The blue light flickers to green, showing I've eaten below my regulation level of fat and sugar. Thank fuck for that, I can't take another visit from the Doctors. The last examination hurt so much I couldn't sleep.
I hear the dusty modem connect to the Authority's servers, where it sends my data and calculates the price of my piss. It seems it's a good one today - it's given me enough credits to buy a shot of orange juice. Must be Chloe's cooking.
The goons take the guy in the cubicle next to me. Too much nicotine.
Seems I pissed slower than usual today as I'm seeing the prostate transplant advert. I remind myself to drink more water.
Personally I'm not a fan of this term "Neonliberal" because neon lighting doesn't really have anything to do with cyberpunk. The neon lighting aesthetic is a retro 80s thing, only indirectly related to the cyberpunk genre by way of dated cyberpunk media from the 80s. Cyberpunk media made today shouldn't feature neon lighting, it should have LED lighting. Focus on neon is missing the point of cyberpunk, it reduces cyberpunk to little more than a retro aesthetic.
We're currently between coherent future aesthetics in our society. The "Apple store minimalism" trend is in decline, and there isn't really a good candidate to take its place. Ironically, this leads to people going retro for their futurism. Personally, I'm holding out for a Art Deco revival, but the 80's neon definitely has its charms.
Neon aesthetics were appropriate in these because of technological context in which these were created. Neon signage was not yet an anachronism in the 80s. I don't blame sci-fi writers of the past for failing to predict future technology, but at the same time I find it hard to take deliberately anachronistic sci-fi seriously.
It's analogous to the difference between genuine Victorian science fiction (e.g. Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, etc) and modern steampunk media set in the Victorian era. Modern steampunk emulates the style and feel of Victorian science fiction, but I think that makes it a different genre. Victorian science fiction wasn't written to be anachronistic but steampunk is, so they're different genres.
> Cyberpunk 2077
I haven't played it so I can't really judge it, but I can say that what little I've seen hasn't gotten me excited.
The way Cyberpunk 2077 adapted Cyberpunk 2020 made me realize that we've moved the near future 50 years farther off, but we're still stuck in the same futurism fantasy of the 70s/80s.
...
I guess I knew that already, but this made me realize it in a new way :)
It’s “cyberpunk” in that it would fit in a world of cyberpunk fiction.
Maybe some punk can hack them as a practical joke.