Information…

Information, as I said earlier on, is power. The lack of information always puts you into a position which could, in the end, be your own end. As is logical, after all what has been said, the importance of money is very relative in Cyberpunk novels. So we face a new kind of commerce, info exchange. If the wrong people are able not only to access information but control it, they will take over society, and thus take over the control of our own lives; this is one of the biggest fears in these novels. The importance of information retrieval cannot be stressed enough here, the importance we have given historically to the knowledge of theoretical aspects of the world have always been surprising. And obviously, this, applied to modern life would be exaggerated to extreme. As we can check out in this article

http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/triffid/trimmings/volume1/art32.htm

about the importance of "information retrieval" where it gives us a little summary of the ways information has been obtained by people in the past (through the creation of Encyclopedias, Dictionaries, etc… and the author of this article believes that the importance of information in Cyberpunk is only a logical consequence of this, what do you think? Try answering this question after reading the article please…) Technology, and by extension information, is considered always as the criminal that has achieved this, but it was us who invented technology, wasn't it? Technology is basically the physical presentation of the evolution of information.

This importance of information renders sentimental and moral values as useless. Characters of Cyberpunk novels are usually portrayed as selfish and indifferent to other human beings. It seems that they cannot run the risk of being worried about other human beings because that implies a problem; it renders them vulnerable because they don't have the control of the situation. They usually never talk about family structures and physical relationships between human beings (couples) is usually more related to sexual intercourse than sentimental values. Most of relationships in these books are business associations or are based on interest and a group of people that have some kind of deal in their heads, and collaboration is the only way to achieve a goal (usually also related to the finding of information).

The most obvious example of all this that has been said about information is the presence and importance of AI (artificial intelligences). The fact that humans prefer Cyberspace and that this is the "natural habitat" for AI makes these entities superior to humans. And also the fact that information is such an important element, makes AIs, the perfect example of infinite knowledge and power, the "one to be" and probably the goal that humans seek to achieve in many Cyberpunk novels; the loss of their essence, and the acquisition of a new one. AI are usually born from the desire of immortality of a human, and their wish is that of ameliorating human life (or eliminating its essence, which in their eyes is the same thing), combined with an unruly desire for immortality and self-fulfilling egotism, very close to narcissism, which is ironically one of the biggest flaws of the human race.