It's just WEIRD at this point that "cyberpunk" is still a thing that is popular. In 2026.
Neuromancer came out in 1984. Modern cyberpunk is basically indistinguishable from what Gibson lay down in that book. That's 42 years ago. 42 years before Neuromancer came out, we were in the middle of world war 2!
@WAHa_06x36 At some point it stopped becoming near future science fiction and started becoming a largely 80s nostalgia thing.
I actually think the continuing popularity of cyberpunk is thanks to steampunk in a way. It established this idea that -punk is something you can apply to any technology or time period to get gritty science fiction out of it, which allowed cyberpunk to evolve pretty seamlessly from a specific literary movement that would otherwise feel pretty dated now and into "the name for the -punk genre as it applies to 80s tech"
@Owlor @WAHa_06x36
Y
My take is that differences in media aesthetics narrowed as the 20th and now 21st centuries have progressed
Music styles changed, but recordings went from barely audible cylinder recordings in the 1890s
To very close to lifelike by the late 1950s
After that, audio changed, but a recording today is mostly a stylistic, not a sonic improvement
Same with video really, and narrative
Innovations are harder for people to discern
Digital came later but may be heading that way
@Owlor @WAHa_06x36
I noticed this studying the 1950s–1960s popular folk revival, mostly inspired by commercial 78 rpm recordings, some of which were as little as 20 years old
But the difference in audio quality between some of these “old“ records was so great that they seemed like they came from another world
The cultural difference between Depression era, and Post WWII was also enough to create a mythology
Around what was trying really hard to be an earlier era’s pop music
Dag Ågren ↙︎↙︎↙︎
Owlor 
AccordionBruce