languid-lemur asked on the Cyberpunk subreddit what the most cyberpunk thing is in your daily life.
This was my response:
Spending untold amounts of time on executive-function-attenuated addictions to dying corporate ad-driven profit machine engagement platforms that you reopen after momentarily forgetting that you just closed them when the dopamine rewards diminished while your life was happening in the background white noise without you noticing, like the soft hum of the air filters you’ve forgotten to service for another month. NFC smart watch payments on self-checkout machines for your greater convenience and the lessening need for inhuman interactions and paying fewer retail employees a poverty wage with no benefits, while the smart machine stupidly tells you to remember to take the receipt that you declined to print and tells you to have a nice day and sincerely thanks you for your purchase from the deepest abscesses of its silicon heart. Meanwhile at work you hesitate to deal with the security-obsessed IT administrators who want to lock it all down so the technology is not useable because that’s how you prevent issues, deepfreezing 99% of the hard drive so it forgets to remember your files when it reboots over night after an update and a network crash they wait a few hours to tell you about. But at least the black-topped corn starch 3D printed glow-in-the-dark mechanical keyboard caps are turning out decently and the supply chain shortage price-gouged microcomputer hardware you’ve been waiting for finally arrives via webcam monitored independent contractors so their boss can cowboy up to the mesosphere one more time instead of solving world hunger. So I got that going for me, which is nice.
depression
Man, I miss when cyberpunk dystopian existence was a thing of sci-fi writers’ imaginations.
Building gadgets with multiple possible uses out of sketchy Chinese electronic parts purchased no questions asked from an online auction site to (probably) illegally monitor the utility meters on my house to determine just how badly the multinat that supplies power and gas to my block is gouging us.
These days I’m jumping between the apple headset and LLMs. The apple one is too expensive to be proper cyberpunk yet, but I invite you to take a look at how the absurdly creepy biometric research apple has done for it, that approaches reading your mind.
edit: whoops this probably doesn’t count as “daily life”