Here's a fun game: First, check out Mondo 2000's tongue-in-cheek 1993 piece “ R.U. For everyone who watched Stand Alone Complex on Adult Swim (or, let's be real, a DivX player), there's now a bespoke keyboard aglow with bisexual lighting, a liquid meal plan, or a “smart” vibrator. It has inspired video games like Cyberpunk 2077 (naturally starring Neo himself, Keanu Reeves), an Urban Decay eye shadow palette characterized by deeply '90s duo chromes, a collaboration between Yohji Yamamoto and Adidas, and roughly 4 million posts on Instagram. Still, 40-ish years since its incept date, cyberpunk maintains a vast claim on the aesthetic landscape-one often ironically divorced from the dark, anti-capitalist messages those visuals sought to convey. Cyberpunk foretold a desperate world of unlicensed physicians doing back-alley body modifications, and while so far all they do is perform illegal butt lifts, with Crispr, who knows?
In a future so hostile that no one is fit to survive, those who do have been fitted for something new-new brain, new heart, new nerves-perhaps in exchange for a lifetime of indentured servitude. But to define cyberpunk by its look is to do it a disservice, especially since those sartorial choices are the whole point in the first place: armor against a world in collapse. Like the best fiction, cyberpunk still slips on like a pair of fingerless gloves, even if-in the 21st century, partially situated in the future it imagined-it's hard to see where fiction ends and reality begins.ĭespite all of this, cyberpunk often gets reduced to an aesthetic: black leather, mirror shades, implants-pieces of flare that look cool when lit by neon and computer screens. (Though the same could be said of the words Renaissance or Victorian.) It can tackle artificial intelligence, embodied identity, digital immortality, or simply, in the case of Pat Cadigan's Synners, whether a marriage can survive electronic pornography addiction. An aesthetic movement and a commentary on capitalism, it can be a genre, a subjectivity, an adjective, a political approach, a time period. Cyberpunk is like cyberspace: instantly recognizable, but so ubiquitous as to be intangible.