I took a deep dive into the old forest of the early internet in search of old essays on cyberpunk culture, just to see what they were thinking the future would be at the time, and contrast that with how things are now. We are living in a time, or past the time, where many cyberpunk stories take place. Bladerunner and Akira took place in 2019. The first two Cyberpunk tabletop games took place in 2013 and 2020.
In the 1980s I was a kid, and I didn’t catch up to the notion of cyberpunk until the mid 1990s. By then, Cyberpunk as a way of looking at the future thought had already passed it’s prime. Cyberpunk was becoming mainstream. It was in comics, video games, and movies. I was also too young to grasp what cyberpunk really was.
Cyberpunk was mysterious to me because cyberspace was mysterious, new and accessible. I was in awe when I first saw Johnny Mnemonic in the mid-90s and experienced how Johnny moved around in a virtual reality internet. This wasn’t my experience when I got online back then, but I was still fascinated with the global connectivity, and the future seemed closer.
Bouncing around those old cyberpunk zines, I’m reminded that I’m missing the core aspect of what cyberpunk was about ideas, thinking about a future that they may not fit into. It felt like it was a coping mechanism, to prepare us to find ways to survive… thus the high tech, low life mindset. Cyberpunk zines, novels and short stories were all warnings.
Cyberpunk today is a marketing term. It’s nostalgic. It’s also chrome, neon, loud, and entertaining. It’s also blinding. In 2026, the corporations are bigger, our government is fractured, and more people are connected globally than ever. People are also more easy to manipulate, more angry, and are fine with the world’s largest corporations be in control.
Cyber attacks, corporate corruption, government misdeeds, wars, and environmental disasters all make the headlines and disappear just as quickly.
We failed those old cyberpunks.
