Launching The Cyberpunk Wiki

We are hurtling toward multiple dystopic scenarios that fiction has warned us about.

Corporate takeover of governance has begun in earnest as special interest groups have purchased their way to the highest halls of power in the US, Europe and Asia. Climate disaster threatens an increasingly large swathe of our cities with flooding, deadly heatwaves and violent storms. Artificial intelligence, algorithmic recommendations for content and government and corporate psychological operations are uniquitous on our phones, our TV screens, billboards, text messages, email inboxes and more.

Public/private partnerships on warfighting, surveillance, censorship and artificial intelligence research are blurring the lines of what really is the private and public sector. For the average person, in many respects, they’re two sides of the same coin. Militech as a singular corporation doesn’t exist, but it exists in spirit in the form of Anduril, Palantir, Raytheon, BAH and the rest of the DIB. Arasaka doesn’t exist as a singular company, but one doesn’t have to squint too hard to see the makings of the tech monopoly coming.

It seems like the Cyberpunk Dystopia is coming. Hell, it seems like it’s already here.

But where the hell are the punks?

There is no shortage of builders. There is the “maker” community, an endless stream of “B2B SaaS entrepreneurs” and plenty of people whose goal is, ultimately, to be a corpo. Where are the punks fighting the system? Where are the black markets, the fixers, the chrome, the tech we can use to fight back?

I’m not talking about aesthetics, though that is explicitly lacking as well. The closest thing we’ve gotten to anything close to cyberpunk aesthetics outside of Asia is a low-quality truck.

We got GLP’s, which frankly are as close to a cyberpunk drug as we’ve gotten in a while, but even those are being produced by a massive corporation for baffling profits. Aesthetically, it’s fairly cyberpunk, but not exactly punk.

There are precious few examples of the punk side of cyberpunk. There are very few people genuinely building a more decentralized society. There are very few people trying to build for the chooms at the bottom rungs of society. There are very few people trying to address the power disparity between the upper 5% and the lower 95% by giving more power to the latter to directly confront the former.

There are some builders that are exceptions to the rule. There are others that live in a confusing adjacent state. There are projects that have been started and abandoned. There are communities living in obscurity, either by choice or because they haven’t gotten the attention they deserve.

The Cyberpunk Wiki is for highlighting these projects, proposing others, creating a community around building for the future we’re facing and addressing some of the needs that we have now or will have soon.

Start here: The Cyberpunk Wiki.