Okay, tbh, I'm going to vote against all map points on the de rigeur "tech metropolis" list.<p>TOKYO, HK, SHANGHAI, SHENZHEN, SEOUL, or <insert yet-another East-Asian megacity here.><p>No to all of them. Why? They're really more capitalist mega-aggregations of labour and value...tech, either consumer-side or industry-side and any, cyber-punk under-side to these places is really, despite their (arguably somewhat faded) romance, these days is a side effect ( okay, maybe 1990s-era Harajuku FRUiTS style aside ).<p>I'm going to vote for someplace in Africa as actually the most cyberpunk.<p>I've never been there, but bear with me. High mobile phone usage but lots of shanty towns, mobile finance but still open air barter markets. And they do a lot of destroy/recycle/resell of tech ( old computers, old tvs, old batteries, old ships ). It's technologically advanced, but it's also still animist and voodoo. The internet didn't just "get adopted", it got "inhaled" and started changing everything, because things were still flexible enough to be changed.<p>Look maybe I'm just TOOMA, and someone who actually knows and has lived there can set this perspective straight. But for sake of freshness of updating the conception of "cyperpunk" I'm going against the grain of passing the crown around the clique of Asian megacities, to someplace maybe a little more grungy, maybe a little more deserving of the mantle of "cyberpunk".<p>A place where you could still imagine, perhaps, an organic "phreaking" culture existing even today, accompanied by reverse engineering and zines, distributed by bicycle couriers to people cool enough to be included in such secrets.<p>I know Africa is not glittering spires of glass and steel, but is that really so cyberpunk in our current time? Isn't the essence of cyberpunk something a little more bustling but raw-and-real, and digital but down-to-earth?