CYBERPUNK IS NOW (AND ALREADY IN YOUR POCKET)
by vanta rainbow black
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"this story is dedicated to all those cyberpunks who fight against injustice and corruption every day of their lives." --Hideo Kojima
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the smartphone. it is simultaneously the greatest tool and most thoroughly binding shackle of our era. to not have a phone is to essentially be unable to participate in modern society. in the apartment complex i live in right now, you HAVE TO download an app onto your phone and scan for the machines with bluetooth JUST TO USE THE FUCKING WASHERS AND DRYERS. think about that: the mere act of washing your fucking clothes in 2025 can potentially require a smartphone! if you had told this to someone fifteen years ago it'd sound like something out of a satirical cyberpunk story. like there isn't even a way to pay with coins or anything. so fuck anyone with a broken phone who's too poor to afford a replacement. fuck anyone whose phone is dead and needs a charge. fuck older people who don't use smartphones. this is essentially the message being sent by our property management company making these ridiculous decisions
anyway. needless to say... cyberpunk is now. the world is a boring horrifying techno-dystopia. we rely on our phones for so much. navigation, rideshares, ordering food, communicating with our loved ones, maintaining a social life, and anything else you could possibly think of. but they also collect so much information about us, and sell it to the highest bidder to be used for targeted advertising purposes. i never see ads, i've been using ublock origin since i was 14. but whenever i accidentally step into that world, the ad-infested shithole that is the modern web, i recoil in horror. i CANNOT believe regular people live like this. and most don't even realize there's a better way. sometimes trans people talk about having their gender affirmed by advertising algorithms -- there's even a song about it by she/her/hers -- and every time i'm just like... wtf? you see ads?! lol
big corporations design dark patterns to keep us hooked. to keep our attention firmly ensnared by their algorithms. infinite scroll on shorts, push notifications, peer pressure. they dangle promises of clout in front of you to keep you invested. they track every minute detail of your browsing. like how long you stay on a page, how fast you scroll, and more. facebook itself is known to collect ridiculous mountains of personal data. even on people who don't have accounts! there are fucking shadow profiles!!! and they're known to cooperative with government requests for censorship and data
handing over control of our social lives to some big corpo that's at the whims of oppressive governments (which? all of them. government is inherently oppressive) is a bad idea. that's why i love the fediverse so much! it's social media in the hands of the people. it's ours, truly and fully. i cannot imagine staking my livelihood on a corpo platform, constantly under the threat of demonitization or shadowbanning or just outright banning. hold your tongue, don't say the wrong thing. you can't even curse on some of those platforms. i've said it before and i'll say it again: that's no way to live!!!!!
people, by and large, walk around constantly glued to our phones. they're so critical to our daily lives they go beyond a tool and become an extension of our very being. i remember the first time a computer felt like that to me -- it was in the seventh grade. my laptop. this was before smartphones however. i just had some flip phone or something. we are all essentially cyborgs who don't even realize it! smartphone cyborgs!!! smartphones have made us more connected. like, what the fuck did people do before the internet when they didn't know something? they either looked it up in a dictionary or just lived with not knowing. which is unthinkable to someone from the modern era. but you and i have the vast sum of human knowledge readily at our fingertips. the rise of the internet historically directly correlates to an increase in social justice. the defining aspect of the 2010's, when smartphones became largely ubiquitous, was an enormous uptick in people giving a fuck about things. queer rights, black lives matter, mental health awareness. remember when something like a marilyn manson (fuck that guy tho) concert was offensive enough to warrant huge protests? and then the internet happened and everyone got desensitized to shocking stuff lol
smartphones have also enabled the greatest mass theft in history. the theft of personal information on an unthinkably vast scale. they have enabled us to be tracked, monitored, logged. they have created an unspoken expectation among many that everyone will always be instantly reachable with communication. they have contributed to horrific situations of domestic violence and familial abuse (stalkerware, etc.). they have severely thinned the line between work and personal life. they've made a spectacle out of existence, birthing armies of influencers and content creators. everyone wants a piece of the pie so to speak. they've enabled fraudsters, scammers, and thieves to find new horizons of deceit. they've turned the world into a literal cyberpunk dystopia. i don't know what else to call it. the core of cyberpunk is HIGH TECH mixed with LOW LIFE and, well, yeah. in a world where even the poorest of people is expected to own a smartphone (my aparment complex mentioned previously is explicitly low-income housing) this is where we find ourselves
but, the battle is not lost. there are things you can do to help subvert surveillance capitalism. both on a personal and societal scale. we don't have to just lay down and accept defeat. even if it's probably impossible to fully disentangle yourself from the massive web of surveillance we find ourselves in, there are ways to minimize and reduce things. like, for instance, using the fediverse instead of corpo social media. lemmy instead of reddit. peertube instead of youtube. bookwyrm instead of goodreads. ublock origin, privacy badger, noscript. leaving your phone at home when protesting. and probably a buncha other shit idk about because i'm not exactly the most technical person. sure, i deem myself a cyberpunk, but i find myself drawn to the more social and political aspects of the genre. i've tried to learn programming before (python) but my ADHD has always just refused to cooperate
the cyberpunk genre is marked by the contrast of high tech and low life, massive wealth inequality, and a technological dystopia. if you can't see that in the world we live in today, you really gotta look around more and listen to alternate perspectives from marginalized groups. cyberpunk is now, and all we can do about it is try to be true to ourselves despite everything. but, to me, cyberpunk is about more than just the dystopia -- it implies to a certain spirit of rebellion typical main characters in such a setting might exhibit. and that's what i mean when i say we're "putting the punk back into cyberpunk." like all counterculture movements, the mainstream will try to water it down and make it palatable to the masses. but it's more than just a genre; it's a worldview. a wake-up call. a call to arms against the suffocatingly bleak oppressive society of the present day. but, most of all, it's a promise -- to fight. and not give up. however bleak things get. because fuck capitalism. a critique of capitalism is inherent to the mere premise of the genre, and yet many fans of the genre fail to understand that just because it's heavily stylized and looks cool that doesn't mean it's a desirable future. the techno-dystopia is what we're fighting against
in closing, cyberpunk is now and the vast majority of us are all cyborgs just a little bit