Because it's been strip mined to a nostalgic, retro aesthetic. In 2021 people at forefront of design & urban futurism should stop recycling Ridley Scott's 1980s and catch up to Gulf Futurism, Sino Futurism, Afro Futurism, AND contemporary sociopolitical ills as the OG genre did. https://twitter.com/SFXmagazine/status/1109159817464238082

They're selling kids who have video editing powers that Francis Ford Coppola never had on their telephones and know Korean lyrics in pop music the same old grimdark holograms instead of like, how Neuromancer gave Rastafarians a space station in 1984.

Sadly one of the most exhilarating sci-fi stories I've read in years that reminded me of mainlining OG cyberpunk was Isabel Fall's "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter", which got the punk to cyber ratio so unsettlingly dead on and was contemporary as fuck.

To me the natural evoution of cyberpunk isn't corporate mercenaries it's how a Vietnamese house track became a global smash hit thanks to an anime gif and tiktok dances and I'm still struggling to learn how Vietnamese house music has blown up worldwide. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/hai-phut-hơn

A "cyberpunk" novel in 2021: mixed race queer Gen Z kid from the U.S. whose granddad fought in the Vietnam war going to a mostly COVID free Saigon tasked by a horrible startup to find someone not famous making killer beats on soundcloud to lock down the rights to use them in ads.

This is pretty much how cyberpunk ended up manifesting in reality, not as advertised https://twitter.com/thecoopertom/status/1325710953305026560

I will spar with people who say The Matrix isn’t cyberpunk. It may have very well been the most mainstream pop culture manifestation of it (1999), and I’d throw down one of its greatest contributions was smuggling queer theory & trans allegory into a sci-fi Kung fu action movie.

Alright time to kill this thread by asking for a genre that doesn’t exist yet....

K-pop-punk

One final theory: original strain of Cyberpunk came full circle when Mariya Takeuchi’s bittersweet, Japanese bubble economy city pop masterpiece Plastic Love (from Nov 1984) became a monster hit in 2018 partially thanks to a recommendation algorithm https://pages.vassar.edu/musicalurbanism/2019/06/05/the-curious-case-of-mariya-takeuchis-plastic-love-guest-blog-by-thomas-calkins/