Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty

The Relic in the Machine: Phantom Liberty and the Corpse of the Future

There is a scene early in Phantom Liberty where V, that meat-puppet increasingly colonized by a dead rockstar's ghost, crashes an aerodyne into a walled-off district of Night City and emerges in Dogtown—a failed state within a failed state, presided over by a warlord in exile, where the trash rots in artful piles and the neon still flickers because neon, in this universe, is ontological. You are not supposed to read this as a political allegory. You are supposed to read it as "content." But the mere fact that the game's most celebrated expansion takes as its primary setting a zone of total abandonment—a literal cordon of the left-behind, stitched to a spy-thriller plot about a collapsing superpower called the New United States of America—tells you everything about the cultural moment that produced it. The future has not been stolen. It has been subdivided, walled off, and sold back to us as atmosphere.

Cyberpunk 2077 was always going to be hauntological before it was anything else. Cyberpunk, as a genre, is a retrofuture: a vision manufactured in the Reagan-Thatcher deadzone of the mid-80s, when Gibson and Sterling were extrapolating from Tokyo's asset bubble and Los Angeles's smog, and when the horizon of the possible had just been fatally contracted by the neoliberal settlement. Every subsequent "cyberpunk" artifact—and there have been forty years of them now—is a ghost dance around that original moment of foreclosure. We keep returning to the chrome and the rain because we genuinely cannot imagine what should come after. Phantom Liberty is not exempt from this; it is its apotheosis. Here is a piece of 2023 media whose cutting-edge aesthetic is a shopworn 1984 fantasy about Japanese corporations, whose political imagination is bounded by 1970s spy paranoia (Idris Elba essentially plays a John le Carré character with a cybernetic arm), and whose emotional register is cribbed from 1990s prestige TV. The future, as a cultural category, has been out of stock for decades. What we have instead is an ever-more-baroque curation of its relics.

And that word—relic—is, of course, the DLC's central metaphor made flesh. V is dying because a piece of proprietary hardware, an engram containing the consciousness of Johnny Silverhand, is overwriting their nervous system. The body is being eaten by intellectual property. One could not invent a more precise allegory for the subject of late platform capitalism if one tried: the self as a leasehold, constantly intruded upon by signals it did not request, suffering a slow somatic cancellation that presents to the medical-industrial complex as inevitable. V's journey to Dogtown is a journey to beg a disgraced netrunner—Songbird, whose name itself gestures at captured song, extracted voice—for a cure. The cure, naturally, costs more than it delivers. The ending sequence, whichever branch you take, is a masterclass in what might be called the pedagogy of no good options: side with the state and watch Songbird dragged into a black site; side with Songbird and watch the NUSA's thugs hunt you both; take the "best" ending and receive, as your reward, two years of coma and an exile from every relationship that made your life legible. This is not tragedy in the classical sense. Tragedy requires a cosmos with stakes. This is the flat affect of a system that has already won, generously offering you a selection of losses to personalize.

What is remarkable about Phantom Liberty—and what makes it a more honest artifact than the base game—is that it refuses the redemption arc its own marketing cycle demands. CD Projekt Red spent three years rehabilitating Cyberpunk 2077 from its catastrophic launch: patching, apologising, retooling, and finally releasing this expansion as a sort of cultural indulgence, a penance purchased at sixty more hours of your life. The press dutifully crowned it a comeback. But inside the text, the logic of comeback is precisely what is denied. There is no restoration. The body does not heal. The state does not reform. The friend cannot be saved, or if she can, you cannot be. The "phantom liberty" of the title is not a mystery to be solved—it is the operating condition of every character in the game and, not incidentally, of the player holding the controller. We are offered the feeling of meaningful choice inside a structure that has pre-metabolized every possible outcome. Call it depressive hedonia with a skill tree. You grind, you upgrade, you customize, you shoot, you spare, you romance, you betray, and the city remains exactly as it was when you arrived, because the city is not a place but an ambient mood, pumped into your optic nerve by a company that also pumps it into thirty million other optic nerves simultaneously.

This is why the game's political content, which seems at first glance to be doing the most, is actually doing the least. The NUSA is corrupt; Militech is corrupt; Arasaka is corrupt; the fixers are corrupt; the cops are a joke; Dogtown's "anti-capitalist" warlord Kurt Hansen is a fascist arms dealer running his own extraction racket. There is nowhere to stand. Every faction is a shade of the same rot, and the game insists, with something like religious conviction, that this is not a failure of imagination but a description of reality. Politics has been replaced by the management of decline. Solidarity has been replaced by contracts. The only relationships with any warmth—V's friendship with Reed, V's flirtation with Songbird, V's communion with the dead man in their head—are relationships conducted in the shadow of betrayal, mediated by handlers, priced in favors. This is not cynicism. Cynicism would require a vantage point from which to be cynical. This is the default atmosphere of a culture that has forgotten there was ever anywhere else to breathe.

And then there is the matter of how the thing got made. The open secret of Cyberpunk 2077's development—the crunch, the ruined launch, the engineers working ninety-hour weeks to ship a product that shipped anyway in a broken state—is not external to the text. It is the text's material substrate. Phantom Liberty is gorgeous precisely because human beings were ground into pixels to render it so. When V walks through Dogtown and admires the textural density of the decay—the hand-painted graffiti, the physics-accurate detritus, the subsurface scattering on a sex worker's cheekbone—they are admiring the condensed labor time of people who cannot afford to live in Warsaw anymore. The game's central anxiety (that you are a body being hollowed out by a product) is an almost embarrassingly direct reflection of its production (a product hollowing out bodies). That this was not by design, that the artists working on the game were probably not thinking in these terms, only proves the point. The ideology does not need anyone to believe it. It just needs everyone to keep working.

What, then, to do with a thing like Phantom Liberty? It would be dishonest to dismiss it. The expansion is one of the most technically accomplished pieces of narrative software of the decade; the Reed arc contains genuine pathos; the performances are often extraordinary; the music drills into the skull in ways that feel, occasionally, like an actual aesthetic event. The point is not that it is bad. The point is that it is very, very good at being the thing it is—and the thing it is, is a monument. It is what our culture builds instead of futures. The old cyberpunks thought they were warning us. We took the warning and made it merchandise, and now we wander through its ruins with a quest log, mistaking the density of the simulation for the density of experience. V dies either way. The credits roll either way. The disc ejects, or the launcher closes, and we are back in Night City without the neon—the original, continuous, unpatched Night City, the one we were trying to escape when we booted the game in the first place.

Somewhere in Dogtown, a bird is still singing. Somewhere, it has always been 1984.