The imagined future of Cyberpunk is here: how successful will it be?

For decades, a subgenre of science fiction known as cyberpunk has envisioned a future of chrome-plated mercenaries, cyberspace cowboys, and hackers battling corporations spread across the globe. Four decades later, much of that future has arrived, but not in the way its creators expected.

Brain-computer interfaces such as NeuralinkPowered by artificial intelligence Smart glassesAnd increasingly sophisticated robotics Prosthetics They set out to bring their chrome-plated sci-fi future into the real world. Meanwhile, a handful of technology companies, including OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google, are now shaping how billions of people communicate, work, and increasingly interact with AI.

As its name suggests, cyberpunk blends cutting-edge technology with the anti-establishment spirit of the punk movement. The result is a “high-tech, low-life” vision, popularized by science fiction author Bruce Sterling, in which incredible innovation exists alongside rampant poverty, crime, corruption, and corporate power. From William Gibson’s Neuromancer to Neal Stevenson’s novel Snow crash, One ready playerand Cyberpunk 2077the genre depicts an immersive world of rogue artificial intelligence Virtual realitycyber reinforcement, and companies like Notorious Arasaka and MilitaryStrong enough to compete with governments.

For many of the people who built Internet culture in the late 1980s and 1990s, those stories felt less like dystopian warnings than blueprints for what the technology might become.

Ken Goffman – better known as RU Sirius, co-founder of World 2000 And co-author L Cyberpunk guide– Cyberpunk is remembered as an era defined by experimentation and optimism.

“All that dark stuff was very much there world “Also, but it all seemed like a game,” Goffman said. Decryption. “If dystopia is coming, it’s something that’s going on in our heads at that point and we can be with it and laugh about it.”

The future turned out to be much less cinematic, he said.

“Even now, some people think the apocalypse will be as exciting as Mad Max, but what it actually is is very boring and cliched.”

Like many early Internet pioneers, Goffman believed that personal computers and networking technologies would shift power away from governments and corporations.

“We felt like they were a little benign,” Goffman said. “They were handing us this power, and we were going to mess with it, and maybe we would overthrow them, we would overthrow the government, we would overthrow everything.”

Instead, many of the companies building these technologies have become some of the most powerful enterprises in the world.

“I think that was one of the errors, maybe in our thinking, that it would only get more sinister.”

Goffman also saw the Internet lose one of its defining characteristics: anonymity.

“Facebook actually made me change my name from RU Sirius to Ken Goffman,” he said. “That seemed like the beginning of the end of something.”

Looking back, he wonders whether the cyberculture movement helped create an Internet that few of its pioneers knew about.

“Have we blown up consensus reality?” Goffman wondered. “Have we undermined reality and the truth as well?”

For Shira Chase, a professor of entertainment and media studies at the University of Georgia and author of The Unseen Internet, the enduring value of cyberpunk lies not so much in its aesthetic as in its understanding of power.

“We were trying to look at the shiny bits without looking at what those shiny bits meant,” Chess said. Decryption. “Those surfaces that cyberpunk refers to are always embedded in the dystopia.”

She argues that the greatest expectations of cyberpunk were never bionic limbs or mirror shadows.

“The thing that no one wanted to fully address was the moment when companies took over the digital spaces completely,” she said. “We’re done, we’re cooked.”

While the Internet is, in most cases, freely available and accessible, an increasing amount of the Internet now exists behind subscriptions, proprietary AI models, and closed ecosystems controlled by a handful of companies.

Chess sees the same pattern emerging around artificial intelligence. Instead of worrying about sentient machines, she is more interested in how to interact with society He talks about them. In November 2022, Elon Musk to caution That humanity may be “summoning the devil.” Speaking at MIT in 2014, the head of Tesla and SpaceX compared AI researchers to a magician trying to summon a spirit.

“I don’t think there’s a devil in the AI ​​box,” Chess said. “What I believe is that the more we act like it exists, the harder it will be to convince future generations that it doesn’t exist.”

However, she also sees signs of a new cyberpunk movement emerging, indicating the movement’s growing popularity com. cyberdecks– Custom-designed computers assembled from recycled hardware, open source software, and off-the-shelf components – as an attempt to regain control of personal technology.

“I hope the cyberpunk genre gets a new life in it, and maybe this move towards cyberpunk is the first phase of that,” she said, describing it as a way to “try to imagine around technology that can’t be controlled the way it used to be.”

This philosophy extends to software as well. As AI programming assistants proliferate, Chess is concerned that developers risk becoming further removed from the systems they rely on.

“The more you do it, the less likely you are to understand the systems,” she said. “In order to fight, they’re going to have to learn how to code and make things that aren’t corporate.”

You also see signs that the conflict at the heart of cyberpunk is resurfacing in the real world. Organizations such as Stop the AI ​​Race, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and community groups have been on the rise bidder new Artificial intelligence data centers Due to concerns about water use, electricity demand and environmental impacts. At the same time, Open source Developers and Privacy advocates It has increasingly challenged closed AI ecosystems. Recently, artificial intelligence agents have become… OpenClaw and Hermes agent It has given individuals their own AI systems that continue to improve themselves.

“The fundamental tension with cyberpunk is that it needs something to push back against,” Chess said. “For all these anti-hero vigilantes, there has to be something to resist, and it has to be this kind of corporate baseline.”

The battle to use code against government and corporate oppression can also be felt in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space, where groups including the Spartacus Project are using it. Bitcoin network to maintain WikiLeaks Afghan War Records. In 2023, it was find out That a copy of Bitcoin Whitepaper was hidden in Apple’s operating system, macOS.

However, like cyberpunk, anger toward AI companies can turn violent. In April, one of the suspects allegedly threw… Molotov cocktail At OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s home in San Francisco before threatening OpenAI’s headquarters.

When asked what comes next, Chess pointed to the younger generations.

“I think there is something coming,” she said. “Generation Z and Generation Alpha have some very nuanced feelings about the technology they grew up with.”

Forty years later NeuromancerCyberpunk feels less like a failed prediction than a remarkably accurate one. The biggest surprise is that the most enduring prediction for Cyberpunk was not vines, but the conflict over who controls them.