I often see the opinion that we're living in a cyberpunk dystopia right now and I'm like, no, culturally, we're still living in the 70s-90s but with better phones and basic internet. All the economic and environmental issues were there already.

Cyberpunk is actually optimistic in how technology upends that puritanical, nationalistic culture by making bodies and borders fluid and largely irrelevant. That's the "punk" part. You can update the aesthetic but we've never caught up to that promise or potential.

Most of us can't even imagine that culture, even the ones making cyberpunk games, who just regurgitate the shittiness of modern culture upon this imagined future. But oppression, inequality, surveillance, and the sense of nature collapsing are not new and predate cyberpunk.

Cyberpunk never well engaged with its own premise but it's hardly irrelevant and to be honest, this opinion smacks of cis white people experiencing for the first time a small part of the surveillance and oppression others have always experienced.