Is our reality cyberpunk?
I had this thought today. Cyberpunk is a pretty popular concept right now with the video game and all and it made me wonder...
Is today's society not similar to that? Think about the aspects of it that our world shares:
-New and complicated societal issues (hatred, cyberbullying, echo chambers, depression, suicide, ect) spurred on by new technologies that are rapidly advancing (The internet and its widespread and rapid proliferation)
-Global chaos and a looming foreign nuclear threat (China, Russia, Iran, COVID, civil unrest, ect)
-A society characterized by high income inequality, corporate/state mergers, and authoritarianism
All of this seems very similar to our society today. The difference is, there are no flying cars or pretty colors. In a sense cyberpunk is almost a mirror of our reality, through magenta tinted glasses. What do you think?
techstepgenr8tion
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Is today's society not similar to that? Think about the aspects of it that our world shares:
-New and complicated societal issues (hatred, cyberbullying, echo chambers, depression, suicide, ect) spurred on by new technologies that are rapidly advancing (The internet and its widespread and rapid proliferation)
-Global chaos and a looming foreign nuclear threat (China, Russia, Iran, COVID, civil unrest, ect)
-A society characterized by high income inequality, corporate/state mergers, and authoritarianism
All of this seems very similar to our society today. The difference is, there are no flying cars or pretty colors. In a sense cyberpunk is almost a mirror of our reality, through magenta tinted glasses. What do you think?
I think you just nailed what science fiction does - ie. it's a laboratory for current concerns, and the Cyberpunk future maps on to the present moment because it's mostly been written in the days of neoliberalism and what some might argue to be post-neoliberalism potentially moving toward neofeudalism.
A lot of this really landed with the last Joker movie as well and it did touch that nerve successfully with a lot of people who watched it.
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What are these divergences specifically?
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I always figured our reality was much more crust punk.
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Yes, pretty much, except for the aesthetics. We slid into a dystopian 80s future while largely maintaining the aesthetics of the 80s - the architecture still is the same, and on the surface, one could think not much has changed in the last 40 years.
Even our cyberspace looks like an 80s office building. The cybercrime and corruption is all happening...
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Don't be silly! If it were cyberpunk, it would always be night time!
Seriously, yes, more or less. The cyberpunk future was usually imagined as being more overtly seedy and dirty though. We have the same social and technological inequality, it's just dolled up to look nice and marketable. Apple's heavy handed business tactics would fit in perfectly in a cyberpunk setting. Their sleek designs and aggressive stylized branding would not, so much. Optimism and professionalism are great distractions from inequality.
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Δυνατὰ δὲ οἱ προύχοντες πράσσουσι καὶ οἱ ἀσθενεῖς ξυγχωροῦσιν.
Those with power do what their power permits, and the weak can only acquiesce.
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I am not sure what element of dystopian cyberpunk is more true than it has been before, arguably many societal wrongs just have more of a spotlight rather than being on the fringes of public perception. With the exception of perhaps the likes of wealth inequality, which is the problem of capitalism, which perhaps one would call late stage capitalism where the elements that were meant to be freeing start to create the exact same kind of structures people say capitalism stops.
Elements of transhumanism are probably more true as in line with cyberpunk ideas, where most of us have a piece of technology on our person that widely expand abilities such as connection a ridiculous amount of information, and access to the cyberspace.
Generally the whole punk thing is not much of a thing, right? I would like to say the idea of the punk in cyberpunk was some element of changing moral identity in following the path, but generally people are far more diverse than they were before. If anything the perhaps detective like character of the cyberpunk story that keeps to the past, is more now the one who would push the problematic capitalism. I have seen conservative groups trying to push the idea that conservatism is the new punk rock.
And I am not just pulling the topic of conservatism out of nowhere, the idea of cyberpunk is intricately connected to conservatism, being something like their fear of the future.
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What are these divergences specifically?
Smartphones are the big one - no trodes or decks. Interestingly, while trodes effectively meant having to sit still while using them (similar to sitting in front of a computer desktop), they also allowed a far, far more flexible and wide-ranging experience of the matrix/internet. These days people's experience is much, much more controlled, confined, filtered, and warped by the companies which produce the devices and services for internet access. Cyberpunk had its giant zaibatsus, but generally they operated mostly outside the matrix itself; they didn't make money from providing platforms which warped users' thinking and threw enormous amounts of advertising at them (and then convinced them this was normal and acceptable). Gibson had it done with Armitage being warped by Wintermute as a once-off, but that was by an AI and only one person, not a more pervasive all-users cultural pressure by state actors (and corporations).
People don't augment themselves casually with prosthetics or implants, and it's certainly not cheap and available in back alleys. Bioscience isn't as far advanced on the cutting edge. There are a lot more positive breakthroughs - while climate change is a problem, green technologies are gaining ground. While credit cards are gaining ground, cash is still largely accepted. Space orbits and travel haven't been developed to nearly the same level. Robotics isn't anywhere near as developed - BigDogs aren't slamhounds. AI is severely less developed - and interestingly, the self-aware AIs in cyberpunk tend to be monolithic individual personalities more than they are, for example, used for marketing or politics.
As a counterpoint, intrusive personal information collection, selling, and datamining is actually far _less_ developed in most cyberpunk. Social media is almost completely non-existent in any form, whereas in the real world it's incredibly pervasive. And comparatively few cyberpunk corporations make their money off 100% online services, rather than producing some kind of custom hardware. The few which do seem to operate straddling the digital line, having brick-and-mortar fronts and in-person customer service agents as much as they offer the same services through the matrix.
