Like a lot of breakaway scifi subgenres, cyberpunk asked questions about heavy social and political topics by taking the emerging technology of the day and dialing it up to 11, projecting a dystopian future where all of the (then) contemporary concerns had reached some impossible nightmare zenith:
Resource shortages driven by mass consumption
Urban decay brought about by austerity and the collapse of the American economy in response to globalization
Ultracomodification and alienation driven by unchecked capitalism
Increased corporate power subverting or even outright replacing governments
Information technology being used to reinforce state power, and subsequently take on it's own power outside of anyone's control.
Plus a million other things the genre grew to include
Problem is, the cyberpunk dystopia happened: We hit the upper limit of what dysfuncitonal economies and broken goverments and capitalist profiteering were able to exploit and it's all down hill from here as the value extraction systems cannibalize each other.
Cyberpunk has gone from being dystopian to being nostalgic, a retro throwback to the days when the cultural assumptions about personal agency in a world full of infinite growth were still somewhat possible. Yeah, the world was shitty, but you could still be an ultracool badass who smashed the system before going down in a blaze of glory.
Flash forward to the day and systems are smashing themselves (plus all of us, and the world in general) to pieces trying to siphon the last little slivers of market percentage into shareholder's pockets.
If you wanted to make a genre that was as topical for right now as cyberpunk was for it's time, I think there's two directions you could go..
Fantasy of Reform: Stories that are based around people's resonances to these massive systems breaking down and how to subvert/repair/overcome them. Society is worth saving, we just need to steward it through the birthpangs of latestage capitalist collapse. Shoutout to Cory Doctorow who's been writing in this protogenre since the bush administration.
Post Dystopian Absurdism: Turn the dial past 11, break it, show us what happens when the titans of industry not only go astray but collapse, decay, are left as nothing more than ozymandious style relics buried in the sand. It's a bitter hope, but showing people surviving and even thriving in a dead era or in its aftermath reassures us that life will go on, no matter the hurdles. I think of the Forever Winter game by fundog as my example for this, making a nightmarish world where the player can be kind, or perhaps even silly if given the chance.
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