31 January 2025

10 min read

Please note that, in parallel to the author’s previous review of Cyberpunk 2077, this review of Phantom Liberty includes some spoilers about the game’s plot.

Released over a year ago, in October 2023, CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty is an engrossing expansion pack for Cyberpunk 2077 (2020). In our welcoming review of Cyberpunk on The Commoner in 2023, we described it as a groundbreaking PC and video game that amounts to a satirical anti-capitalist odyssey. This is despite the concern that Thomas Wilson Jardine had expressed previously in these pages over one of the game’s unique pull-factors being its activation of players’ “interpassivity,” or sublimation of anti-capitalist desires—an apt political concern to which we return in the conclusion. Building on the base game, Phantom Liberty adds a riveting new story line, centered around espionage and the New United States of America (NUSA) government’s Federal Intelligence Agency (FIA), an apparent future counterpart to the existing Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Between Phantom Liberty and recent Cyberpunk updates, the Polish video game company CD Projekt Red has revamped the upgrade system, introduced new weapons and vehicle combat, and created an entirely new district in the “Free City” of Night City, California: namely, Dogtown. However, rather than convey freedom with justice and equality, Dogtown’s name and virtual landscape suggest the “dog-eat-dog” world that psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud saw as pervasive in human relations: “Homo hominis lupus [man is wolf to man],” he writes in Civilization and its Discontents (1930).

In this vein, the new district is governed by one Lt. Kurt Hansen, a megalomaniacal arms dealer whose priorities include profit, militarism, neo-secessionism, and preserving his monopoly on power. As a vision of the future underpinned by reactionary modernism, also known as fascism, the devastated landscape of Dogtown in 2077 undoubtedly makes for Night City’s most dystopian locale. Its seediness pays tribute to the noir genre, which the late Marxist writer Mike Davis describes as a “great anti-myth” that challenges capitalist-friendly, boosterist framings of Los Angeles, California, by instead repainting the metropolis “as a deracinated urban hell.”

To this point, almost immediately, Phantom Liberty presents its players with a truly breathtaking and iconoclastic sequence. As the story commences, NUSA President Rosalind Myers’s Space Force One is hacked and forced to approach Dogtown. (The spacecraft’s name thus refers not only to the U.S. president’s airplane, known invariably as Air Force One, but also to the “sixth” U.S. military branch, Space Force, created by President Donald Trump’s decree in 2019.) As such, the mysterious presidential aide So Mi (also known as “Songbird”) requests assistance from the mercenary V, the game’s main character. While players prepare to receive the descending spaceplane in Dogtown, it is suddenly shot out of the sky (see below). What follows is V’s mad rush to the burning wreckage of Space Force One—set to an awesome and  clamorous soundtrack—in a bid to fight off Hansen’s hit-squads and rescue the president in time.

While excitement over this high-stakes opening may convey some simultaneous sense of loyalty and disloyalty toward the State and authority more broadly, once Myers is safe, V can actually choose whether to work officially for the FIA or not. In general, the story hardly boosts the NUSA, which is after all led by Myers, the former CEO of Militech, an infamous arms-manufacturing company. As described in our review of the base game, Militech’s major rival is the Arasaka corporation, which seeks to resurrect Japanese imperialism. As the plot progresses, players can collaborate with the FIA; play both sides; or resist the NUSA/FIA altogether, as represented by the sleeper agent Solomon Reed (played by Idris Elba).

In this review of Phantom Liberty, we will focus on Night City’s Dogtown district as an example of the capitalist hells depicted in noir and visionary science fiction. Then, as we look forward to the sequel provisionally known as “Project Orion,” we will explore some of the anarcho-cyberpunk dimensions of the base game and expansion pack alike, together with the anarchist elements of two of Cyberpunk’s endings, before concluding.

Dogtown as Capitalist Hell

In his award-winning book Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (1991), the late historian Richard Stites explains how Russian science-fiction (sci-fi) writers from the early post-revolutionary period depicted “capitalist hells” and “communist heavens.” Alongside the classic Blade Runner, Terminator, and Matrix films and the Deus Ex games, Cyberpunk 2077 exemplifies noir and visionary sci-fi by highlighting some of the possible dystopian near-future intersections of late capitalism and high technology. In this sense, Phantom Liberty is no exception.

Indeed, at the outset of Phantom Liberty, the warlord Kurt Hansen has implemented a capitalist hell in Dogtown, a desolate and walled-off section of Night City. While the Night City Police Department has no presence in Dogtown, the Barghest, Hansen’s private militia, brutally enforces his rule there. Previously known as “Serenisands,” Dogtown had initially been meant to serve as an upscale tourist trap, but corporate investors pulled out due to waves of war and social unrest, leaving substantial infrastructure abandoned. Then, after leading a military operation to occupy the region, Hansen retained power to impose his authoritarian-capitalist vision.

As though to reflect such a grimdark atmosphere, there are surface-to-air missile (SAM) batteries stationed throughout Dogtown (see above). (One, or perhaps several, of these SAM launchers is used in the attempted assassination of President Myers.) For its part, Barghest specializes in gun-running war-mongers across the globe, whereas at home, it patrols the streets of Dogtown with heavy armor and heavy weapons, including killer robots (“Mechs”). Additionally, Hansen’s subordinates use overwhelming violence to manage the district’s borders, in a potentially critical comment (as though by the microcosm-macrocosm analogy) on State borders. In turn conveying the “eternal return” of capitalism, if V and/or his FIA colleagues oust Hansen, a power vacuum ensues in Dogtown. Gangs, including Barghest, violently jockey for power and openly terrorise working people. At the same time, small revolutionary groups issue calls to arms against Barghest, and look to mutual-aid efforts for social reconstruction.

By contrast to these left-wing collectives, the NUSA and FIA are cast in quite a negative light in the game. President Myers exploits So Mi, Reed, and V in ways that are not dissimilar from those employed by the gunrunner Hansen. In this sense, the specific focus placed on spying in Phantom Liberty—which leads almost inexorably to a “neither Hansen, nor Myers” conclusion—has more in common with John Le Carré’s anti-authoritarian espionage novels, which inveigh against the State, capital, and imperialism, than with Ian Fleming’s James Bond universe, which laments the fall of the British Empire while celebrating heteropatriarchy and neo-colonial domination.

Anarcho-Cyberpunk

Ultimately, Cyberpunk illustrates so many anarchist themes—it’s simply marvelous! Anti-capitalism is principal among these themes. For instance, satirical in-game ads about vacationing on the beaches of Somalia or visiting the “Crystal Palace” space station combine the natural human needs for leisure, rest, and travel with imperialism, white supremacy, and an extra-planetary hyper-capitalism reminiscent of Elon Musk’s SpaceX venture. Suggestive ads for the “Mr. Studd” and “Miss Lady” cyber-sexual implants, or “El Guapo” (a vague product line that may include condoms, sex toys, and/or treatment for erectile dysfunction), likewise tie Night City residents’ polymorphous-perverse libido into the interests of profit. Street protests are met with lines of riot police, in allegorical confrontations between Eros (the life-drive) and Thanatos (the death-drive), respectively.

Together with anti-capitalism, Cyberpunk features themes of revolutionary direct action. In the “Talent Academy” gig from Phantom Liberty, V goes undercover as a sports recruiter at a “Sports Academy” in Dogtown. Nevertheless, it turns out that this “Academy” is a center that cyber-trafficks children for highly lucrative sports teams across the globe. In effect, children have cyberware implanted unsafely ahead of time to increase their chances of being “recruited” (or bought/hired) by agents of these sports companies. Still, the vast majority of prospects who aren’t picked are discharged to the streets to die due to these very same implants. Upon learning of this atrocious scheme, V can choose either to negotiate with the “corpo” owner of the facility, or steal incriminating data that will lead to its outright closure.

In parallel, the base game includes a side-mission called “The Union Strikes Back.” Organised by Rogue Amendiares, a subversive “solo” fixer, this noir mission calls for killing a hitman who specialises in assassinating union organisers and otherwise intimidating the working class. Though brief, this gig is like a window into a future without the State mediating labor-capital relations—and, given the high rate of union-busting that management carries out regularly in the US, it is only slightly exaggerated. 

In fact, major corporations like Amazon, SpaceX, Trader Joe’s, and Starbucks apparently wish to abolish labor laws supportive of union organising, given their current lawsuit to dismantle the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which was created by Congress during the Great Depression to protect workers’ right to organise. Musk, a major contributor to and close adviser of newly re-elected U.S. President Donald Trump, may further seek to target the NLRB for elimination through the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) that he and biotech boss Vivek Ramaswamy will be leading in the new Trump administration. Of course, the NLRB balances the interests of capital vs. labor, such that it does not support general strikes, much less the expropriation of the expropriators, yet a near-term future without it would likely amount to corporate feudalism.

Beyond this, “The Union Strikes Back” gig hearkens “back to the future” of the genocidal colonisation of the so-called “Wild West,” while also recalling the intense class-struggle conflicts that raged in the US during the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—notably, the Pullman strike of 1894 and the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain. Plus, Luigi Mangione’s alleged assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in midtown Manhattan in December 2024—as well as the widespread sympathy expressed for this act—may indicate a real-life turn toward the social banditry featured in the virtual landscape of Cyberpunk.

Cyberpunk’s Anarchist Endings

Speaking of direct action, let us briefly revisit the decision, made in our review of the original Cyberpunk game, not to comment on its endings. Instead, we will briefly consider the radical political implications of a couple of these, while excluding those of Phantom Liberty from discussion for the time being.

After all, the “Rogue ending” (also known as “The Sun”) and the “Aldecaldos ending” (also known as “The Star”) are both quite anarchist in orientation. “The Sun,” which involves Johnny Silverhand (V’s insurrectionist alter ego) directly assaulting Arasaka Tower (either by himself or with Rogue and another comrade), epitomises revolutionary direct action (see screenshot below). In reality, the first mission with Rogue that leads to this ending, “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” alludes to Ernest Hemingway’s 1940 eponymous novel, set during the Spanish Civil War, which famously closes with the U.S.-American volunteer Robert Jordan sacrificing himself to protect his comrades and resist the Nationalist advance. The follow-up mission, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” alludes to Bob Dylan’s 1973 song.

In parallel, “The Star” sees V unite with the desert-based Aldecaldo Nomads in an exilic exodus away from spaces of hyper-concentrated capitalist power, like Night City, after they jointly defeat Arasaka. (As a side-note, perhaps the Fremen of Dune influenced CD Projekt Red’s development of the Aldecaldos.) These dual endings illustrate two of the political strategies identified by the late David Graeber in his Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004): namely, the traditional anarchist emphasis on direct confrontation with the State vs. methods of evasion and retreat, which typically receive less attention.

Conclusion: The Specter of Anarcho-Cyberpunk

Ultimately, anarchism is central to the “second world” of Cyberpunk 2077—the “prime world” being our own. Rogue, Johnny, the Aldecaldos (including V’s potential love-interest Panam), and V can all become anarchists in this game—as can players outside of it. The Phantom Liberty expansion pack contributes a satirical sub-plot centered around espionage that is also consistent with anarchism in some ways, given the story’s noir hostility toward the State and capital (in line with Johnny’s critique). 

Indeed, there is little evidence here of questionable sympathies for States run “dialectically” under new managers, as proposed by Marxists. Such anti-authoritarianism could possibly reflect the negative experiences that CD Projekt Red’s developers and their families likely had under the so-called Polish People’s Republic (1952–1989), which was dominated by the Soviet Union that was administered in turn by Marxist-Leninists. Moreover, the expansion’s intriguing title speaks simultaneously to the lack of freedom under capitalism, and to the possibility that the “phantom” or “specter” of liberty will reappear and reconstitute itself through the anarchist inversion of power. We can only hope that the developers continue developing the expected sequel, “Project Orion,” by featuring similar anarcho-cyberpunk motifs and themes.

Still, it must be acknowledged that Thomas Wilson Jardine is right to express concern over Cyberpunk’s reliance on “interpassivity”—that is, the virtual “satisfaction” of our anti-capitalist urges, which by itself leaves capitalism in the prime world untouched. Yet, it is not so simple as all that, for many pathways link thought and action. In stark contrast to the corporate world’s strategies of “anticipatory obedience” and active collusion with the new Trump regime, Cyberpunk is a game “about disruptive combat,” and “a direct struggle with fascism.” As such, as discussed last time, it may “not only nourish the radical imagination, but also encourage revolt.” Phantom Liberty is no different from the base game in this sense. Its message of “neither Hansen, nor Myers” could be symbolically reinterpreted as a rejection of both Trump and Hillary Clinton (with reference to the 2016 US presidential election)—or, more broadly, of both neo-fascism and neo-liberalism. 

At the same time, though, players don’t necessarily have to choose the more anarcho-cyberpunk options available in the game, as in life. Just like the “Dark Side” of the Force is a constant temptation in the Star Wars universe, one can opt virtually and metaphorically to side with Arasaka or the NUSA/FIA in Night City. For CD Projekt Red, such ideological flexibility is surely more lucrative than any exclusive emphasis on revolutionary action would be. By keeping players’ options open, the company ensures appeal to a broader share of the global political spectrum and, hence, the consumer market.

Many thanks to our patrons who help keep The Commoner thriving:

https://www.patreon.com/thecommoner

Javier Sethness

Javier Sethness is a primary-care provider and the author or editor of six volumes, including the forthcoming Tolstoy's Search for the Kingdom of God: Gender and Queer Anarchism.