Why is cyberpunk so dead in everything but tabletop?

>playing a "modern setting" campaign
>it's actually in the 90s/early 2000s because the GM doesn't want every character to have a smart phone that can trivialise most noncombat encounters

You can't run a modern horror game without fucking magically turning off cell phones or just having arbitrary monsters that don't line up with anything they can find online in which case the players will bitch at you.

>not having their enemies track them via the networked GPS receiver, video camera and audio recorder they're each carrying
>not encouraging the players to go low tech through sheer paranoia
Your GM has no imagination.

I'm not so sure of that. Sure you could google werewolf weaknesses, but if you're being chased by one you're probably going to be fucked anyway.

Then again, a monster that fucks with tech would be pretty interesting. Like a monster that replaces on screen text with something spooky.

That's getting into cringe territory. I think a plain vanilla stalker that knows how to hack is much scarier.

>Cyberpunk is dead
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorpion_(TV_series)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI:_Cyber
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Robot_(TV_series)
I don't even watch TV. I'm sure there are more on.

The aesthetic got better, and no one cares for bulky cyberware. That's about it. Hell, even the Marvel movies have had cyberpunk inspiration, especially Winter Soldier (which even had cyberware!) Basically, are all right. They're no longer set in the future because we no longer need to set them in the future (although much of the technology showcased in those is just as unrealistic. I mean, must have much better service than I've ever seen)

Honestly even my friends and family who do have high tech phones wouldn't get much use out of them in a horror movie situation. At best you could call for help, but in most of those cases you can just LEAVE the area in the first place.

Have you been watching, like, any movies at all?

It lost its edge.

It's been neutered and reduced to a vague array of pop culture references used to advertise all sorts of shitty high-tech products. It's being exploited to make us buy the very things it tried to warn us about.

Cyberpunk used to be full of scary and outlandish things and that's what made it appealing and relevant. Now that those things are starting to happen, they're either fucking boring, or scary but in a dreadful, threatening way. In a way that's too real to deal with and makes the fiction seem like cheap entertainment by comparison.

As a result, nobody takes it seriously anymore. We see the writings on the wall as we dive deeper into technological alienation, but we don't pay attention anymore because it's already too late to do anything about it, and we prefer reveling in the glamor of self-destruction than fighting back to make sure that cyberpunk remains fiction.

Just look at the techwear/cyberpunk threads on Veeky Forums: a bunch of college kids buying overpriced parkas and convincing each other that they're rebels just like in the chinese cartoons: They're playing with the corpse of cyberpunk, gnawing on its bones and getting infected by the very diseases it warned us about and which killed it.

You wanna bring cyberpunk back?
Make it fucking horrific and brutal again. Make it edgy as hell. Make people fear the future but make them ready to fight it.

>it's actually in the 90s/early 2000s because the GM doesn't want every character to have a smart phone that can trivialise most noncombat encounters
That's because the DM doesn't use the time they are all on their smartphone to attack them from the shadows.

If you enjoy cyberpunk for 80s asthetics you are no better than steamfags famalam.

Crime rates peaked and crashed in the late 20th century and are now heading slowly but surely downwards. Cyberpunk (and punk genres in general, like WoD) was most popular as society was heading toward the peak of this trend, when it seemed like crime would continue spiralling out of control, which gave us visions of the future like Robocop and Escape from New York. The idea of ever-increasing social decay going hand-in-hand with scientific progress, leading to a technologically advanced but anarchic, crime-ridden dystopia has become less relevant as society has settled into a more boring and safer future. In literary circles, this has caused cyberpunk to give way to "post-cyberpunk", which follows a similar time-frame and technologies but is more optimistic and less focused on the underclasses.

>not running a vaporwave A E S T H E T I C campaign

Or, like have you been watching music videos? The cyberpunk aesthetic is permeating mainstream culture like woah.

"post-cyberpunk" is just regular sci-fi that's not full-blown space opera. It's not a real thing.

haha, just because the poseurs don't wear studded jean jackets anymore doesn't mean punk is dead, bro.

>As a result, nobody takes it seriously anymore. We see the writings on the wall as we dive deeper into technological alienation, but we don't pay attention anymore because it's already too late to do anything about it,
This. We already live in cyberpunk. Its too late.

No, the cyberpunk aesthetic is dead and buried. Some cyberpunk THEMES and ELEMENTS are permeating mainstream culture (usually after being neutered), but cyberpunk fiction itself has been completely fucked over by mainstream aesthetics in the 2000s.

>wanna bring cyberpunk back?
>Make it fucking horrific and brutal again. Make it edgy as hell. Make people fear the future but make them ready to fight it.

Nah dude.
Cyberpunk wasn't ultraviolent and nihilistic; the 80's were about ultraviolent and nihilism and that leaked into cyberpunk fiction written back then, just like curvy iPhone technology shit leaks into scifi stuff written now.
The entire decade of the 1980's was affiliated with this sense of high-octane hopelessness; everything was materialistic, crime was constantly on the rise, life was cheap, the economy grew in leaps and bounds but left tons of people behind and unable to cope and thus dropped many below the poverty line, America was full of soldiers who had come back from Vietnam with horror stories about what they did for their country, and the President was an ex-actor who basically encouraged all these things and seemed determined to get the world destroyed in by playing nuclear chicken with the USSR and sending crazy black ops wetwork shit into third world countries they were involved in to destabilize them further.
This nihilistic Zeitgeist affected Japanese stuff to an even greater degree where not only was everyone aware that materialism was more important then your individual life, the entire COUNTRY made it perfectly clear that this was the case as early as high school and your usefulness in society was directly tied to how productive a worker you were.
Add to that the fact that the nukes would hit Japan first (thanks to our bases there), their existing cultural history with them, and the rise of the OVA market which helped bypass otherwise extremely strict network censorship laws and you have a recipe for telling stories about alienation, war, people being warped into machines, and treated like garbage.

Most famous cyberpunk authors have books that aren't particularly violent at all, especially compared to other novels such as horror ones written at the time.

Yes, like all good things.

mainstream culture always dulls the rough edges that come out of countercultural memes.

I disagree. Maybe you imagined something different, but Rihanna's last couple videos have been cyberpunk as fuck.

youtube.com/watch?v=wfN4PVaOU5Q

youtube.com/watch?v=kOkQ4T5WO9E

This desu.
The reason old cyberpunk looks so dated is because it IS dated and was relevant to the 1980's when it was made but now looks silly and trite when compared to how things ended up changing or not happening entirely.

So that guy doesn't want cyberpunk back, he wants the 1980's back. Which I'd argue he's kind of getting anyway these days, especially if Trump wins the election; we'll even have a conservative celebrity as President again!

Dude you did nothing to prove me that cyberpunk wasn't ultraviolent and nihilistic.

On the contrary you just explained me why it WAS ultraviolent and nihilistic as a result of the time it was made in.

Regardless, cyberpunk is at its best and at its most relevant when it's horrific, edgy and ultraviolent.

I'm not giving that slut any views.
"the guy" wants good cyberpunk back. Which happens to be imbued with 80s edginess. edgeless cyberpunk is just shitty cyberpunk regardless of the decade it was made in.

In that case, yes.
It was that way back in the 1980's.
Unfortunately literally nothing you or anyone else can do can turn back time to the 80's or bring back the exact same cultural situations that led to it being a thing.

By sticking to those aspects of when you thought it was best, it WILL eventually die off completely as a genre when literally everyone who remembers what the decade was like dies of old age or gets too old for their rememberences and opinions to be relevant to culture.

Have fun with that!

We are not fundamentally living in cyberpunk by any means. Yeah, there's dat computer tech and even smartphones that would have given Gibson wet dreams at the time, but the sweeping idea behind cyberpunk originally is the rise of a new collectivism based on faceless corporations, and its fight with old world family businesses, lone billionaires, the fragmented remains of society organized in dozens upon dozens of countercultures and scum from the gutter.

Didn't VA-11 Hall-A come out last week? I mean it's short as hell but I kinda like it.

So what are you suggesting?
That instead we should keep producing lame, edgeless "cyberpunk" that only serves to advertise dumb shit to the people who remember a time when it was more than that?

Cause I don't think there's a middle ground.

He's not getting it back. Ever.
80's and early 90's edgy cyberpunk was popular because it seemed socially relevant at the time and so expressed itself frequently through pop culture.
While there's some weird social similarities between then and now, they aren't significant enough ones to say a genre that's spent the last thirty years stuck in the past will get popular again.

Right now he's complaining that gravity makes it hard to fly; we all KNOW already, why whine about it? Chances are OP isn't even old enough to have been around when cyberpunk WAS socially relevant enough to show up everywhere.

How is it cyberpunk again?
To me it looks a lot more like typical 50s scifi.

as stated, the 80s vision of the future turned out to be wrong.

Awww, babboo doesn't like sexy Barbados singers? Grow up, kid. Christian sexual mores and cyberpunk? Really? How do you deal with the dissonance in your head?

Your opinion is subjective and will die when you do, and nobody will care that you ever held it in the first place.
Think on this and realize that your statements about the "definitive" best era of a type of genre are as temporary as your individual lifespan and about as relevant as whatever mark you personally as a single can manage to make on society as a whole.

I'm a huge fan of classic cyberpunk too mind you, but I also know when my opinion is subjective and not to start threads whining about the good old days of a genre that was starting to wane in public popularity almost before I was born.

We are basically living in a Cyberpunk world, where the Punk never got off the ground. There are no meaningful countercultures, only the Mainstream and Corporations.

All of the violent crime was outsourced to Mexico, too. Cyberpunk just isn't happening in Seattle.

"the guy" is me. OP is another dude.

Don't tell me there aren't tons people who are pissed with the current state of things, and that they wouldn't enjoy fiction that reflects their anger and fear.

In a cyberpunk world, the punks are getting ground into the dirt and the countercultures never get on the TV except as ridiculous caricatures, just like today.

But the japanese zaibatsus stalled and the corporate world never took up raising their own employees and controlling their lives.

If anything, we are living is the most individualistic time period ever.

I'm calling her a slut because it's a stronger insult than "bad singer", don't get butthurt because your "wow so cyberpunk so cool" waifu isn't getting two more views from a random user.
My opinion is subjective but my statements are true.
Fuck right off with your aloof and cynical posturing, you aren't wiser than anyone else just because you sound calmer.

Anti-authoritarianism is something that modern culture is doing its level best to stamp out as best it can. You can even see it in this thread -- "edginess was for the 80s even though it's so much worse now."

Cyberpunk is a hypothetical NOW where people don't just bitch about this stuff on the internet, they pick up a gun and a laptop and do something about it.

DX: Human Revolution was pretty successfull and another title of the series is coming.
Also Cyberpunk 2077
So it's not entirely dead in Vidya. Not particularly big, but in no way dead

Because it became real.

Actually, cyberpunk novels are still a thing. They've changed a little, going with the times as new trends have come and the net has become more mainstream than we expected, but it's all still there. Ready Player One was pretty cyberpunk.

There's also a lot of post-cyberpunk that is pretty much just cyberpunk but viewed from within the system instead of without.

Oh no, they do! Always, in every era.
It's just those fears and angers are different and not the ones held in the 1980's anymore; the advancement of technology is now no longer recognizably linked to spiraling crime rates (it advanced faster in the 90's then it ever did in the 80's and crime PLUMMETED that decade), so instead you get the fear and the anger without the cool technological shit.

The fears are less about "corporate consumerism is crushing me!" and "the spiraling crime rate will kill us all even as we advanced technologically at a rate that outstrips our morals!" and are instead about "globalism is crushing my personal long-held ideas of my culture and the world!" and "the economic gap even in areas that have nothing to do with major corporations is widening!" The economic gap is the strongest similarity, but rather then rebel against consumerism (which everyone at least subconsciously recognizes gives them all the cool things they want) they note that the wealth gap between the richest and middle class is almost universal and has nothing to do with major corporations at all, just the nature of a top-down governed society.

Not passing judgements on these more modern fears by the way; weather they are justified or not is up to future historians, not myself.

true
And what better way to stamp out anti-authoritarianism than to label it as "childish" and "backwards" ?

Because raising your own employees is inefficient and nonsensical when you can let others do it and just exploit them.

And individualism is a huge part of Cyberpunk. After all, you need to buy all these products and use these services to express your individuality.
Just don't be an individual capable of independant thought where it matters.

You didn't make any statements in that last post. You just asked questions.

>Anti-authoritarianism is something that modern culture is doing its level best to stamp out as best it can.
Just look at the people who THINK they are rebels: dull, samey-looking, vapid and pretentious consumerist millennial teenagers who think they are being rebellious for being far-left LGBTQABCD+, who think they are oppressed and fighting the good fight...while repeating an opinion the media is shoving down everyone's throat and labeling anyone who disagree a neo-nazi.

Nothing is more 'rebellious' than a hipster with tatoos, giant holes in xir ears, a Mac, drinking starbuck off the money their daddy is making. /s

They don't seem that different from those found in traditional cyberpunk, and there's more abstract ones that have no reason to stop just because the economy changed a little.

Cyberpunk doesn't HAVE to be a symptom of the times.

But they're gonna make a sequel to the best cyberpunk game ever, user.

I miss 80s and early 90s cyberpunk anime. Remember when anime seemed like the manliest shit in the entire world?

mexico doesn't really "feel" cyberpunk, it feels like any other unstable, crime-ridden latin american country in the last 60 years.

not in the posts before that, obviously.
see that's the thing: rebelliousness has been diluted into the mainstream to the point where it completely lost any solid meaning. Just like cyberpunk.

I'd argue that in the US there's been two Presidental candidates who made their entire election platform thing extremely anti-authoritarian (though one in particular has a reputation for being quite severe in his authorian measures in his area of influence).

But if you mean the style stuff? Yeah.
People figured out halfway through the 90's that all the style shit that they bought into because it was rebellious and cool was actually being sold to them by the guys who they were trying to rebel from in the first place and had almost since the very beginning.

It kind of put a damper on the entire thing and make people wonder WTF even was the point in the first place.

I know you're baiting but your bait is true nonetheless.

It always seemed like a stupid concept, to be honest. I don't know how it caught on.

Yeah, and they threw the baby (rebelliousness) with the bathwater (the accessories)

it would help if the means anti-authoritarianism chose to express itself right now weren't things labled childish before the anti-authoritarians took them up.

That you are looking back with such foundness to the 80s and 90s, which is when you were children, is rather telling.

it IS a stupid concept but we live in stupid times.

There's always Gundam Thunderbolt.

I think it became as fantasy as the usual medieval settings, just less consumable.

As someone at IT have put it, cyberpunk will never come, because people don't know how to make, modify, and fix technological tings.
I mean most don't know how to dod as system restore on windows, or how to get the office printer working, how are we supposed to commertalize high tech, that can't be used by pre-school children and is easier to replace than underwear?

>And individualism is a huge part of Cyberpunk. After all, you need to buy all these products and use these services to express your individuality.
You got it wrong. In the cyberpunk themes, you buy these things because your company makes them. You do it because your company is so large that you can basically live off purely on its products. That's why corporate slaves are described looking all the same, eating the same thing and watching/listening to the same cultural products.

Having special things to show your originality was the mark of the protagonists in cyberpunk, not the wageslave. In our society, however, wageslaves define themselves with what they buy, because the economy has created dozens upon dozens of small companies that became big by selling to niche markets, which is arguably materialistic, but nonetheless pretty remote from the 80s cyberpunk.

corpret espionage with ak47 when

No, there are countercultures. Veeky Forums hates them and makes fun of them.

Corporations have more power than governments. The US can't pass gun control laws that a majority of citizens want because the democratic-republic process favours lobbyists with money. Hell, the fossil fuel industry (and the tobacco industry before it) has fucked up the world by lying about what their product does, faking studies and working to undermine and discredit what the average citizen knows. History is falsified and rewritten to better conform to what lobbyists want, as opposed to telling the truth. If you don't think we're living in a cyberpunk world, look at Monsanto. Look at anything from the farming industry.

The only difference is that, yeah, punk hasn't taken off. When people tried to fight the man a few years ago, they were slandered by the media. When they tried to fight the man this year, the media ignored them. Historic protests went down and DC arrested more people than ever, and protesters lined up outside the media companies. Did that get any meaningful coverage?

Honestly, I am a bit surprised that more traditional cyberpunk isn't more common. I mean, most of the shows you get these days are hackers working OUTSIDE THE LAW or for the law, not any of the FIGHT THE MAN stuff you'd get in the 80s. But there really is a lot of cause for FIGHT THE MAN stuff. Hell, Veeky Forums makes fun of tumblr, but the stereotype of that crowd would love cyberpunk themes: You're oppressed for being an outsider, whether you're queer or coloured or just a weirdo. The world is shit. Fight back and make it better

I mean, fuck, millennials are saddled with shitloads of debt from buying into a lie their elders sold them, most work harder for less, and constantly get told they're not trying hard enough or applying themselves. That is a demographic that is just begging for punk stories about people who are good hearted and altruistic and fighting against the man

No, but the ultra violence and nihilism part of it ARE symptomatic of the time it was in.
Cyberpunk that is socially relevant right now would look very different because neither of those things are as relevant as they used to be and shock us much less than they used to when they are.

I apologize; I wasn't clear I think.
I didn't mean to say that cyberpunk ITSELF would die, only that the nihilistic and violence themes would die out because they aren't as socially relevant anymore and thus are less about the near-future and more about the "that already came and went".
>see that's the thing: rebelliousness has been diluted into the mainstream to the point where it completely lost any solid meaning. Just like cyberpunk.

It was ALREADY pretty mainstream.
That's why in the 1980's you had so many extremely popular and successful cyberpunk films and themes. Punk music hadn't gotten popular quite yet, but goddam if shit like RoboCop and Running Man and GETCHOR ASS TO MAHS didn't sell like hotcakes.

It's just that people hadn't yet realized that rebelling using elements given to them by the people they were rebelling against was kind of circular and masturbatory at heart.

>Trump
>conservative celebrity

Yeah it would help, but saying dumb shit on youtube is easy.

>That you are looking back with such foundness to the 80s and 90s, which is when you were children, is rather telling.
Not really. It's irrelevant anyway.

My friend is a big fan of it. He once bought an indie card game just because it had a sort of cyber punk theme. It was awful.

I genuinely don't see the appeal. Even simply aesthetically, it is pretty hideous.

Source?

Part of what makes anime girly now comes from SEVERE cultural problems that have been affecting Japan since the 1990's; so yeah, it was manly because the culture itself was different and economic and cultural shifts changed the country like it did every other nation in the last 26 years.

You can track its evolution in the Terminator movies, of all things.

The first one is about smashing the machines.
The second one is about smashing the machines by going after their inventors, which the authorities protect.
The third one is about realizing the machines are inevitable and doing your level best to survive in the world they create with the help of the authorities.
The fourth one is about taking back the world from the machines by (essentially) bombing everything back to the vacuum-tube age.
The fifth one is probably the closest we've ever gotten to "post-cyberpunk." We now serve the machines, and the fight to stop them causes massive collateral damage.

There's nothing rebellious in holding opinions validated by the mainstream media. Things which were once out of the mainstream have now not only become mainstream, they've become diluted, corporatized, a mere brand for people to wear. See: the gentrification of anything 'nerdy' and...hell, even gay culture has morphed from sick-weirdos-living-an-edgy-life to suburban quaintness.

The real rebels are the people our media label as wrong or even monstrous, ranging from legit far-right extremist to disaffected leftist who have been cast aside by their ideology's inevitable spiral into madness. Yet even here, I see people knee-jerking whenever these ideas are brought up. People are afraid. And those who dare rebel are mocked and shunned.

I know it was pretty mainstream but at least it was identifiable as such. There were subcultures based around it that were very prominent; they were fake as fuck most of the time but they existed. Now there's a bunch of vague traces of it, but it's not "a thing" anymore.

And I say that cyberpunk without nihilistic and violent themes is worthless and deserves to die, while violent and edgy cyberpunk, even if it's masturbatory or not quite attuned to current issues (which is arguable) doesn't deserve to die.

Well he IS a celebrity.
And technically he's socially conservative when it comes to certain subjects, though he's pretty inconsistent about that sort of thing when you try to pin him down on the subject matter.

But I digress; weather Trump will be a major influence in future pop culture depends on if he wins or not.

...

Kinda off-topic, but what's the best cyberpunk media?
Blade Runner/Do Androids Dream and Ghost in the Shell go without saying

GitS really isn't that good. watch Serial Experiments Lain instead.

Monsanto is the perfect example of a company that gets criticized at every turn and most of its controversial products are banned outside of the US because of that trough. The fact that your government is corrupt may be bad, but it's hardly generalized nor particularly cyberpunk.

The real issue is that cyberpunk didn't predict that the giant conglomerates were, in fact, just as bad as governments in terms of efficiency, and that smaller companies in the digital age would be much more efficient to sell everything to everyone.

They Live. Hands down.

and this is the people back to the 80s and 90s childhood, which make you look childish I was talking about.

So basically you don't like a Thing and want Thing to not be a Thing anymore or being the way Thing was back before the Thing was what the Thing is?

That's fair.
Silly, but it's a totally legitimate reason to start a thread on here and there's probably two or three more on here right now jest like it.

Gurren Lagann?

Shit, you know what the most recent "fight the man, be a punk" work I can think of was? DmC: Devil May Cry. The game with literally just Bill O'Reilly as a demon.

This is pretty true.
Yeah, and the one anti-establishment candidate who was actually anti-establishment got shafted and denied and was fucked over by his own base as well as the media. The other one on the other hand went up against limp fish trying to keep to the Grand Old Party traditions and just played up the racism and ignorance that's right out of the GOP playbook and won.

How do you not realize that you're part of the problem? This is what I've said a few times in this thread: Anyone who actually cares or gives a shit about something is mocked and derided. You're not a Neo-Nazi, you're just the exact kind of reason that Cyberpunk is dead. You mock the people who try to reject the norm. This attitude that has been sold to you by the media and by memetic repetition is bullshit, but you don't care, you buy into it. The stereotype of the bra burning double standard misandrist feminist is older than you are and was never really even true then, but you still buy the new model hook line and sinker.

This is why cyberpunk doesn't work. Because you and people like you, who say you want cyberpunk back, start getting irrationally hateful when it comes to highlighting the actual punkish culture. I mean, let's put it down to very simple brass tacks. Those people are rebelling, even if its just to rebel against gender. How are you rebelling? What way do you go against the grain that society tells you to conform to?

Also, re: Millennials: Millennials as a "thing" is a concept that has repeatedly been debunked. This is my personal favourite take down of it, but you can honestly just google to find more. The concept of the pretentious consumerist millennial teenager is a fallacy. It's a prepackaged stereotype sold to you.
youtu.be/-HFwok9SlQQ

Got any suggestions?

I got Megazone 23 queued up, but I'm looking for more.

He's center-left on everything except immigration and abortion. On immigration he has taken a hardline nativist stance, and on abortion he took a legalist stance. I'm sorry, but when your trade policies interface with Ralph Nader more than Ronald Reagan, you stopped being a right-winger.

>They Live
>cyberpunk
user what?

SEL isn't really watchable. Watch the GiTS movie instead.

Bro, Veeky Forums has been mainstream for years. When my ideas get mocked and shunned, that's when I know I hit a trigger point.

Rephrase your sentence in a proper way .

>A man fights against society that has been brainwashed by "aliens" using technology that he fights to destroy

I don't know how much more cyberpunk you can get. Just because he isn't wearing black leather doesn't mean it isn't cyberpunk.

Because it came true and no one wants to be reminded that they live in a corporate-controlled country with a deliberately shrinking middle class, workers being replaced with robots, and food that isn't real.

It seems to be missing the "cyber" part, no?