When the advent of Cyberpunk was drafted and released into the mainstream culture in the 1980s, the core idea is throught now in retrospect to be based around "more technology means less humanity, and that is bad". But, times have changed - there wasn’t a community of open source tech, or shareware of the like originally. Sure, there were disk and floppy swaps, code manuals where you can manually rewrite the code on your own systems, and hacker DIY zines for the electrically curious – But there wasn’t a method of rapidly and quickly releasing community-led software, tech specs, or designs like we have now.
Cyberpunk was about an expansion of the expanding proliferation of corporate control, not that technology was bad, in fact most cyberpunk and cyberpunk adjacent (neuropunk, neo-noir, futurisms, industrial, extropian, etc) genres and philosophies prided themselves on the fact that they had access to non-corporate tech, black label tech, stolen tech, self-made DIY tech, hacked tech.
The overall motif has always been ’Corporations suck, megacorps especially, and politicians funded by the corps suck, but hey! the technology we have makes our life far more enjoyable, far more free, far more cool, we just have to eliminate the corps with it’
The shift from ‘technology is cool, made our lives better, but we need to take our power back from the faceless corps’ to 'Cyberpunk is about how bad technology is’ entirely misses the punk roots of the entire thing, this new 'idea’ was quite literally controlled and distilled down by the very same type of corporations the original ideas were fighting against.
Take your power back, build and make cool shit, the corps aren’t going to give it to you unless you fight for it.
