this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Cyberpunk

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"High tech, low life."

"The street finds its own uses for things."

We all know the quotes and the books. But cyberpunk is more than a neon-soaked, cybernetic aesthetic, or a gritty dystopian science fiction genre. It is a subculture composed of two fundamental ideas: PUNK, and CYBER.

The PUNK: antiauthoritarian, anticapitalist, radical freedom of expression, rejection of tradition, a DIY ethic.

The CYBER: all that, but high-fuckin'-tech, ya feel? From DIYing body mods to using bleeding edge software to subvert corporate interests. It's punk for the 22nd century.

This is a community dedicated to discussing anything cyberpunk, be it books, movies, or other art that falls into the genre, or real life tech, projects, stories, ideas or anything else that adheres to these ideals. It's a place for 'punks from all over the federated Net to hang out and swap stories and meaningful content (not just pictures of city nightscapes).

Welcome in, choom.

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Cyberpunk is my favorite genre of sci-fi, and I definitely found it via movies and TV, so I'm wondering what everyone's favorite pieces of media out there?

Some of my tops are of course the classics like Blade Runner, Akira, Robocop, and Dredd

I think one of the earliest reasons I fell in love with Cyberpunk was Batman Beyond. That theme song also totally deeply influenced my music taste.

What about yall?

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[–] SynAck@dataterm.digital 7 points 1 year ago

For me it was Ghost in the Shell and Shadowrun, which was the first pen & paper RPG I played when I was in college. I always played a rigger because that was the first time that I ever thought about "hacking" something other than a computer or network as a lifestyle. Combining the cultures of "petrol heads" and "tech nerds" clicked with me.

But the first "cyberpunk" movie that made the idea of technology as a sub-culture real to me was, ironically, (and I hate to admit this) seeing "Hackers" for the first time. Certainly not as a real vision of what "cyberpunk" was, but rather an extremely over-the-top and glamorized commentary both on how non-technical people view technophiles as well as how people who ate, slept, lived, and breathed a tech-centered ethos might live. Like, my parents legit believed that's how I acted with my friends when I wasn't around them.

I grew up in the era of The Legion of Doom and the Cult of the Dead Cow, and realized that this hyperbolic version of the archetypical "console cowboys" was how a lot of people saw the younger generation of computer kids. They had graduated from the long-haired, bearded, ex-hippies toiling away in a basement somewhere into stylish (albeit very weird) tech-savvy young hacktivists that were trying to buck the system solely because someone told them they couldn't.

Then, reading Neuromancer and Snow Crash introduced the idea of a virtual world parallel (beneath? alongside?) to the physical world and that was the gravity that brought it all together.