anime

[Anonymous No.22080128]

>>22075375
>, I suppose. Even something like Star Trek, whilst very much progressive-leaning, was about clean upstanding people always striving to do the right thing

what's the deal with angloids and their stupid social commentary?

[Anonymous No.22080136]

>>22075970
>/tg/ discusses this a lot

link of the threads????

[Anonymous No.22080772]

>>22073486
> Japanese bar scene
> burroughs reference
> drugs mention

God damned communists!

[Anonymous No.22080780]

Cyberpunk died when people decided that its dystopian. Cyberpunk was not dystopian originally. It was cool, aesthetic and meant to be enjoyable for techbros. But over time people turned it into some cringe anti-capitalist shit.

[Anonymous No.22080785]

>>22078624
>Anyone alive when Neuromancer came out knows it came out with a loud bang
I literally never noticed it.

[Anonymous No.22080795]

>>22080780
>Cyberpunk was not dystopian originally
What are the seminal works?

[Anonymous No.22080803]

>>22072913
The internet turning out to be kinda lame IRL.

[Anonymous No.22081003]

>>22079725
Obsessed

[Anonymous No.22081283]

>>22072913
Realizing we already currently live in the increasing breakdown of proper law and order and an increase of poverty, but less cool looking

[Anonymous No.22082082]

>>22074558
>It is a dystopian genre meant to warn us against technology.
Where do people get this idea? Its the exact opposite. It was meant to make technology look cool

[Anonymous No.22082475]

Cyberpunk reality replaced cyberpunk fiction. But read A Song Called Youth (trilogy) by John Shirley.

[Anonymous No.22083094]

>>22075148
kek

[Anonymous No.22083323]

>Turns out that yes, we can make prosthetic legs that run faster than human legs, but ain't nobody chopping off their human parts to get them.
The rest of your rant is probably fine, but this is such a stupid thing to include. Prosthetic legs are not better than regular legs and it's not even close.

[Anonymous No.22083331]

>>22075049
Then just write? Its not like the internets preventing you from writing, just turn your wifi off or something lol

[Anonymous No.22083334]

>>22083323
ehh, for running they actually are. go look up oscar pistorius dude. how do you not know this.

[Anonymous No.22083345]

>>22083334
What about all the other things you use your legs for besides pure speed, dumbass? Are you gonna sit there and tell me with a straight face that blades make it easier to turn corners and walk up stairs?

[Anonymous No.22083413]

>>22076023
It kinda has, but not for the reasons we think. The supply of food has had some interruptions but most of the food insecurity is systemically induced as a product of profit seeking. Canada specifically has been breaking records year over year in food banks use in addition to rising rates of homelessness. Not to mention the Heat Dome event in '21 that killed over 600 people in BC and gave me severe dehydration to the point of making my piss brown and burning to expel. The biggest failure is the assumption that there is a point at which things cannot continue to get worse. There is no rock bottom to hit.

[Anonymous No.22083448]

I've always thought the problem with the genre is that most creatives don't have the tech knowledge to write good Cyberpunk, and the authors that do tend to suck at writing a compelling novel without being bogged down by technology.

[Anonymous No.22083453]

>>22080780
Technology in the hands of Government enables tyranny though.

[Anonymous No.22083521]

im trying to 'gentrify' cyberpunk into high or at least midwit lit. tech and poverty still there but just background, the characters' neuralinks as noteworthy to them as your phone is to you. beyond that and few other staples -- hi/low city, doomsday cult, mass surveillance, etc -- my novel is just a love story in future China, so arguably not cyberpunk at all, but this could be a direction it goes in, like neo noir: just the aesthetic stripped and grafted onto new forms like harvested organs planted in new hosts.

[Anonymous No.22083683]

>>22083345
The secret is technology will never be better than flesh if for no other reason than self-repair

[Anonymous No.22083697]

>>22080795
Neuromancer and Blade Runner? Neither of which are really dystopian...Neuromancer is not dystopian at all. It is straight up futuristic cool from the start. Sure it has a "low life" punk aspect, but that is not the same as dystopian. And Blade Runner was intentionally made to look really cool

So the idea that cyberpunk is "dystopian" really only came later after "serious" and pretentious analysis of this once fun and cool genre

[Anonymous No.22083708]

>>22072913
lack of innovation and the inability to adapt to the developments of the 21st century. we are basically STILL harping on neuromancer and blade runner which feel completely archaic today

[Anonymous No.22083805]

>>22077703
This is a really accurate answer. 90% of all the bullshit labeled as Cyberpunk now is just a cheap looking mass produced aesthetic. Neon lights and smog in a rainy city is all it takes for zoomers to eat it up as cyberpunk.

[Anonymous No.22083819]

>>22072977
ghost rider 2099

[Anonymous No.22083829]

>>22075970
i always found that bizarre as vaporwave is as dystopic and outright critical like cyberpunk literature was. Vaporwave was supposed to reflect the shallow nihilism of 21st century techno-positivist global consumer capitalist liberalism superstructure.

[Anonymous No.22083840]

>>22072913
When the 21st century became more sci-fi than cyberpunk.

[Anonymous No.22084003]

>>22072913
Reality killed cyberpunk. Most of what the genre imagined has happened. It has nothing more to offer.

[Anonymous No.22084250]

>>22072977
Watch the original blade runner

[Anonymous No.22084300]

>>22073068
Other anons are tripping, the anime was dope choomba.

[Anonymous No.22085024]

>>22072913
It's a genre whose anxieties were never replaced by a new artistic movement, literally the definition of the conditions of postmodernity.

[Anonymous No.22085037]

>>22072965

[Anonymous No.22085915]

>>22072913
It's a future that was lost. People saw cyberpunk as a possible future for society. The optimism for technology in the second half of the 20th century even influenced people's ideas about dystopia and decay. They imagined that technology would continue it's rapid progress and transform society before social rot and other issues set in. The decay has instead come first while it seems that we aren't making such rapid leaps in tech development. People simply stopped imagining it as a potential future. It's much more popular today for people to imagine a force such as government actually sabotaging transformative events to maintain their control; the Ever-Present or 'the end of history'. We fixate now on futures being actively prevented from happening. Cyberpunk is ultimately a vision of a bright free future with a dark side. It's the wild west but with advanced technology.

[Anonymous No.22087618]

>>22075049
kek so true

[Anonymous No.22087630]

>>22072913
I highly recommend Corpus Chrome Inc by Zahler. The funny parts are funny, and the dark parts are dark- like his movies. And the action is great.

[Anonymous No.22088711]

>>22079639
>Edgerunners is in the top 0.1% of anime: to be fair, to make it in the top 1% all you need is to begin and end a coherent story in a reasonable timeframe, but still.

Bro all the edgy "deep" cyberpunk anime(all 6 of them) are better and more entertaining. Edgerunners might be interesting to a new person into the genre.

[Anonymous No.22089282]

>>22083331
>bro just like… stop taking drugs.
Lol

[Anonymous No.22090681]

>What killed the cyberpunk genre?
retrofuturism

[Anonymous No.22091459]

>>22072913
We live in it

[Anonymous No.22091780]

>>22072913
Cyberpunk is too close to reality to be fun escapism anymore.

[Anonymous No.22091914]

>>22077765
>Nothing about social media, no phones, no global warming, no mass globalization of society, no addressing the fact once everyone gets on social media you just realize the majority of the population is incredibly dumb and npc by default with no manipulation even being applied to them.
Snow Crash covers all of these except global warming.

[Anonymous No.22092476]

>>22077765
>Cyberpunk created a possible cool future
It was always a dystopia. Most people would be a hobo in a cyberpunk setting, not the cool hacker.

[Anonymous No.22092478]

>>22083697
>Blade Runner
>not dystopia
>hardly any real animals exist
>not dystopia

[Anonymous No.22092496]

>>22072931
80s retro futurism is the death of cyberpunk
there was a way forward with Serial Experiments Lain, which focused on the questions of technology as it affects the present
the aesthetic must evolve while the message applies to the present crises we are facing
for instance, take the idea of slaving away for no pay, owning nothing, blowing all your money on entertainment and sterile pleasure, and having your future decided by corporations

[Anonymous No.22092501]

>>22083697
Shut the fuck up retard

[Anonymous No.22092504]

>>22083521
>regular stories in a cyberpunk world
Been there, done that.

[Anonymous No.22092513]

>>22072913
Overabundance of boring futuristic ideas

[Anonymous No.22092545]

>>22092478
Not every post-apo is a dystopia, you absolute wojak.