Gary said,

I also love that players who were serious about cyberware would create characters that started with ridiculously high empathy and then loading them up with as much cyberware as they can get their hands on. I always been amused by the concept of these Mother Teresa-like characters that undergo elective surgery to turn themselves into ruthless cyborg killing machines.

Anon said,

> These days distopic themes are greatly neglected in favour of the post-apocalyptic ones!

I agree to that and it’s pretty clear that the cyperpunk genre had a short, intensive life.
“The light that burns twice as bright burns for half as long – and you have burned so very, very brightly!” eh?

We all know that there are fashions and fads and everything seems to vanish from the public focus – and sometimes comes back like high fantasy.
Maybe the time in the spotlight for cyberpunk literature is simply over – as is the influence on other media for the most part?

In my opinion, however, the decline of cyberpunk, which was always located in the “near future”, is to a large part somewhat natural: If you look around you you’ll discover that we already live in a dystopean future, even if not as extreme as in Blade Runner.

All the elements are there, though:

– Megacorporations and megabanks giving a shit about laws (see the Siemens corruption scandal, the various bankster schemes like the money laundering at the HSBC, the Libor manipulations etc.). This if of course not really news, but the extent of it is unprecedented.
– Countries and states selling out the people that elected them to feed these corporations and increase the income of already rich people to unknown heights.
– The rich get richer, the middle classes of the formerly leading industry countries are crumbling and the amount of poor people is steadily rising. We have no colonies on other planets, yet, but there are some fun places in the world that are completely unreachable by common people.
– We already reached the phase after capitalism as there is no free market with free market risks: The dictate of the corporations and governments bowing down in front of them to socialize their losses (and of course privatize their profits) on the shoulders of future generations (see what happens in the European Union at the moment).
– Surveillance of private persons is increased from year to year. Telephone calls are being recorded, streets are getting monitored, internet and email traffic is getting analyzed – and all under the disguise of fighting against child pornography and terrorism…
– We already have secret ops divisions in corporations and churches – and sometimes a dozen union leaders get murdered if they stand in the way of a big coporation in Columbia.
– We still have massive pollution and are at the brink of climate change (which of course is being denied by everyone who could lose money because of it).
– Secret info wars are getting fought with computer viruses specifically targetting plants and industry machines like centrifuges (allegedly to prevent enrichment of uranium), hacker groups copying credit card databases etc.
– Wars being fought with drones – rembember all those “riggers”? We now have them, sitting at the CIA HQ in the USA, killing countless people in Pakistan, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan – without trial but collateral damage…

No wonder people want to experience the next level – like in postapocalyptic scenarios (Fallout or The Walking Dead, anyone?) with even more extreme violence and contempt for human life!

And while the Zombie overkill in the media is surely something that will vanish in a few years (to reappear in the future, as it is a supernatural element) the former industry cities like Detroit keep crumbling and people derive their fun from exploring “ancient structures” from a “better past” (google URBEX).