Futuristic, as if the word is automatically synonymous with better.
Maybe writing cyberpunk for nineteen years has made me cynical, but “futuristic equals better” sounds less like insight and more like a 1960s slogan. A sales phrase to sell someone on an aerodynamic toaster oven. A shortcut for people who do not want to ask harder questions about what they are buying into.
Because a lot of technology now is not being sold on whether it works beautifully, saves time in a meaningful way, costs less, or helps people focus on what matters. More often, it gets sold on the feeling of being ahead. The feeling of proximity to what comes next. The feeling of alignment with momentum.
And for a lot of people, that seems to be enough. Lean forward far enough and you might just fall into the next best thing.
That mindset matters because it helps explain one of the ways cyberpunk keeps getting flattened in contemporary pop culture.
A lot of people engage with cyberpunk as if it’s permission. Permission to admire velocity. Permission to admire private power, aggressive technology, premium alienation, and systems so large they begin to feel natural. There is a flattening that happens where cyberpunk becomes surface, mood, and aesthetic shorthand. Neon. Interfaces. Implants. Skyline. Grime. Brands. The look of a decaying future with just enough gloss left on it to make the decay feel stylish.
This reminds me of a quote.
“Every film about war ends up being pro-war.” — François Truffaut
Curious Archive says it cleanly in his video essay A Weapon to Destroy a God: “Regardless of how brutally or faithfully one might depict conflict, he maintained that to frame something in the language of filmmaking is to narrativize and aestheticize it, and therefore make it more consumable.”
>> Clearly, cyberpunk does this well, because it’s what keeps happening to the genre every time some large investment project pulls the genre out of the shadows. It’s bad medicine. And it’s a corporate tool to cash-in and keep the real work from biting too deep into society.
It doesn’t seem to matter how sour the taste is supposed to be. Somebody will still suck up the corn syrup fruit drink and say “cool.” The warning becomes a taste and a style. The critique becomes a product and a trend. The atmosphere becomes something to admire instead of a future to fear.
And right there, that is the mistake.
>> Right there people side with cyberpunk’s antagonists. It’s like putting on the gray uniform and slicking your hair back. The little kid doesn’t know, but the adults should know better.
Cyberpunk was not a celebration of those forces. It was what happened when writers and artists looked directly at where those forces lead. It was not futurism in the flattering sense. It was not accelerationism. It was a warning about what happens once consumerism, technological dependence, private power, and cultural fragmentation become ordinary enough to disappear into atmosphere.
And that is why fandom matters here too.
Sports. Politics. Technology. Content. Products of every shape and size have become fandom, folded into identity in ways that would have seemed embarrassing not that long ago. There are people who do not just like a thing. They become emissaries for it. And once that happens, criticism starts feeling intimate, almost anatomical, like you accidentally insulted a body part. As if anonymous internet words can make an emotional subscription bleed.
Cyberpunk is not the logo on your underwear. It is not your syndicated podcast owned by some billionaire conglomerate, or a brand being gutted by private equity on the way down. Four decades into the internet, most of the population seems to have forgotten how to choose what they feel. Fear, anger, and outrage get spoon-fed by media systems, while real art and real writing keep boiling under the surface of society. Underground.
>> This is how real cyberpunk gets it right.
Not because it predicted gadgets. Not because it gave people a cool visual language. Not because brands, billionaires, and trend-chasers can borrow pieces of its shell .
It gets it right because it can still remind us that sleekness is not innocence and that the past rhymes with the future. And maybe most importantly, it still reminds us that the point was never to admire the machine.
The point was to notice what the machine was doing to us and not fall forward into the gears.
(This is the first article in a new series, as we examine some current trends. If you write, especially if you write cyberpunk, hopefully you’ll find some inspiration in where this goes. And for everyone else, perhaps you’ll find some small truths and stick around.)
