Neon Veins, Iron Fist

“The future is there... looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.”

― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

Acknowledgements and inspiration: C.W Howell’s incredible (and dare I say, better) article here, along with a couple of mutuals on Bluesky.

Cyberpunk continues to haunt us, like a spectre of the past once thought to be banished to the realm of the imagination. While associated with fears of the 80s (especially that of Japanese and Asian dominance in the world economy or unconstrained capitalism unleashed by the Reagan Revolution) or with the aesthetics of Blade Runner or AKIRA, cyberpunk as a genre is not really dependent on either; the roots of the genre started there, but the thematic concerns of a society drunk on ultraviolence as a tool to get ahead or enforce order or a degraded social world where all one seems to find is the drive to get ahead at any costs seem to be present in our contemporary news headlines.

Despite the repeated proclamations of death of cyberpunk in years prior by both the left and right, the genre's thematic concerns have only grown more, not less, relevant in our modern social world. The contemporary left often criticizes cyberpunk for failing to more effectively subvert the capitalist co-opting of “cool,” while the right decries it for neglecting to challenge progressivism’s relentless dismantling of the “natural” in favor of so-called “liberation.”

And yet despite all of these critiques and proclaimed “death” of the genre, I still find that the works included serve as a better analytical lens to our contemporary social reality then many works of cultural or political criticism today - primarily due to the lack of analytical substance in much of contemporary critique, especially when it comes to analyzing the roots of our contemporary predicament.

Beyond the Neon

Cyberpunk is often reduced to its surface aesthetics: neon-lit cityscapes, techno-orientalism, and cyborg protagonists navigating corporate dystopias. But at its core, it is a stark commentary on what humanity is being driven to become in an era of relentless systemic acceleration. It offers a chilling glimpse into how the structures surrounding us—economic, technological, and political—seek to colonize and reshape us in their own image. In this struggle, humanity is left with two brutal options: evolve or perish.

Colonization of the Lifeworld

Borrowing a phrase from Frankfurt School theorist Jürgen Habermas, cyberpunk explores the "colonization of the lifeworld by systemic imperatives." For a bit of background for those of you not aware of Habermas’s thought, Habermas defines the lifeworld as the everyday domain of intrapersonal values, meanings, and cultural norms; it’s the everyday world we all inhabit, governed by human agency and community. He defines this against what he defines as systemic imperatives – which for him are large-scale impersonal mechanisms such as the market and bureaucracies that are governed entirely by instrumental rationality (efficiency, control, and goal-orientation). For Habermas, while systemic imperatives have their role in governing societies, contemporary societies tend to colonize the lifeworld with the systemic imperatives - in plain english, the everyday world we live in is slowly replaced with a world where the only imperative is that of the cost-benefit analysis - does this make me better?

The works of cyberpunk pioneers like Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and William Gibson’s Neuromancer exemplify this tension. In Blade Runner, replicants struggle to be recognized as human, existing within a world that reduces them to commodities designed for profit and control. In Neuromancer, relationships and identities are transactional, shaped by the relentless logic of systemic efficiency. These stories highlight a key theme: the subsystems that were once tools for human flourishing—markets, bureaucracies, technologies—have overtaken the lifeworld, subjugating human values to their own imperatives.

The subsystems that were at one point supposed to be subservient to humanity have quickly grown to colonize the rest of the lifeworld with omnipresent imperatives - imperatives one cannot even escape even within ones interiority, as even one’s desires and own being turn into commodities that can be bought, sold, and modified.

Cyberpunk is a genre deeply shaped by its origin in its time, rising to prominence during and after the Reagan revolution. In this era, the capitalist market expanded its dominion while the social state ceded ever more of its responsibilities to private interests. This socio-economic and socio-cultural backdrop birthed a world of stark contrasts: glittering corporate towers dominating sprawling urban decay, technological innovation entangled with personal alienation, and the individual crushed under the weight of corporate hegemony. It channeled the anxieties of a society grappling with the commodification of life itself, mirroring fears of a future where progress serves the few at the expense of the many.

The Cyberpunk Present

From the toxic social networks produced by digital publics being infested by bullshit and rage (not helped by today’s digital intelligence), biotech CEOs promising designer children, a president backed by technocapitalist elites such as Elon Musk and venture capitalists, a vice president inspired by a neoreactionary thinker (Curtis Yarvin) in favour of a “digital patchwork”, Elon whining about the “woke” design of female game characters, or violence being more and more accepted as a means to achieving one's ends, the lifeworld we now all inhabit appears more closer to that of cyberpunk fiction than that envisioned of any optimistic futurist such as Johan Norberg, Stephen Pinker or Iain Banks.

Cyberpunk lies on the ruins of technological salvation. Despite what the dreams of centrist futurists and transhumanists may have been, it has become increasingly evident that for as much as technology has managed to liberate us in some regards - it also has the ability to enchain us much deeper in relationships of domination. Just look at China’s usage of surveillance capitalism within Xinjiang or various insurance providers deciding to use digital intelligence as an excuse to deny healthcare. In the words of Bruce Sterling, cyberpunk is “high tech, low life” - unfortunately, this increasingly describes the modern lifeworld we all share and inhabit today.

As Howell argues in “Why Cyberpunk Matters”:

“At bottom, cyberpunk is actually a humanism. It’s dark and disturbed because it’s a humanism that speculates what the world would be like if the war between humanity and machine were won by the machines. Many of the predictions of the cyberpunk genre have come true because its root premise is to ask the question: what would the world look like if it were set up for machine flourishing rather than human flourishing?

Cyberpunk is useful, it matters, because it holds up a mirror to this situation. It continues to draw people in because it’s innately able to speak to the present moment. It’s why the real significance of the genre was never in its neo-orientalism, its magenta-hued advertisements, or its sprawling cityscapes. That’s all window-dressing. Cyberpunk is more than style. Its substance is this ruthless scrutiny of the relationship of the machine to the human and its fear that the former is increasing while the latter is decreasing. Maybe there’s a way to harmonize them, but that’s not the trajectory we’re on, and cyberpunk reminds us of that.”

The fears outlined by Howell align with broader critiques of modern rationality, particularly the rise of instrumental reason. Instrumental reason, as Howell’s analysis of cyberpunk indirectly suggests, is not neutral; it is a mode of thinking that prioritizes efficiency, utility, and control above all else. Rather than preserving the ideals of humanity, instrumental reason gradually subjugates them to mechanistic processes, making them second nature and embedding them into our very sense of self. In this way, cyberpunk serves as a metaphorical mirror for what happens when instrumental rationality—akin to machine logic—becomes naturalized within the human lifeworld. The inability of cyberpunk protagonists to escape the logic of the megamachine is not so much a failing of the genre (as argued by critics) as it is an illustration of a world capable of reshaping human desire and intellect to an extraordinary degree.

Using cyberpunk as a lens, it’s easy to see how short-run systemic imperatives are all that remain the In a world incapable of thinking beyond the next dollar, only focused with whatever allows them to get ahead within the degraded institutions that exist, of course we would get a second Trump term. So is it any surprise that Trump’s authoritarian populism flourishes on platforms such as TikTok, Twitter/X, Facebook, and Instagram when each of these platforms ends up amplifying outrage and tribalism as the imperative to maximize engagement takes precedence of that of creating a public capable of discerning truth? Platforms that were once thought to be capable of uniting us into more rational publics have turned into mechanisms of domination and unreason.

Cyberpunk’s enduring relevance lies in its unflinching examination of the power dynamics inherent in modern systems of domination. It doesn’t merely depict the colonization of the lifeworld as an abstract dystopia; it serves as a roadmap for understanding how systemic imperatives—market rationality, technocratic control, and the commodification of human life—create a world where liberation feels unimaginable. In the words of Cyberpunk 2077: “There are no happy endings in Night City, you either die in a blaze of glory or fade away."

In this light, the genre offers a cautionary tale for today’s political landscape. The contemporary social order, characterized by its worship of profit maximization and efficiency, has already blurred the line between human flourishing and machine flourishing. We see this not only in the cold calculus of surveillance capitalism but also in the erosion of collective solidarity as public spaces, political discourse, and even interpersonal relationships are subsumed by the logic of platforms that demand engagement at all costs. Even today we find collective action enormously difficult to accomplish; identitarian concerns, self-interest, and personal gain serve to throw a wrench in any plans for combined action or resistance. Instead, what is lionized by contemporary culture is a sort of neo-romantic/existentialist cult of action where whatever action that does take place turns out to be highly fragmented and incapable of building more solidarity.

The resurgence of authoritarian kleptocratic populism—epitomized by figures like Musk, Trump, and Thiel — relies on the very megastructures cyberpunk warns us about. These leaders weaponize digital platforms, amplifying tribalism and outrage to undermine democratic deliberation. The algorithm becomes their ally, not in pursuit of truth or justice, but in exploiting humanity’s basest instincts for power.

Resistance and the Future

The question is no longer whether cyberpunk is predictive but how we respond to its predictions. Will we allow ourselves to be consumed by the megamachine, or will we reclaim the human lifeworld from the relentless march of instrumental rationality? Cyberpunk’s protagonists rarely succeed in toppling the systems that oppress them, but their struggle itself is one that shows that power is never absolute. We can go all the way back to the man who coined the term cybernetics and gave us the prefix cyber-, the mathematician Norbert Wiener who was concerned with control and it’s limits, who over a half a century ago criticized the drive of capitalists and fascists to reduce people to specific, clearly delineated roles and responsibilities. His critique of this drive, not just moral but instrumental – reducing the broad scope of what people can do limits their greatest potential. A person is not born with a specific role to play given by their genetic inheritance, rather they are capable of constant engagement with the world and thus are capable of a great many things throughout their life. It’s this possibility that our aspiring autocrats and oligarchs wish to crush.

The challenge is not to avoid becoming a cyberpunk dystopia—it’s already too late for that. The task now is to carve out spaces of humanity, freedom, and solidarity within it, transforming the machinery of oppression into tools for liberation. The lifeworld may be under siege, but it is not yet destroyed.

The future is looking back at us. The question is: what will it see?