It's likely that the last Presidential election was decided, in no small part, by the efforts of a neo-anarchist site publishing classified information and a group of meme obsessed netizens attempting to disrupt and undermine the establishment. That seems pretty cyberpunk to me.
The problem is that it does not rain all the time and the ads are not in Japanese. The visual direction is simply off. Also the soundtrack leaves much to be desired. (Instead of Vangelis and Kenji Kawai, we have ... Gangnam Style?) It is not recognizable as cyberpunk.
Less in jest: much of the "cyberpunk" (at least for people like me) even when not talking about the genre of fiction but about the more general ethos or an idea ... was influenced by the presence of the certain set of fiction, especially visual medium (film, comics, the Japanese varieties anime, manga). And with fiction, you have aesthetics and narratives. Maybe an opportunity to entertain a kind of romanticism.
The real life lacks all that. Instead of neural implants, we have touchscreens that get dirty. The advent of artificial intelligence does not come with military grade AIs escaping into wild, followed by action involving tanks and deep philosophical discussions; the advent of AI means that we have very good image classifiers (and other machine learning systems that perform well in fairly restricted tasks such as speech recognition or Go), amazing opportunities for applying statistics to marketing, and bunch of geeks who have read too much Kurzweil writing decision theory papers in California. Instead of identifiable protagonists doing cool things while opposing identifiable antagonists of the story, we get n+1 people thinking they are the cool protagonists, in other words, Occupy and Wikileaks and Anonymous and alt-right.
[The same thing works in both directions of time, really. Cyberpunk science fiction liked the underground scene of punks" resisting the system. The historical fiction as a genre has always loved the idea of underground revolutionaries. (Think about Les Miserables.) And in reality it was much more boring and nasty and ambiguous, because no matter have much you try to be grim and realistic when writing fiction, in fiction even grim and gritty kinda still glitters.]
That's some Neal Stephenson stuff right there.
It's quite funny when you think about it, cyberpunk fiction predicted many of the most recent technology intrigue stories/events.
That's not entirely coincidental, considering how influential cyberpunk was during the nascent days of the internet. We have it to thank for the term "cyberspace" after all, and like the technology in Star Trek, a lot of people who grew up with it have been trying to "make it real" with limited success.
Still can't store a human consciousness on a tape drive, though.
I never assumed only interesting things are happening in the USA. I mentioned one thing that happened in the USA.
>There's no cyberpunk in the hot air and sunlight among the ruins of Syria, in the alcoholic reality of Russian monotowns or in the frozen technoutopia of silently ageing Japan.
First, that doesn't invalidate the premise. Cyberpunk is about the fringes of society and the cutting edge of technology, and liberation from the corruption of authority though anarchy and transhumanism, not about the mainstream.
If you were to extrapolate many settings depicted in cyberpunk fiction, you would probably find that there isn't "cyberpunk" in most of them, either. As far as cyberpunk is concerned, none of that is interesting.
Second, I can't believe you unironically used "frozen technoutopia" to argue against the presence of cyberpunk in the modern world.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/guccifer-20-is-li...
If I recall correctly, the initial Wikileaks trove was supposedly skimmed by a malicious Tor exit from Chinese intelligence traffic.
So yeah, pretty damn cyberpunk.
We are already there in some ways. Take the situation in the UK where, say, apple don't pay any tax to the national govt -- this is a perfect example where a massive corp is more powerful than a govt. There is absolutely no way that the uk govt could change the situation.
There are a few options they could try, but they would all fail and so they're not even attempted as trying and failing would be an embarrassment and admitting that they're powerless.
The options?
Take them to court? The govt would run out of money before they even got into a courtroom.
Sales ban? Unless the cost of stopping doing business in the UK is more than paying tax in every other country who would immediately take the same steps if it worked then they'd just leave the uk.
Guilt trip? Sure, people are annoyed but it's barely a news cycle at a time and everyone will still pay 1k for the new iphone (8 is rumored at around there... apparently).
That's even before you read about the revolving door between govt and big corp and the toothless ACOBA.
The lobby/'campaign donation' culture in US politics is an even stronger litmus, to me at least, that in contract to your view the future has come, and the cyberpunk is in it.
I'm still here...... :P
But "cypherpunk" is >9 years old, and inactive.