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What's your favorite Cyberpunk visual media?
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this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Cyberpunk
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"High tech, low life."
"The street finds its own uses for things."
We all know the quotes and the books. But cyberpunk is more than a neon-soaked, cybernetic aesthetic, or a gritty dystopian science fiction genre. It is a subculture composed of two fundamental ideas: PUNK, and CYBER.
The PUNK: antiauthoritarian, anticapitalist, radical freedom of expression, rejection of tradition, a DIY ethic.
The CYBER: all that, but high-fuckin'-tech, ya feel? From DIYing body mods to using bleeding edge software to subvert corporate interests. It's punk for the 22nd century.
This is a community dedicated to discussing anything cyberpunk, be it books, movies, or other art that falls into the genre, or real life tech, projects, stories, ideas or anything else that adheres to these ideals. It's a place for 'punks from all over the federated Net to hang out and swap stories and meaningful content (not just pictures of city nightscapes).
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I like Blade Runner (and 2049) a lot, but I always felt like they put much more emphasis on the 'cyber' part then the 'punk' part.
Not much commentary on socioeconomic issues, or engagement with themes of anti-athoritarianism and anti-capitalism, or the dystopian nature of the world, all of that is just background dressing to a much more standard science fiction exploration of "what it means to be human", which is something I could find better explored in classic golden age science fiction like Isaac Asimov's Robot and Foundation series, like Caves of Steel.
That's why, out of all visual media, it's really Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and Robocop that made the genre click for me, believe it nor. It's the former that made me finally go out and get all the cyberpunk literature I could and start reading it. That's probably informed by my queer, anarchist, and punk leanings outside of cyberpunk, you know?
To be fair to Blade Runner here, I don't think it was really made to be "Cyberpunk". It has some of the themes and inspired a lot of future Cyberpunk work (at the very least aesthetic wise), but the book "Cyberpunk" wasn't published until a year later and "Neuromancer" didn't come out until two years later, so a lot of the themes that we consider Cyberpunk weren't fully realised yet. I guess you could argue it's more proto-Cyberpunk (and a number of other sci-fi from before then), but it's pretty firmly entrenched as Cyberpunk now, and to be honest, I don't really disagree either. Strict definitions for genres are pretty tricky, even more so for foundational work like I'd say Blade Runner was.