I have a lot of thoughts about cyberpunk as a genre but what sealed it for me was watching Altered Carbon and being struck once again by how stunningly unimaginative most modern cyberpunk is with regards to social structure, gender roles and race.

I have a LOT of issues but one thing that recurs is that almost all cyberpunk envisions a future in which the sex industry is configured in the exact same way it is now - with women serving men exclusively. And the notion of a queer sex industry barely exists at all.

if your vision of the future does not assume that women will consume sex in the same way men do, you're not thinking hard enough. Cyberpunk aesthetics which rely on stripclubs full of writhing women and nary a naked man in sight are lazy as hell.

I enjoy cyberpunk but you come to a point where you're so oversaturated with a genre steeped in regressive cisheteronormative gender politics and default-whiteness with Asian window-dressing DESPITE its infinite transhumanist capabilities that all you can do is yawn.

in a world where body modification is the norm the only hint of transness is weird fetishisation. in a world where a human being can be 80% cyborg, queer people are still deviant. in a world of sexual hedonism women still exist only to serve and never consume. It's lazy.

western cyberpunk so often posits a future which *looks* Asian but *feels* like America, because that's nice and safe - all of the aesthetic with none of the cultural shift. And when you realise this you understand that so much cyberpunk is hollow all the way to the core.

and it's frustrating because I do believe cyberpunk HAS the potential to tell these stories. It's a perfect environment to explore queerness and sex and class and race and all the things it instead homogenises. I would love to read more cyberpunk that explores these themes.

my point isn't 'cyberpunk bad!' it's that that too many people view it as a cool tropey aesthetic rather than a storytelling framework which opens us to the possibility of radical societal and personal change, which is what it *ought* to be in my view