A world full of money and crime.
Veterans who have returned home from a lost war and are looking for a place for themselves. "Cowboy" hackers, young and defiant people whose home is online. Cyberspace, as a display of information networks in the form of visual images. And the crazy thrill of the software game that they start when they’re hacking someone. When the mind works at maximum speed and absolute concentration leads to the moment when you fill in the puzzle with the one and only correct answer with absolute precision. In "Neuromancer", not being able to hack, Case was looking for this crazy high in a whirlwind of murky criminal jobs, where at every step he risks his life - and even in a chase to death he found only a pitiful semblance!
A world that sucks everything out of people. People are alienated from their bodies - flesh is now a commodity. Here, an idea was used that was later dragged into cyberpunk 2020 - prostitutes who turn off their consciousness during the session and give control over the body to a program that follows the client's desires. This, as it seems to me, just shows what prostitution is - in fact, prostitution is precisely the sale of your behavior, the sale of your soul.
Many people change their appearance just to get a career. There was a guy who wanted to act in virtual reality movies and so he inserted new eyes. His eyes are beautiful, but cheap crap, and in a year he will begin to go blind from nerve detachment. But if he gets success, he can change his eyes, if he gets it... It seems to me that this is the other side of the cult of success, "make it or die", which is present in our society. Just artistically brought a little further.
And also there is the spirit that makes the genre cyberpunk. Cyber - from the word "cybernetics", the science of information systems. Punk of the cybernetics era.
Outcasts and rejected, driven to the outskirts of society, two unnecessary veterans of a senseless war, aging and unpromising by hacker standarts, by the will of luck get a chance to break through: to do a big deal and get big money. And they break through, they run to this goal - and thanks to the right program and their skills, they manage to do this very big business. But in the end it turns out that this was mostly meaningless. The hero wanted to hack a crime boss and make a ton of money so that he could get the star from the sky for the girl he loves. But when he hacked Chrome, he found out that the girl had been working at that crime boss's brothel to save up for her own blue eyes like actress Tally Isham's. So, in the end, the world had won.
(And that makes it even sadder - she had been sold that dream. The next superstar wouldn't have "eyes like Tally Isham's", she would have her own eyes and her own unique charm, her own, not someone else's).
And yet, while they were breaking through the walls of protective programs, they believed that they would fly to the very top. And that was their rebellion against the system, their punk.
