Periods in history carry a name, actually more than one. Art knows Barrock or Art Deco, Science stone or digital age, sociology primitive or civilized and politics feudalism or nationalism, war civil war or occupation.
The time frames in which the situation and later the names change are usually called -post something. Today, in the beginning of the 21st century we live in post industrialisation, because factories took over production from high tech semiconductors down to agriculture, post fashism, because the Nazis are gone out of power from Germany to Italy, post Stalinism, because that ended already when the Sowjet Republics based on the Treaties of Warsaw were still in place and of course in post Sowjet times, beside post cold war times ending with Perestroika and the Sowjet economic systems bankruptcy.
The Cyberpunk dark future genre is placed in post nationalism times. Nations are a rather young form of a political entity that comes in some forms such as republic, monarchy, institutional monarchy, socialist republic or post colonial satellite state.
In brief: A republic is a state that declares the people ruling and comes along with a democratic voting system. A monarchy is run by a network of families with special privileged aristocratic status based on either birth right or by votes of the clan members or people, an institutional monarchy is a state in which the privileged aristocracy turned the people self ruling by usually a voted parliament, a socialist republic is a state in which all property and ownership of especially the state, but historically also of the wealthy elite is distributed to the common people and a post colonial satellite state is the African version of a multi- people nation based on historic borders shaped by colonial forces.
Second World War ended fashism, which was the peak of nationalism gone bad, but turned the world into cold war. Fashism is the idea that one or a group defined by common principles is superior than at least one another and therefore suppressing that one other group. As if someone read the old testament on a really bad cocktail of Cocaine and LSD creating the most very worst interpretation of chosen people ever.
It is quite a good King vs a bad King situation. For the latter we have a word spelled dictator who in the very opposite does not protect, serve and have it’s people chosen to rule by God in his mysterious ways to prosper, but exploits and enslaves for only his own very ego and those loyal to him. Most dictators if not facing the U.S. forces historical ended by figuring out what their son Brutus was all about.
Brutus will just follow up in the very footsteps of his dad and the U.S. never managed to get rid off their own little despots running crucial parts of the economy and political establishment, considering their constant inner social struggle that the media and political activists call structural racism.
We still have nations, but much of what is real in Cyberpunk dark future worlds from novels to tabel top pen and paper games to computer games is taking off already. When I was in Oxford, U.K. making a living on building sites the Sait Business School was built supposed to take on educating the next elite managers in a two year 100h per week MBA designed for banks with a 100k price tag that will, if successful mastered, guarantee a full expenses coverage by the employer along with a catapult position into the high skys of world wide financing, pretty dam big paid. All students listed in the first year listed their country of origin last after name, bank employed and previous university.
Try to get a work Visa for the U.K. any other than sponsored by a bank from anywhere of what we call the Western World.
Cyberpunk is way more real today as most consider possible.
Just, if Cyberpunk is Punk as in U.S. American English and not Punk as in British English we are today in fashism but no post yet.
“Are you a Cyberpunk? Are you on the good side” Cyberpunk Album III - Top spot in my trunk Forbs.
