Cyberpunk and the Portrait of Technological Ownership: A Global South Perspective

Author: Rizky Murdiana & Ilham RamadhanEditor: Achmed Faiz Yudha Siregar

Cyberpunk is an aesthetic that developed in the 1980s. This decade was marked by surging consumerism and the final act of the Cold War. These conditions formed the backdrop for this popular genre within science fiction works. This aesthetic provides a setting for how dystopia occurs in the future, characterized by the phenomenon of “low life and high tech[1]. This is depicted through a future of technology, science, and computation that is highly impressive, including artificial intelligence and cyberware within it. Alongside this development, the aesthetic also portrays an erosion of society’s social values, marked by phenomena of societal collapse, dystopia, and decay[2].

Cyberpunk is an aesthetic that developed in the 1980s. This decade was marked by surging consumerism and the final act of the Cold War. These conditions formed the backdrop for this popular genre within science fiction works. This aesthetic provides a setting for how dystopia occurs in the future, characterized by the phenomenon of “low life and high tech”. This is depicted through a future of technology, science, and computation that is highly impressive, including artificial intelligence and cyberware within it. Alongside this development, the aesthetic also portrays an erosion of society’s social values, marked by phenomena of societal collapse, dystopia, and decay.

One of the most popular adaptations of the cyberpunk genre is the video game Cyberpunk 2077. Cyberpunk 2077 is an open-world game with a story premise about human life in the future. Furthermore, the technological dystopia built into Cyberpunk 2077’s worldbuilding is constructed by megacorporations that have replaced state authority. Within this premise, artificial intelligence becomes an intermediary for violence, and collected biometric data becomes a means of weapons control[3].

The depiction of Cyberpunk 2077 and its aesthetic aspirations are saturated with contributions from writers from developed nations/the Global North. The dystopia imagined tends to reflect the anxieties of Western societies unsettled by the erosion of the middle class and the loss of privacy due to excessive extraction and surveillance[4]. This then reflects how cyberpunk science fiction writing still feels very Atlantic-centric[5].

AI, Colonialism, and the Global South

In another part of the world—the Global South—the issue of rejecting technological intervention is not felt as strongly. This occurs because, generally, models of social rejection like those found in Global North societies are not found in the Global South. Practices such as whistleblowing, strong civic action/citizenship, and general data protection regulation are not easily found expressions of digital technology development in the Global South[6]. This can be seen in the acceptance of digital technology through the lens of developmental optimism. Expressions of resistance toward technology are then seen as obstacles to development and stigmatized as belonging to anti-establishment individuals[7].

Figure 1. Advertisement for security services offered by a corporation in Cyberpunk 2077

Source: The World of Cyberpunk 2077

The relationship of technology acceptance between nations subsequently creates a center/periphery relationship, where central nations become the hub of technological knowledge and the center of capital production[8]. Meanwhile, peripheral nations become the testing ground for various technologies developed in central nations[9]. Cyberpunk 2077 inherits this genealogy, where regions marked as poor, wild, and dangerous on the game’s fictional map are used as battlegrounds for testing weapons and technology. This region is marked by the presence of the Pacifica area. The game’s design indirectly reflects the geographic position occupied by peripheral nations in the real world.

This peripheral expression then becomes one of the empty spaces within the cyberpunk genre[10]. When compared with what actually occurs factually in the Global South, similar cases can be found where the geography of the Global South becomes a testing field for technology and apparatuses of violence[11].This expression has been articulated by African-Asian writers such as Tade Thompson, Lauren Beukes, and Nnedi Okorafor. For them, dystopia is not imagined as a threat yet to come, but rather as something that has already occurred. They document ongoing dystopia as part of the dynamics of technological experimentation taking place in their lives[12].

The testing-ground logic within Cyberpunk 2077 operates through two main channels: first, the use of peripheral regions as testing fields for security and weapons technology; second, the extraction of data and knowledge from vulnerable populations for the purpose of product refinement/improvement. These two channels operate simultaneously in the factual world[13].

The security approach is practised, among other places, by Israel in the genocide of Palestinians[14]. AI is specifically used as the foundation for targeting civilians, where facial recognition (biometric) technology builds a data repository for an AI-based targeting system. This system is then tested under actual conflict conditions, where the costs of loss or collateral damage are borne by powerless populations[15]. The results of this testing are then refined and commercialized, marketed as a legitimate global security market solution—particularly to fill demand for population surveillance[16].

The occurrence of genocide in Palestine shows how artificial intelligence has surpassed the logic of humanity. Humans are no longer seen as living subjects with inherent rights but as numbers whose deaths serve as justification for the successful development of an artificial intelligence[17]. To realize this killing machine, Israeli military and private companies collect various data, including biometrics, call records, location, and social network connections such as WhatsApp or Facebook. An artificial intelligence named Lavender uses this data to calculate a threat score, from 1 to 100, for each individual within the system as an assassination target. This system obscures accountability in decision-making and turns technological calculation into a tool for the reproduction of violence[18].

Figure 2. Advertisement for security services offered by a corporation in Cyberpunk 2077

Source: Visualizing Palestine: Automating Genocide

In everyday life, the same mechanism operates in plain sight without showing its extractive face[19]. In India, for example, the Aadhaar program—a mass biometric identification system—has become the foundation of a surveillance system without an equivalent framework of protection[20]. In Indonesia, Recency, Frequency, and Monetary (RFM) analysis techniques, clustering algorithms, and AI-based machine learning models are used by financial institutions to group customers based on behavioural patterns and financial needs. This is accompanied by challenges in guaranteeing personal data security and continuing high inequality in digital access[21][1] [2] [3] [4] [5] .

AI has also spread into the immigration sector. This machine offers an innovation to turn administrative complexity into a faster, easier automated process.[22] Airports in Hungary, Latvia, and Greece use AI-based lie detection tools and risk-scoring systems at border checkpoints. These projects claim that the facial expressions of border crossers will be monitored to detect indications of dishonesty. If the system becomes increasingly “suspicious” after a series of increasingly complex questions, the individual will be selected for further examination by a human officer.[23]

These various artificial intelligence project examples show how decision-making processes come to depend on algorithms. Machines offer decisions that appear neutral, even though the extraction process behind their construction often ignores the social, political, and economic context beneath it. The tendency to venerate data (data fetishism) displaces considerations of human values in favor of the need for speed[24].

Peering into the Future: The Illusion of Digital Progress’s Beauty

Arundhati Roy, in her book Capitalism: A Ghost Story, poses the question of whether weapons are needed for war or whether war is needed to create a market for buying and selling weapons. The cyberpunk universe offers a picture of how the boundaries of privacy vanish from social life. Instead, human activity is seen merely as an accumulation of data forming large-scale sets that serve as ammunition for various artificial intelligence projects[25]. The security sector is one industry that harnesses this artificial intelligence as a weapon of war. The capacity to process vast amounts of data has been successfully used for purposes ranging from surveillance and prediction to mapping various potential threats[26].

Technology crosses national borders through various formal and informal channels, including technology transfer, trade, foreign investment, and labor migration. The Global South, functioning as both market and testing laboratory, shows how weak data protection regulation combines with a strong perception of technology as a pathway to achieve development.[27] As users, the choice to use technology is often closer to a form of coercive inclusion[28]. In this case, the minimal availability of alternatives forces societies to accept various conditions in order to access these systems. Daily life and digital interaction have been transformed into a kind of transaction, in which the resulting data conclusions and data learning flow to parent companies mostly located in the Global North[29].

Figure 3. Advertisement and portrait of consumerism

Source: The World of Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077, furthermore, serves not only as a warning about the future but also as a parallel mirror reflecting present conditions. This dystopian mirror becomes clearer once we shift our vantage point to the Global South. The phenomena of mega-corporatism, data fetishism, and technology as a legitimation of authoritarianism are no longer speculative scenarios but a configuration of power that is actively operating in reality.

[1] The routledge companion to cyberpunk culture

[2] “Decay” in cyberpunk depicts the process of society’s erosion or disintegration, in the sense that there is real rot and decline in quality of life.

[3] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14407833261423232

[4] https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9780203851968/beyond-cyberpunk-graham-murphy-sherryl-vint

[5] https://brooklynrail.org/2025/10/criticspage/on-peripheral-cyberpunk-and-the-politics-of-technological-refuse/

[6] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14614448231201651

[7] https://www.sciencespo.fr/public/chaire-numerique/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/compressed-Simsek-and-Yasar-AI-Resistance-Report-publication-ready-2.pdf

[8] https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-history-of-postmodern-literature/cyberworld-is-not-flat-cyberpunk-and-globalization/C9EBA9584B9E56B10DEA364051F9F264

[9] https://edri.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Technological-Testing-Grounds.pdf

[10] https://www.wired.com/story/orientalism-cyberpunk-2077-yellow-peril-science-fiction/

[11] https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/ai-global-south

[12] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/27523543231209888

[13] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00380261251352378

[14] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01634437261421440