>>263
Nah. Cyberpunk is a genre created in the late 1970s by smug Canadian Boomers who hated America and spent the 1980s gaslighting themselves into continuous state of abject miserable helpless terror, confabulating that Ronald Reagan was going to destroy the world.
Cyberpunk is humorless, didactic, over-the-top grimderp parody of what they perceived as America's excessive lolbertarian tendencies. It explores dystopian worlds of pollution, anarchy, and strongarm rule by General Motors. The societies depicted are always utterly lawless. There are no lawyers. This is hilarious for several reasons, not least of which was that, for all that their mimeographed zines proclaimed that they were doing this in the name of Originality, Pohl and Kornbluth had already tread this ground to the point of grinding ruts into it thirty years before. Another, though, is that all around the world, the locals say that the stereotypical American introduces himself by saying "I'll sue you" rather than "hello." Cyberpunk tilts at a strawman bearing no resemblance to anything that ever existed outside of the minds of a handful of sanctimonious Canadian acidheads watching the war in Vietnam on television.
No, what we have today isn't lawless superhyperultramegalocorporate anarchy enforced by General Electric's fleet of laser death satellites. We have anarchotyranny instead. In American cities that were the envy and marvel of the world a century ago, feces and discarded hypodermic needles are everywhere on the streets and mobs of VIbrantly Diverse Cultural Enrichers beat and rob and occasionally murder passerby, burn and loot by broad daylight, while Officer Friendly and the rest of the Badge & Gun Gang stand there and watch, with their thumbs stuck up their asses. "There's nothing we can do." "The DA won't charge them." "Orders is orders." "I don't like it, but little Susie needs braces." "I can't lose muh pension." Their orders are to wait for a huh-WITE! person to raise a hand in his own defense. Then, suddenly, the city government isn't so helpless or inept. Then, suddenly, it's "OY YAME THUH LAWRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR" and here come Officer Friendly and the boys, guns blazing and truncheons a-swinging, to put that horrible RAYCISS in his place and force him to confront his privilege, so that his face can be all over the Internet with breathlessly recounted tales that he is a "Nazi militia extremist radicalized on 4chan" as a smirking Boomer Struldbrugg judge presides over the show trial. Maybe today there won't be enough purple-haired SJW pederasts and Vibrant Diversities on the jury to find him guilty, but he'll still be unemployable for the rest of his life. The process is the punishment, and the process is very, very selectively applied.
Cyberpunk is a guided tour of polluted Dickensian misery and lawlessness. But instead we got pic related. I think I'd rather live in Night City.