Cyberpunk 2077 Is Real Life Now, Basically

If the cyberpunk genre was meant to warn us away from a capitalistic, dystopian future hellscape, what purpose does it serve when that hellscape is already here? Cyberpunk 2077 is arguably one of the most mainstream contemporary examples of the genre from which it takes its name, and I remember a lot of discussion and writing about the game when it launched in 2020, arguing that the dystopia it depicts had already arrived. When the game first launched, I lived in a Bible Belt podunk and my time in big cities had been pretty limited, but although I now live in New York City, I don’t even have to look out my window to see signs that the world CD Projekt Red and R. Talsorian Games created is already here. It’s usually all over the news cycle, inescapable in online headlines and my social media feeds.

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Cyberpunk 2077 swings back and forth on the pendulum from “thoughtful meditation on what it means to be human in a depersonalizing corporate hellscape” to “satire that occasionally feels so comically exaggerated, it’s like a Borderlands gag.” But the news is somehow getting stupider by the day, as C-suite executives and tech megalomaniacs with cult followings are doing everything in their power to depersonalize the human experience. We’re pretty much there, right?

We have AI avatar robots walking the streets of cities like Austin and West Hollywood spouting memes at passersby, advertisements for the food we put in our bodies that spend more space boldly claiming that it’s AI-curated than they do on images of the product itself, and social media platforms that were ostensibly built to bring people together but are now flooded with misinformation and horny waifu companions.

Each of these sounds like the innocuous beginning of a Cyberpunk sidequest that winds up having some dark, twisty revelations before all is said and done, but the dystopian threat of all of this nonsense is real, and it’s already having dire consequences. A pilotable robot on the streets of West Hollywood starts out as a walking shitpost, then ends up being adapted into a mobile surveillance tool by a police department operating under a corrupt administration. The wine we drink is being curated by something that can’t taste it, and eventually, the food we eat is “optimized” by a program, and we just consume it like fuel. Art is already treated this way with manufactured AI movies, music, video games, and books all being churned out as capital C “Content” to be easily produced and force-fed to an audience in need of a distraction, and companies like Netflix see this as an absolute win. We’re already seeing the devastating effects of people using programs as a replacement for human connection. People who have become obsessed with using ChatGPT as a substitute for friendship and romance with human beings have been committed for paranoia and delusions in what people are calling “ChatGPT psychosis.” There’s literally an entire quest line in Cyberpunk about people losing their minds due to the damaging effects of the world’s cybernetic implants.

If Cyberpunk 2077 were hopeless about life in such a landscape, if it weren’t filled to the brim with stories of people holding onto their humanity and connections with others with a vise-like grip powerful enough to break the chains of corporate oppression, playing it these days might hit too close to home. The world is getting dumber, and since the perpetuators of all this stupid shit are the ones in power, it’s growing harder to laugh at any of it, no matter how comically stupid it might be, because it’s impossible to ignore how it could all usher us into a slop-filled world where every expression of humanity is coded into an algorithm and turned into a program for someone else’s benefit. The dystopia of Night City has gone from speculative fiction to reality, and we didn’t even have to wait until 2077 to get there.