Cyberpunk
"High tech, low life."
"The street finds its own uses for things."
We all know the quotes and the books. But cyberpunk is more than a neon-soaked, cybernetic aesthetic, or a gritty dystopian science fiction genre. It is a subculture composed of two fundamental ideas: PUNK, and CYBER.
The PUNK: antiauthoritarian, anticapitalist, radical freedom of expression, rejection of tradition, a DIY ethic.
The CYBER: all that, but high-fuckin'-tech, ya feel? From DIYing body mods to using bleeding edge software to subvert corporate interests. It's punk for the 22nd century.
This is a community dedicated to discussing anything cyberpunk, be it books, movies, or other art that falls into the genre, or real life tech, projects, stories, ideas or anything else that adheres to these ideals. It's a place for 'punks from all over the federated Net to hang out and swap stories and meaningful content (not just pictures of city nightscapes).
Welcome in, choom.
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If I had to pick one, I'd probably say Ghost in the Shell Stand-Alone Complex. Everything GitS is great, of course, but that first season of SAC is my fav of all the iterations.
Other Great Stuff:
Cowboy Bebop is definitely Cyberpunk IMO, I haven't seen Serial Experiments or Patlabor before.
Patlabor is a near future mecha anime, where the Patlabors are like the model t of mechs. The tv series is really light-hearted, but the ova/movie series is more serious. It's light on the whole dystopia part of cyberpunk, it's more like the Japanese society of the 80s and 90s transplanted a bit into the future.
Serial Experiments Lain... is really hard to describe. It's kind of like a digital drug trip, but not a good one. A trip that's unsettling.
Edit: Not to imply that Lain is bad, it's great.
Nice I'll have to look those up!
Great list, I second every one of these!