As far as the aesthetic, while Blade Runner certainly is a central pillar of the genre, one should look to works from Japan as well. Anime cyberpunk stylings like Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Bubblegum Crisis, AD Police, and others fed into the cycle, as was common of the time. Japan's rise in the business world at the time fueled quite a bit of Cyberpunk speculation, so it's no surprise that the Japanese pop culture take on cyberpunk was itself influential. The US/Japan relationship was and to a degree still is a feedback loop of ideas going back and forth. I won't go so far as to say my favorite aspects of cyberpunk style are anime-centric, but I'll be damned if they don't have some great ones to pull from.
On the thematic side, the Japanese cyberpunk ranged from just another way to do monster of the week Sentai shows (Like Bubblegum) to weird, trippy, transhumanist explorations (Akira, GitS). Sometimes well, and sometimes not so much, much like Western cyberpunk, which ranges from cheap schlock with neon to, well, Blade Runner. It's a bit of a shame that the breadth of western cyberpunk cinema is pretty much exclusively Blade Runner, RoboCop, and Johnny Mnemonic. Yes, I know there are some others but they're at best enjoyably bad movies for the most part.
That said, I would agree that cyberpunk is critical of society and human nature, that science and technology are themselves tools, capable of great good and great harm, depending on who wields it. It carries with it the idea that as technology changes, as society "advances", human nature still is flawed. We create slave labor, underclasses, even when we have fantastic technology that can do away with many of our ailments.
It is also a mechanism to describe that even in this bleakness, even in this dystopia, people can do the right thing, though it may come at considerable cost. Some of the better stories are essentially Chrome Noir, mingling with another genre that shares similar tones and opinions about human nature which can make for sharing material quite nicely.
One of the more fun and interesting questions to me with regards to the genre, and one of the ones I am also the most critical of when it is handled, is what is it to be human? As one slices away the parts of themselves that are meat and replaces them with machine, at what point do they lose track of themselves? Perhaps the answer is that they find themselves in the transfer, or of course the most bleak answer of all, which is that they never really changed, and everything they have done is what made them alienated from their fellow man.
Of course this comes from the other end as well, the question of synthetic life, be it Replicants, Boomers, or Ghosts, at what point do we consider the smart machines "human", and thus worthy of respect and rights of their own? In most cases, the answer is that they are already at that point in the course of the story, but we have ignored that in favor of creating a new slave race to uphold our gilded cities.
_________________  Resident RPG Rules Snob 
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