“Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it instead.”
—Joyce Messier, Disco Elysium
Gibson is a concrete example. He fashions critiques of capitalism in a book, the book is distilled into the aesthetics of cyberpunk, and the cyberpunk aesthetic is repackaged and resold to us.
Yeah, this is the general effect of "the thing in power", not just of capitalism. Capitalism, communism, feudalism/monarchy, colonialism. Once something is sufficiently entrenched, even resistance to the thing must be done in reference (and in context) to the thing being resisted against.
There are many layers to this, but the most "practical" is that the very structures and language of the status quo very much threatens to infect and limit the scope and form of resistance.
This is literally the idea that NewSpeak took to the logical extreme.
Capitalism is perhaps uniquely infectious in how "simple" (and therefore flexible) its core tenets are.
—Joyce Messier, Disco Elysium
Gibson is a concrete example. He fashions critiques of capitalism in a book, the book is distilled into the aesthetics of cyberpunk, and the cyberpunk aesthetic is repackaged and resold to us.