The great danger evoked in future narratives of the "cyberpunk genre" is not that humans will one day be ruled by machines, but that we will lose ourselves in their dreams.

Because that excludes resistance.

The loss of one's own personality here means not only dreaming the dreams of another, but wanting to live them.

Axel Weidemann

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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The ambitious video game "Cyberpunk 2077" was about crossing the border between the machine and human worlds, the fight between two personalities in the same body and the question of the difference between soul and software.

In one of his strongest moments, where the player finds himself at a crossroads, surrounded by the twilight blackness of virtual space beyond the "Grid", traversing a thin bridge of light and data, an androgynous voice quotes TS Eliot's "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock: Streets that follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent / To lead you to an overwhelming question.

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/ Oh, don't ask, "What is it?" / Let us go and make our visit."

And just as one must have attended a reading, a play or a concert in order to internalize them as consciousness-raising processes, it is advisable to have completed the path through this video game up to the point described yourself in order to experience the neural fireworks right down to the den To feel the fingertips holding the controller, which triggers this combination of image, sound and the simulation of participation – into which Eliot's poetry explodes like a sun.

This is where corporations work on the further development of people

Those who, for understandable reasons, shy away from going there can at least let their curiosity be tickled by a two-dimensional decoupling from the "Cyberpunk" universe of the Polish developers "CD Projekt Red", which can be accessed via a game console or PC: "Cyberpunk: Edgerunners" is the name of the anime series that starts on Netflix and takes its viewers to the neon-flooded metropolis "Night City".

Here, powerful corporations work far from any ethics on the further development of people, the expansion of their consciousness and their working world.

To keep each other in check, they employ off-grid mercenaries: pistol-wielding chrome cowboys, sirens bewitching algorithms, and behemoths whose human essence consists of chips, wires,

The story begins with a colossus, with one who wanted to be titanium too much and exchanged his soul for "chrome".

"Cyberpsychosis" is the name given to those cases in which the brain surrenders to the load of machine parts.

They have to be eliminated by a "Max-Tac", a special team in the truest sense of the word.

Don't be fooled: Even if it looks like one of those high school suspensions for a moment, after three of the half-hour episodes we're right in the middle: David, who is thrown out of the squad forge of the Japanese Arasaka group after the accidental death of his mother, lets himself - he needs money - with a team of mercenaries who soon find themselves embroiled in a corporate war they can't overlook.

There is no question that the video game fuels interest in the series and vice versa.

But both stand for themselves, even if it's fun to rediscover distinctive designs, brands and characters from the game in the series.

The artists at the Japanese anime studio Trigger have effortlessly appropriated these elements, which are based on the pen & paper role-playing game "Cyberpunk" by Mike Pondsmith, who is also mentioned in the opening credits.

Director Hiroyuki Imaishi ("Gurren Lagann", "Kiru ra kiru: Kill la Kill", "Promare"), however, focuses less on elegiac moments that the genre contains, and instead tries to add poetic and, as it is, to the action It's appropriate for an anime to capture images in slow motion and frozen explosions of violence that just barely miss kitsch.

The nice little messes of this future – sex in “Cyberpunk” is a performance promise that can control more neurons in virtual space than in reality – the series describes in passing;

as well as their emotional hollowness: After the "Ripper-Doc" has certified his mother's death, he hands David a tablet on which a computer voice lists the most favorable burial options.

But no one here hopes for real salvation anyway - at most for the money to allow themselves at least a brief glimpse into the realm of big and promising machine dreams, to dream along in the gap between light and darkness for just an artificially lengthened second: of something that we still able to move to tears.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners

is on Netflix.