Cyberpunk isn’t just about dystopian futures—it’s about the failure of successive faith based systems, each of which once promised order, progress, or salvation but collapsed under their own contradictions. The genre layers these failures, showing societies where techno-optimism, corporate paternalism, state control, and even countercultural resistance have all failed to create stability.
Thats why Solarpunk and similar optimistic sci-fi strains struggle to gain traction because they assume a level of societal self-correction that feels increasingly implausible. The weight of history suggests that institutions—whether state, corporate, or ideological—rarely self-reform in a meaningful way. Instead, they tend to calcify, collapse, or get subsumed into new, equally flawed structures layering over each other, creating a world where belief systems persist past their usefulness, unable to dissolve yet incapable of stabilizing 1 reply
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We devoured the futures that might have led to a more stable and exploratory civilization—ones envisioned by Clarke, the Strugatskys, or Stanislav Lem—because they required long-term commitment to intellectual rigor, curiosity, and self-correction. Instead, we’ve regressed to faith-based ideologies that co-opt technology, not as a tool for discovery, but as a means to hasten predetermined ideological endgames.
Whether it’s techno-utopians believing AI will be the Second Coming, reactionaries pushing for a return to some imagined golden age, or political movements treating ideology as destiny, it all points to the same thing: we’re leveraging technology not to build the future but to confirm beliefs about it. 1 reply
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