We Wanted Roddenberry, We Got Cyberpunk

There’s a comment that’s been rattling around in my head since I stumbled across a discussion thread about tech companies and their slow-motion moral collapse. Someone wrote: “We wanted the Gene Roddenberry and we got the Ridley Scott.” It’s such a perfect summary that it almost physically hurt to read.

I’ve been in the IT industry long enough to remember when working in tech felt genuinely optimistic. The early internet had this wild, anarchic energy — the sense that we were building something that would flatten hierarchies, democratise information, and give ordinary people a real voice. And for a brief, shining moment, maybe it did. Then somewhere along the way, the people running these companies looked at all that power and decided the best thing to do with it was… extract as much money as possible and capture every government within arm’s reach.

The discussion I was reading kept circling back to cyberpunk fiction — Neuromancer, Ghost in the Shell, Cyberpunk 2077 — and how unsettling it is that what was written as warning literature now reads like a project roadmap. One person made the observation that the genre’s creators intended it as a gut punch to the naive technological optimism of the mid-century. The future wasn’t going to be Star Trek. It was going to be corporations running everything, the gap between rich and poor becoming a chasm, and technology serving power rather than people. The tragedy isn’t that those writers were visionary. The tragedy is that some people apparently read those books and thought, “ooh, good idea.”

What really stings, sitting here in Melbourne in 2025, is that the dystopia we’re actually living in is somehow blander than the fictional version. At least Night City had aesthetic. We got the surveillance capitalism, the regulatory capture, the billionaires cosplaying as revolutionaries — but without the neon and the cool implants. Just Mark Zuckerberg in a grey t-shirt dismantling fact-checking while Elon Musk buys a government department. As someone in the thread drily noted: we’re in a cyberpunk dystopia, but without the cassette-futurism vibes.

The structural problem, as a few sharper commenters pointed out, isn’t really about individual villainy. It’s about a system that actively rewards the worst behaviour. When a company’s only legal obligation is to maximise shareholder returns, morality becomes a competitive disadvantage. One person described watching their own employer make exactly this transition — the slow compromise of values, justified with the logic that “if we don’t do it, someone else will.” That’s not evil in the cartoon sense. That’s a rational response to a deeply irrational incentive structure. Milton Friedman did enormous damage when he convinced the world that corporations exist only to serve shareholders. Before that, there was at least a nominal expectation that businesses had obligations to employees, communities, and society. We’ve spent fifty years dismantling that idea and acting surprised at the results.

Google literally dropping “Don’t be evil” from its code of conduct is almost too on-the-nose to be real. Though as someone pointed out, they didn’t really drop it and then become evil — there was a significant lag in the paperwork.

For those of us who actually work in tech, this stuff is genuinely uncomfortable to sit with. I build things for a living. I care about building things well, building things that help people. But there’s a real moral weight to the question of what those things get used for once they leave your hands. Someone in the thread, clearly working in AI and robotics, described reaching a conclusion I recognise: you can’t fully control how the tools you build get used, but that doesn’t entirely absolve you of responsibility for building them. A Buddhist commenter talked about starting to question whether software development — particularly AI work — still qualifies as “right livelihood.” That hit home in a way I didn’t quite expect.

Here in Australia, we’re not immune to any of this. We’ve watched successive governments tie themselves in knots trying to regulate social media platforms that have more lawyers than most countries have public servants. The News Media Bargaining Code was a genuine attempt to force some accountability, and the platforms responded by briefly threatening to remove news from Facebook entirely, which was basically a corporation telling a democratically elected government to get stuffed. They eventually backed down, but the message was clear about who they thought was actually in charge.

The thing is, I don’t think we’re helpless. The pessimism in that thread, while understandable, sometimes tips into paralysis. There are real policy levers available — serious antitrust enforcement, separating corporate money from political influence, supporting worker-owned cooperatives and open-source alternatives that aren’t beholden to the same growth-at-all-costs logic. None of it is simple, and none of it will happen without sustained political pressure from people who actually understand what’s at stake.

We built the internet once. The fact that it got captured doesn’t mean we can’t fight for something better. It just means we need to be a lot clearer-eyed this time about who benefits, and build the regulatory guardrails before the next wave of technology — and AI is very much that next wave — gets consolidated into the hands of five companies and three egomaniacs.

We wanted Roddenberry. We can still choose not to settle for Ridley Scott.