The camera pans down into a rain-slicked alley, illuminated only by the neon glare of frayed advertisements. A man is beckoned to a noodle bar, and through sheer force of will works through the language barrier to order. Two people approach from behind; the chef leans in: ‘HE SAY YOU BRADE RUNNAH’. I have abridged this, but this was my first exposure to the cyberpunk genre - this was many people’s first exposure to the cyberpunk genre.

Cyberpunk, despite having its name associated with the CD Projekt Red game, is a genre unto itself. It is summarised as high tech, low life - a world where you can get a new kidney grown for you by Thursday, all the better for you to destroy it that weekend with synth-wine. Cyberpunk dystopia is a phrase thrown around a lot, and it is interesting to me because it shows a lack of understanding of the source material. Calling it a ‘cyberpunk dystopia’ misses the point - it’s the same as calling fire hot. Dystopia is baked into the source code. So when I first saw that Blade Runner scene with my dad in my early teenage years, I was enamoured. I have stayed enamoured ever since, such to the fact that my fixation on Cyberpunk 2077 is a symptom of this as opposed to the catalyst.

I was going to start this post explaining why I name all my projects, VMs, and hardware after Cyberpunk 2077 entities. This ended up becoming less of an explanation and more of a love letter to the genre itself.

Neon Bliss

By seven years old, the screen I watched the world through was already tuned incorrectly.

To put it simply, my peers pissed me off - I had not learnt to articulate it so poetically back then, but the substance does not change. School was a chore for me - most classes I had already surpassed with my private tutor, while others encompassed art/pe/hymn practise. I went because it was the law, not because I enjoyed it. The joy I found at that age was technology - I was captivated by machines, systems and the magical world that tied together electricity and data. My peers did not make sense to me; computers did.

However, alongside this wonder came an early, heavy awareness that things weren’t right. By the time most kids were just learning to navigate primary school, I was already carrying a distrust of authority, an unearned cynicism, and a quiet, burning anger. I was seeing how good things (systems meant to help or connect) could glitch, fracture, and disrupt the people around them. I was far too young to be as tired, depressed, and fundamentally angry as I was. I am unsure at what point the switch flicked in my head, that I went from happy child to brooding brat, but I have a distinct memory of trying to strangle myself behind the coat rack in year four - that feels like a good place to label “point of no return”.

Then came the media that gave all of that unspoken noise a language.

When you’re a pre-teen already laying the groundwork for nihilism and distrusting every structure around you, being handed a genre that explicitly says “The thing you love will be used to crush you, and the systems above you are broken by design” wasn’t scary - it was cathartic. It was absolute catnip for me. For most kids, media sold a naive promise: study hard, trust the adults, and technology will build a clean, bright utopia. Cyberpunk offered zero comfort, and that’s why I trusted it. It validated the cynicism I was already feeling. It acknowledged that the future wasn’t going to be shiny silver suits and flying cars for everyone; it was going to be high-tech tools welded together by desperate, angry people in the shadows just trying to hold onto their autonomy.

It didn’t create my worldview; it just handed me the blueprints.

It played in the background for much of my life; I went on to discover heavy metal, girls, beer, and weed. I grew out my hair, scraped by in my GCSEs, ended up doing a vocational course in sixth form. I ended up in one uni, flunked, spent a year as a bouncer, went to a second uni, lockdown hit. I have told this story countless times, but I hated my life, I hated the path I was on, and decided to use lockdown to find something other than economics to base my life and career around. It was the perfect microcosm - politically, the world was burning down, and I had just rediscovered technology.

I have never quite explained what it was that made me turn to libertarianism, mainly because it is a politically charged topic. Lo and behold, I am going to bury it in here - It was CHAZ. The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone was an occupation protest and self-declared autonomous zone in the Capitol Hill neighbourhood of Seattle, Washington. The zone, originally covering two intersections at the corners of Cal Anderson Park and the roads leading up to them, was established on June 8, 2020, by people protesting the May 2020 manslaughter of George Floyd. The zone was cleared of occupants by police on July 1, 2020. It took 23 days for the police to go in and clear them out. In the meantime, people’s homes, businesses, and livelihoods were torn apart. It was this exact thing that radicalised me and made me understand why America had the Second Amendment, and is a large reason why I am now pro-gun. It is a privileged position for us in the Western world to be able to say “the police take care of us”, but that exact scenario said, “sometimes things will get so bad the police will leave you to fend for yourself”.

Another thing that most people do not know about me is that while in university, I was an ardent communist (technically I was a neo-Marxist, but this does not matter). I was even treasurer of the Marxist society in one of my universities, as ironic as that position sounds. I had, and still have, a deep mistrust of private business entities, and thought companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc. were the devil incarnate. This was underscored by several other events

• Edward Snowden’s leaks
• My discovering a YouTube channel called The Hated One
• My realising that most news media is owned by the same few people and is basically controlled by capitalism itself
• Studying the 09 crash and realising that some institutions are so strategically large they are deemed “too big to fail”.

The list goes on and on and on.

The difference between then and now is Marxists think the solution is bigger government - I don’t know what the solution is, but I know it isn’t more government. Looking back, the irony isn’t lost on me. I went from believing the solution to corporate dominance was a bigger, more powerful state to realising that state power and corporate power are just two sides of the same coin. Neither is coming to save you. One wants to monetise your attention; the other wants to manage your compliance.

A lot of people talk about “living in a cyberpunk dystopia” - We’re in one.

Grab your iron

Death Athletic is a documentary that follows Cody Wilson, the figurehead of the 3D-printed gun movement. Cody says something in the documentary, “The only philosophically coherent position is revolt”.

Within the cyberpunk genre, there are no good guys and bad guys; you have corporations and people trying to survive. There is no morally coherent position during survival; there is doing what it takes to make it to the next day. Notice how in almost all Cyberpunk media, it is a group of people living on the edge of society breaking the rules so they can have a stable future.

• Alien Romulus has a group of teenagers breaking into a Weyland-Yutani space station to steal batteries in order to escape to non-corpo-controlled sectors.
• Cyberpunk 2023 sees the attack on Arasaka Tower, each member of the siege there for their own reasons - no overarching manifesto.
• Blade Runner sees the replicants just trying to prolong their life and live normally.

There are no stories of conquest or honour; they are stories of desperation.

Most people get into self-hosting because they don’t want to pay for streaming services. Most people work jobs they hate to pay for an apartment they can barely afford. Most people begin caring about privacy because they know the petabytes of data they produce might one day be used to manipulate them. These actions are not as dramatic as blowing up a corporate headquarters, but they are cut from the same cloth.

The biggest lie you will ever be told is that actions have consequences. The brutal reality of the situation is that getting caught has consequences, and in a world where my dad’s car can be stolen on plain CCTV, and the police do nothing about it, why should anyone care about me pirating the entirety of Dexter? This is not me advocating for outright unruliness; it is me urging you to see the world for what it is. The mantra of the cyberpunk genre is that survival is not pretty, and people must become monsters to do so. I have often fallen back on a quote, that being “to be a well-adjusted person in a sick society is not a sign of mental wellness” (Note: This quote is widely attributed to Jiddu Krishnamurti). When the social contract is already broken at the top, following it to the letter at the bottom does not make you noble - it makes you a sucker.

In classic cyberpunk media, from Gibson’s Neuromancer to Blade Runner and Cyberpunk 2077, violence isn’t portrayed as heroic, honourable, or glorious. It is an industrial byproduct. When corporations control the rule of law, the economy, and even the physical air you breathe, traditional avenues of appeal don’t exist. Violence becomes the baseline currency for self-preservation. Case in point: Case in Neuromancer isn’t pulling off high-stakes hacks out of ideological purity or a desire to free humanity; he’s trying to repair his damaged nervous system so he doesn’t end up dead in a Chiba City gutter. The replicants in Blade Runner aren’t waging a war of conquest; they’re hunting for a few more years of life with a gun in hand because their creators built them with an expiration date.

Even outside strict cyberpunk, stories like Alien hammer home this exact reality. When the Weyland-Yutani corporation treats human crews as expendable bio-harvesting assets, non-violent negotiation is off the table. The crew isn’t fighting the Xenomorph or the corporate androids for glory - they’re blowing up ships, welding doors shut, and racking shotguns just to draw another breath. Violence in these worlds isn’t a political choice or a moral failing; it’s the ultimate, desperate mechanism of friction when an omnipotent entity tries to erase your autonomy.

What makes these stories hit so hard today is that our modern world is quietly adopting the same underlying mechanics, even if the violence looks different. The modern megacorporation doesn’t send armed mercenaries to your front door to break your knees; it uses automated systems, arbitrary price-gouging, algorithmic manipulation, and legal fine print to slowly grind down your ability to survive independently. The violence of our era is systemic, quiet, and frictionless-until the pressure builds up so high that the human element snaps. What makes it hit harder for those in the know is that the idea of corporations breaking down your door and killing you is not that far-fetched- I strongly encourage anyone brave enough to look up what shady shit Nestle has done.

When people reach their breaking point in a system designed to extract everything from them, the response inevitably turns raw. Whether it’s physical unrest in the streets when local infrastructure fails, or digital sabotage against corporate platforms, the instinct is identical: when the system denies you a peaceful path to security, people will dismantle the rules to secure it themselves. You don’t need a grand manifesto to justify pushing back. You just need the basic realisation that when a machine is built to consume you, fighting back is the only logical response.

A Drink at the Afterlife

Ten years ago, the ongoing motto of the cyberpunk fanbase was “Cyberpunk is not just Blade Runner” - This has taken a new shape now, with the community trying its best to simultaneously accept that CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 as a masterpiece, and wishing its fanbase would shut up about it, as it is not the only thing in the genre. Words cannot describe what I would not give up to play that game for the first time again, and even years on I find myself loading up one more playthrough, using it as an escape.

Cyberpunk 2077 follows V, a mercenary who gets baited into a career-defining gig that would thrust him (or her) into being a Night City Legend. The best-laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley, and V ends up with the captured psyche of Johnny Silverhand slowly eating away at his mind - taking it over neuron by neuron. What follows is canonically two to three weeks of V running rampant across Night City trying to find any cure. There are nine possible endings, all shown in the diagram below.

There are no happy endings in the game, no happy endings in Night City, and no happy endings in cyberpunk as a genre.

Look at that chart. Map every branch, trace every decision tree down to its absolute extreme, and the destination never changes. You either end up dead, uploaded to corporate storage, exiled past the Blackwall, or stripped of the very cyberware and agency that allowed you to survive Night City in the first place. Even the DLC’s coveted “cure” ending, the one where V technically survives, feels like a sick joke. You live, but you’re left a powerless, unremarkable face in a crowd of millions, completely vulnerable to the next street thug with a cheap iron. In Night City, survival at the cost of your autonomy isn’t a victory; it’s just slow-motion decay.

This is where Cyberpunk 2077 captures the soul of the genre better than almost any piece of modern fiction. The game tricks you into thinking you’re playing a classic power fantasy where enough street cred, high-tier chrome, and firepower will eventually let you rewrite the rules. But Night City isn’t a playground to be conquered - it’s a meat grinder designed to extract value from you until there’s nothing left. The Afterlife bar sums up the entire economic model of the city: you don’t get a drink named after you for winning; you get a drink named after you for dying in a spectacle big enough to entertain the next generation of suckers.

However, among these endings lies one outlier, and you will not directly appreciate it from the flow chart. This ending looks the same as the rest, and leads to the same outcome for V as the rest. The Star.

In the Star ending, V is “cured” by Alt - stripping Johnny away and leaving them months to live due to the neurological damage. Yet it is different in every way, because in this ending you leave Night City with the Nomad clan you befriended to search for a cure. It is the only ending that leaves a modicum of hope. I have a theory why the further you get into tech, the closer you get to leaving society behind to start a farm. It is because you reach a point where you realise the only way to win is to stop playing. By leaving Night City, V stands a chance - and that is him stopping playing. Leaving Night City is the ultimate act of liberation. In a rigged game, true victory isn’t beating the house; it’s walking out of the casino entirely.

This idea that true absolution comes from stepping off the grid entirely isn’t unique to V and the Aldecaldos. It runs through the marrow of the entire cyberpunk genre. Look at Rick Deckard and Rachael at the end of the original Blade Runner. They don’t stay in the smog-choked, corporate-dominated metropolis to start a revolution against the Tyrell Corporation. They pack up, get into a spinner, and head for the mountains. In Gibson’s Count Zero, characters who survive the digital meat grinder often seek solace in isolation, away from the hyper-connected noise of the Sprawl.

The tragic illusion that the genre repeatedly exposes is the myth of the “noble fight” from within. You cannot negotiate with a system that views you solely as fuel for its engine, and you cannot dismantle a monolith using the very tools, markets, and frameworks it owns. Trying to reform or fight the corporate machine on its own turf just feeds it more attention, data, and conflict to monetise. We see this exact same dynamic playing out in the real world today. The growing movement toward off-grid living, homesteading, self-hosting personal infrastructure, and stepping away from centralised digital platforms stems from the exact same realisation V reaches in the badlands. People are coming to understand that no amount of petitioning, consumer choice, or policy tweaking will fix a system designed from the ground up to extract their focus, labour, and autonomy. This slowly begins to make the radical among us question whether Ted Kaczynski was right.

When tech workers who built the modern web spend their weekends building off-grid solar setups, growing their own food, and air-gapping their personal systems, they aren’t being hypocritical - they’re executing their own version of The Star ending. They’ve seen the blueprint from the inside, recognised the trajectory, and decided that the only philosophically sound move left is to stop playing.

Absolution in a cyberpunk reality isn’t a grandiose victory over the megacorps. It’s the quiet, defiant act of severing the cord, choosing your own tribe, and reclaiming your right to exist outside the machine.

Why CyberPunk

Everyone thinks this about themself, but I am an incredibly complicated person. In the first season of Luther, at one point they say something akin to “Maybe if he read a different book at some point he would be a completely different person”. My politics, personal philosophy, and relationship with wider society do not fit cleanly into one binary archetype. However… I also might equally be a delusion of self-importance.

In many ways, my infatuation with cyberpunk as a genre may just be a macabre mirror to that of a Disney adult. Perhaps me seeing disturbing parallels between the dystopian worlds of these universes is confirmation bias, and maybe I’m just reading too much into a genre designed to look cool under neon lights and rain.

Perhaps naming my servers, networks, and virtual machines after entities from Night City is just my version of a Disney adult wearing Mickey ears at the theme park. Maybe my deep-seated distrust of central authority, my shift toward digital self-reliance, and my obsession with data sovereignty are just elaborate coping mechanisms - a way to manufacture meaning out of a world that often feels indifferent, noisy, and exhausting.

If it is confirmation bias, it’s a damn convincing one.

When you look at the trajectory of modern life, where every device is a sensor, every platform is a landlord, every interaction is monetised, and traditional institutions offer less protection by the day, the warnings of Gibson, Scott, and Pondsmith stop reading like speculative fiction and start reading like operational manuals. Whether Cyberpunk shaped my worldview or simply handed me the vocabulary to describe a cynical intuition I had as a seven-year-old behind a school coat rack doesn’t really matter anymore. The reality is the same.

I don’t hold onto this genre because it offers a clean solution or a utopian vision of the future. I hold onto it because it tells the brutal, uncomfortable truth: no grand institution is coming to save you, the machine is built to consume, and your autonomy is something you have to carve out for yourself every single day.

Call it edge, call it cynicism, or call it a delusion of self-importance. At the end of the day, when I boot up a machine, route my own traffic, or sit back to watch the rain slide down a neon-lit alley, it’s a reminder of who I am, what I value, and why I refuse to stop playing on my own terms.

gpg --keyserver hkps://keys.openpgp.org \
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curl -fsSL 'https://blog.eddiequinn.xyz/sigs/posts/why-cyberpunk.txt' \
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