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.
Kinda true on the push, but not on the “we don’t have pockets of cultures”. Lemmy and the fediverse as a whole can be described as a pocket of culture, maybe a subculture of a larger thing. It doesn’t matter how hard the corporate overlords try to impose a single culture, people within it will want to subvert or change it one way or another.
In real life, this happens with cities that receive many immigrants or after any diaspora. People from far away always bring something with them and, depending on how they are received and integrated within their neighborhood and society, some changes will show up, given time.
Lastly, schismogenesis is a real thing - cultures can form entirely out of “we are DIFFERENT from them”
That’s a fair point and an unrealised bias, our country doesn’t have that large of an influx, so it’s generally been mostly just “us” around here.
Even so, when starting from the local flavour, there are very few aspects which stray from globally mass-distributed stuff, y’know? Like, most stuff around here feel pretty American, for one, even though we’re almost on opposite ends of the planet. And it’s the same in many other places I’ve visited. And it makes sense, honestly, it’s easier to interact if everyone behaves in a familiar manner.
Edit: also, really good point about internet-based nodes! I guess I was focusing more on the external-world aesthetics of it all, maybe I’m just longing for a change:))