I have been saying this for years now, and basically no one agrees with me or understands what I am saying.
The conversations usually boil down to ‘but we dont have cyberpunk fashion and aesthetics and there are no flying cars, and most people dont have robot arms so /obviously/ real life is not cyberpunk.’
This of course belies that basically every cyberpunk fan I know is a poser and doesnt get it.
The fashion and robotic arms and computer tech in everything that it doesnt need to be in are ultimately just world building and plot devices that make corporate control extremely obvious and in your face.
Like… its the setting. In which actual stories take place, and obviously the setting impacts people and their lives and choices.
The actual message of cyberpunk as a genre is basically: if we let corporations control everything via technology we are addicted to and cannot live without, our lives will become nasty brutish and short, love and friendship become commodities to be bought and sold, and real trust and happiness between people is basically impossible.
What was previously known as humanity itself dies in a techno-corporate world, mostly because it isnt profitable.
So you point to how that /has already happened in America/ in a myriad of ways that are more complicated and less obvious than the overt aesthetic and world features of cyberpunk literature… and that in some cases are in opposition to it… and people just yell that because the surface of our reality doesnt match the surface of cyberpunk, theres no way that the underlying facts are the same.
I once had someone vehemently argue to me that CyberPunk 2077 didnt look very cyberpunk to him… because it includes daylight, cyberpunk scenes always happen at night, man!
Right because there is corporate technological control over your life at so many levels you cannot hope to understand them all… and obviously those things can only happen at night. Mainstream computer soft and hardware just become non corporate and non privacy invading and non addictive and non exploitative when the sun is up. smh
Anyway yeah we live in a world where a huge swath of Americans are literally chemically addicted to social media apps and websites… and these apps and websites are known to cause mental disorders of all kinds, they exist to steal your information and sell you shit you probably dont need, the content they shove in your face is algorithmically optimized to make you /angry/, because angry people make the best social media addicts…
Yeah, its pretty obvious to me that instagram and tiktok and facebook are perfect corporate techno drugs and the country is full of addicts.