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The cyberpunk genre has been experiencing an attempted revival, but many modern examples of cyberpunk, including Cyberpunk 2077, often fail to capture the genre's full meaning.
Cyberpunk is, at its core, a critique of mainstream culture, rampant consumerism, and aggressive unfettered capitalism. While many modern attempts have excelled greatly at portraying the “cyber” aspects of the genre, they often ignore or fail to capture what makes something “punk.”
What makes something cyberpunk?
Cyberpunk isn’t a genre that shouldn’t just be applied to any future dystopian work of media. What sets cyberpunk apart from mere dystopian literature, film, or games is an underlying tone that the world isn’t right. That’s not to say anything is broken. Usually, it’s exactly the opposite. Instead, in a cyberpunk story, everything is working exactly as intended.
The fact that suffering, poverty, and crime are present is meant to hold a mirror up to modern society. It points out how societies are often willing to put up with fractured living conditions so long as they are concentrated among the poor and destitute.
It shows the audience how wealthy and powerful people take advantage of these conditions and often draw a direct link between the ambition of the powerful and the suffering of the poor.
Exploitation is a key ingredient of cyberpunk stories. By comparison, many modern works that wear the cyberpunk label often fail to make this link. They have all the right parts of the genre, but they fail to connect them in the right way.
The mere presence of poor people isn’t enough to make something cyberpunk in the same way that a shootout doesn’t make something a war movie.
The whole point of the genre is that advances in technology do not imply advancements in society.
What Cyberpunk 2077, Blade Runner 2049, and numerous modern remakes get wrong
A cyberpunk film doesn’t have to be specific about the kind of exploitation iconic to the genre, but at the very least, it needs to be present. The problem with a lot of modern cyberpunk is that they often present a dystopian world as something that just happened.
The cyberpunk genre is meant to be a wake-up call. It’s meant to shake the audience and tell them, “this is where humanity's headed if something isn't done about it now!” Modern cyberpunk media lacks this sense of urgency and has even brought a sense of droll acceptance or even endorsement.
Cyberpunk as a genre is inherently anti-corporate, something which makes the corporate reimaginings of Blade Runner, RoboCop, and Total Recall increasingly more ironic.
The producers are right that modern audiences are already primed to engage with cyberpunk but fail to recognize that the reason for this is because of the deepening corporate influence on modern life.
As a result, these modern cyberpunk games, films, and shows feel more like a corporate attempt at profit-seeking rather than an artistic expression of frustration with the same.
Cyberpunk critiques commodification
The commodification of daily life is an ongoing trend in the modern world. Bored? Buy some entertainment. Lonely? Buy companionship. Found an obscure game? Go ahead and buy that funko-pop and custom T-shirt. Upset with the general state of the world? Buy an anarchy poster and a Che Guevara shirt.
In the end, even rebellion is commodified, and this is what is currently happening to cyberpunk as a genre. The corporatization of anti-corporate media removes the teeth and venom and leaves only a harmless, controlled animal. It can then be marketed and sold like anything else. So long as people are buying rebellion rather than practicing it, they too will be harmless.
How to engage critically with cyberpunk media
Critical engagement doesn’t mean adopting all the ideas present in a work of art and constructing an identity around it. It means simply decoding and understanding the ideas present. While many mass-market attempts at cyberpunk works are usually poor imitators; other cyberpunk games and older cyberpunk movies are still integral to the genre and fine works of art on their own.
Shadowrun: Dragonfall, Blade Runner, the original Total Recall, Deus Ex, and the original RoboCop are still amazing entries worth experiencing with a modern eye. By comparison, the newer Deus Ex games and the remake of RoboCop have managed to strip away the more rebellious ideas and critiques of commodification.
Some of these are still present in more modern media but often buried and unfocused compared to previous works.
