In 2019, The Baffler ran an article with the title “Cyberpunk is Dead.”

The premise of the piece was the upcoming launch of Cyberpunk 2077, one of the most hotly anticipated (and overhyped) video games of all time. Promotion for the game included appearances from Keanu Reeves at a major gaming conference, and the revelation that he would be play a primary character in the game (further bridging the world between big budget gaming and Hollywood).

The author of The Baffler piece, John Semley, speculated that—despite the hype and hysteria around 2077—the genre was on the way out.

“Cyberpunk 2077 looked forward by reflecting back,” he wrote, “conjuring its tech-noir scenario from the nostalgic ephemera of cyberpunk futures past.” It was part of the trend of 1980s nostalgia, not something especially pertinent or relevant to the present. It contained the familiar trappings of that decade—a sense of libertarian threat to the government in the form of Reaganomics, a kind of vaguely “yellow peril” anxiety about Japan’s influence on and superiority over American business, and an old vision of computing where everything was still hardwired into gigantic machines and 3 megabytes of stolen RAM could fetch a hefty price on the black market.

William Gibson, too, was cool on 2077. The author of Neuromancer, the 1984 book that largely solidified cyberpunk as a literary genre, remarked that 2077 looked like Grand Theft Auto but “skinned-over with generic 80s retro-future.” He wasn’t that interested, despite coming up with much of the lingo that the game uses himself (flatline, chrome, matrix, cyberspace, etc.). This isn’t uncommon. Critics and authors have been declaring cyberpunk dead since the late 80s, the decade in which it came into being.

For Semley, cyberpunk was stuck in a timewarp. His critique got extra cachet when, in late 2020, Cyberpunk 2077 subsequently endured one of the worst launches in video game history. Maybe the genre is dead. Had cyberpunk truthfully sunk into nothing more than trotting out old arguments against Reaganomics, and putting them into the mouths of street kids who emblemize the “high-tech, low-life” style of the genre?

Cyberpunk and the Soul

The subsequent resurrection of Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the most interesting stories in gaming history. Few games have had a worse launch, and those that did (other than maybe No Man’s Sky) never rebounded quite like it did. Its reputation is now practically golden. An expansion called Phantom Liberty, featuring Idris Elba, was released to great acclaim in 2023.

Cyberpunk, it seems, won’t go away. It did not, in fact, die.

So, what is it that keeps drawing us to this genre? It is more, I believe, than simply the distinct aesthetic.

The neon lights, the bright cityscapes, the grungy vibe of the technology with its body modification and mechanical biology—this is all what’s most arresting about cyberpunk, of course. But the genre is far more than that. It reflects, instead, a deep-seated and long-standing anxiety that modern people feel—that our humanity is at stake, that our souls are endangered, that we are being slowly turned into machines.

All of the classic cyberpunk works, whether they are the western standard-bearers like Neuromancer, Blade Runner, Snow Crash, and Cyberpunk 2077 (the video game is Polish but the tabletop game it is based on is American) or Japanese animated classics like Akira and Ghost in the Shell, reflect this anxiety. The story is always about the beleaguered and blighted lower class denizens of an all-too-mechanized world struggling to make do as everything around them is slowly consumed by the megamachine. How long can they hold out against this omnipresent force of dehumanization?

Cyberpunk’s answer is usually bleak. It’s a genre that focuses on the war between humanity and machine, but after that war was already won by the machines. The Butlerian Jihad either failed or never happened. You must submit to your new overlords and eke out an existence among them. Or, worse yet, you must become them.

It is this, far more than the neon advertising and the stylistic recreations of Times Square or Akihabara, that constitutes the true essence of cyberpunk. The visuals are, of course, what gave the genre its “cool factor.” But they are ephemeral. What remains is the social anxiety and prophetic ululations about technological dehumanization. Far from going out of style, this is as relevant now as it has ever been. We are living, after all, in Lewis Mumford’s nightmare world—which looks, in the end, much like a cyberpunk dystopia. It is a world in which human life and the human soul are increasingly imperiled.

Blade Runner: Did You Ever Take That Test Yourself?

Blade Runner came out in 1982, and it was a commercial flop before becoming a cult hit.

The movie was strange and slow, a noir film where you knew who the killers were the whole time. It not only crystalized the visual style of cyberpunk, but also married it to the hard-boiled noir stories that came out of Los Angeles in the 1930s and 40s. It took noir’s staples—the moody cynicism of Philip Marlowe, the corrupt wealthy and powerful in the megacity of Los Angeles, the weary narrative voice-over—and fast-forwarded them to the near-future.

The premise is that Rick Deckard, played by Harrison Ford, is a blade runner, a sort of mix of a private detective, professional hitman, and HR rep who searches for replicants (androids) and “retires” them when they have broken the law—specifically if they have fled from their slavery on other worlds and escaped to Earth, where they are illegal. In the course of the film, Deckard hunts down a group of replicants led by Roy Batty who are trying to prolong their lives past their built-in expiration date of four years.

Deckard is an odd protagonist, a rather slow-witted detective and a poor fighter—perpetually getting beat up made him seem more like Jim Rockford than Sam Spade. It is Roy who is the true hero, living and dying to realize his humanity, immortalized in his final words as his memories of the things he’s seen are lost in time, “like tears in rain.”

In the years since, there’s been a long debate about whether or not Deckard is himself a replicant. But this, I think, misses the far more interesting question—whether Deckard was ever human at all.

When Deckard runs the Voight-Kampff test on Rachael (who is unknowingly a replicant), he remarks, “How can it not know what it is?”

This is the central premise to cyberpunk, because we are in this situation. We, too, are living, working, and dying as machines, but we don’t know what we are. We’ve been duped with rosy nostalgia (false memories?) and cynical advertising (false images?) to believe we’re one thing when we’re really another. We’ve all been slotted into Lewis Mumford’s megamachine, all part of a vast interlocking mechanical collective where all the gears and cogs are organic—they are us. We are the machines, the replicants, the robots, who only appear human. Or, in a word, skinjobs—the slur people use for replicants.

When Tyrell says that the motto of his corporation, which builds the replicants, is “more human than human,” perhaps this is what he has in mind. Something that looks, talks, and acts human, but which is in fact a perfectly pliant and reproducible machine servant—the perfect worker. “I’m not in the business,” says Rachael, “I am the business.”

(Robot, by the way, comes from Karel Čapek’s play Rossum’s Universal Robots, it is the only Czech loan-word in all languages—it comes from robota, which means serf labor or drudgery).

Deckard is at his most robotic when he tracks down Zhora. For one, he’s been strongarmed into doing this by the police chief; Deckard, like all good workers, seems to have little agency or choice. And then when he finally finds Zhora (who is moonlighting as an exotic dancer with the biblical alias Salome), Deckard switches into his disguise—a sniveling bureaucrat from “The Confidential Committee on Moral Abuses” with a high-pitched, nasally voice, who has come to investigate crimes against sex workers. Zhora simply laughs at his inane business-speak.

This is Deckard not only at his most adventurously investigative (and really, he’s not a very good detective), but this is also his true self—the mechanical cog in the megamachine. He’s the quintessential Organization Man who’s following his orders form on high. He is, in a literal sense, a robot—tasked with the drudgery of paperwork and “retirement,” with all the glamour of an HR representative forcing an exhausted employee out to pasture (language Heidegger pointed out was telling, in that we’re talking about human resources—aka, something to be extracted and harvested).

“Did you ever take that test yourself?” Rachael asks Deckard at one point. We know he hasn’t, and we know what the answer would be if he had.

It is only after Deckard encounters and battles (and gets completely demolished) by Roy Batty, only after he witnesses an authentically human soul, that he becomes human himself. “Six! Seven! Go to Hell or go to Heaven!” shouts Roy as he toys with him. “That’s the spirit!” And then, as Roy’s dying, and a dove flies overhead, it is clear that he was in possession of a soul. He was human. Deckard wasn’t. But now, as Deckard finds the courage to defy the authorities and flee from Los Angeles with Rachel (who, as a replicant, has not long for this world), he embraces his own soul and likewise becomes human.

“It’s too bad she won’t live,” says Gaff, another detective, “but then again—who does?”

Blade Runner 2049: A System of Cells Interlinked

The poem “Pale Fire,” which sits at the heart of the Nabokov novel of the same name, revolves around the poet John Shade’s search for proof of the survival of the soul after death.

In the second canto, Shade wonders if everyone knows the truth of the afterlife but him:

That was the day when I began to doubt
Man’s sanity: How could he live without
Knowing for sure what dawn, what death, what doom
Awaited consciousness beyond the tomb?

What drives Shade’s hope for eternal life is the death of his young daughter, who he hopes to one day see again.

As David Bentley Hart observed, the survival of the soul is a recurring theme in all of Nabokov’s novels. It was his conviction that “consciousness is something like the ground or essence of all reality and that the soul, being pure consciousness, is indestructible.” Nabokov himself recollected in his memoir Speak, Memory that “common sense” says there is nothing but the abyss before and after life, but he “rebel[s] against this state of affairs. Over and over again, my mind has made colossal efforts to distinguish the faintest of personal glimmers in the impersonal darkness on both sides of my life.”

Does the soul endure beyond death?

Blade Runner theorized that the soul was a hard-won ordeal, something achieved in rejection of the omnipresent machine world that threatens to choke it out. Its sequel Blade Runner 2049 asks the next question, the same one Nabokov did. Does this soul endure? No surprise, then, that the novel Pale Fire is the nucleus of the movie.

K, played by Ryan Gosling, is a replicant blade runner tasked with hunting down his own kind. He is subjected to regular testing to ensure he is psychologically stable (to the extent he has a psychology). He must answer emotionally charged questions while reciting back lines from a text that he had seemingly selected. The words are from “Pale Fire.”

And blood-black nothingness began to spin
A system of cells interlinked within
Cells interlinked within cells interlinked
Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct
Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.

In the poem, it is a near-death experience for Shade, when he had a heart attack while giving a lecture and then saw this vision of a tall white fountain. When he later reads that someone else had a similar experience, Shade takes it as proof of the existence of the afterlife. It was a shared event, a real eschatological horizon, a light in the darkness that indicates there is survival, there is a soul. The tall white fountain is the clinching evidence.

K’s investigation of his own soul and its existence begins after this. Blade Runner 2049 is, along with an inquiry into the soul, a retelling of the Nativity. There is a miraculous child born (of the replicant Rachel, who should’ve been unable to conceive). The ruthless powers-that-be decide this child must be sought out and destroyed (with the police chief played by Robin Wright mimicking King Herod and the Slaughter of the Innocents). The child must be hidden, and the miraculous parents must flee (as Mary and Joseph fled to Egypt).

In the movie, K is tasked with finding this miracle. He displays some reluctance to go after the child, however. He is uncomfortable killing something that was born, because “to be born is to have a soul, I guess.”

But he comes to believe, because of a memory he has of his own past, that he might actually be the miracle child himself. His AI girlfriend Joi (who, her advertising slogan says, will tell you “everything you want to hear”), suggests he should have a real name, the biblically suitable Joseph. She then echoes the Nicene Creed when she says that he was “born, not made.”

The tall white fountain is John Shade’s guiding light. It is proof of his soul’s immortality. For K, his guiding proof is his memory of a small toy he hid when he was a child, the date of his birth (which coincides with the miracle child’s birth) inscribed upon it. But both turn out to be false.

Shade, breathless with excitement about the prospect that someone else had seen the tall white fountain and written about it, seeks out confirmation. But, horror of all comedic horrors, it turns out to be a misunderstanding wrought from a silly typo. The original vision turned out to be not, in fact, one of a tall white fountain, but a tall white mountain.

The poet then exclaims: “Life Everlasting—based on a misprint!”

K’s hope, too, is dashed when he finds out that his memory is a false one. It did happen—but to someone else, to the real child. That memory was implanted in him as part of the process to make replicants behave like human beings. He is, then, a replicant just like any other. When he finds this out, he doesn’t say anything, but his face tells the whole story. “You imagined it was you. Oh, you did. You did,” says the rebel replicant who knows the truth, “we all wish it was us. That’s why we believe.”

The evidence is gone. There isn’t any. Ergo—no soul, right? But the story doesn’t end there.

Shade has no certainty anymore. He doesn’t know. But he doesn’t know it isn’t true either. He doesn’t know the soul won’t continue to exist. In fact, he chooses to believe it will—as an act of faith. The words he pens right as he is unknowingly about to die read:

I’m reasonably sure that we survive
And that my darling somewhere is alive,
As I am reasonably sure that I
Shall wake at six tomorrow, on July
The twenty-second, nineteen fifty-nine

He doesn’t. But that’s the whole point—the knowledge or lack of it is not there. There is only the decision. It is the same one that K makes in Blade Runner 2049. He knows he’s not the miracle child, he was not born, but he chooses to believe anyway—there must be more. He will be human, which means he will have a soul, and he will give his life in the process. “Dying for the right cause,” says the replicant rebel who told him the truth, “it's the most human thing we can do.”

In both Blade Runner movies, the endurance of the human soul in the face of the megamachine is the main thematic arc. In the first movie, the soul is under attack by corrupt governments, by advertising, by laws, by the very culture of machine society itself. In the sequel, the persistence and survival of the soul is explored. It’s achieved at great cost, and even if the evidence might not be there to warrant it, one must believe in it—or else the machine wins.

Cyberpunk has always been about this struggle at bottom. Cyberpunk 2077 picks up where both leave off—as it asks the next question. What if technology could achieve the soul’s immortality?

Cyberpunk 2077: Secure Your Soul

A terminally ill protagonist might seem implausible for a video game, but two of the best stories in recent gaming have featured such characters: Red Dead Redemption II and Cyberpunk 2077.

In 2077, the main character, known as V, is racing against the clock to counteract a hopeless condition.

She is a low-level thief with big dreams, and ends up with a death sentence after a heist goes sideways. Her mind becomes colonized with the construct of a long-dead revolutionary rockerboy named Johnny Silverhand (played by Keanu Reeves, in what is unironically one of his best performances).

V’s mortality is central to the game’s narrative and thematic arc. She spends the game searching desperately for a way to undo the damage done to her mind, the engram with Johnny on it slowly rewriting her consciousness and turning her into him. The dynamic between V and Johnny is one of the most compelling character relationships that I can remember in a video game, as it starts out hostile and angry and ends up with a deep bond as they both struggle against the hand that they’ve been dealt, and against the force of the megamachine.

The fear that one could be slowly turned into a machine is the essence of cyberpunk. The difference with 2077 is it takes this threat literally. V isn’t just being abstracted out of existence by the corporate forces that degrade all of us into robotic supplicants. She’s actually being deleted by a piece of software in her head. It’s an in-your-face way to capture the feeling that cyberpunk media always revolves around: the degradation of humanity in a mechanical world and the disappearance of the human soul.

As a song from one of the in-game radio stations plays periodically (a band with the amusing title of The Cartesian Duelists):

Behind the veil
Is the machine
It steals your soul
Devouring all your dreams

Early in the going, when Johnny and V are still at odds with each other, and when Johnny sees in V a second chance at his failed rebellion, he calls for a war against capitalism using similar language as justification:

I saw corps strip farmers of water, and eventually of land. Saw them transform Night City into a machine fueled by people’s crushed spirits, broken dreams, and emptied pockets. Corps’ve long controlled our lives, taken lots... and now they're after our souls!

“After our souls,” too, turns out to be rather more literal than metaphorical in 2077.

Threaded throughout the game is a subplot about a new program called Secure Your Soul, a technological feat that enables the wealthy to transform their consciousness into a digital personality construct, essentially uploading one’s memories and identity into a computer and living on beyond death. The goal, eventually, is to find new hosts for the minds of the powerful (often taken from, unsurprisingly, the unwilling). It is a way to ensure that the soul survives—it fulfills, through technology, the hope of John Shade and K (right?).

It sounds preposterous, but there are real world efforts at this kind of technology. Ray Kurzweil is probably the most notorious advocate of grasping immortality through machinery. Years ago, The New Yorker ran a fascinating long-form essay on “Silicon Valley’s Quest to Live Forever,” painting a sympathetic but disturbing portrait of brilliant men and women who think they’re heroes out to defeat humanity’s oldest foe but are in reality turning themselves into Voldemort.

What, after all, would be the likely result of such technology coming into being? Perhaps we might expect it to become the province only of the rich and powerful. They can live forever, while the rest of us toil and die in service to their goals (doing the robota that is our lot). This seems likely. But Cyberpunk 2077 sees an even darker possibility. What if a mechanically wrought afterlife was used not as a reward but as a punishment? What if we create hell rather than heaven?

This is what happened to Johnny Silverhand. He lives on after death not because of “Secure Your Soul” but because of the “Soulkiller,” a way to imprison someone forever inside a digital prison. He has been dead for decades, his attempt at a revolution in the past failed, and the corporation he battled sent him to hell for his sins. He did, in fact, do things the god of biomechanics wouldn’t let him into heaven for.

Imagine such technology in the hands of tyrants, autocrats, and dictators. It suddenly seems not just possible but probable this is how they’d use it.

This same concern is what animated the cyberpunk video game that I co-wrote, The Mind’s Eclipse, which came out in 2018. It didn’t sell very well, but you can see that we were preoccupied with this same question.

It is the final shot in the war against the human soul—ironically, by forcing immortality on it through technology, humanity is finally obliterated.

Cyberpunk is a Humanism

It’s grim stuff, for sure. No one could ever accuse cyberpunk of excess optimism. But I don’t think the counter charge of excess pessimism is accurate either.

At bottom, cyberpunk is actually a humanism. It’s dark and disturbed because it’s a humanism that speculates what the world would be like if the war between humanity and machine were won by the machines. Many of the predictions of the cyberpunk genre have come true because its root premise is to ask the question: what would the world look like if it were set up for machine flourishing rather than human flourishing?

Cyberpunk is useful, it matters, because it holds up a mirror to this situation. It continues to draw people in because it’s innately able to speak to the present moment. It’s why the real significance of the genre was never in its neo-orientalism, its magenta-hued advertisements, or its sprawling cityscapes. That’s all window-dressings. Cyberpunk is more than style. Its substance is this ruthless scrutiny of the relationship of the machine to the human and its fear that the former is increasing while the latter is decreasing. Maybe there’s a way to harmonize them, but that’s not the trajectory we’re on, and cyberpunk reminds us of that.

What else can we turn to?

There’s a memorable side-quest in Cyberpunk 2077 called Sinnerman, in which V encounters a penitent murderer named Joshua Stephenson who’s converted to Christianity while in jail, and decided that, since he is to be executed, crucifixion is the apt method—as he wants to reach people in the world and show them that there is something greater and more worthy out there.

It’s a difficult plotline to sit through, and certainly some players felt it was sacrilegious as much as it was pious. But I think that’s what makes it so interesting.

Naturally, since capitalism is capable of commodifying everything in existence, even resistance to itself, a media company jumps at the chance to record his crucifixion and distribute it to the masses. It would be, they speculate, quite lucrative.

The player doesn’t have to participate unless they choose to, but Joshua asks V to nail him to the cross, and as she does so, she recites the lines of St. Dismas from the Bible: “Do you not fear God? You stand condemned under the same sentence? We are punished justly, for we receive what our deeds deserve. But this man has done no wrong. Remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

Joshua, too, echoes the appropriate line as he is dying, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

In the end, this might be the only way to eternal life, to the preservation of the soul, that offers any hope. Johnny seems to intuitively grasp this, as he remarks that Joshua is “the real rebel.” And as Joshua dies, the normally foul-mouthed and angry Silverhand stands by, hands clasped and head bowed in respect, fulfilling the role of Longinus as he marveled at calvary.

Like the best cyberpunk stories, this one is ambiguous. It’s ghastly and could be seen as blasphemous, but it’s also suggestive of something greater than what is dreamt of in our machine-world’s philosophies. Joshua might have been wrong to try to ape the crucifixion, but he was right to locate in it a foundational opposition to the machine.

From the acquisition of a living soul in Blade Runner, the investigation of its immortality in 2049, and the alarm bells about technological afterlife in 2077, the preservation of the soul is the guiding thread of the genre. It’s there even in the squalid and dismal depths that cyberpunk stories sink to, as its authors and creators are not interested in rosy and idealistic visions of the future but instead stare the present in the eye and try—against all odds—to find the indefatigable human spirit at the bottom of all the wreckage.

Cyberpunk is the test we take ourselves, to ensure we’re still human, to discover whether we’re more than simply “a system of cells interlinked,” and whether we can secure our souls by means other than technology.

It’s why cyberpunk matters, and will continue to matter, even as we gaze around us on a dreary day and see what humanity has wrought in the vast digital megalopolis, buzzing under a sky the color of television tuned to a dead channel. Somewhere beyond the static grey there is another life to be had.