I'm dismayed that it petered out. I see the cyberpunk form of art and worldview as more useful with each passing year.
Another hypothesis I have is that cyberpunk media is not as captivating as it used to be since we arguably live in a cyberpunk world. In America there is unimaginable wealth inequality, with some cities having insane costs of rent for cramped apartments, with access to the best technology and medicine in the world but only if you can afford it. We also don't have to use media to imagine a world where digital corporations have a huge amount of power over daily life and the government spies on everyone all the time since both of those things are happening right now. I think we live in a cyberpunk world, it just doesn't have huge buildings, neon lights, and widespread punk fashion.
I came in contact with a few guys who wanted to make another alt-chan with a different model (see what other users are typing in real-time, and all posts get deleted early in the morning) but it never materialized as far as I can tell.
Edit: do any of you want to join an online cyberpunk community?
There are (at least) three aspects of online community participation, that seasoned users are pretty well-versed in:
1. Archiving, mirroring and back-ups.
2. Leaked screen captures and scrapes
of private direct messaging.
3. Back-end aggregation of logs and
messages, even for supposedly private
SMS interactions.
The ones that don't? Your girlfriend just screenshots it, and and tweets it out in the open for the world to see anyway. Whoops!
There are no more online subcultures. Only distortions of perception enforced by impulsive, would-be moderators.
Sure, there are probably logs somewhere. User logs and server logs. But in all the decades I've been using IRC, I've never seen my chatlogs show up on a search engine before. It's just obscure enough and just low value enough to slip under the radar.
Merchandising. I'd love to support a site like that with mugs or shirts of my favourite greentexts. You could get memorabilia of the instant when memes were born, and it would fix the monetization problem that pops up when they get big.
An irrational anger stirs deep within my soul at this suggestion. Too many marketing agencies have attempted to monetize internet culture with catastrophically misguided results. At this point, monetizing internet culture is synonymous with meme murder.
There is definitely a sense in which I would be interested in at least checking out a cyberpunk community, but as other have mentioned, it's more or less culture now.
I will when Cyberpunk 2077 comes out next year. That game has been in development for more than 7 years and looks absolutely insane. They have released 48 minutes of gameplay for anyone who is interested (I have no connection or monetary interest in this game).
https://www.cyberpunk.net/en/news/22523/gameplay-reveal-48-m...
Edit: yes to joining a cyberpunk community.
I'd be interested in that, but I stopped browsing Lainchan a while ago, for instance.
Google Neal Stephenson and "getting big stuff done". Stephenson wrote some of the best books late in Cyperpunk's sci-fi reign, but later came to feel that portraying technological advance as leading to decay, inequality, and corruption was contributing to the stifling of technological ambition in the U.S.. When huge technological leaps are necessary to get past pressing problems like clean energy, space exploration, etc., does it make sense for pop culture to portray technological progress as a negative force that will lead to dystopias?
William Gibson gradually moved away from Cyberpunk for a long period of time, writing novels that were set closer and closer to the present day. "The Peripheral", released in 2014, was the first book by Gibson set in what could be considered "Cyberpunk" for quite a while, but it's not really cyberpunk. (Note: Mild spoilers ahead) Technology does indeed create a calamity that negatively impacts world society in this book, but "cleptocrats" are just as much to blame for creating a dystopia. However, the book also shows some "big stuff" being done, even in the dystopia, and some pretty far-out tech ultimately prevents the calamity it created in the book's prime timeline. A fairly idealistic group of heroes actually change the world for the better using technology in this book, which is rather more optimistic view of both people and technology than is consistent with standard cyberpunk.
While Ernest Cline was not an established author before writing "Ready Player One", it's interesting to note that this book doesn't really represent a return to cyberpunk for serious science fiction. The plot can certainly be considered cyberpunk. (Note: I have read the book, but not seen the movie yet). However, it's basically one long dose of 80's nostalgia, so the cyberpunk setting makes perfect sense for that book. Thus, it's not really science fiction in this respect. It's not trying to predict or shape the future. It's an exercise in wallowing in the past, and the form of this novel matches that function.
I'm still a fan of cyberpunk, but I recognize that science fiction has moved on. It responds to the needs of society, and nightmarish technocratic dystopias are not what is needed today.
It describes struggling or weird futures without the somewhat outdated trappings of cyberpunk, but with some of the same attitude.
Not everyone is a stim-addicted decker working for the mob, but there's still a corrupting element when you include e.g. pervasive smart glasses that make regular social interaction more manipulative (Sight by Sight Systems), or biomechanical arms that give the wealthy an unbeatable advantage in sports (briefly touched on in Deus Ex: Human Revolution). It addresses real ethical questions about near-future advances in technology instead of the fairly blunt instruments of cyberpunk like power and oppression. I think there's still plenty of room for more post-cyberpunk content because the questions it poses are the ones we're actively talking about at the moment (or will be in the near future).
But I was 19 at the time. And around the age of 26-27 I stopped spending time in that culture.
So I think you just outgrow it.
But those cultures are still alive out there. New people come in, some old people stay.
There are always going to be kids who refuse the "normal" trends like snapchat. Who seek out alternative places and those alternative places are imo still websites. Apps will never breach this space because apps are too easy to adopt by large groups of your peers.
The alt.kids want something tougher, a challenge. And most of all they want to get away from the throng.
I'm just waiting to see persistent community forums in darknets. Of course I don't make an effort to track these things anymore but I'd love to know that it has become a reality.
Anonymity is important because just like games lead to programming and hacking, anonymous forums lead to free expression and sub-cultures. It might look like they're just goofing around but look at what 4chan became. We were just goofing around but enough people came to goof around to make it a potential movement.
It's also a genre of science fiction. It basically combines futuristic tech with dystopian/utopian elements, and grimy, old-world stuff. For example, a cyberpunk setting may have godlike AI, but everyone lives in the ghetto. Usually there are rogue actors that try to disrupt or exploit the technology system in place-- the "hackers". These actors are all about reclaiming old tech, building gadgets, and often cyborg-like body mods.
Cyberpunk is a sort of philosophy as well, along the same lines. This is where the subculture aspect comes in. Ever heard of steampunk? Steampunk in a fictional setting is where all technology is mostly mechanical, usually drawing on Victorian elements as well, and sometimes magic or supernatural stuff is included. Steampunk can be boiled down to an initiative to create stable, reliable, mechanically sound systems, usually put to interesting/novel use.
Cyberpunk as a subculture is similar. It's all about making tech work for you, pushing it to its limits, experimenting and exploiting within the given system. It's a rebellious attitude and a response to corporate and government tech control. It incorporates a fashion element like all good subcultures, likes to resurrect old tech (like nixie tubes), and often incorporates body modification (like NFC chips under the skin). People like to repair their own technology, modify their own technology, and collect obscure technologies. Many are also hackers, or want to be.
In other words, “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed” — William Gibson.
And it will probably always be that way, not just in terms of global inequality, but even in a single person’s life: you might be among the billion or two people living as humans have lived for thousands of years, on subsistence agriculture and herding with no running water, but you also have a smartphone and can video-chat with your cousins across the world. That aspect of cyberpunk storytelling is just taking this fact of existence and amplifying it to draw attention to it.
Guy's got a way with words...
"CYBERPUNK is Marianne Trench's stylistic documentary about the cyberpunk movement of the 1980s. William Gibson, author of cyberpunk classic Neuromancer, and Timothy Leary, famous advocate of psychedelic drugs, share their thoughts on the future of society and technology.
While looking a bit dated now, this film provides an interesting insight into the cyberpunk movement of the 80's. The feeling at the time was there was some overlap between this new technical age we were entering vs the counter culture of the 1960s."