As fun as it is to run around Night City spraying bullets and driving into crowds of pedestrians, I think we can all agree that the world of Cyberpunk 2077 would be a terrifying place to live. In Night City, the streets are ruled by gang violence, the police have been privatized by mega corporations, and you’re able to’t even call an ambulance unless you pay a $30,000 monthly subscription fee. The people of Night City, even the most wealthy and protected classes, are living on the razor’s edge.
Like all good sci-fi, Cyberpunk’s future is a dark reflection of our present. Night City is the furthest logical extension of the wealth disparity, corporatism, and right-libertarianism that exists in our society today. Night City is a nihilistic vision of our future, one in which every rule of law, social service, and even our innate human desire to protect and care for our fellow man has utterly evaporated and/or been privatized. Cyberpunk 2077 represents the worst possible outcome for humanity if we continue down the current road.
I’m afraid of the things that Cyberpunk represents, but I’m not scared that we’re actually going to end up in Night City one day - at least not in my lifetime. Total systemic collapse like the one depicted in Cyberpunk would require an apocalyptic global catastrophe, and anyone who’s ever presumed that they’re living at the end of the world is using magical, even narcissistic thinking. Things may get a lot worse - climate change may wipe out society completely - but they’re never going to get Cyberpunk bad.
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Cyberpunk’s techno dystopia is as much a work of fantasy as Dragon Age or Star Wars, but there is one technophobic, cautionary sci-fi game that does truly terrify me. Capcom’s mid-2000 Mega Man spin-off series of Battle Network games may seem like an unlikely source of near-future anxieties, but playing the recently released Legacy Collection has reminded me just how prescient this series was back then, and how much more important its warnings are today.
As a brief explainer, the Mega Man Battle Network games take place in the year 20XX and tell the story of a grade school boy named Lan and his virtual companion Mega Man who live in AC/DC Town. In Lan’s future, everyone carries a mobile device called a PET that allows them to interface with the net. Each person’s PET also houses a NetNavi - an artificial intelligence that takes on a humanoid form to travel through the labyrinthine passageways of the internet.
We’re not far off from Lan’s world today. After a few more generations of ChatGPT, we may have personalized AI assistants that are not unlike NetNavi. We already have virtual simulation of physical space in the Metaverse, too. There’s a lot of people spending a lot of time and money right now to make these things a reality. Regardless of whether or not AI ever achieves sentience, we could have something akin to NetNavis walking around and interacting with each other in the metaverse in a matter of years, if not sooner.
Though Lan just wants to be a normal kid, his community is constantly under threat by a cyber-terrorist organization called the WWW. In the first Battle Network, Lan and Mega Man work together to thwart the WWW over a number of months, in a series of outrageous and escalating scenarios. In the first chapter, the WWW hacks into Lan’s oven and sets his house on fire. In the net, Mega Man has to track down Fire Man and delete him to protect Lan’s family. In the next chapter, the WWW replaces all of the teacher’s at Lan’s school with agents that run a program on their school computers to hypnotize them. Some months later, the terrorist kidnaps a child in order to force his father to hack into the water plant and install a virus that shuts off the water supply to the entire town.
These are absurd scenarios, obviously. We probably don’t have to worry about hackers blowing up our ovens, taking over our grade schools, or shutting off our water. At the same time, data breaches, ransomware, and DDoS attacks have already proven to be devastating. Most people probably remember the PlayStation Network hack that brought the service down for 23 days in 2011 - the attackers were never identified. In 2000, a teenager installed a backdoor on the Department of Defense’s servers and brought NASA’s network down for three full weeks. The Colonial Pipeline attack in 2021 was a ransomware scheme that caused several states to almost completely run out of fuel, and it was only resolved once the company paid a $4.4 million dollar ransom. The more we rely on technology, connected devices, and virtual services, the more vulnerable we become.
Lan’s world is particularly vulnerable because of the proliferation of connected devices. Everything from cars to vending machines to the desks in a classroom are connected to the net, which allows the WWW to target every facet of society. When you look how big the Internet of Things industry has become, from our appliances to our home security, Tesla cars, and wearables, we’re not that far off from Lan’s reality.
What scares me most about Battle Network’s dystopia is that it doesn’t look like a dystopia at all. ACDC Town is a typical middle class suburb with clean streets, public parks, and local schools. Children are allowed to roam the neighborhood during the day, and no one seems particularly bothered by the constant terrorist attacks that set their houses on fire. Lan and his classmates are still expected to go to school when the town runs out of water, and in their homeroom the teacher tells them to try not to exert themselves too much so they don’t get thirsty. There’s no public outcry from anyone or any kind of response from the government. Everyone just seems to accept that cyber attacks are a part of life, and they endure it. If not for a fifth grader and his pal Mega Man, they’d likely all be dead.
Cyberpunk 2077 is scary in the way that a haunted house is scary. It’s a fantasy world full of mutants with robot legs and swords for arms, but as soon as it’s over, you realize none of it was real. Battle Network’s society may be a cyberpunk dystopia, but it looks just like our own. The violence and terror still exists, but it’s being waged invisibly, across the vast networks that connect us. The WWW is an organization that seeks control over the net, and uses intimidation tactics while leveraging data security vulnerabilities to get it. When I think about what Web3 advocates are after, it doesn’t seem that different. They want us to be entirely dependent on the internet so that when they commodify and control it, they can control us too. Lan and his friends may not be dodging bullets while they walk down the street, but the threats they face scare me more, because they’re the same threats we face today.
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