Thoughts About Cyberpunk: Edge-runners
At the beginning of last month, there was a lot of talk about a new anime on Netflix that everyone was gushing over. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is a 2022 anime that was the result of a collaboration between Studio Trigger and CD Project Red (The developers of Cyberpunk:2077). I remember seeing promotion for it and being intrigued because of my admiration for Studio Trigger and their other shows such as Kill La Kill and Little Witch Academia. However, I didn’t follow up with this interest until my friends began talking about it constantly in our group chat and asking me to check it out. It’s only ten episodes long but I ended up taking two binge blocks to finish it. The last block being the 1st of October. When I first began watching Edgerunners, I was into it. The animation was lovely (as to be expected from Trigger) and the story was interesting and action packed. The deeper elements made itself apparent very early on but I didn’t feel like it warranted anything more than a couple of tweets but after I finished the series, I gave my best friend a quick call to tell her about what I thought. I expected our conversation to be a quick five or so minutes but we ended up talking about it for about thirty minutes. As we were talking, I brought up the idea of how would one even go about organizing any collective action when living under the conditions of Night City. It is this I want to elaborate further. This is not intended to be a structured essay with a thesis to defend. Rather, it is simply a stream of my thoughts.
Cyberpunk as a genre is about humanity at its most alienated. A world where the division between state and corporation have lost any meaningful distinction. One where capital has been fully developed and totally stagnated, where capitalism only continues because of corporate wars and espionage constantly destroying and rebuilding capital or in sending net runner into the ruins of the old internet in hopes of uncovering lost data. Data is very important, I feel like they talked more about data then they did about money. Maybe the two are synonymous at this point. This most apparent towards the end of the series as the Arasaka corporation and their rivalries with Militech become more centered in the story.
In the this atmosphere of total atomization and alienation, is there any hope for meaningful change? Any chance for collective action or revolution? Because my politics have become more and more annoyingly been bleeding into my thoughts on media, this question came to me from the first episode. As I continued watching, I came to the belief that the conditions of Night City would make revolution or any meanigful collective activity nearly impossible because in order to survive in Night City, you have to cease to be human. Who are those who rule at the top of Night City? The ones who have the best chance of living their lives to their natural conclusions? Late in the show, the character of Adam Smasher is introduced, a legendary mercenary who is essentially a one-man-army. We see him in the last half of the final episode. A human tank who doesn’t have a single organic body part anymore. This is the kind of person who rises to the top of Night City and the world of Cyberpunk, a complete rejection of humanity.
My apologies for this ramble, I started this article last night but as it was late I put it aside until the morning.
