Velocity and Anxiety: Why Does the Cyberpunk Era Speed Us Up?
Velocity — that’s everything! But how does digital speed really affect our emotions?
In a world where time feels on the verge of running out, cyberpunk cinema and culture channel, with raw aesthetic intensity, the impact of technological acceleration: suppressed emotions, conflicted relationships, existential dread…
Here, we explore how cyber films and synthwave music translate — with depth and sensitivity — the drama of living on the edge, under relentless information overload.
And, of course, the anxiety that tears at our hearts day after day, corroding human connections!
Fábio César
Urgency and Speed: A Symptom of Our Time!
Anyone who has listened to the track above — and especially watched its music video — will quickly notice one of the most pressing issues of our age: constant psychological pressure.
In the bizarre universe of cyberpunk films, the sensation of urgency or lateness is everywhere, leading to the inescapable impression that all human projects are ephemeral.
Off-screen, we are thrown into a volatile world, where commitments are either already overdue or about to expire.
The time window is always too narrow, deadlines vanish without appeal.
There’s no room to enjoy life, to meditate, or to let things ripen — because one must act. One must run!
Visual Acceleration: chases and high-speed machines
All that emotional pressure, born from the dizzying velocity of events, finds its visual translation in cyberpunk cinema — one of this site’s central focuses. Think of Blade Runner, The Matrix or Babylon A.D. (2008), with their recurring images of:
- Car chases across neon streets
- Flying machines slicing through megacities
- Bullet trains cutting urban skylines
- Automated precision devices in every corner of daily life
These works stage an era where urgency is the rule. Each frame seems to scream: “You’re late!”
And in music too, you can feel it — in Lauren Mayberry’s anxious vocals with CHVRCHES, you hear the fight to keep relationships alive against the natural erosion of time.
Framed Time and the Chronometrization of Existence
In our economy, the same logic holds. The intervals of transactions, financial operations and productive activity have been drastically shortened. Brazil’s PIX instant payment system is perhaps the most striking example.
We’ve long been living in this sped-up mode of existence. As Goethe’s demon Mephistopheles once said, in an early ode to life’s acceleration:
“If I can buy six horses,
doesn’t their strength become mine?
I can run with them, and be a real man,
as if a dozen hooves were my own”.
On these verses, Marshall Berman notes with lucidity:
“The six horses suggest that, for Mephisto, the most precious commodity is speed.
Above all, speed is useful: whoever intends to achieve great things in the world must be able to move in all directions, quickly”.
From Geometry to Cyberspace: The Birth of the Cyberzone
Since antiquity, humanity has lived time as an intimate, poetic reality — as in Ecclesiastes 3, which tells us there is “a time for every purpose under heaven.” And among the Greeks, some philosophers enunciated the inspirational principle of the Platonic “NÛN”, making it present itself in the instant.
But, on the eve of modernity, that vital impression was reshaped into a geometric framework. Galileo’s system mapped time against space, establishing the idea of velocity as a body’s position along a line.
Time became mathematically consistent, measurable with increasing precision — exact to the tick of atomic clocks. Seconds, once the smallest units, are already too slow for ultrafast chemical reactions, quantum events or research into the origins of space-time itself.
And this sense of simultaneity — everything happening at once — is even sharper in the digital realm. Bits and algorithms flow on a timescale of their own, one that quantum computing will soon push beyond imagination.
We now live inside a grid of precision, which I call here the Cyberzone: a physical territory already absorbed into the virtual, where cyberspace and interzones form an environment of constant emergence, where accelerated transitions dictate reality and events fade into routine occurrences.
Complexity and Fragmentation: the abyss of information
Our struggle with time has another consequence: the growing complexity of human life. The uncontrolled flood of data has fragmented scientific disciplines and overwhelmed our ability to synthesize.
Today, often only artificial intelligences can weave results from scattered fields into a minimally coherent picture.
Cyberpunk cinema mirrors this. Especially works steeped in espionage or geopolitical intrigue. Take Atomic Blonde (2017): a labyrinth of twists, betrayals, and layered intel that makes following the characters’ logic nearly impossible. A narrative metaphor for the hypercomplexity of the digital era.
Or, in my own words, through a poem that feels like a capsule of our contemporary life:
ACELERATOR
Magnetic
statically
jammed!
Inside the beam
razor-thin
subtle –
precision,
you find
a particle of light
deranged
– like urban love.
…
If urgency and pressure are symptoms of life today, then synthwave rises as an emotional answer. Not just background music, but a kind of sonic catharsis — an electric cry, both passionate and melancholic, against the collapse of human experience into seconds and bytes.
The track “Frações de um Mundo”, by the Brazilian duo AX-80s, captures that mix of temporal vertigo, nostalgia, and heartbeat desire. A song that could be sung on an autumn night in Neo-Tokyo, in a São Paulo neighborhood, or on the hills of Rio de Janeiro.
Its title — “Fractions of a World” — echoes the fragmentation of reality itself, mirroring the shattered digital experience of the cyberpunk age.
Synthwave: The Soundtrack of Passion — and Digital Anxiety
So how does all this tie into Retrowave culture?
In this fragmented existence, between accelerated movie cuts and synthetic beats, cinema and synthwave merge. Both conjure emotions of speed, nostalgia, and existential crisis.
Whether it’s the rapid-fire arpeggios of outrun, the heavy kicks of darksynth or the melancholic textures of dreamwave, there’s always that sense of racing against time — chasing the past, or surviving the present.
Visual acceleration becomes sonic synth acceleration. An a tense urban chase becomes a pulsing bassline, a compressed kick, a staccato lead.
The abyss of information becomes infinite delays, frenetic basslines and atmospheric pads.
Time that flies, and Music that carries us ….
At its core, Retrowave is more than music: it’s an artistic response to the same existential dilemma that cyber cinema portrays.
If you live in São Paulo’s rush or any global metropolis, this text shows how cyberpunk cinema and synthwave music can serve as valves of escape — or protest — against urban overload.
That exhausting fight against the arrow of time isn’t just the frenzy of characters in Blade Runner or Atomic Blonde. It also pulses through outrun’s synths, goth’s cryptic lyrics, and dreamwave’s slow-motion melancholy.
Each time a synth arpeggio recalls the whine of an old modem or a futuristic alarm, we’re sonifying this era of urgency.
After all, synthwave is the soundtrack of our own race against the clock … and the calendar.
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And you? How do you feel the pressure of living in an accelerated reality?
Has your playlist been a refuge, a protest — or the very soundtrack of your own race?
Drop a comment: Which synthwave track best mirrors your experience of speed in this cyberpunk age?
Keep exploring Area Orbital, diving into other reflections on music, cinema, and technology — always through the retrofuturist lens of synth and cyberpunk culture.
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Digital grid image generated by Artificial Intelligence for this article.
Airplane photo sourced from PXHere, under CC0 1.0 Universal licence.
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About the Author:
Fábio César holds a degree in Philosophy from São Judas Tadeu University.
He has been a reporter for Sacred Sound Magazine and later a member of the culture editorial team for Eclésia Magazine.
