Advertising for technological enhancements saturates Night City, the dystopian environment of Cyberpunk 2077 (2020), shaping how bodies and futures are perceived by players and player characters alike. This video essay analyzes those diegetic advertisements and argues that they do more than market cyberware. They cultivate disdain for the “meat” of organic embodiment and organize desires for bodily transformation. I trace the aesthetic logics of Night City’s advertising through the biopolitics of the Freikorps, Italian Futurism’s celebration of mechanized modernity, and fascist erotics. These logics are monetized in Cyberpunk 2077.
Bodily inadequacy, or “hating your meat,” becomes a problem that corporations promise to solve. Those promises structure gameplay, and technological enhancements become rational and pleasurable responses to in-game challenges. The game, as an ideological system, teaches its subjects to actively pursue a lifestyle of posthuman optimization. Fascist aesthetics return not through the state or mass spectacle, but by way of branding and mechanics.
is a PhD candidate in English Literature at Queen’s University. His research examines the intersections of fascism and authoritarianism, gender, sexuality, and aesthetics, with a focus on modernist literature and contemporary video games. His work has appeared in Feminist Modernist Studies and edited collections with Routledge, including scholarship on D. H. Lawrence, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Dragon Age: Inquisition, and Oscar Wilde. His current research considers how literary and cultural texts represent political subjectivity, embodiment, and belonging under and against authoritarian modernity.