I’m talking about how pockets and islands of cultures pop up everywhere within these settings, how Cyberpunk as a whole does away with national borders and lets everyone from everywhere and anywhere suffer equally.
And we’ve kinda’ missed the mark on that, as now culture is instead becoming eclectic. We don’t have pockets of cultures, we are steadily pushing toward having a single culture, a mass of haphazard associations and little comprehension of meaning.
Keep in mind the nature of fiction. It has an obligation to create friction and conflict. Intrigue is built into a fish-out-of-water story. Reality is far stranger, and far more complex. People and culture interact in imperceivable ways, and our influence on each other isn’t something we can predict. Nor is one type of culture drift good, or another bad. It isn’t better or worse in reality to have concetrated pockets of similar-thinking communities. In fiction, it is narratively expedient.
That’s a very fair point, and I agree that cultural dynamics aren’t uniform. However, the largest beacons/propagators of culture which exist have demonstrated this tendency to run the tender bits through a blender together, then spray it out indiscriminately, because it’s making them money. And, from a functional perspective, it is an effective means of doing so, because we mass-consume Content nowadays.
Honestly, this is a bit paradoxical on my end, which is why I may have expressed myself abstractly - I tend to prefer flexibility over specialisation, but this is one aspect in which I see more value in specialisation rather than flexibility. Basically, I think we’re losing repositories of undiluted culture over time, and I guess I’m just really scared of plastic…