Cyberpunk 2077 looms on the horizon, and its E3 2018 trailer and closed-doors gameplay demos for press ignited a conversation across video games about what cyberpunk is. Many people hold out that there is some kind of originary, “pure” cyberpunk ideal that is more than the neon lights and robot arms that populate a lot of our cyberpunk games. At the heart, some people hold out for the politics of the “punk” of cyberpunk that existed before, and against, the latter-day stapling of Blade Runner umbrellas and droning soundtracks into any old movie or game. Is Cyberpunk 2077 just slamming first-person gaming mechanics into a comfortable production design? Have we been robbed of the true politics of the console cowboy now that they’re everywhere?

The first is about the relationship between the individual, technology, and their society. Neuromancer follows two characters, Case and Molly. Case is a hacker, the kind who slips behind the technological walls and borders that most people don’t know exist. Molly is a fixer and an assassin whose nails, skin, and glands have been weaponized against the world around her. They’re two out of millions of freelancers who use technology to interface with, and rewrite, the laws of the near-future world that they live in.

If there’s an “original” cyberpunk moment, it is probably the publication of William Gibson’s Nebula, Hugo, and Philip K. Dick Award winning Neuromancer in 1984. Jammed into the early 1980s with Blade Runner (1982), Tron (1982), Escape From New York (1981), Videodrome (1983), Akira (1982), and a whole host of other post-1970s works, Gibson’s novel was a part of a wave of science fiction that focused in on a couple tendencies in media at the time. A focus on these tendencies, I think, is what helps a coherent cluster of ideas called “cyberpunk” emerge.

But the reality is that there might not have been all that much “punk” there to begin with.

The latter half of the 20th century was, to put it bluntly, a nightmare for many people. The Cold War was playing out worldwide with drastic and violent effects for countries all over the globe in no small part due to both open and covert operations by the United States and the Soviet Union. Nationalism reigned in many countries, often to genocidal ends. In the United States, progressive movements won strong victories before being disempowered and abandoned by the politicians that had been elected to represent them. Economic devastation ran rampant through the 1970s, American power appeared to be waning, and some form of hot war seemed to loom.

The second is that power accrues power. The major corporations of Neuromancer are eternal entities that create products and usurp nations beneath them. There’s no question that the families, megacorps, and crime organizations that rule the world will continue to do so forever. If power accrues power, then there’s less available for everyone else, and Neuromancer (and all of those works I mentioned above) suggest that the best thing a person can do is just try to get by. You might seize a little power, and you might unseat a villain, but the vast structure of power is going to kick your ass no matter what. Take the money and run, but a vat-grown Yakuza assassin is probably going to get you eventually.

So what, then is the relationship between aesthetics and politics in cyberpunk? Even if we cast off the influential films, the novels are filled with decks that allow hackers to fly through cyberspace, drones controlled by devious multinational corps, cybernetic implants, rotting locales, neomodern space stations, and a whole host of wondrous images that demand we pay close attention.

Mixed with a healthy dose of influences from science fiction’s New Wave and predecessors like Alfred Bester and Philip K. Dick, cyberpunk is the ultimate blender of anxieties about the back half of the 20th century. It’s melancholic, but it’s hopeful for the individual. Winning elections isn’t in the cards, but burning a local mob boss and making a little cash? That’s doable.

As Dante Douglas writes over at Paste , “Early, seminal cyberpunk novels and short stories of the 1980s saw the future as a bleak one, populated by megacorporate structures that would eventually dwarf the nations that birthed them.” In this vast network of connection and the accrual of power, what could one person do? Deckard’s questions about humanity, Molly Million’s augmentations for survival, and Snake Plissken's absolute nihilism emerge out of this mire. People are small. They’re crushed by nuclear powers, the Vietnam War, economic insecurity, and globalized markets.

Cyberpunk emerges at a moment directly after the acceleration of finance capital, wherein economic growth becomes about the number of transactions you can oversee, not about the actual objects you produce. Capitalism became more flashy, but for many people in the countries where cyberpunk originated, the factories that once signaled economic growth disappeared. The machinery of economics became invisible.

A robot arm is rarely a robot arm; it’s also the byproduct of a nation or a corporation blasting you with a cutting laser. The worlds of cyberpunk works are visually split, and how their places and people look and relate to each other often tells us as much as exposition or dialogue does. Roy Batty battled Deckard in a rotting apartment while discussing the inevitability of death and the end of things. In these early cyberpunk works, the aesthetics aren’t just wallpaper, they’re often doing the work.

And things begin to spin out through the coked-up hedonism investment banking craze of the 1980s. This is the culture that produces Patrick Batemans and Jordan Belforts. This is the world of the freelancer, the jet-setter, the individual who bounces from consultancy to investment banking to an academic post without a pause between them. Whatever you can make of yourself comes down to ingenuity and where you find yourself in the great economic machine. Neoliberalism, the economic principles of pure individualism paired with an utter demolishing of public works and a concept of the public good, reigns.

There’s no difference between appearances and substance here.

There’s no difference between appearances and substance here. Everyone is atomized into individuals, and there’s no way of going back. You’re only in it for yourself, even if you’re a part of a group, because at the end of the day you can only trust you. Politics and aesthetics are the same, and it’s that way because neither of them lead anywhere. The “lesson” of those original cyberpunk works is that you might get away with the money, but if you do, then you’re going solo. The alleys are dark and the neon casts purple shadows. You’re going to have to take care of that robot arm on your own. Better get good at micromechanics.