The Future Cyberpunk Imagined Is Here: How Much Did It Get Right?

For decades, the sci-fi subgenre known as cyberpunk imagined a future of chrome mercenaries, cyberspace cowboys, and hackers battling global corporations. Forty years later, much of that future has arrived – just not in the way its creators expected.

Brain-computer interfaces like Neuralink, AI-powered smart glasses, and increasingly sophisticated robotic prosthetics have begun to bring the chrome future of science fiction into the real world. At the same time, a handful of technology companies, including OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic, Meta and Google, are now shaping the way billions of people communicate, work and increasingly interact with artificial intelligence.

As the name suggests, cyberpunk combines advanced technology with the anti-establishment spirit of the punk movement. The result is a vision of “high tech, low life,” popularized by science fiction author Bruce Sterling, in which astonishing innovation coexists with rampant poverty, crime, corruption and corporate power. From William Gibson’s Neuromancer to Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Ready Player One and Cyberpunk 2077, the genre envisioned a world of rogue artificial intelligence, immersive virtual realities, cybernetic enhancements and companies like the infamous Arasaka And Militechpowerful enough to compete with governments.

For many people building an Internet culture in the late 1980s and 1990s, those stories felt less like dystopian warnings and more like blueprints for what technology could become.

Ken Goffman – better known as RU Sirius, co-founder of Mondo 2000 and co-author of Cyberpunk Handbook– remembers cyberpunk as an era characterized by experimentation and optimism.

‘All that dark stuff was really in Mondo too, but it all felt like a game,” Goffman said Declutter. “If there was a dystopia, something was happening in our heads at that moment that we could be there and laugh about.”

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

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

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 bit benign,” Goffman said. “They gave us this power, and we were going to tamper with it — maybe even overthrow them, overthrow the government, overthrow everything.”

Instead, many of the companies that built these technologies became some of the most powerful institutions in the world.

“That was one of the mistakes, I think, maybe in our thinking — that it wasn’t just going to get meaner.”

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

“Facebook 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 pioneers would recognize.

“Have We Inflated Consensus Reality?” Goffman wondered. “Have we also blown up reality and the truth?”

For Shira Chess, professor of entertainment and media studies at the University of Georgia and author of The Unseen Internet, cyberpunk’s lasting value lies less in its aesthetics than in what it understood about power.

“We tried to look at the shiny parts without looking at what those shiny parts meant,” Chess said Declutter. “The surfaces that cyberpunk implies are always embedded in a dystopia.”

She states that cyberpunk’s greatest prediction was never cybernetic limbs or mirror screens.

“What no one wanted to fully address was when companies completely took over the digital space,” she said. “We were done, we were done.”

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

Chess sees the same pattern emerging around artificial intelligence. Instead of worrying about sentient machines, she’s more concerned about the way society talks about them. In November 2022, Elon Musk warned that humanity may be ‘summoning the demon’. During a speech at MIT in 2014, the head of Tesla and SpaceX compared AI researchers to a magician trying to summon a ghost.

“I don’t believe there’s a demon in the box with AI,” Chess said. “What I do believe is that the more we behave as if something is there, the harder it will be to convince future generations that it isn’t.”

Yet she also sees signs of the rise of a new cyberpunk movement, which points to the growing popularity of cyberpunk cyber decks– custom computers assembled from recycled hardware, open source software and off-the-shelf components – as an attempt to regain control over personal technology.

“I hope that cyberpunk will see a new lease on life, and that this move towards cyberdecks might be the first phase of that,” she said, describing them as a way to “imagine a technology that is not controlled in the way it has been.”

That philosophy also extends to software. As AI coding assistants become commonplace, Chess worries that developers risk becoming further removed from the systems they rely on.

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

She also sees signs that the conflict at the heart of cyberpunk is reemerging in the real world. Organizations such as Stop the AI ​​Race, Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and community groups are increasingly opposing new AI data centers due to concerns about water use, electricity demand, and environmental impacts. At the same time, open source developers and privacy advocates have increasingly challenged closed AI ecosystems. And more recently, AI agents like OpenClaw and Hermes Agent have given individuals their own persistent, self-improving AIs.

“The core tension in cyberpunk is that it needs something to resist,” Chess said. “For all those anti-hero citizens, there had to be something to oppose, and it had to be some kind of corporate base.”

The struggle to use code against government and corporate oppression is also being felt in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space, with groups including Project Spartacus using the Bitcoin network to hold WikiLeaks’ Afghan War Logs. In 2023, a copy of the Bitcoin Whitepaper was discovered hidden in Apple’s operating system, macOS.

However, like cyberpunk, anger towards AI companies can turn violent. In April, a suspect reportedly threw a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s San Francisco home before threatening OpenAI headquarters.

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

“I think something’s coming,” she said. “Gen Z and Gen Alpha have very nuanced feelings about the technology they grew up with.”

Forty years later NeuromancerCyberpunk seems less like a failed prediction than a remarkably accurate one. The bigger surprise is that cyberpunk’s most enduring prediction wasn’t chromium, but the struggle over who controls it.