Brain implants, AI glasses, smart prosthetics. Cyberpunk fiction predicted a lot of today’s technology with eerie accuracy. But the genre’s real warning wasn’t about chrome-plated mercenaries or cyberspace cowboys. It was about corporate power.
R.U. Sirius — born Ken Goffman — co-founded Mondo 2000 and helped define cyberculture in the late ’80s and ’90s. He remembers those days as playful, experimental. “All that dark stuff was very much in Mondo as well, but it all kind of felt like play,” he told Decrypt. The future, he said, turned out far less cinematic than anyone expected.
Here’s what early internet pioneers got wrong: they thought personal computers and networking would shift power away from governments and corporations. Instead, the companies building those technologies became some of the world’s most powerful institutions.
“We kind of felt like they were a little bit benign,” Goffman said. “They were handing us this power, and we were going to mess with it.” The internet’s loss of anonymity was another blow — Facebook literally made him change his name from R.U. Sirius to Ken Goffman.
Shira Chess, a media studies professor, argues cyberpunk’s lasting lesson isn’t technological at all. The genre’s real insight was about how corporations could grow powerful enough to rival governments. That part, it got exactly right.
