Maybe a better way to rephrase my point: money won and took over other sources of value. Technology became the biggest section of the economy.
Case in point: this site is called Hacker News and it’s run by a venture capital investment firm. Those two things (hacker/cyberpunk culture and VCs) would probably have seemed almost antithetical in the 90s.
I think money won some thousands of years before cyberpunk showed up.
Hippie and punk were really the same thing, with different haircuts. Both were useless beyond selling lifestyle.
"cyberpunk" always carried an aesthetic baggage that accomplished nothing, but there was still something there, and it is still there, if you know where to look. I think the deterioration of the political situation in the US and Europe has people dusting off their cyberpunk inclinations. I know that it has lit a fire under me.
I’m not so sure that’s a valid dichotomy. The cypherpunks were heavily anti-government libertarians and probably overlap a lot with the local VC crowd over a certain age. The cypherpunk I remember best was a horrible person who used to rant incessantly about gassing Jews on ba.foods and other usenet groups. To cast them as anti-capitalist altruists or even slightly left leaning is not very accurate.
Your original point is clear. In the 90s, these technologies and movements did not mandate supplication to authority, which meant some area where punk could still breathe. And atrophied.