I want the Trigger ending to Cyperpunk Edgerunners where it's revealed that cyberpsychosis is a corpo plot to keep the workers/humanity down and you can defeat it by going beyond the impossible and kicking reason to the curb.
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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I probably should have elaborated a bit more: Pondsmith doesn't have a terrible take, and his take now is better than the older cyberpunk themes of machinery and change literally being innately corrupting things, but I still think it centers the very presence of cyberware as something that's dangerous in and of itself. He acknowledges the social issues, but still sort of frames it as more like having good personal circumstances protects someone from the consequences of having cyberware and having bad personal circumstances makes the risk of cyberware worse, when the cyberware should be tangential to the whole process: it is the horror of the setting and the trauma characters suffer that drives them to the edge, and the cyberware just goes along for the ride and makes them more dangerous if they start lashing out (or causes problems of its own that can be boiled down to the social issue of poor healthcare access).
Semi-off-topic, and this obviously isn't Pondsmith's intent, but this has me thinking of cyberware as a metaphor for capitalism. Capitalism has reshaped or destroyed many social bonds, breaking down communities to a series of untethered individuals, free from distractions and therefore able to be worked longer and harder. Cyberpunk takes this alienation to the next level: even breaking down to the individual is not enough, and they must be further divided down to their constituent parts, which will be replaced with more "useful" pieces.
I suppose this is all fairly fundamental to the genre but it's telling that I've never thought of it on these terms until now.