Netflix adaptation gets cyberpunk right: 10 lives, award-winning novels, and the cost of immortality

A future built on stacks

Premiering in 2018, Altered Carbon adapts Richard Morgan’s novel. In its futuristic society, people carry a digital drive called a stack in their spine, storing their consciousness. Those with enough money can transfer their consciousness into other bodies, known as sleeves. Death becomes less final for the wealthy, while access to that technology remains unequal.

Kovacs wakes to a murder

Joel Kinnaman plays Takeshi Kovacs, a former freedom fighter who is brought out of storage 250 years after his death. He wakes in a body that is not his own and is asked to solve a murder.

As Kovacs encounters this society, he sees how the powerful continue to benefit from the suffering of others. The technology may change how people live, but it has not removed familiar human problems.

Technology deepens inequality

One example is a 10-year-old girl revived after a car accident. Her family cannot afford an upgrade, so she is placed in the body of an old woman.

The series also depicts people being exploited and tortured, while bodies are treated as disposable. With consciousness able to move between sleeves, the story suggests that bodily autonomy has been severely diminished.

A bleak cyberpunk warning

Altered Carbon presents corporations and wealthy people as forces that shape life for everyone else. Even AI-run hotels, described as simple amenities, can become troubling when businesses focus on attracting guests and grow obsessive toward them.

The series’ brutal imagery has been criticized as gratuitous, but the story frames it as part of a warning about technology enabling large-scale human rights violations. Its bleak outlook offers little escape, emphasizing what could follow if these abuses continue.