I can't help but laugh a little bit when I hear people talking about how cyberpunk died in the 90s.
Nearly every large metropolis now has its own second life of location-based game layers; whole buildings are wrapped in screens. There are ads for video games on video billboards, and ads on billboards inside of video games ? sometimes even ads for other video games.Virtual Graffii is overlaid on the environment by portable computers. Anarchists and revolutionaries organize via encrypted virtual networks, And, really, anyone with the know-how can buy designer drugs or refined plutonium on secret websites using an experimental decentralized online currency.
Teenagers with smart phones wander the streets, wearing on them computers rivaling the most powerful consumer models from a decade ago. These youths wander around, compromising networks discretely from their phones, wreacking havoc and making a killing for themselves scanning other people's RFID Embedded credit cards and dumping the funds through multiple online bank accounts, while corporate executives plan the overthrow of state governments, with fascism creeping into politics and unmanned robots hovering in the skies. The hobos wander the rail tracks with backpacks full of movies and a laptop. New Eyeglasses allow seamless integration of life with the network and cyberspace
Police have come to fear the technology of protestors they suppress. Three letter government agencies plot increasingly intricate ways to monitor the population, from unmanned drones to city-wide CCTV installation to the questionably legal hacking of private CCTV networks and the use of facial recognition databanks to track people everywhere they go in the physical world while projects like Trapwire monitor everything they do online. New Brain-machine interfaces allow sensitive information like bank account and PIN numbers to be extracted form a person's brain involuntarily.
In the midst of the surveilance state, society begins to stagnate and the gap between the economic and political elites and the city-dwelling lower class widens into a gaping chasm. Hackers and whistleblowers risk life and limb to expose the activities of the surveilance state and expose the dangers of the powerful multinational corporations, travelling from hovel to hovel with backpacks full of high tech equipment just one step ahead of the authorities they oppose.
Once straight-edge white-collar tech workers go rogue, moonlighting as vigilantes of the information age, breaking into secure stores of information to free knowledge and give it to the public, facing the kind of persecution and threats which can drive men to choose death over the suffering.
Urban decay sets in over the cities of the west while in the east vast towering metropolises of Neon, LEDs and lasers fill the night sky with an arcade-scheme of lights and flashing images while on a cloudy night over New york city, the light pollution from skyscrapers that make mockery of the tower of Babel turn the sky the color of an old television set tuned to a dead channel.
Cyberpunk didn't die, it became reality. And now we all live in a bizarre warpath between an Orwellian and Huxleian dystopic future society where corporations are willing to kill thousands of brown people to sell YOU some Coca Cola?. That's what a monoculture is. It's everywhere, and it's all the same. And it takes up alien cultures and digests them and shits them out in a homogenous building-block shape that fits seamlessly into the vast blank wall of the monoculture. This is the future. This is what we built. This is what we wanted. It must have been. Because we all had the fucking choice, didn't we? It is only our money that allows commercial culture to flower. If we didn't want to live like this, we could have changed it any time, by not fucking paying for it. So let's celebrate by all going out and buying the same burger.