The strawman visage of the greedy *individual capitalist* is not the good cyberpunk anti-capitalist critique you think it is https://twitter.com/ClassyKernel/status/1336543491577540608

The horror of neoliberal capitalism is in the vast commodification of every facet of living, in the machines which reduce us to numbers and freeze any semblance of freedom & choice, in the merging of state and private interests & destabilization of any public support structures

It's in the ruthless and targeted efficiency of systems which are designed to oppress & corral the working classes, it's those *systems* doing massive harm for the sake of their own existence & for the class of owners and investors and politicians who profit from their existence

A good cyberpunk game means stripping agency from the player, or at the very least in stripping agency from their ability to individually affect the world, bc that's what neoliberalism does. As soon as any individual could start making waves, they're recuperated and neutered

But clearly that's antithetical to years of power fantasy game design.

I mean, I guess you could attain the power fantasy of being recuperated into capitalist systems of oppression, but that would require critique on the basis of worker exploitation, which is never happening lol

Like, fundamentally cyberpunk 2077 could never portray the precarity of existence a trans person faces as they navigate a world dead set on exploiting them for their labor only to then present them with 2 corporatized HRT options which will both inevitably enrich their exploiters

And it could never explore the intersections of race classes and worker classes, or the propaganda systems which generate consent/discontent and neuter class consciousness among the workers. To do so would be a self call out.

& ignoring all of that is ignoring cyberpunk's history as a genre of reagan-era fears of neoliberalism. It's ignoring today's world as one which is arguably many times more mundanely horrifying and depressing than the aesthetic, sci fi power fantasy that cdpr is selling.