Opinion

Cyberpunk involves many elements we wouldn’t necessarily want to experience in real life. As audiences, we cheer when we see Neo in The Matrix wearing his trench coat and gunning down agents. As genre enthusiasts, we look skeptically at Star Trek and wonder if maybe the future will have a little more misery and oppression than that.

Modern mass media has created an idealized image of what a hero must look like: usually male, white, skinny but buff, pearly white teeth, full head of hair. The list goes on, crafting such a high and unrealistic criteria of perfection in order for anyone to feel good about themselves. 

I was introduced to Akira relatively late.  It was the same way with Blade Runner.  Both were ground-breaking, inspirational pieces of art that wowed viewers at the time.  Speaking as a latecomer to the classics, though, they’re looking a little long in the teeth.

The Wire is rightfully mentioned in most discussions surrounding the all-time best TV dramas, but rarely (if ever) because of its status as a classic cyberpunk story.  That changes now.  The series could easily sit alongside the creations of William Gibson, Ridley Scott, or Mike Pondsmith. Cyberpunk stories tend to be urban, technological, dystopian, and sometimes, but not always, apocalyptic, nihilistic, violent, and highly critical of late stage capitalism. The Wire is also all of these things, just with a bit less rain-drenched neon.

I’ve recently come through a bout of Coronavirus. It was horrible. Imagine running a marathon and then going to a party where cigars are compulsory, the only drink on offer is 120 proof whisky, and the thermostat on the AC unit is broken – causing it to behave as if it’s playing hopscotch across Mercury’s terminator line. Add in some deeply disturbing dreams, and the morning after that party was my COVID-19 experience for two and a bit weeks. Your own experience, when it inevitably arrives, may be different.

Aside from the fact that a global pandemic is happening in real time, there are more implications to the cyberpunk genre than us chanting “Cyberpunk Is Now” at the top of our lungs.  We may (or may not) be doing that anyways. . . Unfortunately, we can’t afford to wear one of hiroto ikeuchi’s designer cyberpunk masks, as seen in the featured image, so instead, let’s take a look at what’s happening with Cyberpunk 2077 and The Matrix 4.

What Is Cyberpunk? A Neon City In The Rain? The scene opens on a rainy, smog-shrouded, hypercapitalist, neon, surveillance state and the viewer is dropped in without context. There’s an inciting incident to plunge you into the story, and you, the viewer, are gripped for the next two hours.  Any scene setting is left to the imagination, and questions of why the world is this way, and how it came to be, are left to fan fiction and speculation. This is the future. Deal with it. 

And when the inevitable finally comes to pass, what then? Do I get a puppy? Do I get another shelter dog? I want a dog as much like my current dog as possible, so it’s an option to get his genes sampled and find out exactly what blend of the 57 varieties he actually is. And then I can simply find another one.  What if I could have a dog who would never die? One who would never get old and frail and ill, and habitually balance on that knife edge of life and death as I will him not to go into the light?

1990 saw the return of Robocop in Robocop 2. The sequel doesn’t suffer from a lack of talent – Peter Weller and Nancy Allen return as their roles of Murphy and Lewis, with Tom Noonan as Cain, the main antagonist.

Maybe you never uploaded that one picture to social media. Maybe nobody recorded that conversation you had in a dark alley five years ago. Maybe you’ve faithfully kept that secret you promised you’d keep to your grave. But like the internet, you can’t remove events from your memory. Once it’s in a human brain, it stays there. And sooner or later, artificial intelligence is going to gain access to human brains.