Cyberpunk in the 90s & Steampunk

I read a summation of cyperpunk and it was helpful to better categorize the subgenres of sci-fi. I found I agreed with the author on many points as I've had the same thoughts on older sci-fi. It also provided an unusual perspective about sci-fi and its origins. For example, the other claims 50s sci-fi had predictions of technology that were usually exciting but unsettling. This wouldn't be unexpected as the 50s was in an era fraught with the potential of nuclear technology and futurism. Despite the massive tools we had, we still didn't know enough and that simultaneously scared and excited us. Society wanted to know more about our future.

In opposition, the tech portrayed in 80s sci-fi was depressing and dreadful. At this point, we had knowledge of the things we didn't know. We had been to the moon, been through the Cold War, and survived the fall out of the Vietnam War. But I can imagine we were more broken  after the tune of the 70s era. Now we were less excited and more hesitant of our expectations of the future, as our depictions were more often filled with monsters and horrible dystopias. In 80s sci-fi, we stopped depicting the future as streamlined and desirable. Instead, the city was dirty and had contemporary, not future, problems like drugs, war, crime. Nothing felt solved in the future imagined by the 80s, so it wasn't something to be looked forward to.

In the 80s is when the word cyperpunk was established as it reflected the increase in computer utilization. It came from the word cyperspace. From here, we see artificial intelligence become a character we move along the decades. The author sums up cyperpunk by looking at Frankenstein through its lens:

"FRANKENSTEIN promotes the romantic dictum that there are Some Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. There are no mere physical mechanisms for this higher moral law -- its workings transcend mortal understanding, it is something akin to divine will. Hubris must meet nemesis; this is simply the nature of our universe. Dr. Frankenstein commits a spine-chilling transgression, an affront against the human soul, and with memorable poetic justice, he is direly punished by his own creation, the Monster. Now imagine a cyberpunk version of FRANKENSTEIN. In this imaginary work, the Monster would likely be the well-funded R&D team-project of some global corporation. The Monster might well wreak bloody havoc, most likely on random passers-by. But having done so, he would never have been allowed to wander to the North Pole, uttering Byronic profundities. The Monsters of cyberpunk never vanish so conveniently. They are already loose on the streets. They are next to us. Quite likely *WE* are them. The Monster would have been copyrighted through the new genetics laws, and manufactured worldwide in many thousands. Soon the Monsters would all have lousy night jobs mopping up at fast-food restaurants."

Through this train of thought, the author continues to suggest that cyperpunk is different from a lot of sci-fi is that society already knows what it's not supposed to know. Whereas before, sci-fi often predicted what we could know, and how it would affect us. It was the story of the unknown. Now that cyperpunk instead plays on an existing knowledge but on taboo and inhuman subjects, we can look to our future, or so the author claims. Cyperpunk is a very real reflection of our future, it reflects how we approach an ever-growing need to challenge the human condition.