My cyberpunk city, my cyberpunk world

Noah Smith: “People will point you to Neuromancer, or Snow Crash, or Ghost in the Shell, or even The Matrix, but none of these, or any other seminal works, fully captured the gestalt in the way that, say, Lord of the Rings defined epic fantasy. Cyberpunk assembled itself in our minds, a vision composed half of a technological and social future we felt was coming, and half of the adventures we imagined ourselves having in that future. […] We felt this future coming; we didn’t need prophets to tell us about it. […] The canonical work of cyberpunk, the most perfect aggregation of the genre’s memes, is not even a single work; it’s a fictional universe that began as a tabletop role-playing game created by the American Mike Pondsmith in the 80s, became a Polish-made video game in 2020, and then became a joint Japanese-Polish animated TV series in 2022.”

Brad DeLong: “This is the world of unbelievable and strange information technologies and extraordinary, unequal wealth, coupled with social dysfunction, and with a great many people straining their every nerve and muscle to figure out how to misinformed people and hack their brains. I do confess I did not think a major reason for the bad actors to do what they do would be ‘to sell ads’.”