The dialectics of Night City: How ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ anticipated our hypercapitalist dystopia

William Gibson’s ‘Neuromancer’ bequeathed cyberpunk a future in which capital colonises every frontier. Four decades since, the technofascist sprawl of its progeny is collapsing the distance between dystopian speculation and our late-capitalist present

Published - October 18, 2026 06:00 pm IST

A look at Night City in a still from ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ | Photo Credit: CD Projeckt Red

Good Morning, Night City! It has been a few years since Cyberpunk: Edgerunners clinched Anime of the Year, over half a decade since CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 rehabilitated itself from a catastrophic launch into a retrospective videogame masterpiece, and more than forty years since William Gibson first codified this particular dystopia in the seminal Neuromancer; yet cyberpunk as a genre has only grown more prescient with age, with every waking moment inching towards the very hellscapes these fictional antecedents have long warned of.

Bruce Bethke coined the term in 1983, but it was Gibson’s genre-defining 1984 classic that furnished cyberpunk with its definitive origins. Written before the commercial internet and eschewing the obsession with flying cars or the other consumerist bric-à-brac of erstwhile sci-fi, Neuromancer imagined cyberspace as a domain of corporate espionage and competing private interests, where disgraced hacker Case is recruited into a conspiracy involving two AIs whose merger could circumvent the constraints imposed on machine intelligence. What was most extraordinary was Gibson’s prescience in locating the coming technological revolution within a monopolistic economic order that had little intention of sharing its spoils. Four decades later, Silicon Valley has duly turned the supposed democratisation of information into a business model predicated on harvesting behavioural surplus and invoicing everybody for access.

With the genre’s evolution, each medium found a different way to make cyberpunk legible to its own historical moment. In 2019, Cyberpunk 2077’s sprawling open-world portrait of its technofascist Night City, found a companion in its acclaimed spin-off anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (2022), a tragedy of mercenary ambition and bodily obsolescence. With Season 2 out this week, Night City returns to a cultural moment evermore intent on vindicating its creators’ bleakest intuitions.

The world of Night City swings between a genuinely incisive inquiry into human personhood under corporate dehumanisation, and a satire extravagantly idiotic enough to give you pause. But what is deeply concerning is that the deluge of awful headlines you probably consume everyday in this very newspaper— each outdoing the last in the fresh hell our cities, countries and the world at large seem to produce with concerning regularity— have started de-abstracting the once-distant cyberpunkian horrors of Night City.

Take for instance, “cyberpsychosis” — Cyberpunk 2077’s term for the psychological breakdown via excessive cybernetic augmentation — and the parallels with “AI psychosis”, in which chatbots reinforce delusions and validate users’ fantasies, become difficult to ignore. We may be some way off from people losing their minds over military-grade chrome, but the prospect of technology actively exacerbating psychological distress is no longer the stuff of dystopian fiction.

David Martinez resisting cyberpsychosis in a still from ‘Cyberpunk: Edgerunners’ | Photo Credit: Netflix

The concept of “Braindance”, Cyberpunk 2077’s technology for turning recorded sensations and memories into immersive entertainment, feels less far-fetched if you have ever been a victim of doomscrolling. Meta’s own internal research, exposed through the Facebook Files, revealed how engagement-driven algorithms could amplify addictive, divisive content while inflicting collateral damage on users’ wellbeing. Generative AI threatens to industrialise the arrangement further, flooding social feeds with synthetic slop engineered to capture our attention, even as research finds that AI-assisted interactions can increase participation while eroding the perceived authenticity and quality of online discourse.

David Martinez and his crew using BDs or “Braindance” in a still from ‘Cyberpunk: Edgerunners’ | Photo Credit: Netflix

Meanwhile, the mercenary “edgerunners” of Night City may be risking their necks for corpo/fixer contracts, but India’s own gig economy has found a more prosaic way to make contract workers expendable, with delivery partners and app-based cab drivers tethered to opaque algorithms, volatile payouts and incentives that reward longer hours without guaranteeing a living wage. Recent research into quick-commerce earnings and investigations into delivery workers’ protests have laid bare a system in which the platforms dictate the terms while workers absorb the fuel costs and physical risks, all under the increasingly threadbare alibi of “flexibility”.