Cyberpunk-related aesthetics

Cyber Culture
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As one might expect, Aesthetics Wiki has a huge list of various aesthetics. I’ve put together a list of the ones I feel are related to or adjacent to cyberpunk.

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That is quite the list! Although I really feel like the “-punk”, “-core”, and “-wave” suffixes have been overused to the point of near irrelevance.

Even though I’m not a fan, shouldn’t Steampunk also be on this list? It’s like a “what if all our technology was still powered like 1800’s locomotives?” take on tech.

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Here are my (subjective) thoughts.

The ones I put on the list tend to be grounded in the Information Age and looking forward. Nostalgic elements may be present, but not in the sense of retrofuturism. The overall mood remains slanted towards something just beyond the horizon that the world is moving (or being dragged) forward to.

The steampunk aesthetic is grounded in the industrialism of the Victorian era. The mood isn’t so much one of nostalgia as it is a sense of that particular past being better. It’s slanted more towards a past or present that could have happened. To me, it feels like a revival aesthetic like Neoclassical or Gothic Revival.

I also didn’t feel atompunk belonged on the list. Although this looks towards a future people in the 1950s imagined, it does so without the context of the Information Age. It also lacks that feeling of something waiting just over the horizon.

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