Cyberpunk once stood out as a vital genre of anti-capitalist fiction. Today, it’s been reduced to a cool retro aesthetic easily appropriated by the world’s second-richest man to market ugly Blade Runner–inspired trucks to nostalgia-driven Gen Xers.
The article seems confused. On one hand, it correctly states that cyberpunk's
vision has often been constrained by the ironclad law of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, the ideology that frames capitalism as the natural system of governance for humanity, making it impossible to imagine a way out. Fisher saw exhausted resignation in tech-noir Hollywood movies set in the future. Indeed, cyberpunk’s antiheroes — often hackers or street kids — never seemed intent on saving the world, just themselves or their ragged communities. Hyperindividualism and free expression trumped solidarity and collective action.
But then, it cannot explain what to do with this hypothesis. The article doesn't manage to bring across how Cyberpunk 2077 is more capitalist realist recuperation than classics of the genre like Neuromancer, Robocop or Blade Runner. It pretends there is a dichotomy between these seminal works of the genre and Cyberpunk 2077, and i agree that there is, but this is only relevant in regards to aesthetics, not in regards to if any of these works are effective critiques of capitalism. Spoilers ahoi: This is because none of them are. As much as i love cyberpunk as a genre, it has been a fully recuperated mess of ideological confusion from the very start.
If the article would arrive at that conclusion, we could then get into how an actually anti-capitalist take on the genre would have to look like. I think what the genre lacks from a genuinely leftist perspective are two things:
Building the setting's lore along the lines of historical dialectics, outlining clearly distinct and clearly dystopian characteristics of the next-highest stage of capitalism and making them integral to the narrative. It cannot just be "capitalism does what we already know it to do, but slightly more obvious", it has to be a logically concludent step up from how it ruins our lifes today, a worsening that is not only quantitative, but qualitative, and that is then explored in the story. Otherwise, it leaves the recipient with the impression that nothing will fundamentally change if capitalism is allowed to continue developing unimpeded.
Offering a response to this development that isn't just apathy or a grudging retreat into hyperindividualism. If material conditions worsen qualitatively, this also means that revolutionary potential increases. That doesn't mean such a reboot should lose its dystopian qualities, but there should be some perspective, some glimpse of a way out when capitalism's contradictions are heightened so much. We're hopefully talking about the last stage of capitalism before its collapse, so at least the first signs of that collapse should be visible.
Both aren't actually done in examples of the genre i'm aware of. This may partially be because the foundational examples like Blade Runner, Robocop or Neuromancer all where written at a time when reaganomics only began to rear its ugly head. That they seemed like a warning, not a cynical coping mechanism, because they came out of an era where we could still have heeded that warning and avoided the world we live in now.
The article seems confused. On one hand, it correctly states that cyberpunk's
But then, it cannot explain what to do with this hypothesis. The article doesn't manage to bring across how Cyberpunk 2077 is more capitalist realist recuperation than classics of the genre like Neuromancer, Robocop or Blade Runner. It pretends there is a dichotomy between these seminal works of the genre and Cyberpunk 2077, and i agree that there is, but this is only relevant in regards to aesthetics, not in regards to if any of these works are effective critiques of capitalism. Spoilers ahoi: This is because none of them are. As much as i love cyberpunk as a genre, it has been a fully recuperated mess of ideological confusion from the very start.
If the article would arrive at that conclusion, we could then get into how an actually anti-capitalist take on the genre would have to look like. I think what the genre lacks from a genuinely leftist perspective are two things:
Building the setting's lore along the lines of historical dialectics, outlining clearly distinct and clearly dystopian characteristics of the next-highest stage of capitalism and making them integral to the narrative. It cannot just be "capitalism does what we already know it to do, but slightly more obvious", it has to be a logically concludent step up from how it ruins our lifes today, a worsening that is not only quantitative, but qualitative, and that is then explored in the story. Otherwise, it leaves the recipient with the impression that nothing will fundamentally change if capitalism is allowed to continue developing unimpeded.
Offering a response to this development that isn't just apathy or a grudging retreat into hyperindividualism. If material conditions worsen qualitatively, this also means that revolutionary potential increases. That doesn't mean such a reboot should lose its dystopian qualities, but there should be some perspective, some glimpse of a way out when capitalism's contradictions are heightened so much. We're hopefully talking about the last stage of capitalism before its collapse, so at least the first signs of that collapse should be visible.
Both aren't actually done in examples of the genre i'm aware of. This may partially be because the foundational examples like Blade Runner, Robocop or Neuromancer all where written at a time when reaganomics only began to rear its ugly head. That they seemed like a warning, not a cynical coping mechanism, because they came out of an era where we could still have heeded that warning and avoided the world we live in now.