While it’s important to recognise where early cyberpunk literature is coming from with respect to its skepticism of body modification, it feels like a lot of folks are basically using that to excuse the ableism of modern cyberpunk.
Yes, it’s true that much of the chrome angst in first-wave cyberpunk literature is explicitly tied to the corporate state’s efforts to abolish personal bodily autonomy, and to the extent that having a robot arm is construed as dehumanising, it’s dehumanising because a corporation owns your arm, not because prosthetics are evil.
However, it’s equally true that the “prosthetics eat your soul” horseshit of later cyberpunk lit is something that popular cyberpunk authors were very much complicit in. They wanted to retain the chrome angst as an aesthetic trapping while dialing back its political dimension in order to better appeal to mainstream audiences; to this end, the idea that having cyborg parts is intrinsically dehumanising was enthusiastically embraced. This isn’t a pop-cultural misunderstanding at work – it’s a shift in attitude that’s present in the literature itself.
Furthermore, that transition happened relatively early in the genre’s history, and was probably the norm rather than the exception no later than the mid 1990s. For those keeping count, that was 25 years ago, which is considerably longer than first-wave cyberpunk managed to remain culturally relevant. Basically, cyberpunk sold out, and it sold out early!
The fact that literary cyberpunk had some interesting things to say about bodily autonomy in 1984 – and that the chrome angst is a core component of that commentary – doesn’t give the genre a free pass for all the subsequent “prosthetics eat your soul“ stuff, and it certainly doesn’t mean that the two thirds of the genre’s entire history can be excused as “not real cyberpunk” on that basis. If you want to constructively address that shit, first you’ve got to own it!
You know, right now seems like a GOOD TIME to ditch “prosthetics eat your soul” and revert back to “your cyber arm and brain implants are owned by Google, which can drop support for them at any time and it’s a crime to jailbreak them” I’M JUST SAYING.