Cyberpunk in 2025: A Triptych

I used to play Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun a lot in the mid-late 1990s, as well as Necromunda, which always felt cyberpunk-adjacent. To do so at that time was to engage in a pleasantly unlikely fantasy of dystopia: there was a big gap between the 'lived experience' of my friends and I and the worlds which these games depicted. When I first started playing Cyberpunk 2020, for instance, I surely had never once even used the internet, and had no real conception of what it was. My peers and I unconsciously felt ourselves to be essentially in the same era that in which our parents had grown up - we called each other on the phone, we walked around to each other's houses to ask 'Are you coming out?', we sent letters and thankyou cards, we went to our grandparents' houses on Sunday to have a roast dinner. The dystopian future which Cyberpunk 2020 and its brethren depicted felt impossibly distant (even though the milieu, Merseyside circa 1994, was hardly prosperous or indeed crime-free). 

Nowadays it seems as though the dystopia is basically here - it just, to coin a phrase, isn't evenly distributed. I don't have to go very far at all to see Cyberpunk 2020 in action before my eyes: any retail park on the outskirts of a down-at-heel area of town will do. There aren't any cybereyes or full-body mods in evidence yet, but most of the rest of the furniture is present (albeit in a slightly different way to how it was imagined by Mike Pondsmith) - along with exactly the right amount of alienating, atomising vibes.

This has given the cyberpunk genre a newfound subversiveness - the theme, to use Bruce Sterling's expression, of the 'victims of the new' has never seemed more apposite, or uncomfortable. We already have cyberpunks, in numerous different guises, and they have a way of scrambling our priors and problematising our assumptions in all manner of different ways. The big appeal of the cyberpunk genre, and cyberpunk games, was the way in which it used the antihero - the assassin, the Gordo Gecko-style corporate, the muckraker journalist, the dodgy medic, the hacker - to expose the dark underbelly of the developing future. And our era is increasingly defined by antiheroes: those who, in fighting for what they believe in, or pursuing their own self-interest, throw moral inconsistencies and confrontations into stark relief.

Three examples leap to mind of modern-day cyberpunks in this antiheroic vein. In each instance, what is interesting about them is the way in which they problematise some aspect of the future in which we have found ourselves. 

The first of these is what you might call the poverty-porn YouTuber - the category of person (often raking in kabillion-willions of views) who turns up in some godforsaken spot with a GoPro, engages with the locals with superficial and vaguely sociopathic charm, and then puts the results on YouTube with a title like 'I Visited the Poorest and Most Dangerous District of Tashkent'. In each case, a fine line is walked between exploiting other people's misery for views and hence cash on the one hand, and raising awareness on the other - a recent example I happened to watch concerned a visit to La Rinconada in Peru, which managed to hammer home the awfulness of the conditions which some people are forced to endure but which I also found to be an obnoxious 'Aren't I terribly adventurous?' exercise in self-centredness and self-promotion on the part of the narrator. But it what it mostly illustrated was the strangeness of the effects of easy global travel and the internet on geographical boundaries: it is now possible for us to sit at our desks in our lunch hours and watch what is going on in La Rinconada - ostensibly one of the most isolated places on Earth - over a bad cup of instant coffee and digestive biscuits. This is cyberpunk: a subversion and interrogation (albeit unconscious) of the 'the new' and its consequences. 

The second is the phenomenon of the Left-Right Climate Infrastructure Terrorist: the evolution of both pro- and anti- 'Net Zero' activism towards inchoately violent goals. On the one hand, trust-fund brats and Boomer activists reconnecting with the 'spirit of 68' to spraypaint Stonehenge, disrupt cultural events, attack paintings, and piss off commuters. On the other hand, largely working class 'Bladerunners' targeting the ULEZ cameras designed to levy fines on petrol and diesel vehicles travelling around London. Either way, a sense that ordinary political processes are not producing the correct results, and a resort to vandalism to in the name of political messaging - but also the deployment of technology to produce decentralised, networked threats that are almost impossible to police against. This is cyberpunk - the use of 'the new' to subvert the way in which the future itself is developing, either through resisting development itself or insisting on a reassessment of who should bear the costs.

And the third is the phenomenon of the Extreme Challenger - the person who engages in feats of physical achievement or endurance, often monitored in real time by vast numbers of followers. One interesting example I recently came across were the participants in the so-called Montane Winter Spine, a non-stop 268-mile ultramarathon going the length of the Pennines, from somewhere in Derbyshire to Kirk Yetholm on the Scottish Border. Taking place in January each year, the participants often go for days without sleeping - the winner this year did it in around 82 hours. My friend, who was describing it to me, said that runners will catch a nap here or there by lying down in a puddle or shallow flood - they will be so tired that they will fall asleep for 10-20 minutes, but will then be woken by the coldness of the water and will be thereby prevented from sleeping for too long and losing time. But there are many other variants on the theme of extreme challenges in many different spheres of human life, with a crucial factor - the Montane Winter Spine being a good illustration - being the fact that people can 'spectate' online in real time (in that case through a constantly updated GPS tracker on all the runners). Again, this is cyberpunk - the use of the 'new' to transform expectations of what human beings are capable of, through a strangely organic form of cybertech: ultrarunners (for instance) whose capacities are enhanced by the fact that technology facilitates competitiveness and status, rather than because it, for instance, gives them new 6-million-dollar legs.

Thinking about things in this way truly expands the remit of what a cyberpunk RPG campaign could consist of. The original 'tech noir' assumptions of Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun, very much informed by Gibson's short stories and first trilogy of novels, produced excellent results. But here we can see other modalities emerging: the 'medias' going around warzones and extreme environments to please their YouTube following; the activists planning disruptive infrastructure attacks and evading the security response; the hard core 'challengers' trying to break world records in the most extreme ways. All there, and all I think readily 'gameable' with a little thought.