Well, the authors who created cyberpunk forty years ago–William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, John Shirley, Walter Jon Williams, Rudy Rucker–were mainly Canadian far-leftist Boomers who hated Ronald Reagan and were terrified that he was going to start a nuclear war. This is why there’s a certain sameness to the bleak, humorless, dystopias of which they wrote–they’re all agitprop. They’re all warped caricatures of the postwar US, as seen by anti-American European and Canadian Marxists: lawless superhyperultramegacapitalism, in which cyborg billionaires lord it over a continent of genetically engineered cannibal illiterates among the radioactive ruins left by World War III.

One can’t read Burning Chrome or Neuromancer or Frontera without noticing that what just about any foreigner will tell you is the single most distinctive feature of ‘Murrican culture is missing. There are no lawyers constantly suing one another and everyone else. Maybe the cannibals ate them, improving anarchotyranny ever so slightly by loosing mere anarchy upon the world. Cyberpunk societies may have abominations of nature shambling down the sidewalk oozing slimy ichor that sizzles and eats holes in the concrete when it drips on the pavement, but at least they can’t force people to bake “transition party” cakes for them.