For decades, the sci-fi subgenre known as cyberpunk imagined a future of chrome-plated mercenaries, cyberspace cowboys, and hackers battling globe-spanning corporations. Four decades later, much of that future has arrived—just not in the way its creators expected.
Brain-computer interfaces like Neuralink, AI-powered smart glasses, and increasingly sophisticated robotic prosthetics have begun bringing science fiction's chrome-plated future into the real world. At the same time, a handful of technology companies, including OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google, now shape how billions of people communicate, work, and increasingly interact with artificial intelligence.
As its name suggests, cyberpunk blends cutting-edge technology with the anti-establishment spirit of the punk movement. The result is a vision of "high tech, low life," popularized by science fiction author Bruce Sterling, where astonishing innovation exists alongside rampant poverty, crime, corruption, and corporate power. From William Gibson's Neuromancer to Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, Ready Player One, and Cyberpunk 2077, the genre envisioned a world of rogue artificial intelligence, immersive virtual realities, cybernetic enhancement, and corporations like the infamous Arasaka and Militech, powerful enough to rival governments.
To many of the people building internet culture in the late 1980s and 1990s, those stories didn't feel like dystopian warnings as much as blueprints for what technology might become.
Illusion versus Reality
Ken Goffman—better known as R.U. Sirius, co-founder of Mondo 2000 and co-author of the Cyberpunk Handbook—remembers cyberpunk as an era defined by experimentation and optimism.
"All that dark stuff was very much in Mondo as well, but it all kind of felt like play," Goffman noted. He adds that if dystopia was going to come, it was something happening in our heads at that point that we could be with and laugh about. However, the future turned out to be much less cinematic. He notes that even now some people think an apocalypse will be exciting like Mad Max, but what it really is, is very boring and banal.
Like many early internet pioneers, Goffman believed personal computers and networking technologies would shift power away from governments and corporations. They felt like these entities were somewhat benign. They were handing us this power, and we were going to mess with it—maybe even overthrow them, overthrow the government, overthrow everything. Instead, many of the companies building those technologies became some of the world's most powerful institutions. He admits that was likely an error in their thinking—assuming it wouldn't just get nastier.
Goffman also watched the internet lose one of its defining characteristics: anonymity. Facebook actually made him change his name from R.U. Sirius to Ken Goffman, which seemed like the beginning of the end of something. Looking back, he wonders whether the cyberculture movement helped create an internet that few of its pioneers would recognize, questioning if they blew up consensus reality, truth, and reality itself.
The Real Power Struggle
For Shira Chess, professor of entertainment and media studies at the University of Georgia and author of The Unseen Internet, cyberpunk's lasting value lies less in its aesthetic than in what it understood about power. She argues they were trying to look at the shiny parts without looking at what those shiny parts meant, noting that those surfaces that cyberpunk implies are always embedded within a dystopia.
She argues that cyberpunk's biggest prediction was never cybernetic limbs or mirror shades. The thing that nobody wanted to fully deal with was the moment that corporations took over digital spaces fully; we were cooked. While the internet is, in most cases, freely available and accessible, an increasing amount of the internet now exists behind subscriptions, proprietary AI models, and closed ecosystems controlled by a handful of companies.
Chess sees the same pattern emerging around artificial intelligence. Rather than worrying about sentient machines, she is more concerned about how society talks about them. In November 2022, Elon Musk warned that humanity might be “summoning the demon.” Speaking at MIT in 2014, the Tesla and SpaceX chief compared AI researchers to a magician trying to summon a spirit. Chess does not believe there is a demon in the box with AI, but she believes the more we behave like there is, the harder it is going to be to convince future generations that there is not.
A New Wave of Resistance
Yet she also sees signs of a new cyberpunk movement emerging, pointing to the growing popularity of cyberdecks—custom-built computers assembled from recycled hardware, open-source software, and off-the-shelf components—as an attempt to reclaim control over personal technology. She hopes that cyberpunk gets a new life, viewing these cyberdecks as a way of fantasizing about tech that isn't controlled in the way it has been.
That philosophy extends to software as well. As AI coding assistants become commonplace, Chess worries that developers risk becoming further removed from the systems they rely on. The more you do that, the less likely you’re going to understand the systems. In order for them to fight, they’re going to have to learn how to actually program and make things that are not beholden to the corporations.
She also sees signs that the conflict at the heart of cyberpunk is re-emerging in the real world. Organizations like Stop the AI Race, Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and community groups have increasingly opposed new AI data centers over concerns about water use, electricity demand, and environmental impacts. At the same time, open-source developers and privacy advocates have challenged increasingly closed AI ecosystems. And more recently, AI agents like OpenClaw and Hermes Agent have given individuals their own persistent, self-improving AIs.
The core tension with cyberpunk is that it needs a thing to resist against, Chess notes. For all of those anti-hero vigilantes, there needed to be something to resist, and it needed to be that sort of corporate baseline. The fight to use code against government and corporate oppression can also be felt in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space, with groups including Project Spartacus using the Bitcoin network to preserve the WikiLeaks Afghan War Logs. In 2023, it was discovered that a copy of the Bitcoin Whitepaper was hidden in Apple’s operating system, macOS.
Like cyberpunk, however, the anger toward AI companies can turn violent. In April, a suspect allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s San Francisco home before threatening OpenAI’s headquarters. Asked what comes next, Chess pointed to younger generations. She thinks there is something coming, as Gen Z and Gen Alpha have some very nuanced feelings about the tech they have been raised with. Forty years after Neuromancer, cyberpunk looks less like a failed prediction than a remarkably accurate one. The bigger surprise is that cyberpunk's most enduring prediction wasn't the chrome, but the struggle over who controls it.
