Cimorene

Indeed, even when they reject it, these new subgenres often repeat the same gestures as cyberpunk, discover the same facts about the world, and tell the same story. Our hacker hero (or his magic-wielding counterpart) faces a huge system of power, overcomes long odds, and finally makes the world marginally better

Err.... that's not a rare trope. It's not limited to *punk stories. It's kinda the basis of, oh, all military sci-fi, along with a whole bunch of mainstream literature. "What you are fighting is huge and powerful and hostile, but if you are talented and lucky, you can defeat it and improve the world" is also the core of Harry Potter, which is not normally considered even an offshoot of the cyberpunk genre.

It's possible that what makes cyberpunk, cyberpunk, is that the "huge and hostile evil" involves tech-heavy corporations. And yeah, we're still flooded with stories about evil technocrats, because hey, we're still flooded with reality about evil technocrats and fiction has always held up a mirror to life.

And then he rambles on about how all these *punk variations are not imagining anything new (while he admits he published a story involving "dronepunks" in a recent anthology) and authors should do something "different." Of course, he utterly fails to describe the something-different, other than being certain it shouldn't end with the "-punk" suffix. 30 years, he apparently thinks, is more than long enough to mine the possibilities of a subgenre.

Has he also written articles about how derivative and formulaic space exploration SF is, and how it's time to set that genre aside and find something truly innovative?