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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cergorach" data-source="post: 9759330" data-attributes="member: 725">To a certain extend it is an aesthetic, just like Steampunk is in most cases.But it's also a label, and labels only work if used consistently. Just like you wouldn't place Star Wars or Star Trek under the 'Hard sci-fi' label. I think the Cyberpunk label/aesthetic is fairly narrow. Cybernetics (if you look it up) is a rather broad field, that predates Cyberpunk by decades. But I think that the Cyber in Cyberpunk refers to Cyberware instead. And while there is some around, it's certainly not in common usage such as the classic Cyberpunk media often portray...Heck Brain Machine Interface research started in the '70s, with the foundations being laid in 1924. Even after 50+ years of research, most of this stuff is (highly) experimental. Are we getting there? Heck yes! But we're not there yet, we still need to get to the levels of pre-iPhone/Android smartphone use, we're not even there yet. And if it ever becomes common usage (another Jetsons)? And the question will then also be, will the whole of society be Cyberpunk? What if it's just a city in Berlin? What if it's the whole of the US? Will we get color coded maps with 1st World, 2nd World, 3rd, World, Cyberpunk? And if so, what color would Cyberpunk be? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Dystopian we can designate certain parts of the world as, Kowloon Walled City is often the inspiration of Dystopia in the media as the Dystopian future, while it's been around for a long time. I think that certain aspects within the US some of us would designate as dystopian. But that's a different label from Cyberpunk.Now imagine a book that's set in a Cyberpunk setting, but it's written like a cheap romance novel. Is that still a Cyberpunk novel or a romance novel or a Cyberpunk romance novel?If we take a cybered up street samurai out of a Cyberpunk setting, we can identify it as Cyberpunk, but if we lift an average corporate wage slave from that same Cyberpunk setting, it would be indistinguishable from a normal office worker... The same hollow eyes... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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