In 1982 Blade Runner hit cinemas: Harrison Ford hunting replicants down neon streets in a forever-raining Los Angeles. The same year the writer William Gibson published the short story Burning Chrome, coining the word 'cyberspace'; in 1984 his novel Neuromancer defined the entire cyberpunk worldview.

The core contradiction is simple: technological progress hasn't made life better — it just hands big corporations more power while the streets get poorer, more violent, more divided. Japan's Akira (1988) and Ghost in the Shell (1995) pushed the aesthetic to its peak: neon Japanese signage, rainy nights, cybernetic implants, hackers in black raincoats.

In 1999 The Matrix turned 'falling green letters' into a global visual meme. In 2020 CD Projekt's Cyberpunk 2077 dragged it back to the mainstream. Today every dev tool's dark mode + fluorescent green / purple, every 'terminal aesthetic' brand, and Vercel's site design — all owe cyberpunk a drink.