Cyberpunk called the chrome future; reality shipped it with terms of service 📜

Four decades after cyberpunk fiction imagined a world of cyberspace cowboys, hacker outlaws, and globe-spanning corporations, the technologies it foreshadowed have arrived through a handful of firms rather than the street-level renegades who popularized the genre. Brain-computer interfaces such as Neuralink, AI-powered smart glasses, and increasingly sophisticated robotic prosthetics are bringing science fiction's chrome-plated future into the real world, while companies including OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google now shape how billions of people communicate, work, and interact with artificial intelligence.

The cyberpunk genre, whose name fuses cutting-edge technology with the anti-establishment ethos of punk, was popularized by author Bruce Sterling's "high tech, low life" framing and produced landmark works including William Gibson's Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, Ready Player One, and Cyberpunk 2077, the last of which featured corporations such as Arasaka and Militech wielding power comparable to nation-states. To the early internet pioneers of the late 1980s and 1990s, those stories served less as dystopian warnings than as blueprints for the technological future.

Ken Goffman, better known as R.U. Sirius, co-founder of Mondo 2000 and co-author of the Cyberpunk Handbook, described the era as defined by experimentation and optimism. "All that dark stuff was very much in Mondo as well, but it all kind of felt like play," Goffman told Decrypt. "If dystopia was going to come, it was something happening in our heads at that point that we could be with and laugh about." He added that the actual future has proven far less cinematic. "Even now some people think an apocalypse will be exciting like 'Mad Max,' but what it really is, is very boring and banal."

Like many early internet pioneers, Goffman initially believed personal computers and networking technologies would redistribute power away from established institutions. "We kind of felt like they were a little bit benign," Goffman said. "They were handing us this power, and we were going to mess with it — maybe even overthrow them, overthrow the government, overthrow everything." Instead, many of the companies building those technologies became some of the world's most powerful institutions. "That was one of the errors, I think, maybe in our thinking—that it wasn't just going to get nastier."

Goffman also watched the internet lose one of its defining early characteristics: anonymity, a shift he tied directly to the rise of large platforms. As cyberpunk's imagined future of rogue artificial intelligence, immersive virtual realities, and corporate governance continues to materialize, the genre's original vision of decentralized, countercultural power has largely been overtaken by the very institutions it once warned against.