Cyberpunk is a genre first and foremost. A critique of capitalism set in a corporate dystopia with transhumanist themes.
A lot of the aesthetic is rooted in the culture of the time period that it was created in (the 80s). The cultural fear, more specifically. A time where American corporations, and by extension the US government and population, were afraid of the Japanese economic boom and saw a future where the dollar was replaced by the yen and Japanese supplanted English as the lingua franca of the world, Japanese culture was exported the way American culture is, and Americans started eating their meals with chopsticks instead of forks.
Cyberpunk is a genre first and foremost. A critique of capitalism set in a corporate dystopia with transhumanist themes.
A lot of the aesthetic is rooted in the culture of the time period that it was created in (the 80s). The cultural fear, more specifically. A time where American corporations, and by extension the US government and population, were afraid of the Japanese economic boom and saw a future where the dollar was replaced by the yen and Japanese supplanted English as the lingua franca of the world, Japanese culture was exported the way American culture is, and Americans started eating their meals with chopsticks instead of forks.