The comfort of cyberpunk in a deeply disturbing present

I rarely play video games these days, but I’ve been playing CD Projekt’s much anticipated, much maligned game Cyberpunk 2077 on the Xbox Series X. Fortunately, I encountered none of the game-breaking bugs, and although the AI is shoddy and Night City feels strangely lifeless, it was an interesting experience. I did not go in expecting GTA Night City, I was more curious about what a contemporary take on the pen-and-paper roleplaying game Cyberpunk 2020 would look like.

When Cyberpunk 2020 was released, some 30 years ago, the gloomy year that we just barely escaped seemed like an exciting future. Dystopian, sure, a prophecy of how human lives are ground down in the mill of big capital, but also a fascinating prediction of how trends in our own time would develop, into cybernetically upgraded humans, neon-shimering skyscraper-scapes, dark alleys and filthy bars.

Next to William Gibson’s Neuromancer trilogy and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, old-school rpg:s such as Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun are among the pivotal works of the genre. Not because of their debatable artistic qualities, but because these games systematized the fictitious future that literary and cinematic works hinted at more subtly. In the cyberpunk future, global corporations and super-rich individuals rule the world. Democracy is a notion forgotten and discarded. Thanks to the merging of flesh and silicon, the mental and physical faculties of men are greater than ever, although this transhuman fusion often turns out to undermine our humanity.

As we now find ourselves living the future of early cyberpunk works, some of their prophecies certainly ring true. Technology – not in the form of neural implants but in the form of mobiles and social media – both enhances and enslaves us. A few powerful tech companies influence everything from our patterns of consumption to our personal relations and elections of political representatives. The fruitless attempts of the EU and US to regulate these tech behemoths only further underscore how far power has shifted from democratically elected officials to hoarders of capital.

While the world at large was suffering through 2020, Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, added $72.7 billion to his net worth. Soon his megacorp, Amazon, will employ 1.2 million world-wide. Meanwhile, the world’s most populous nation, China, is gradually implementing a surveillance system designed to control their citizens’ movements on and off the net. Their mature system for online censorship is being supplemented by a web of hundreds of millions of surveillance cameras, many of which are linked together, their imagery fed into a sophisticated system of facial recognition algorithms and artificial intelligence.

In a world that has in some regards outpaced the cyberpunk prophecies, you might expect that Cyberpunk 2077 would update the genre in more substantial ways than adjusting the titular year. At least the game designers have clearly done their homework; every genre trope imaginable is crammed into the game. Go ahead and check the boxes for upgraded street scum, slimy corporate thugs, decadent brothels, mysterious voodoo hackers and biochips blurring the line between organic and artificial intelligence.

With a major-league budget estimated at some €250 million, it is perhaps not surprising that the game is more of a playground for cyberpunk aficionados than a work of avant-garde art. At least CD Projekt should be commended for not flinching from one of the less crowdpleasing aspects of the genre: the feeling of impotence, of higher powers playing with mere humans. It is a trope borrowed from film noir, but it has its roots in Greek mythology. Where man was once a pathetic mortal in the eyes of the gods, cyberpunk turns her into an absurd little creature compared to faceless megacorps, fantastical technology and the borderless currents of capital.

In cyberpunk, tech, despite its promises to empower humans, inevitably turns out to be a curse, rendering us ever more helpless. Only the most powerful are its lords; masters of the hardware and software that manipulates our lives and cheats death. Thus, when the people of Night City protest the leaders of Arasaka Corporation, their chant is not “Regulate the tech giants!” but “You are not gods!”

This is as good a place as any to note that tech moguls like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin all have invested heavily in life extention research. Many of our tech oligarchs are evidently inspired by the cyberpunk genre, treating its dark visions as a guidebook to successful entrepreneurship. Similarly, many later works in the genre have fallen into the trap of romanticizing the genre’s dark omens. Cyberpunk 2077 is, in large parts, a nostalgic remembrance of a future we once dreaded. In hindsight, that future is as cozy as a well-worn tv couch, far more safe and intelligible than the future we got instead.

William Gibson, meanwhile, abandoned the genre soon after he popularized it, preferring to engage with the complexities of our contemporary world and the inherent risks of the mechanisms driving it forward. His latest books, The Peripheral (2014) and Agency (2020) revolve around the slow-motion apocalypse we are currently in the middle of. These books mix our age with a future scarred by the decisions we make (and fail to make) today. Pandemics, climate change, geopolitical conflict, hacker wars, economic inequality, erosion of democracy – all the current trends we would rather not think about – combine into an unstoppable avalanche slowly devastating the world.

This is the future we’re living, one that cyberpunk authors of the 80’s and 90’s could only partly predict. It is to his credit that William Gibson stubbornly continues to anchor his fiction in an unsettling present while his epigones create escapist entertainment. But not even Gibson can shrug off the structures he put his finger on when he, in Neuromancer, wrote about the world-warping force of corporations known as “zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human history”.

The power of capital is uncompromising, in his early work, in his later work and in our present time. Thus, the colossal budget of Cyberpunk 2077 amplifies its thrills but dulls its edge. And when William Gibson’s latest novels are televized (a The Peripheral series is currently in production) we can always hope for something bleeding-edge, but the end result is ultimately out of the author’s hands. In a twist as ironic as it is cruelly logical, the television rights have been acquired by… Amazon.