"Transhumanism is about how technology will eventually help us overcome the problems that have, up until now, been endemic to human nature. Cyberpunk is about how technology won't."
— Stephenls of RPG.Net, on the relation between transhumanism and cyberpunk
AKIRA is an extremely influential cyberpunk anime movie.
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Government censorship of the media, refugees are treated poorly and social welfare appears to be nonexistent. As well, members of the military appear to be able to issue orders to civilians (something which is not permitted in most democracies except under martial law).
Also, assassinations are regularly ordered by the Prime Minister or other government officials (which the author of the original manga, Shirow Masamune, said meant that there had been a massive failure in the political process).
A lot of themes in SAC steer the series more towards Post Cyber Punk, however. It's still a dystopia (especially given hints about how bad the rest of the world is), but it's a less severe dystopia then many settings, a more realistic in that not EVERYTHING is automatically as bad as it could be.
Armitage III is incredibly similar to Ghost In The Shell, and predated the movie (but not the manga) by a year. (Both series revolve around female robotic law enforcers solving crimes perpetrated by or against robots, and both tacklesimilar themes.
The characters who provide the "punk" element are all secondary, such as The Men in Black, the kids at Cyberia, and Lain's sister. Lain herself is an innocent, in contrast to the usual convention of putting a scumbag in the spotlight of a cyberpunk story.
Bubblegum Crisis and especially its spinoff, AD Police — in all its incarnations. The remake series, Bubblegum Crisis: Tokyo 2040 was criticized for being more clean-cut than the original.)
Thanks to deliberate use of Zeerust, this series borders on Diesel Punk, although cybernetic implants are a fairly important part of the story's world.
Alternative Gods is a Death Note cyberpunk AU. It has a strong emphasis on hacking and technology. You've got an evil corporation (Yotsuba) doing unethical experimentation, a noirish tone, colliding conspiracies, and "heroes" that are hackers, misfits, antiheroes, criminals, and visionaries (sometimes all at the same time; exhibit A—Light Yagami.)
The SpongeBob darkfic Cyberpunk, as its name may suggest, has many elements of this genre.
Film
Blade Runner is often described as a cyberpunk film, but actually lacks most of the defining features of the genre. Computer systems and networks hardly feature, the impact of technology and ubiquitous information on society is not really a major theme, and none of the main characters are the hackers and information-underbelly characters who populate cyberpunk. However most people tend to agree that the film pretty much codified the visual style of the cyberpunk future: polluted, overpopulated, overbuilt mega-cities plastered with neon signs and video billboards, where the sun never shines even when it isn't raining.
Heck, William Gibson, literary father of cyberpunk himself, was terrified when he saw the movie. Why? Man's own words:
"About ten minutes into Blade Runner, I reeled out of the theater in complete despair over its visual brilliance and its similarity to the "look" of Neuromancer, my [then] largely unwritten first novel. Not only had I been beaten to the semiotic punch, but this damned movie looked better than the images in my head! With time, as I got over that, I started to take a certain delight in the way the film began to affect the way the world looked. Club fashions, at first, then rock videos, finally even architecture. Amazing! A science fiction movie affecting reality!"
The novel Blade Runner is based on, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep, is one of the major precursors of the cyberpunk genre. A lot of the more cyberpunkish elements were dropped from the movie in favor of focusing on the major plotline, since most of them were only peripherally linked to the actual plot and served more as background material. A lot of the dropped elements also were used in the novel to prove Deckard was human, which contradicts Ridley Scott's interpretation that Deckard was a replicant.
Johnny Mnemonic was adapted from an eponymous William Gibson short story (with a screenplay written by Gibson himself), but sadly fell victim to Executive Meddling during production, with the final result sorely disappointing fans and creators alike.
Strange Days is a unique example, being set only a few years in the future from when it was released, and featuring only a few pieces of futuristic technology.
Sneakers has all the markings of Cyberpunk, except for being set Next Sunday A.D., and thus lacking in the chrome.
Literature
John M. Ford was an early pioneer his 1980 novel Web Of Angels.
John Shirley is considered another of the genre's founding fathers, with his novel City Come A-Walkin' releasing around the same time as Ford's (see above). His later novels, in particular Black Glass and the Eclipse Trilogy, cemented his reputation.
K.W. Jeter could have launched the genre a decade early were it not for the publication of his novel Dr. Adder getting pushed back for twelve years (Jeter originally finished the manuscript in 1972, but no publishing company would accept it at the time due to its graphic violence and sexual content). It went unpublished until 1984, finding its way to shelves just in time to be completely overshadowed by a certain other book (see below).
William Gibson is often referred to as the father of the genre; he created the word "cyberspace", and, despite his lack of technical knowledge, his novel Neuromancer was the prototype for much of what followed.
Marc D. Giller's Hammerjack and its sequel Prodigal; both include virtually every trope associated with cyberpunk, but most notably the leather-clad "razor girls."
Bruce Sterling is another shaper of the genre; in fact, he is often considered its chief promoter. His works tend to be less bleak than Gibson's.
Neal Stephenson has been credited with founding the "post-cyberpunk" genre, working with more "modern" ideas such as memes, the Internet, and computer cryptography. He tends to stuff a lot of ideas into his books, which become brilliant when it works and confusing when it doesn't. Most notable is probably Snow Crash.
John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider invented the concept of an internet worm / virus long before the WWW, and it gave us a hacker hero long before WarGames. The other two books in Brunner's triptych - The Sheep Look Up and Stand On Zanzibar also form a major part of the foundation of what would be later called cyberpunk. Interestingly, Gibson noted the The Sheep Look Up is one of the few novels pre-to-post cyberpunk that came anywhere close to hitting the prediction nail on the head. And if you have read "Sheep" you realize this is not a good thing ...
Pat Cadigan is also considered to be a genre co-founder and major influence, starting with her 1984 short-story "Rock On"; as well as the later novels Mindplayer, and Synners, the latter of which which expands on the story and themes of "Rock On".
Many of Vernor Vinge's stories incorporate cyberpunk elements. The most notable is his 1981 novella "True Names", about a group of hackers who take on the US government — until they encounter something online much, much worse. Unlike other cyberpunk writers of the time, Vinge was a computer scientist who had actually used the Internet and had some idea of what it could do. The story's focus on online anonymity remains relevant today.
Negative consequences of technological progress are a common theme in the works of Dutch author Tais Teng. The most intense example of cyberpunk is his short story Silicium Snelwegen ("Silicon Highways"), in which broken computer chips are repaired by nanomachines imprinted with the personalities of specialists. The story becomes horrific when the main characters, personalized nanomachines busy repairing a chip, discover that their originals have been erased and they now exist only as data.
Philip K. Dick is a notable precursor to cyberpunk, and many adaptations of his work fit squarely into the genre.
Elizabeth Bear's Jenny Casey trilogy.
Richard K. Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs trilogy sits firmly in the Cyberpunk genre. Brain Uploading technology has resulted in a class of super-rich immortal oligarchs, the UN Protectorate keeps off-world colonies firmly under their heel with sociopathic super soldiers, and the anti-hero is one of them who quit to become a mercenary.
Frank Schätzing's Limit extrapolates China's current internet-surveillance and police-state tendencies Twenty Minutes into the Future. The result is quite cyberpunkish.
Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos series uses a lot of cyberpunk tropes, particularly Brawne Lamia's backstory—she's a very noir private eye, who joined the Hyperion Pilgrims after a cyber-entity asked her to figure out who had tried to murder him while he had taken on a human body, and why. However, unlike many other cyberpunk stories, the Hyperion universe isn't actually all that dystopic— at least not until the Techno Core, the self-aware computers that seceded from humanity decide that it's time to wage war against their biological creators.
Jeff Somers' The Electric Church series.
Kim Newman, writing as Jack Yeovil's Dark Future novels blended elements from Horror with Cyber Punk, taking place in a near-future whose environment was ruined by corporate greed and cybernetics and genetics were predominantly used to enhance military and sexual capabilities.
The miniseries Wild Palms was something of a noir-cyberpunk hybrid dealing with virtual reality.
Music
Death Grips: Their debut album, The Money Store, deconstructs hip-hop tropes ((violent lyrics, distrust of police, and namedropping of websites and contemporary subjects) and pairs them with computer-y, glitchy beats, giving the whole thing a bleak, dystopian, cyberpunk kind of feel.
Sigue Sigue Sputnik: Mixing punk and electronic music in the style of Suicide, this band takes its inspiration from movies like Blade Runner, The Terminator, A Clock Work Orange, and Mad Max. The band members dress in an outrageous fashion involving brightly coloured hair and lots of fishnets, and involve dystopic and post-apocalyptic themes in its songs, as well as many references to violent video games, high-tech sex (not necessarily with a human) and the suggestion they are from the future. They also play the evil corporation completely straight, by effectively being it.
Berlin "digital hardcore" (i.e. a fusion of Hardcore Punk and Hardcore Techno) band Atari Teenage Riot can be described as this fairly easily. The fact that they broke up in 2000 and reformed in 2010, by which point many of the themes of their music actually coming to life lead to their comeback album being entitled Is This Hyperreal?. See also: Cyber Punk Is Techno
Snatcher, by Hideo Kojima. Everything, down to the main character's design, screams "I wanna be Blade Runner." It even has the Gibson Shout Out used by Centurions, in the form of a second Deckard-a-like who even sort of looks like Harrison Ford. Too bad this one dies a rather painful death early on, setting the game's events in motion. The game also borrows cyberpunk themes from AKIRA.
Binary Domain, a game which stands out for being classic Cyberpunk in an era when Post Cyberpunk is much more common. Evil corporations, human-like robots, rebellion against authority, global economic and environmental collapse, deep separation between the haves and the have-nots...
The original Shin Megami Tensei I and its sequel both heavily involve cyberpunk themes. While the power of the authorities in both games are religious in nature rather than technological, they do use technology to communicate their message (it brings to mind the large television screens the Mesians would use to broadcast propaganda. Beyond that, the grey featureless walls, the endless maze-like architecture and people dressed in rags with advanced technology at their side all plays on this theme.
Though not as obvious, the First Encounter Assault Recon series takes place in such a setting. Most of the cyberpunk elements are understated, as the series places greater emphasis on supernatural psychic phenomena, but most of the elements are there - advanced technology that does not necessarily benefit mankind, superpowerful Mega Corp as the primary villain, and a generally dark atmosphere. Transhumanist elements are touched on, though in this setting it is focused on the transformative effects of weaponized psychic technology rather than cybernetics. Cybernetic augmentations married with psychic technology are present, along with genetic experimentation, and characters like the Point Man, Paxton Fettel, Michael Beckett, and Alma are all considered transhuman due to their psychic abilities, with one character stating that they would be like "a god among men."
EYE Divine Cybermancy takes place far into the future, at a level one would expect Space Opera to take over, and has extensive and ancient Psychic Powers. However, the several urban enviroments you are sent to reek of cyberpunk. Lots of computers, several layers of grime, giant corperation Vindico, giant ads for either weapons or virtual prostitution, and almost everything can be hacked. Sometimes they can hack you back.
Deus Ex Human Revolution turns the Transhumanism Up to Eleven. This installment is also more "traditionally" cyberpunk than its predecessors, given it is set in 2027; focuses on bionic augmentations (nanotech is in early stages of development); the fact that the protagonist, Adam Jensen, works for a corporation rather than a government agency and that the game plot focuses on corporate espionage and side quests are essentially cyberpunk film noir in all its glory.
Thorne is an adult game (NSFW, obviously) with a cyber punk setting. Despite the fact that it's a porn game, it has fantastic character design and setting.
Kara clearly takes place in a cyberpunk setting, and touches on many common cyberpunk themes.
Western Animation
Perhaps the first Western cartoon to use cyberpunk motifs was the Centurions episode "Zone Dancer". The plot took elements from Blade Runner and Neuromancer, the dialogue actually used the word "cyberpunk," and as an additional Shout Out, one of the guest star characters was a computer hacker named Gibson.
In general, Digimon tends to be on the Post Cyberpunk end of the spectrum. Digimon Tamers is closest to Cyberpunk, thanks to being written the same writer of Lain. There's a secret government conspiracy, monitoring everything and conducting dark experiments. The heroes are young streetwise punks who befriend rouge AIs. They end up subverting the government conspiracy, and stopping more dangerous AIs. Philosophical questions about Life arise. Granted, not as grim as other examples, but still heavy stuff for a shonen series.
Dennou Coil goes a fair way toward exploring the social impact that Augmented Reality has on the world, for good and ill, but it's all rather lighthearted, with some episodes diving into Magical Realism.
Blame!, much like The Matrix description below, takes the Cyberpunk genre to its extreme limits and ironically becomes less like traditional Cyberpunk as a result.
The first half of Mythic Quest. The second half turns into Heroic Fantasy.
Neon Genesis Evangelion has many of the classic tropes: corrupt government conspiracies planning to bring about The Singularity, cover-ups, "jacking in" (albeit into giant cyborgs), an Artificial Human who suffers from Cloning Blues, pessimistic/miserable protagonists in a grimdark setting, existential questioning, and technology being used for very shady dealings. However, the series gradually becomes less tech-based and more mystical as it goes on.
Interestingly, Puella Magi Madoka Magica has several of the trademarks of Cyber Punk, albeit with magic replacing technology. In spite of that, the show's themes of the Magical Girls being essentially Trans Human beings, complete with magic literally eating their souls, a shady scientific bureaucracy that manipulates them so that they can fulfil their energy production quotas, and a rebellious Anti-Hero, complete with a dark color motif, fighting against the higher ups are all very much Cyber Punk flavoured. However, since the world is much cleaner, and with the show's magic being used for good purposes in addition to the bad, it doesn't fully fit.
The sci-fi novel/anime Ai No Kusabi explores cyberpunk theme in a world ruled by a Master Computer. Artificial Humans are the ruling Elite and they look down on basic human emotions.
Comic Books
Adam Warren's comic version of the Dirty Pair; the original anime lacks this element, however.
'Last Man Standing'' has a bit of Cyber-punkism with the evil Mega Corp known as Armtech, but some it's fantastical elements don't make it a clear cut case.
A chapter in Pugad Baboy portrays some elements of Cyber Punk when some of the characters get transported to a 2078 Manila in a portal. The Chinese-Filipino community has a greater influence than the native Filipinos with parts of the city under poor conditions.
Avatar: The inhabitants of the Pandora can connect to a natural/organic version of the internet via neural connection fibers, who are being threatened by a mining corporation.
Earth in Avatar is overpopulated and has technology and adverts everywhere, and looks a little like Los Angeles from Blade Runner.
Brazil has all the plot elements, but with ductwork and teletype machines in place of the Internet. It even has a guerrilla plumber in place of a hacker.
Chinatown: While not an example in and of itself, it's the type of Film Noir that inspired the setting: with an unspeakably Corrupt Corporate Executive conspiring to control the city's water supply so he can turn the Los Angeles basin into a sprawling urban wasteland. (he succeeds.) He even looks like Tyrell.
Inception: The film's certainly more noir but the dream-sharing technology (and its illegal uses) are pretty cyber, while the general theme of Corporate Espionage is very punk.
The Matrix Arguably takes the whole cyberspace theme to its most extreme conclusion, but perhaps too extreme to be considered truly Cyber Punk, ironically enough. The quasi-religious symbolism and the idealism of the protagonists pretty much disqualify it too.
The Matrix starts out cyberpunk, but then veers into Post Cyber Punk after the heroes become accustomed to jacking in and out of the Matrix at will. Note the distinction seems to be that the heroes of The Matrix are messianic action heroes, with superhuman powers by dint of skill hacking into the Matrix; if they were underpowered rebels fighting a losing battle and Zion turned out to be a Matrix Within A Matrix, it would probably be considered Cyber Punk.
However, The Matrixdoes keep with the core Cyber Punk theme of technology as a tool of control.
Sneakers an unconventional choice, as it's based on the (then) present and features only one technological wonder (the Macguffin), but it touches on several of the basic tropes and themes of cyberpunk and hacker cinema. There's a gang of genius quasi-criminals, shady .gov types, and this quote:
Cosmo: [I] learned that everything in this world—including money—operates not on reality . . .
Brave New World (one of the first deconstructions which featured the proto-Cyberpunk concept of a techno-utopia being a dystopia) has the punk, misfit Savage put in contrast with the corporate World State where consumerist mass production is prevalent in every aspect of life (including engineering 90% of humans into a Caste System of healthy but hedonistic Designer Babies).
Philip K. Dick's works influenced the cyberpunk genre, including titles like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (which was adapted into the movie Blade Runner) and A Scanner Darkly.
Jeff Noon's "Vurt", "Nymphomation" and "Automated Alice" have many elements of Cyberpunk, heavily influenced by Lewis Carroll (so there's a lot of Mind Screw).
Asimov's novel The Caves of Steel anticipates the dystopian urban decay, and the bland foods made from algae.
Beat writerWilliam S. Burroughs wrote several books that would later have an influence on the genesis of cyberpunk fiction, despite Burroughs not really being thought of as part of the science-fiction canon of writers.
Vernor Vinge's 1981 novella "True Names" anticipated most of the technical elements that became the hallmarks of Cyberpunk, including the shadowy hackers, Cyberspace, and the Digital Avatar. Just about the only things missing were the tone and the urban decay. The protagonist, Mr. Slippery, is pure cyberpunk, as are characters like DON.MAC and the elusive and mysterious character known only as The Mailman. All a year before Gibson finally published "Burning Chrome".
The X-Files episode "Kill Switch" revolves around a gang of literal cyberpunks (computer geeks with a bad attitude and certain tastes in clothing) trying to stop a government spy satellite that became self-aware. Oh, and said satellite can manipulate the whole freaking Internet for its own purpose and kill anyone it deems dangerous with inescapable laser-driven wrath from above. This episode was actually written by no less than William Gibson.
The Epitaph episodes of Dollhouse have strong elements of this, as well as biopunk. Mag and Zone's survival gang and Victor's tech-heads especially embody the attitude and aesthetics.
The Alphaverse in Charlie Jade. And it gets worse; there's no rebellion there, just the cruel fact that Dystopia Is Hard, which means the corporate-run state is on the verge of collapse in ways that make an apocalypse almost welcome. Had the show not been cancelled, that's what would have happened at the end of Season 2.
A lot of Machinae Supremacy songs, for example Dark City, A View From the End of the World, and especially (and blatantly) Cybergenesis.
Tabletop Games
The art, style, and language of Misspent Youth by Robert Bohl are full of cyberpunk tropes. It's a game where you play teenage punks in a sci-fi Dystopia, out to smash the Man. The system includes group world creation, so a cyberpunk game is not always guaranteed, but the game is designed to address all the same themes of technology as oppression. In fact, in the world creation step, you make Systems of Control — sci-fi-based social or technological ways The Authority (the GM-like role and group-generated in-fiction antagonist) has to oppress and ruin the lives of the Youthful Offenders; the "player character" role.
GURPS has guidelines on how to make a cyberpunk campaign and at one point had the awesome but sadly discontinued Cthulhupunk.
Shadowrun borrows blatantly and shamelessly from William Gibson's work, right down to a big chunk of the terminology used (Matrix, Street Samurai, etc). Gibson reportedly dislikes Shadowrun due to the magical aspects.
R. Talsorian Games' Cyberpunk 2013, its second (Cyberpunk 2020), and (to a lesser extent) third editions are more "traditional" cyberpunk games.
The third edition's shift of focus from gritty future-noir to transhumanist adventure actually makes it closer to Post Cyber Punk, which is one of the main (numerous) problems fans of the previous editions have with this version.
And of course, Rifts. It mixes elements of pretty much every genre in the world, Cyberpunk not least.
In the introduction of the original Rifts core book, there's a paragraph remarking on how when the game was being developed, it would be Palladium Book's answer to Cyberpunk. Kevin Siembieda admits that there are quite a few Cyberpunk elements.
Iron Crown Enterprise's Cyberspace RPG.
Eclipse Phase straddles the line between Cyber Punk and Transhumanism. On the one hand, many people do wind up with a totally different understanding of culture, life, and even humanity, and on the other, there are even more trying to keep the old forms of government and commerce alive... often as a means to control others. Also, from the outside, the more transhuman beings usually appear horrifying and incomprehensible.
The MMORPG City of Heroes has very literal Cyber Punks in the Freakshow, a powerful gang of drug-fuelled cyborg punks who have to be seen to be believed. They are pretty much the main comic relief faction of the game, while still managing to be a considerable threat in their own right. Case in point from a bank robber: "I'm gonna buy a sports car, then weld it to me!"
Final Fantasy VII, definitely. It becomes rather obvious when your bioengineered antihero protagonist battles an army of corporate thugs on a freeway, with a gigantic sword, on a motorcycle. However, it tones it down for the rest of the game, so it's not a straight example.
Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus covers cyberpunk themes like virtual reality, consciousness transference, and is about a Noir-ish Anti-Hero battling a Trans Human who had put his mind into the Internet. It's much fluffier and more magically based than you would usually associate with cyberpunk, though, and never asks any really tricky questions about identity.
Chaos;Head. Surprisingly, being set in present day, its tone is probably more modern than numerous other futuristic fictions.
Its successor Steins;Gate delves even deeper into cyperpunk themes, though it may be considered more Post Cyber Punk.
Mirrors Edge. Although it's set in a Shining City, it nevertheless has cyberpunk features like rebellious, marginalized heroes opposing an oppressive government, and information running is the key aspect of the story.
Devil Survivor: It's an Atlus game set in modern urban Japan society! And it's Tokyo no less! However, without giving away any spoilers, the message is very much against cynicism.
The DS version of Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter has a quasi-Cyberpunk world called the Galactic Jungle. It features an authoritarian Council that make many unneeded rules, like no sneezing.
Technobabylon comes complete with Cyberspace in the form of the "Trance," people engineered from birth to be suicide bombers, and on and on
''Mario Football'', and especially its sequel Mario Strikers Charged Football, which combines this with Mario characters and soccer!
Perfect Dark has many cyberpunk elements (AIs, hacking, industrial espionage etc.) although it's a straight Science Fiction story as well.
Hardwar incorporates some cyberpunk elements, but it's mainly a flight simulation game that takes place in the moon Titan with space trading elements (but as mentioned earlier, does not actually take place in outer space).
Fracture has this as a main aspect of the Atlantic Alliance, who are opposed by the Pacificans.
The last about thirty years of the Chaos Timeline definitely have this vibe going on, courtesy of the Logos (hackers) and the more earlier achieved advanced state of computer technology and networks than in our history.
The lifestyle and technology in the novel Theatrica relfect cyberpunk themes, such as the techno raves, the intranet system, and the barcodes on the back of people's necks.
Western Animation
Batman Beyond. Gotham City's evolution seems quite natural- still crowded, dirty and corrupt, only now the cars can fly.
Futurama has some elements, including at least one recurring antagonist Mega Corp, though the government is more comically inept than corrupt, and it's all Played for Laughs. The heroes are just getting by, doing their jobs and occasionally saving the universe.
Coming off the heels of The Eighties, it's no surprise that Sonic Sat AM featured these themes. The show has industry and technology radically transforming society and the world. The world has become a ugly place, with youths revolting against a corrupt government. However, being a Saturday morning cartoon featuring Sonic the Hedgehog, it's not as depressing it should be.
Japan. Japan's economic structure of state-linked crony corporations is very Cyberpunk. The Mega Corp was consciously modeled on these Japanese "Zaibatsu" (favored merchants) even moreso than the large, bureaucratic managed corporations of 1950's America. William Gibson, the father of the genre himself, even said "Modern Japan simply was cyberpunk." [1] However, Japan doesn't use technology as a tool of control to nearly the extent that Cyberpunk requires, and nor does it have the resistance against the current social order required by the genre, which makes it lean more towards Post Cyberpunk.
Add to that Japan's significant technological lead over pretty much every other country (various devices being released there well ahead of other areas).
Japan's economic stagnation throughout the 2000s somewhat subverted its cyberpunk status. It may have the aesthetics of a cyberpunk country, but its nowhere near the world power that writers in the 80s thought it would be.
Similar to Japan, Hong Kong has a domestic economy that (unlike its highly laissez-faire international economy) is strongly cartelized by a series of politically-favoredcorporations. The similarity to the Japanese Zaibatsu model, where the economy is highly managed by "collaborative efforts" between the government and crony corporations, is unmistakable (for more, see Joe Studwell's book Asian Godfathers). And Hong Kong Island's skyline certainly looks like something out of Blade Runner. However, unless China starts cracking down on Hong Kong's civil liberties, it isn't nearly dystopic enough to be considered Cyber Punk.
Hong Kong has been referred to as "Shadowrun on location."
You could argue that some of China's larger cities (such as Shanghai) are like Cyberpunk, for the same reasons as Hong Kong.
England has the highest concentration of closed-circuit television cameras in the world today. The British "Surveillance State" is arguably an example of technology as a tool of social control; a very significant theme in Cyberpunk.
That's more like a reference to 1984, though then again, 1984 could be thought of as proto-cyberpunk.
This extends to its dependent states, such as Guernsey and particularly Sark, the former of which is run primarily by the owners of locally operating firms (who put all public construction through their firms, thus making the MP expenses look like nothing, and resulting in schools that are just refurbished warehouses, built for profit margin rather than a decent environment.) and English people (who abuse the island's tax status and purchase houses, perform routine maintenance and then sell them on at an inflated rate, meaning the average small house costs over £350,000), while the latter island recently repelled an attempt by the Barclay Brothers to put corporate sponsored politicians in, effectively trying to annex the island as their personal corporate enclave. Following their failure, they pulled their investments from the island, collapsing its economy and causing the unemployment to rise to over 50%.
Think about it. Corporations can decide who gets to eat and who doesn't based on some silly comments or some...irreverent moments captured on film in your Facebook page. As some more internet-savvy people have pointed out, if you're foolish enough to put it on your Facebook page and have it public & connectible to you...
