Cyberpunk 2025: Freelance Fascism

In Cyberpunk 2077, you never have to think about V’s phone carrier. Or texting between operating systems. Or a planned obsolescence of V’s cyberware. Or bankruptcies bricking V’s implants. And that’s because the tech is the question being addressed in Cyberpunk and in cyberpunk, not the corporations (and the corporations’ leaders) themselves.

As a genre, cyberpunk concerned itself with the specters of the 80s — mainly rapidly evolving technology and rampant capitalism. What it didn’t foresee was a global descent toward illiberalism coinciding with the rise of powerful figures in the same tech industries it was warning about.

It didn't foresee the individuals claiming control.

Unclouded by the insanity of thoughts

Jeremy Bentham was an 18th and 19th century philosopher, legal scholar, social reformer, and the founder of utilitarianism. He argued for the separation of church and state, equal gender rights, decriminalizing homosexuality, abolishing slavery, and, eventually, anti-imperialism (on a purely economic basis). He was also kinda racist, but he was born in the 1700s — this isn’t an excuse, but it is an explanation. He was (very broadly) a force for good, but he was also extremely Of His Time™.

Starting in the 1780s, Bentham’s big project was prison reform. But think less “reform the carceral institution,” and more “physically re-form prisons to make them more efficient and dehumanizing.”

His Panopticon (a derivation of the Greek word for “all-seeing”) was a multi-story, circular jail (gaol). All of the jail cells would face in toward the center of the circle. The guard tower would be in the middle where the guards would be able to see the entirety of any cell at any time.

The fun (“fun”) trick of the Panopticon was that the guards could see the prisoners, but the prisoners could never see the guards. Bentham argued that, since prisoners would never know if they were being watched or not, they would, logically, always follow the rules.

You know, constant paranoia.

Or, as Oracle CEO Larry Ellison echoed in 2024, “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”