Deliberate Punk Ethos
In the space between 1997 and the 2020s though, something interesting happened. A pop culture consensus had started to form, one that imagined that cyberpunk had been created with the intention of upholding a progressive to liberal ideology specifically, the assumption that leftism broadly had the greatest claim to the sci fi sub genre. It’s difficult to find a single citation for this, as it’s something I saw expressed broadly in various places on social media, often from people that enjoyed the aesthetics of cyberpunk but incorrectly assumed, first, that the -punk suffix in cyberpunk implied a deliberate punk ethos from the original movement writers and, secondly, that punk as a movement was inherently left wing. Neither of these things are true.