Cyberpunk 2025: Wrong city, wrong people

This series has officially spanned into the new year, which means I really should've planned ahead with the titles. Meanwhile, though, our time off over the last couple weeks of the year let me play a bunch more Cyberpunk 2077. And I think I’ve finally figured out what it is that I don’t like about Cyberpunk 2077.

There are plenty of things about the game’s design that I actively hate — the dialogue is wooden, the pacing is inconsistent, the open-world gameplay is incongruous with the story being told, and the driving is amongst the worst ever coded — but it still nails the vibes of Night City and of the Cyberpunk TTRPG. And I think that’s my problem, ultimately: it’s all aesthetics with no heart.

I just don’t think Cyberpunk is very cyberpunk.

Wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle

According to the wiki, Night City is the fourth largest city in the world of 2077 at about 75 square kilometers or 29 square miles. For reference, Tokyo is 850 mi², New York City is about 470 mi², Las Vegas is 142 mi², and Boston is 90 mi². The population of Night City is almost 7 million people in 2077. This puts the population density around 93,000 per square mile.

That’s on par with places like Mandaluyong in the Philippines, Malé in the Maldives, and Dhaka in Bangladesh. Night City looks like that kind of metropolis from a distance, but it doesn’t really feel like it’s that densely populated. Now, I know that that’s likely a limitation imposed by the hardware running the video game, but it does make the city feel … less than it could be. 

When cyberpunk and Cyberpunk were created, the Cold War was in full swing and WWIII felt inevitable. Reagan and Thatcher were the leaders of the Western world. Technology was accelerating at an unprecedented rate. Punks were still scary, countercultural revolutionaries. There was a global recession and an energy crisis. Social safety nets were being gutted. Income inequality was growing rapidly.

Things looked dire. And the nascent genre of cyberpunk reflected that.

I talked about this in the first entry of this series as well, but cyberpunk is almost 50 years old. The future it was warning against has come and gone at this point. The TTRPG started off in 1988 and was set in 2013, it jumped to 2020 in 1990, 2030 in 2005, and then 2045 in 2020. The real world’s timeline just keeps catching up. It’s only Cyberpunk 2077 that actually feels future-y at this point. (Chris and Jack have a great bit about this.)

All of that just means that the universe of Cyberpunk is more of a … future of an alternate history? It’s the retrofuturistic predictions of the past’s version of a future that we never got. I think that’s where and why Cyberpunk 2077 falls so short for me — it seems to be more interested in presenting the world of Cyberpunk than it is in being cyberpunk. And, in focusing on the aesthetics over the underlying why, it misses the original point of both Cyberpunk and cyberpunk. It misses why the genre mattered then and matters now.

Bruce Sterling called cyberpunk “lowlife and high tech.” At the time, the tech was happening regardless. The lowlife part, however, was a choice.

Being a lowlife is a judgement passed down from on high — lowlifes are outside of and opposed to the dominant socioeconomic culture. Criminals are lowlifes, but so are, in the eyes of the elite, any number of other “undesireables.”

But, when you’re the dominant socioeconomic culture, you also tend to make the rules. Homelessness, for example, is a systemic problem, but both Donald Trump and Gavin Newsom have tried to legislate homelessness away. So, if it’s illegal to be homeless, does that make a person experiencing homelessness a lowlife?

That’s the thing about cyberpunk dystopias — they’re only dystopic from the bottom. For everyone at the top, it’s a utopia. It’s kind of intrinsic to the hypercapitalism of it all. And that power imbalance is the conflict in cyberpunk, even if it’s not explicit. Think of the people living on the orbitals in Hardwired, the functionally immortal wealthy in Altered Carbon, the Tyrells of Blade Runner, or the Tessier-Ashpools leapfrogging through time in Neuromancer.

There has to be an elite to struggle against — a high to the low, if you will. The lowlife part of “lowlife and high tech” is necessary to a cyberpunk story and setting. There are plenty of lowlifes living low lives in Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City. There are homeless people, criminals, and addicts of all sorts everywhere you look, but they’re not people. They aren’t people experiencing homelessness as a result of systemic failures. They’re not addicts struggling with socioeconomic realities.

They’re set dressing.