Some observations about cyberpunk tropes and conventions after reading too much of it:
The corporation in cyberpunk is doing the same job the dark lord does in fantasy. It's the force that's too big to fight and too embedded to escape. The difference is that nobody in a cyberpunk novel gets to pretend the enemy is evil by nature. The corporation is just doing what its structure incentivizes. That's what makes it worse.
Philip K. Dick wrote 44 novels and died in 1982, two years before the word "cyberpunk" even existed. But in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, he put the entire genre's central question on the table before anyone else had the vocabulary for it. The book asks whether empathy is the thing that makes us human, and it never answers cleanly, and that refusal to resolve is what keeps the book relevant forty years after he wrote it.
Hacking in fiction almost never reads well. The writers who get away with it treat hacking the way heist movies treat lockpicking: keep it short, keep the stakes visible, and let the audience feel the clock.
Dick once wrote, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." That's essentially the thesis statement of every cyberpunk novel worth reading. The genre keeps asking what's real when everything around you, your memories, your identity, the news, the economy, can be manufactured.
Madeleine Ashby's Company Town is set on an oil rig off Newfoundland. The protagonist is one of the only unaugmented people in her community. Ashby doesn't write the chrome-and-neon version of cyberpunk. She writes the version where the technology is mundane and the class divide is the point, and the story feels more honest for it because most people's experience of technology isn't glamorous. It's whatever their employer installs on their body to make them more productive.
The cyberpunk city is always raining. At some point this became a cliche, but I think the rain does something functional that's hard to replace. It shrinks the world. It makes characters move through tight spaces, avoid eye contact, stay close to walls. The weather becomes architecture.
Body modification as a trope works best when the character pays for it with something they didn't expect to lose. The metal arm is cheap. What it does to your sense of self, or your relationship with someone who can't afford one, that's where the story lives.
Cory Doctorow's Little Brother explains real cryptography within the plot. The protagonist is a teenager fighting government surveillance in San Francisco after a terrorist attack. Doctorow doesn't simplify the technology or wave his hands around it. He trusts the reader to care about how the tools work because understanding the tools is what gives the resistance its weight.
Readers of cyberpunk will tolerate a bleak world for 400 pages, but they won't tolerate a bleak world with no one in it worth caring about. The darkness is the setting. The character who still tries is the story.