Why is cyberpunk boring?

Because some people abuse of clichés. Cyberpunk has potential in the hands of a good author.

This too. They should made a setting no where megacorps rule alone, but one where state and the means of production are private only in name

It isn't.

Cyberpunk is not boring, you are boring.

Because lonely right-wing incels watched Blade Runner 2049, and saw "this guy is just like me because he has no gf" instead of "capitalism is bad", and now cyberpunk is some cool desired world and not a bad thing.

Sovietpunk?

Actually that could legitimately be a direction one could take cyberpunk, what with China replacing Japan in the popular imagination as the force that will take over the world.

>Muh both sides

Rampant nationalization is not part of the actual discourse, it's not a thing that is happening and not a thing to which people can truly relate.

Because we're living it, and it's kind of a let down.

Pretty much like China. China or modern US.
Never said anything about nationalization

Because the vast majority of people have reduced it down to an aesthetic and a checklist of tropes, completely devoid of worthwhile thematic content. Cyberpunk in the mainstream has been stripped of its countercultural values in order to be commodified.

Because reality has become too close, only without any of the hope.

>Partly because cyberpunk writers refuse to go whole hog with it, turn the lense inward and just really take a look at how fucked our culture is.
>It would require basically a reinvention of the genre.
There are genres out there that do that. Cyberpunk was trying to do that in the 70's and 80's, saying "hey don't do that, or this will happen.... and then we did it anyway and proved the writers to be optimists in their prophecies.."

Cyberpunk was always an examination of the present. It was a fever dream extrapolation of all the awful things that looked to be coming in the 80s, and a lot of it came to pass. Though certain parts, like further acceleration of street crime or an ascendant Asia started to reverse themselves. The tech side of things was always less important to cyberpunk than the societal side, but people have let the aesthetics of the genre wash away the message.

Cyberpunk is outdated because of where it is rooted. Cyberpunk is the 80's and early 90's trying to warn us of a future that came to pass. What we need now is post-cyberpunk. Something that examines where we're going beyond this point. To that extent I think some people have actually been doing it but it doesn't look or feel like the familiar cyberpunk of Blade Runner or Johnny Mnemonic. It's more transhumanist in nature. Some have toyed with the idea of a post-national cyberpunk where instead of corporations there's simply so much access to information and communication that mirco-democracy became common and the social impacts from the breakdown of geopolitical borders to form a fluid polity. There's still a lot of potential but frankly it'll need to move away from beware of corporations because that ship is already docked in the Present Day port.

Because Cyberpunk has become less of a philosophy and more of an aesthetic. Cyberpunk was something heavily influenced by its time period, and as the thoughts and trends of that time period faded from relevancy so did cyberpunk, making it feel like a cheap coat of paint rather than something inherently more complex.

If you wanted to make a modern day equivalent of cyberpunk, then you'd probably want something in the complete opposite direction. A hard divide between good and evil, but who the good guy is depending heavily on whose perspective you're viewing it from, clean and muted with down-to-earth tone and people.

We're close to cyberpunk, but we're not there yet.

We are still getting to the cyber in cyberpunk. But there are no "punks" as far as I can see.

Cyberpunk was always high tech, low life.

It's because introduction of Chinese themes

Yes but he heard nationalization because he wants to be offended

>we're not there yet
We'll never be there completely. There were parts of cyberpunk that were extrapolations of things that looked like trends but turned out not to be.

I'm due to play in a cyberpunk-setting campaign this summer. It inspired everyone to go full edgelord with their characters, so we anticipate some 'lets cut loose and be cringe' brand fun.

Because we're living in one and it sucks

CyberPunk was always an amalgam of references genre conventions and political moments. Take the vague "wasteland future apocalypse with scattered scifi technology" and the "punk loner gunman maybe a vigilante maybe a hero maybe a mercenary" and then add "anarcho punk intellectuals" to a "doomed dystopian future america where corporations are laws unto themselves".

Consider how all of those things have changed in terms of pop culture context and also in real life. Punk has become unattached from Hippie idealism, its more about indulgence and libertarianism than in nonconformity or individualism. Wasteland Retro has become a genre like Mad Max or Fallout- less about scifi exploration/AIs or robots like in gonzo novels, and more about violence, tribalism, and survivalism. Our gunslingers being unhinged antiheroes while still being professional mercenaries (which somehow makes perfect sense for a murder hobo character but zero sense in terms of narrative logic). "Why would Lethal Weapon's Mel Gibson be allowed to keep his job if he's manic and always going off the reservation?" The antihero with the heart of gold is somehow a relic of the 80s. Corporate power is no longer a vague boogeyman that fills the void - like in the first RoboCop where they have some financial incentive to take over services from the crumbling Detroit. How would that make money?

>Why is cyberpunk boring?
yeah it's boring to me because I'm not really into utopian settings....

Hahah. That's right.

Please excuse my plebness, but would that mean a Modern Cyberpunk story would be about social media and how it corrupts people and places? Someone falling into the rabbit hole of keeping their score up, always taking in the upvotes, and how it crushes civilizations?

It's not, you're just lacking imagination.

Because it isn't dissimilar enough from reality anymore to stand as a fantasy setting on its own anymore.
Case in point from vidya.
Way back in the day, the old Shin Megami Tensei games had a lovely cyberpunk-esque backdrop. Now they just have smartphones.

You can still run Cyberpunk, you just have to adjust for modern day tech, and spice it up.

I have literally read something like this, linia oporu (Line of Resistance) by Jacek Dukaj and it was great. Sadly I don't think it was ever translated to English. If they ever translate him, many of his works are quite post-cyberpunk.

>turn the lense inward and just really take a look at how fucked our culture is
so, like the newer stuff william gibson is writing?

>people have let the aesthetics of the genre wash away the message
and added elves and orks

Because people decided it could only be done one way. Same reason fantasy is boring.
If you can't tell I'm saying it's because you need to stretch your imagination to make it into something interesting.

What?

Check out Back Mirror.

Reminds me of Snow Crash. I like the idea that the internet basically shatters government and everything becomes weird and privatized. Government becomes superlocal and completely private, with private police and private mail on a block by block basis.

I like it because it's cyberpunk but with an emphasis on a chaotic, lawless, fun future full of tribalism and memes.

Snow Crash is kinda ruined for me by the author's unbelievably basic bitch political takes irl.

are they any good?

Kek

Can you elaborate?

Like for example..?

Because you're boring.

I don't remember anything about politics. I just remember the horde of illegal immigrants coming to plunder America, the amazing Reason, and virtual reality. (As well as Hiro's bike.)

Japan taking over the world is the biggest one.

You Polacks ought to make a game out of it like Witcher, otherwise nobody in the West will ever bother

This user distills it down the best- cyberpunk has lost it's fringe, edgy elements and that real emphasis on imperfection, not just obvious dystopia. Now it's just a vector for spoonfeeding 80's nostalgia.

Maybe another time will roll in where cyberpunk feels more distinctive again, but for now it's basically become everything it's hated: a formulaic product designed to pacify people.

>the absolute state of this post
>failing to understand this many things at once

Because the real world used it as a blueprint to disguise our own problems. While a lot of cyberpunk's technological predictions came true in a less extravagant form, a lot of their implications for privacy, identity and social interaction were 100% spot on - what cyberpunk didn't predict was that corporations could successfully dupe the public into thinking these were good, happy, clean things and that the public would be completely apathetic to the losses they would suffer.

Find a more post-cyberpunk video than this: youtube.com/watch?v=lNpuERqvEfM

This guy just put a spy device in his house for the convenience of turning off the dollhouse lights with a word. His daughter is asking it to tell jokes, and the machine is scanning her voice, creating an advertising identity profile that will be sold to various corporations for her entire life. And all the comments are talking about how amazing this is and how much they want one too.

The Cyberpunk future came true but we're the masses and not the cool hackers.

The 90's passed

I dunno what you're talking about. In what ways is our world terrible that a cyberpunk world is not?

Not any of those guys, but:
1. Expodential growth of Asian countries in terms of political, economical,technological and military power. Few years will pass until China will have literally no competition, and will become true #1 (In terms of military power, it will be still bit behind, assuming USA won't collapse)
2. Climate changes, resource depletion&shitload of conflicts leading to multicultural tensions, migrations.
3.Incredible growth of Urbanisation.
4. VR technology.
5. General picture of society in age of information&social networks fits perfectly.
6. Corporations owning world, goverments, nations is not some crazy ultra-leftist BS, it is a fact. look at the USA alone. + PMC are a thing for a long time now.
7. State of Economy, falling in crisis, going deeper and deeper into fiat money and losing any touch with real state of economy,Cryptocurrencies.

It is really very broad description, am sure many folks can convey that better, especially social part of it, and all of these overlap each other. Some of major CP elements like Vr or major advances in biotechnology are still crawling, but they progress at incredible pace.

IMO, it's ironically because in the current day and age writers are too focused on relating cyberpunk to current issues. Cyberpunk as a genre is saturated with 2deep4u writing at this point and could do with some more black humor application of dystopia. We should aim for satire through mockery at this point because people are sick of depressing realism. Something like Robocop but more outrageous.
Like brainjacking civilians and wiring their minds together to create biological server farms that develop new fast food menu items
or developing a new superbreed of coffee bean that thrives in deserts then terraforming arable land into deserts to mass produce more coffee beans
or weight loss pills that work by supercharging your metabolism thus causing you to actually consume (and buy) more food.

But that is all cyberpunk, he was talking about how the problems of today go beyond cyberpunk.

All those 7 things are common and essential elements to cyberpunk, so I don't get how they're example of our world being worse than cyberpunk fantasies.

I'd say majority of cyberpunk is just as worse, but difference is that we aren't those cool hackers, so it's far more depressing.

Oh. Oh. I misread referred post...
Fuck me.

Plenty of cyberpunk predicted that average citizens would welcome corporations and government spying on us because of reasons.

Those who are against it are hackers and other rebels just like in cyberpunk stories.

I'd like to know too. If it's cybernetic bodies (one example we don't really have yet), I'd say we will have rudimentary ones in about 50 years unless nukes happen. We already have rudimentary cybernetic limbs and even (though very simple) brain computer interfaces.

This