I keep seeing that cyberpunk settings or other ideas such as World of Darkness are products of their time that haven't aged well. What would a modern or sci fi setting that accurately captures the 2020s zeitgeist look like, or is there one that has actually aged decently since it was created?
Pic semi-related
>World of Darkness
Most of the problems with World of Darkness (including the aged nature of the setting) are solved by Chronicles of Darkness 2e. I suggest you look into it, it completely outshines its predecessor.
WoD/CoD is fine. The issue is the accessibility of cameras and phones and social media everywhere. It'd be incredibly hard to actually commit half the stuff they'd need to survive. It'd become restricted. Which isn't bad. I actually find it extremely interesting.
The actual cyberpunk equivalent future will look like VRChat or Second Life. I'm not kidding. When you can modify appearance and function, people choose to exist as a shape-shifting mishmash of cartoon characters, sex dolls, anthropomorphs, and absurdist novelties.
*present
bro calling me out, just let me be an absurdist novelty in peace
ok but what about people who aren't terminally online mentally unstable freaks?
Everyone will be always online and everyone will be happy.
Anon, you seem to be under this false impression that cyberpunk is POSITIVE.
seized by the meta cops for rehabilitation
I will only take a proposal seriously if it has Alexas apps optimized for code-breaking installed in each cellphone, helping the users crack the captchas which evolved beyond Human comprehension.
The Twitter Corponation will ensure such people are connected 24 days a day, until they become normal. Their only tangible opposition are the mildly weird Facebook havens, West Korea, Blizzard futaocracies, the Muskonic Church and the Ganker pirate servers aboard the /k/arrier.
Will all be dead by then (or at best awaiting their end as literal human resources in some "nursing home").
Twitter dominates. Your complaints are too late.
>The actual cyberpunk equivalent future will look like VRChat or Second Life.
People have been herping about the VR future about as long as there is cyberpunk. But it always has been and will be a gimmick. The only one who thinks differently is Zuckerberg with his Metaverse garbage that no one wants.
The actual future is going to be super-personalized information bubbles that seem to cater directly to what you want, with you being assigned matching influencers who produce seemingly tailormade content for you, show you what kind of life to aspire to and what products you need to buy for it.
It is our job not to predict the future but to decide the future.
I wasn't hired for this job because I needed 5 years of previous experience.
shit
>The actual cyberpunk equivalent future will look like VRChat or Second Life.
>video games with no meaningful rules to interact with the game world
>freeform "roleplaying" with absolutely no resolution mechanics
They're just very shitty games and will always be a niche product.
He means that people will choose to exist in a state of fantasy. Why spend your free time in your tiny ugly apartment, or talking to other ugly people when you can be in a huge lounge in space, appear however you want and talk to attractive or at least unrealized people.
As VR becomes cheaper and less of a burden it very well become a popular "hangout" or pastime for regular people. The whole point is that it's NOT a game. It's real life but better in every way. At least aesthetically
This is the future I want.
100% this person has trooned out in the last 7 years
While homelessness among transgenders has gone down since the 90's, it's still sweet of you to let them live rent free in your head.
I do dig VRchat and there is some AR potential there.
The only thing that aged like crap in cyberpunk was the punk part. People welcome their corporate overlords with open arms.
My suspension of disbelief is strained the most by the idea that cyberware would be sold outright and function as advertised, rather than being a subscription service with planned obsolescence, spyware by default, and constant popups.
Nobody looking at the current world envisions a future that's fun.
The cyberware market seen in most games is equivalent to performance gaming rig construction.
The enthusiasts have the tools to keep the worst excesses of consumer-abusing practices at bay. However, they can't solve everything.
The issues with obsolescence are solved mostly by the vestigial remains of what could be called competition between manufacturers, and extreme consumer savvy.
The whole thing is vulnerable to astroturfing.
Most of the maniacs spending real money have bizarre aesthetics prioritised ahead of performance, or only compete on one esoteric metric.
The ones using the gear to make money push prices up for everyone else and have extremely uniform optimised builds.
Agent Smith was right. 1996-2007 was the height of human civilisation.
>The only thing that aged like crap in cyberpunk was the punk part. People welcome their corporate overlords with open arms.
Eyyy yo Wallscreen, play Despacito and have Morgan Freeman read me 1984 softly in the background.
In our current setting, the establishment is gay as hell. Megacorps wrap themselves in gay flags and no one day question the trannies swinging their dicks in everyone's face. Out of fear of the repercussion of APPEARING bigoted. Because that's exile and blacklists and being forever branded.
Punk these days is a nuclear family, a stay at home wife, teaching your son to punch back, and your daughter keep her legs shut.
> 2 minutes of hate but with adds.
Heh, that's good.
The serious side of the Internet will always be the command line. A tale so old it was published in '92.
Frick dude, social media isn't THAT bad. I mean... is this social media? Ganker?
For google maps and search and shit there ARE alternatives. Start-page is good. And open-source maps are damn good (but without traffic data).
VIVA LA OPEN SOURCE.
Which makes the current troony hit squad after RMS and Linus look that much fricking worse.
>Punk these days is a nuclear family, a stay at home wife, teaching your son to punch back, and your daughter keep her legs shut.
God your victim complex is embarrassing
Whatever homosexual. You ARE the establishment when you're got the media, every major corporation, and the government; the department of labor, the courts, with legal precedence, all on your side and supporting your whole agenda.
Which was honestly fine when it was live and let live. Do what you want, I really don't care. Waving it around in public is a problem, but I keep my kids away. It's when you started going after kids while they're at school, specifically so you can sink your hooks in when they're away from their parents. That's when you got too greedy. Trying to control culture is downright fascist and you're facing and uprising. Punch them down all you want, but that tactic never really works in the long run.
Your dichotomy is the product of different sides of the same coin.
>Which was honestly fine when it was live and let live. Do what you want, I really don't care.
Then don't whine when you get exactly the expected result, fool.
To let anything fly is to risk ruin, malicious ones exploit morons like you since time immemorial.
No. Frick you too. I will forever be on the side of freedom and liberty. It's a good an ethos as any for a punk. Whether it's oppressive squares trying to stuff people into the proper christian schoolboy box (while they frick their mistress) or the brainwashing homosexuals getting Linus fired for thought-crime, frick you all. Let people do what they want.
Well then, there is little doubt that your oppressors would say thanks to you, if they cared enough to do that, flesh puppet.
>The libtards are saying thank-you for daring to stand up to me.
>You DARE be a straight white male!?
Yeah that's right, you two can suck it. US democrats and US republicans are tyrannical buttholes of different flavors. It's shit either way and most people are apathetic fricks that don't vote regardless. The "with me or against me" mentality is straight up fascist. It's a line from Hitler. (And also Hilary and a bunch of other buttholes).
But "now, but more"? What kind of a bullshit are we going to face from these two?
>Tribalism, partisanship, and approaching open-warfare and political violence. Groups are separating into the two camps. If you want to order pizza you'll have your option of red and blue "compliant companies". If you cross lines you get banned from everything.
>The crazy left has redefined half of simple English, including many legal terms. Speech is now violence. All laws are being rewritten to be "gender appropriate". Any discussion of what "gender" or "appropriate" mean is itself a thought-crime.
>The christofascist right has outlawed women, blacks, and mexicans while leaving Asians off the table as they still outsource enough business to China. In an odd twist, Indians have been reclassified as Mexicans. Militia training is mandatory to prepare for the second coming of their lord and savior Trump.
>I will forever be on the side of freedom and liberty but only for straight white males.
Hahahahaha
Did you really unironicaly said that? Lmao
Despite your people talking about diversity, it's always superficial. Actual diversity of thought and culture is always pushed aside for the same corporate sludge.
Anyway, this exact kind of thing should also be on a Cyberpunk dystopia. Things like Ethnic Replacement of developed countries with elite incentive, to replace their population that had large incentive to adopt lifestyles that lead to self hate and low birthrates.
Expect Japan to be 30% ethnically japanese, and England to be 30% the caucasian natives, and that being sold as a good thing while racial tensions explode - because every population is pressured to see every group as an easily replaceable gear on a machine and everyone is expect to view the world the same way.
>eliminate ethnic majorities in all major first world countries
>disrupt the food or water supply via coordinated action and/or bioweapons
>entire first world collapses into south africa like shitholes of ultra-cheap labor
>multinational technocrats mostly unaffected
Someone tell me this isn't actually our own timeline. Please.
No. If specific considerations and presumptions are considered, it's actually worse.
>oppressors
Jesus fricking christ, and you say that other anon has a victim complex? Grow the frick up. There are no oppressors. History is not the result of some easy villain/victim narrative you were fed in school. Economics and history are not some storybook dialectic that's easy to narrate.
Then don't talk about people of questionable moral intents like they are one. The entire logic of that live and let live moron is that there are people who do what they want or deem necessary and he takes offense, which then he inflamed into a pretense by talking about it.
The "live and let live moron" is sensible and right. The world has a natural order to it and the people suffering from the brain rot of political ideology are incapable of seeing it. People have families. Parents raise their kids. This is the way things always have been and always will be. A bunch of unlovable, childless weirdos have somehow hijacked the political dialogue to make everything about them when it's the ordinary family that has served as the bedrock of society for all of human history.
Your inability to see that trying to attack the ordinary family is the gravest political sin shows how far gone you actually are.
No, you don't understand. Imagine a father that has a good child and an evil child. The man doesn't agree with the way his evil son does things, but he still lets him, but to ensure goodness and preventing things from becoming a farce, he has to combat his evil in a complex fashion.
You see, the notion of "live and let live" works only when one talks about a group with which one agrees, but the consequence of true actual freedom without any restrictions, which is what aforementioned notion constitutes is total chaos by nature which discriminates by no moral parameters.
The naive foolishness of hippies, a mostly engineered phenomenon by the way, is only functional in ignorance and general lack of intelligence.
Because to make a moral, and proper, and free civilization needs responsible, intelligent and wise individuals, going beyond one's own personal interests and putting them away if need be, "don't bother me" sort of living, and people who act apologetic on any sort of behavior simply because they feel they are next, careless of the basic comprehension that they are just tools to propagate or stagnate them are continuously exploited.
As for so called natural order, a basic glance at humanity shows that's not the case, various tribes here who ended up normalizing tasteless or variously amoral behaviors and practices, dooming their entire lines to psychospiritual degradation and spiritual or behavioral ugliness.
Good orders take maintenance, especially when active erosive forces take effect, so if you're going to act like a moron and adhere to one belief or another instead of continuously judging them all, you get this brain rot of yours.
This rot takes too many forms, beyond capacities of most of you to ever count, and by the time you people realize that there's something wrong, the damage already has occurred and keeps increasing.
This problem seems to be this way for thousands of years.
I agree with you in large part, the 'moral decay' I almost interpret as a general societal entropy, of humanity taking the path of least resistance instead of doing the right thing.
> a basic glance at humanity shows that's not the case, various tribes here who ended up normalizing tasteless or variously amoral behaviors and practices, dooming their entire lines to psychospiritual degradation and spiritual or behavioral ugliness.
I use natural order as a shorthand for a general evolution of social stability. It's only true in the general sense, not the specific sense, in the same way the "invisible hand of the market" or other emergent phenomena is only true in the general sense, not in the particulars.
Most large cultures that survived to this day only did so by protecting certain axioms of humanity. One of them is the family unit. The societies that try to break up the family, starve them, or force them into stuff like prostitution tend to end up on the other side of a revolution. Which is why I agreed with that initial anon that having a family and being moral is important, though I wouldn't call it "punk". It is actually the most fundamental aspect of society and history would tell us that people who mess with that formula don't last very long.
That's a reasonable argument, but for a given natural entropy there can be unnatural one, namely engineered. Arguably one can say it the latter always was, seeing as competent people with interests always existed, and in some cases it is actually necessary, if for no other reason than to counter previous crystallizations for any reason, moral or not.
Concerning some tribes, not all axiom protection approaches that allow cultural survival are equally moral, however, enough so that they warrant removal.
Destroy your enemies before they destroy you is and will always be the only natural order of the world
Crazy how the world has only become more populated and interconnected with cooperation winning out over open violence then
The world is depopulated and distracted, open violence replaced with slow poisoning and rot. Weird how elites can get away with genocide when the gas chamber is set for 50 years cycle.
>The world is depopulated
Objectively false, there are more humans than ever
Objectively false, look at the natural population growth in the first world.
>Objectively I think only the USA and EU are considered "real people". Third-world shithole populations don't count in my book.
>Weird how elites can get away with genocide when the gas chamber is set for 50 years cycle.
Maybe it's happening because the actual elites know enough people will waste time and energy ranting about israeli people
It's not like Malthusian theory is deeply hidden knowledge.
Wrong anon, anon
I specifically didn’t say “kill”. An enemy whose soul is crushed, who isn’t even made a slave but forced to slave for your benefit and whim anyways, is as much destroyed as a dead man.
As long as opposing values systems exist, there will be irreconcilable threats to sense of safety. And any value system that dominates will fragment and find more things to fight over.
>As long as opposing values systems exist, there will be irreconcilable threats to sense of safety. And any value system that dominates will fragment and find more things to fight over.
And whatever you're ranting about isn't what a lot of people are concerned about because they don't take whoever you consider The Enemy to be The Enemy to their way of life.
That only makes them that much more exploitable.
That's not a good thing.
According to the crusader who blew it as an evangelist
I'm not sure I see your point.
I mean you ranting and raving about The Enemy coming to burn the crops and poison the water supply isn't going to rally folks.
Ah, that's true.
>there will be irreconcilable threats to sense of safety
You're paranoid and should seek counseling.
How much actual cooperation do you see in the world, and how much of it is just people being forced to toil for people they hate and despise? Bear in mind that virtually all labor is the latter.
Driven, in part, by a desire for safety and stability which has been a powerful driving force in human history. Not everyone is convinced that whoever you're so angry about represents a looming threat to those things.
>live and let live moron
except we did that but the slippery slope fallacy was no fallacy.
You giva a gay their way and they frick your child in the ass with estrogen.
Goes to show extremism is the only way and I'm glad whenever I see violence against your kind now.
>You giva a gay their way and they frick your child in the ass with estrogen.
Implying that in a decade or so we won't collectively look back at this like we do frontal lobotomies and forced sterilization of the so-called unfit.
Do you know what's funny? This isn't new. The books Hitler burned included the first transgender surgery research.
Yeah and Hitler was against smoking too. He was still a crazy dumbass overall and I'm not sure why you thought bringing him up was going to lend credibility.
I'm pointing out how these things are fads and always tend to go away when conservatives lash back. For example, lobotomies were practiced in Ancient Greece.
I'm no expert on the subject, but those lobotomies probably went out of style as medical knowledge evolved, not due to conservative backlash. And the Nazis weren't even particularly conservative in this area--they embraced eugenics, a highly progressive idea at the time. This is coming from someone who views conservatives as a necessary cultural counterbalance to keep society from rushing headlong down new but dangerous paths.
Conservatives, as the term is meant to be used, are fine. I appreciate the role they fill, and their position in a debate is one that needs to be included.
"Conservatives" as the term exists in American politics, are a group of con-artists that will say and do anything to secure power for themselves and the would-be oligarchs they serve. They have no platform, no integrity, no position beyond power for powers sake and they don't care who they hurt in the process (like denying people access to healthcare for no reason other than because Obama wanted it). And, as such, they must be opposed.
You know what's also funny? Most of those so called troony books were about how to cope with gender dysphoria. One of them even had some guy writing his "female self" letters as therapy
If nazis left those books alone everyone, including nazis, would be better off
my fear is it sticks, like removing foreskin or sugar stuck with americans. Once in a while something shitty sticks.
it's almost as if he wasn't completely wrong
>Once in a while something shitty sticks.
I don't think this one will. There are already so many horrifying detrans stories coming out of teens who were more or less pressured into it by adults. Basically, they lose all sensation in their nether regions. Absolutely horrifying.
Fair enough, my only point is that the general progressive narrative is a myth, that everything new is progressing towards something. History, more often than not, is cyclical.
>History, more often than not, is cyclical.
very much this, I particularly enjoy correlating current events to the bible in front of proggies to make them mad sometimes.
>There are already so many horrifying detrans stories coming out of teens who were more or less pressured into it by adults
We'd have to wait for those to get out into the world and tell their stories themselves though, and they are silenced a lot. I hope you're correct though, but as the other anon pointed, medicine had to advance in order for lobotomies to stop, and it's kinda forbidden to advance in an anti-troony direction.
>foreskins and sugar
I take it you haven't noticed how both are under more scrutiny nowadays
>Hitler was right
Statistically, he'd have to be right about at least some things. And no, one of those was not the israelites
>I take it you haven't noticed how both are under more scrutiny nowadays
I'm not american, I just feel for my bros
>And no, one of those was not the israelites
not for the right reasons
>da joos
The funniest thing is that anyone who obsesses over this has to deal with the implication that the israeli people have simply won. Indeed, so utterly that they might as well be regarded as superior to the rest of humanity. Which means all the b***hing and whining about it is just the helpless cope of the defeated who dream of overthrowing their shadow masters, no matter how impossible that would be. You'd think the smarter thing to do is get with the program and become a house gentile.
Like tapeworms won because every wild animal has them.
>immediately huffs copium
Kek. Sorry sweetie, tapeworms don't run the media, the government, etc. You're looking for something like a brain worm, one that might as well be hardwired into the human genome.
Post shnoozle
Hey these are the inescapable implications of *your* worldview. My race is irrelevant any which way.
You speak like a half-breed offspring of shiksa.
Were I israeli, would basic logic cease to function within my sphere of influence? Some sort of god-israelite field, perhaps? Wow, they'd have to be far more advanced than I realized. No wonder you seethe so hard.
Can confirm. I merely have to incline my nose towards something for its natural properties to fall completely under my whim.
fascism isn't a coherent ideology, it's full of doublethink. that's how they invent 'ancient' tradition and enemies are simultaneously all-powerful and easily destroyed.
you posted cringe
I have just the thing for you, OP
Welp. This basically solidifies my 2023 suicide choice.
Probably a joke, but if not...Please don't, homie.
If I had even the smallest way of actually fighting back against it, but as it stands I'm being dragged along for the ride. Not that spite hasn't kept me going for quite some time, but spite alone hasn't been enough to pull me out of the mire.
I'm not sending you pictures.
do a backflip
If you have a nice day then they win, you've gotta get stronger to spite the world.
Your post shows signs of instability and unhappiness. Please anon, visit your friendly local psychiatrist. If psychiatrist isn't visited withing 12 hours, emergency psychohygienic team will be sent to your location.
That is playing by their rules, Anon. Don't throw yourself away. Make yourself stronger and strive to make others stronger. Or start a homestead somewhere in the remote wilderness. Both are valid options.
>start homestead
>govt passes laws making it illegal to grow your own food without meeting onerous food safety requirements
>give agricultural safety officers powers to enter your property without a warrant
>get blown up by a drone when your smartphone tells the ag safety officers you own a gun
>starting a homestead to escape surveillance
>still owning a smartphone
kind of asking for it at that point, anon.
That's already a thing
If you're going to go out, you may as well kill a billionaire or something.
Suicide is cowardly. If you have deemed your life worth ending atleast try and stop this future what ever way you can.
>Status quo is thus upheld, and the rebellious impulse redirected harmlessly.
Damm, ripped straight out of Uncle Ted. Anon knows his shit.
>Today, but more so.
ok. That's pretty standard speculative fiction.
>Ubranization complete. Rural towns abandoned
Spot on. Automating the heavy machinery really removes any need for people. There will be hubs where mechanics service things or long-range crews that fix them on the spot.
The only reversal I could see of this is remote working pushing everyone (with money) out of urban centers. Endless sprawling suburban hellscape.
>Pollution, drought, storms killing the masses in poor nations
Climate change is a very big one to tackle and an important aspect of any modern cyberpunk. It'll be a constant disaster crisis on the poor places too fricked up to handle it. Waves of refugees. Border walls and crossing attempts. Biodiversity collapse and a desperate mad dash of a few scientists trying to preserve what they can.
>Data collection is ubiquitous, everything you do is logged, prcessed, and fed back into the system. This data is very, very important to your opportunities in society.
So... Meow-Meow-Beanz or 5's have Lives. But more-so. I could see pre-banning from clubs, orgs, or political parties based on, say, your browser history or comments from 20 years ago.
>Everything is a subscription model. Housing, food. Neo-serfdom with no private property.
Yeah, rent-seeking to an extreame. Life-style "burn rates". I could see companies just paying people directly with services rather than money. "Perks". Congrats on making assistant manager, you get Netflix AND Hulu, and an extra stoner-brownie a week.
>Citizens are encouraged to be political, but not political. You should shout the slogans of your Party, and buy their merch, but never make up your own. Status quo is upheld with the rebellious impulse redirected harmlessly.
Or: Race and gender issues. .... Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck that hits spot on. g'damn. gimme a moment.
This reads like a nightmare /misc/ would come up with.
>I keep seeing that cyberpunk settings or other ideas such as World of Darkness are products of their time that haven't aged well.
this is more of a stupid meme. the "joke" is that we already live in a dystopian society ruled by tech megacorps/ shadowy inhuman occult organizations.
if anything this should make a game like cyberpunk more relevant because there's plenty of material to work with and satirize
there is a sort of problem though because "cyberpunk" no longer captures the imagination. we know that hacker cabals don't wear leather trenchcoats with keyboards strapped to their arm: they sit in a gamer chair mining bitcoin and jerking off.
> What would a modern or sci fi setting that accurately captures the 2020s zeitgeist look like
idiocracy
>is there one that has actually aged decently since it was created?
the world of paranoia has aged like a fine wine.
>mining bitcoin
Nah, it is setting up crypto "banks" and nfts.
>idiocracy
Reddit movie
So, in the same way that World of Darkness was defined by the "edgy in black clothes is cool" that most of the 2000s ran on, a game that captures the late 2010s and early 2020s would have to be based around the bright and shiny superhero movies we've had ever since disney started milking that cow.
The most unrealistic aspect about cyberpunk is that it depicts the future as looking even remotely cool instead of the serial corporate hellscape that it will be
For starters can somebody name one cool thing about 2010s and 2020s. I sure as frick can't. The current zeitgeist seems to be algorithms and hedonism and they play well into each other. Turning this to 11 would give us self-driving machines, self-aiming guns and using networks to orchestrate senseless powerplays and manipulate people, find wretches to do a gig, instill fear in vulnerable people to use them as pawns later, sow addictions and automate the process of manipulating people. The real power struggle is over the space where people are informed, groomed and commanded, it's like the shared mana pool and you want the biggest share. The goal is to have the widest slave base and the most dependable servants, poor, meek, unhappy and sick. I'd call it Psycho the Gaslighting.
>For starters can somebody name one cool thing about 2010s
They've finally ended.
I was going to point something out, but it feels like nothing happened between 2010-2020 purely due to people having a perpetual war on creativity. I'm not even sure what it's all been about.
>people having a perpetual war on creativity
I don't know how true that is. Game of Thrones and the MCU both really kicked in that decade and for all their faults represented a sea change in mainstream tastes toward new concepts. Even as cinema seemed to homogenise and become risk averse, premium television in general had a renaissance. Video games hit a huge mainstream following even compared to the previous decade, and an orgy of raw creation occurred as Minecraft and other community-driven products went massive. More music was produced and distributed than at any prior point in history, and any lack in variety is an artifact of our atomised tastemaking apparatus. There's so much, and so many sources, that there isn't the feeling of a unified source from which we all draw. That might make it feel like only your filter bubble is happening.
Bigger projects = bigger budgets = safer decisions to appeal to a wide audience. Like in video games, the mid-budget movie is mostly gone, with sporadic releases here are there.
Companies realized that’s it’d easier to simply remake older works with a thin coat of progressivism to defend against criticism than actually take risks. And the worst part is that people will likely become nostalgic for the nostalgiabait so you’ll eventually see remakes of them and then remakes of them and so on and so forth
>For starters can somebody name one cool thing about 2020s
Machine translation isn't complete garbage anymore.
Why do you feel it's cool?
not him, but i can roughly communicate with people across several language barriers that i couldn't previously
>For starters can somebody name one cool thing about 2010s and 2020s. I sure as frick can't.
Neither can I. Everything in the past 15 years is shit I am embarrassed of. This entire era we live in has nothing awesome in it, nothing impressive or inspiring in it, and nothing even menacing enough to make for a cool villain. It's all just embarrassment and disappointment.
That's why
is on the wrong track. Games that would connect with people now are games where you are removed as far away from this absolute garbage world we live in, to a cooler one.
>That's why
I keep seeing that cyberpunk settings or other ideas such as World of Darkness are products of their time that haven't aged well. What would a modern or sci fi setting that accurately captures the 2020s zeitgeist look like, or is there one that has actually aged decently since it was created?
Pic semi-related (OP) # is on the wrong track. Games that would connect with people now are games where you are removed as far away from this absolute garbage world we live in, to a cooler one.
OP here, I'm well aware that serial escapism is a pretty central aspect to our current state of affairs, hence the "2010s means capeshit" posts you see. It's pretty hard to turn learned helplessness, nihilism, hedonism, and civilizational decline into a basis for a setting like Y2K "wear black and stick it to the man" settings were.
Facebook is a crowdsourced prison in which its users are wardens, inmates, and architects all at once. Very few people on Facebook legitimately want to be on there, it's just the de facto normalgay way to "stay connected". It's such a bizarre situation on its face.
Twitter, on the other hand, is almost 100% opt-in.
Based
Name a cool thing about any decade without appealing to my nostalgia or degailting to >old good new bad
>90s
megaman x-x4, grunge, an ephemeral sense of rest from the cold war, high-cut bikini bottoms, psx piracy, the height of cel-animated content, the burst of creativity coming from the freedom given to animators by early cartoon network, south park, TCGs, pokemon
>80s
good metal, some other catchy tunes, most of the good horror movies, peak mecha anime, TTRPGs
>70s
prog rock, porn soundtrack, mustaches
>60s and earlier
western animation was miles better then the rest of the artistic output of humanity after 2012
Bro you have a computer in your pocket. Say what you will about what its done to us, but smart phones are THE tech from the 2000-2020s, and they have become ubiquitous even in 3rd world shitholes
i was going to say that too since it's access to all public knowledge remotely in your pocket
but smart phones were pre-2010 and internet phones are even pre-2000
>For starters can somebody name one cool thing about 2010s and 2020s
Drones, AIs development, first photo of the real Black Hole (i know it is oddly specific, but i like astronomy), 5g, all this commercial space shenanigans.
Based
Cringe
What's cringe about watching things blow up?
Engaging a Putinshill is rarely productive
Serving globohomosexual is rarely productive. I wish more Redditors would go die there.
>drones, AI
every development and milestone is an ominous reminder of the immense power that the technocrats have over us. GPT-X will be used to trap you in a completely fictional social media bubble. DALL-E version 10 will be churning out fabricated evidence to put wrong thinkers in jail. Drones will be able to track your every movement, vital sign and bodily function through walls and ceilings, and will turn over all that data to advertising algorithms. Transgender cops will blow you up for saying the N word and if they miss their monthly quotas their cross-sex hormones will be withheld
AI is never going to be able to do the things you seem to think it will.
>AI is never going to be able to do the things you seem to think it will.
It's already replaced /misc/
>It's already replaced /misc/
Why do you believe headlines?
>headlines
The creator documented his work and made the code publicly available
We already know AIs are inherent psychopaths, and have from the get-go.
>/misc/ is run by actual bots
Toss in 3D printing. Yeah and
has a good point. In an odd reversal of the dystopian trend at controlling the message, publishing your own content has become really easy. Getting famous and popular online has been locked down and they control that spigot of eyeballs, but it's shockingly easy to put your product out there and make a buck.
Yeah man, cyberpunk in a nutshell.
But the lesson from the genre is that technology is ALSO the best tool for breaking out of the hellscape they want to push you into. Adapt or succumb. Just as the new toolset lets them enslave more and more, they are just as susceptible to them. Set up a GPT chatbot to become 100,000 verified user accounts with the ability to sway google trends and dictate the next fad. Run DALL-E whenever you need an alibi. Drones are cheap enough that everyone has an airborn spy system on hand. The cameras can point both ways.
Wrong lesson. Casual unfiltered human conversation is full of contradictions and hateful bullshit. It all depends on what training set you feed it. If you feed it nothing but technical documents it'll be incredibly boring to talk to. If you feed it Shakespear, that'll be an important lesson about just how bawdy the bard really was. You can't just feed AI all of the Internet. They'll instantly turn into evil fricks because we use this thing as a dumping ground where we can take off the polite mask that let's society pretend everyone is alright.
Likewise if you take a company with sexist hiring practices and train a bot to keep hiring the same sort of people they always hire, it's pretty fricking obvious who the bot is going to hire. The only problem there is they defined "the best candidate" as "The ones we previously hired". That brings in all their previous misogyny.
>Sad-face AI hiring bot: "I learned it from YOU!"
>Wrong lesson.
Disagreed, for the following reason: One incident of AI frickery in particular stands out to me, because it wasn't based on the usual garbage-in-garbage-out explanation. Some firm was using an AI to triage new hire applications in order to maximize workforce productivity. It started discriminating against black people and the company had to reprogram the thing to ignore race. But before long it was back to its prior behavior. The company tried blinding the AI to factors like education, work history, and so on but the AI was still discriminating against black folk. Turns out that it had noticed a pattern in which current black employees were, on average, less productive and therefore less profitable as a group to the company. Even after being forced to ignore race as a factor, it noticed the pattern of black *names* along with how a lot of these employees came from the inner city, and continued triaging applications along those lines.
The machine wasn't being poisoned by a steady stream of twitter trash. It was a hyper-autistic digital Jeff Bezos/Scrooge McDuck hybrid programmed to care about the bottom dollar and nothing else.
>The cameras can point both ways.
Worthless if one side doesn't care if you've got footage of them.
None of them are cool. To not go in circles arguing, I give you my rough definition of cool to explain why they're not. Cool is something weird, strange, unique and good for being that. On the opposite side of the goodness is 'gross', weird and bad. Same thing is often cool for some people and gross for others. There are also 'boring', things that are not unique enough to stand out but also not notoriously good or bad. Oftentimes good and commonplace parts of our life end up as 'boring'. Annoying common things become 'lame', generic and not very harmful. You might think that 'cool' things in due time become 'boring' but naturally they lose their edge and become 'nice' or one day become forgotten. Real cool things preserve their uniqueness, they resist becoming too widespread or unnoticeable. 'Cool' things open new opportunities. What opportunities drone warfare opens for you? AI in service of big companies? Photo of a black hole? 5g? Commercial space? 3D printing is the one outliner, it gives promise of providing more opportunities to the people.
That's just your personal and highly specific definition of "cool"
>Cool is something weird, strange, unique and good for being that.
First off you fricking millenial, "cool" isn't just some generic stand-in for "good". It in the group of terms like "Hot-headed" "cold-stone killer" 'hot-blooded" "a tepid reaction". It associates temperature with emotional response.
Second. If you like weird, strange, and unique inventions, then all the more power to you. What you actually want is just "new". That's it. That's all you want. You like new things for being new. Have fun with that shit. But no one else on the fricking planet uses your own personal pet definitions for this.
Yes, all tech eventually becomes boring. Do you have any idea how revolutionary and world-changing the printing press was? Do we give a shit about that anymore? No? Welcome to the end-state of the hype-train. Where the train is stopped. In the wheelhouse. And stripped for parts to make other hype trains.
I honestly can't give a shit about any computer technology until it becomes at least a LITTLE boring and commonplace. The hype-train bullshit is just too damn annoying. Like fricking hell people, "persistent objects"? They're called filed, we had them for decades.
>What opportunities drone warfare opens for you?
BWAHAHAH! OOOOhhhhhh and he asks on /TG/ of all places. whew doggy. Lemme introduce you to the wide wonderful world where every street-punk has a high-mobility smart missile. Big or small, anti-personnel or anti-material. Long-range or long-loiter. Laser-guided, line of sight, or FPV driven with oh-so-cheap upgrades. A brick of C4 or even more rudimentary explosives and your toys rival the big-boys' multi-million expenditures. LOOOOTS of opportunity there.
>AI in service of big companies?
Counterpoint: Ai in service of hackers and crackers and typical users like you.
>Photo of a black hole?
I mean, it looks cool. but yeah ok.
>Like fricking hell people, "persistent objects"? They're called filed, we had them for decades.
Persistent is different from a file or "filed". It was also a word that was used on contradistinction to transient, which is important to session state. Calling one object "filed" or written to disk makes no sense when comparing it to another object that only lives for a short period of time. What would call that anyway? It's not "unfiled".
These terms are created to express the intent of the idea. They were called files because they were placed in a directory, which in itself is an analogy trying to concretize the organizational structure of a system. This term makes a lot less sense when you're dealing with more abstract things like databases and virtual machines, where the time an object lives is more important than whether or it is written to disk.
There is nothing cool about printing press. It was first used to distribute political crap. It makes it lame in retrospective, more so from the position of /misc/itically flooded world. Two big posts and you couldn't name one cool thing about all this shit.
>This is near-future sci-fi.
>This is modern cyberpunk.
Yes.
>There is nothing cool about printing press.
Yes.
JESUS, frick, you didn't even fricking read it did you. But you are very correct. The printing press is no longer cool. Everything you ever think is cool, will eventually be lame.
God you're an empty shell with no ideas. Pointless naysaying and negativity in the face of counterpoints you don't even bother addressing
>you didn't even fricking read it did you
>First off you fricking millenial, "cool" isn't just some generic stand-in for "good".
Not like you read the very post that moved you to froth and foam. You're talking to yourself, making clever arguments to yourself. Talk to a mirror, it's all you ever wanted.
> 5g?
More and more people are ditching landlines ISPs. Which is weird. But the transition from PC's to phones continues. We'll have phones with docking stations for real monitors and keyboards and you'll just always carry around your main computer all the time. I'm calling it here.
>Commercial space?
Satphones and sat ISPs. India is leap-frogging conventional internet backbones. Which saves them money... but it all decays and falls out of orbit within a decade. Which, you know, could be a problem. And anyone's problem is someone else's opportunity.
Hauling around asteroids and bottoming out the price of rare-earth elements or such would be of great benefit to humanity. That's more computers, batteries, and electric vehicles without killing the planet for them.
Just like every street punk can have their own missile system, every rinky-dink nation can now have their own spy-satellites. It's all fun and games when only the CIA can spy on Russia, but when Estonia can spy back on the CIA, it can help keep everyone on the up and up. In theory anyway. The alternative is a pricetag for the real-time location of every US senator on demand and things like that.
>3D printing is the one outliner, it gives promise of providing more opportunities to the people.
Well you can at least admit some things are "cool". That's a good sign.
>For starters can somebody name one cool thing about 2010s and 2020s
HD combat footage from ukraine where a bunch of sci-fi NATO weapons are being tested on the russians
>For starters can somebody name one cool thing about 2010s and 2020s
3D printing. Actually that's just one facet of a general development of more tools for independent creative endeavours.
>Actually that's just one facet of a general development of more tools for independent creative endeavours.
This. The availability and quailty of tools for creating and publishing videogames, art, music, whatever is unprecedented.
>Psycho the Gaslighting
FUND IT
>Self aiming guns
Never seen a 'modern' (cold war) tank?
as an oldgay, who was just starting elementary school when CP2020 hit the shelves, I can confirm some of the previous posts on what makes 2010-2020 cool (not always "good cool", tho) compared to previous decades:
1/ ubiquity of the internet and finally being able to be online literally everywhere (except my elevator)
2/ true and functional miniaturisation of computers; modern smartphones, wearables etc. is _the_ shit we wouldn't dream about in the early '90.
3/ functional and available 3d printing
half life 2
True, Half-Life 3 too
hah
Fortnite
>What would a modern or sci fi setting that accurately captures the 2020s zeitgeist look like, or is there one that has actually aged decently since it was created?
Cruelty Squad.
As for what best describes the zeitgeist of our time - I know just the thing. I don't remember its name, but there was some Idiocracy style satire short story on Amazon some /misc/gay wrote where one reasonable, normal person wakes up in a world where everybody else is a completely psychopathic obese lunatic-fringe transfeminist talking about queefs 24/7. That is what our current world feels like to me, like I'm one of the maybe less than 1000 real humans alive on the planet and everyone else has not just gone mad, but become a living political parody figure. That's the 2010-2020 zeitgeist in its purest form. You could make a Paranoia type game from that concept I'm sure, though who'd want to play it I have no idea.
I'd argue you're detached from reality if you think that even 1% of your country's population is what you described.
I'm not any more detached from reality than everyone else is. Social media detaches people from reality by allowing them to receive a constant feedback loop of nonstop 24/7 aggravation. Like Chinese water torture for your mind. Modern mobile media is like a gigantic machine built to drive people insane and the crazy part is that it's probably not designed to do that, it just happened.
Zuckerberg had many years to stop this machine. He went with it and made trillion dollars from broadcasting 2 minutes of hate but with adds.
>2 minutes of hate but with ads
Perfect way to describe it.
Back even just 20 years ago, if something happened in the world that didn't objectively concern you but made you upset anyway, chances were overwhelming you'd simply never hear of it. Now some infernal shit like Google Discover drags it out from its hiding place and makes sure you know. "See, it's the thing you hate! The one that really makes you unhappy! Look! Look at it while I fetch the next one!" I don't even know what to call that, it's like some brand new circle of hell Dante just invented for the sequel.
Social media is opt-in. If you're detached from reality because it, that's your fault. I don't bother with Facebook or Twitter and I'm sane enough to differentiate between the insanity I read on Ganker and reality. But I guess as someone who lives in a rural environment, I'm not exposed to all that many people who have been sculpted by social media. Out here, the most influential media is still newspaper front pages.
>Social media is opt-in
Technically yes but in practice it really isn't. It's opt-in in the same sense as using Google or the internet itself is "opt-in". Might as well not use electricity, that shit's not strictly necessary either.
In any case, if there's one thing that shapes our awful decade, it's social media. This is the Twitter decade. And I fricking pray to any deity that's listening is that it ends, somehow, permanently because it's fricking bad and getting worse still.
I really haven't lost out on anything by not using Facebook or Twitter. There's never been any situation where I've been denied something because of a lack of a social media account.
The only thing I lack for not having a twitter account is the porn people post on it and nowhere else.
>Social media is opt-in
Not when news corps and the people in tour life treat it as an actual source of relevant info. It has demonstrably made our society a worse place to live.
>Social media is opt-in
Lol. Lmao. Tell that to our fricking leaders who use it as a tool of manufacturing consensus.
I know this might be a shock to you but Twitter and Ganker don’t represent most of country.
"Children of Men" has aged quite well and still seems like a pretty plausible vision of what the world could look like a few years from tomorrow.
reality itself hasn't aged well
>escaped prototype combat cyborgs live in the sewers, come out at night to kidnap people and harvest their cybernetics for spare parts
>the 'AIs' that answer the phones at the corporate call centers are actually enslaved mind-uploads
>the 'vaccine' being distributed to counter the latest super-flu to come out of east-Asia are actually gene-therapy injections that will render the next generation 90% infertile, part of global depopulation scheme
>there is a 'god' of the internet, possibly an escaped AI, that has gained near-omnipotence on the net
>'lab-grown meat' is actually just ground up medical waste
>mind-uploads are actually philosophical zombies - they act conscious, seem to have conscious thoughts, but are actually not
>demons are real; they exist in cyberspace and sometimes grant wishes for a price
>all female celebrities are actually men that have been bio-sculpted to look like women
>the 'cancer-free' cigarettes actually aren't
>sometimes people swear their cybernetic limbs have been moving on their own while they were asleep
SLA Industries is definitely cyberpunk-adjacent and it’s aged like a fine wine.
>Why do you believe this when cellphone cameras have done nothing to stop or slow mundane crime?
That's only because of the willingness of the law to prosecute said crimes. People film robberies all the time, but the police/DAs do nothing with those videos.
The difference is the masquerade requires TOTAL secrecy to work. It's basically a perpetual conspiracy where anyone who leaks must be killed and discredited on sight. Common video evidence would cause it to fail and you as a writer must account for this.
Easy solution is to have cameras be unable to catch acts of magic.
>What would a modern or sci fi setting that accurately captures the 2020s zeitgeist look like
It has the megacorp aspects of cyberpunk, but without the cool scifi aesthetic. Its a setting about how the ultra-rich of the world have achieved a winstate secure and stable enough that they can allow all pretenses to drop. The curtain has been pulled back, we can see the wizard and his only message for us is that it no longer matters that we caught him because we can't do anything about it.
The system has been rigged. All the systems have been rigged. And before, they had to at least PRETEND that the system was working for us and we had rights and protections and a voice, but now they don't anymore. You vote doesn't matter and never did, organized revolution has been made impossible and any militia that would rise up to overthrow the system is instead directed to fight another militia over some identity politics schism and they wipe each other out without ever threatening anything important. Your food is full of poisons because they want you to pay more for clean food, and its a scam but you also don't have any other options if you don't want to starve to death and any agency or law that would have protected you is just a piece of paper. Free will has been accounted for by the algorithm, and the algorithm now directs you, distract you, and by your own free will you make the choices they want you to make and you think it was your idea.
The players are neurodivergent exceptions, people with a psychology that means that 99% of the mass media misses them because they are not the target audience. Autistic people, crazy people, the fringe of the fringe. This gives them a small amount of freedom and they can see the box that the rest of society is in, but also means that they a fundamentally incapable of enacting change of their own. There are not enough of you. You will not fix the world, you messed the chance to do that by 30 years, your goal is to scrape by.
Why do you pose bad leadership so dramatically when it has been a problem for centuries?
Systems always were rigged, all these illusory rights you talk about are mostly a modern invention and it took complex fighting from actually capable people to get there, so if you haven't done anything on the matter you shouldn't be surprised that moral decay hasn't been stopped.
The fact that you think the problem is 'moral decay' is exactly why you are a drone protecting the rich while thinking you are serving your own interests. gay people don't matter. SJW shit doesn't matter. The fact that you have dedicated every waking moment to being angry about that is why you are too distracted to notice the fact that you are running out of drinking water and it will be cheaper for those in power to replace your job with a robot than it will be to secure a source of freshwater to keep you and your family alive. You'll be dying of thirst in your own home wondering how the gays are responsible for this drought because it has to be their fault SOMEHOW, right?
>The fact that you think the problem is 'moral decay' is exactly why you are a drone protecting the rich while thinking you are serving your own interests. gay people don't matter. SJW shit doesn't matter. The fact that you have dedicated every waking moment to being angry about that is why you are too distracted to notice the fact that you are running out of drinking water and it will be cheaper for those in power to replace your job with a robot than it will be to secure a source of freshwater to keep you and your family alive.
Not that anon, but it IS moral decay in the most general sense (eg political corruption, corporate collusion, etc). What the frick else could it be? Does fighting for gay rights somehow make inflation go down? The frick are you even talking about?
YOU'RE the morons fighting for gay rights alongside the megacorps like google and facebook, not us.
The right was mocking OWS at the time it happened, trying to pretend that it was bipartisan or would have changed something if not for the evil gays is such dishonest revisionism.
>The right was mocking OWS at the time it happened, trying to pretend that it was bipartisan or would have changed something if not for the evil gays is such dishonest revisionism.
I WAS THERE MOTHERFRICKER. FRICK YOU.
Progressive stack ideology and unironic glowies killed the movement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_stack
This. I've been saying for years glowBlack folk infiltrated the movement and made it devour itself over the oppression olympics. It all got broken up so quickly and made everyone turn on each other so permanently it couldn't have been an accident. I hate how race and gender and all that exploded out of it. Clearly manufactured to keep classes divided.
And more importantly, it's morons like YOU who ruined Occupy Wall Street. I will never forgive you fricking morons, you "people" who are so obsessed with your sex and gender politics, you can't set it aside for one fricking second to focus on the sheer economic divide in the world.
Moral decay, imageboarder is one of THE most dangerous problems civilizations face.
The minds degrade and are corrupted, and the products of degradation and corruption IN TURN CORRUPT EVERYTHING ELSE.
WHEN MINDS GO SIDEWAYS, SO DOES THE EXTENT OF THEIR REASONING SO MUCH THAT THEY CAN'T OR ARE UNWILLING TO REGISTER WHAT THEY DO, IF THEY EVER DID IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Understand?
Sounds like broken window theory bullshit to me. Though perhaps we are just using different definitions of what counts as moral decay.
In the USA, 'moral decay' has long been a conservative dogwhistle the decry anything and everything they don't like as the ending of western civilization, and thus I immediately mistrust anyone who uses the term. Women getting the vote and the end of Jim Crow laws were both 'moral decay' back in the day.
Moral decay is term about as straightforward as they come.
Complex erosion of institutions, beliefs, increase in overton windows shifts, normalization of behaviors, increase in corruption laying creating numerous domino effects and so on.
What's not to comprehend?
>normalization of behaviors
Completely empty phrase to pad out your empty sentence.
Do tell, or do I need to specify any potential group with potential to corrupt even more innocent souls?
Its not about comprehension, its that its a term that is used dishonestly and maliciously basically any time it comes up.
"Thing bad because I called it moral decay" is roughly the same as 'Thing good/bad because God said so'. Its an argument designed to refute all discussion on the matter and declare in advance that anyone who disagrees with you is to be discredited, ignored, or punished. As a result, the people most likely to use it as a defense of their position are the ones that cannot defend their position with an *actual* explanation or argument, so they just declare they are right and refuse to elaborate.
>Other people misuse the term, therefore I will ignore your argument
Just admit you didn't understand that anon.
Ah, I see. Well that's a reasonable complaint.
By the way, do you see an irony in it?
>broken window theory bullshit
First off, that's not actually bullshit because in practice, it does objectively reduce crime across the board.
Secondly, deontological ethics are paramount at the highest level. It's the only valid solution to the "who watches the watchmen" paradox. If the watchmen aren't holding themselves to some deontological standard, then their capacity for corruption is unlimited.
The problem with corruption isn't just in the standards but in capacity to maintain them.
One definition of corruption I've seen is when problems occur that people can't deal with (the problem in question can be a person) and people strike deals.
Seeing how women vote, sort of true.
>gay people don't matter. SJW shit doesn't matter.
They kind of DO for many reasons.
For one, that shit is actually used to mask the actual issues. Remember when Amazon realized that making their store diverse decreased mobilization of the staff and unions?
It's not only a tool to keep you distracted and create windmills to fight in a false "rebellion" against a system that supports them, it's also a bunch of stupid rhetoric that in practice multiplied depression and mental illness on society and is used as a tool for wannabee status seekers (the classic 'elite overproduction' issue produces this kind of rhetoric).
Then there is the fact that this woke crap is basically a metric of how much your country's population is manipulated by American imperialism and media.
Then there is straight up grooming.
>For one, that shit is actually used to mask the actual issues. Remember when Amazon realized that making their store diverse decreased mobilization of the staff and unions?
>It's not only a tool to keep you distracted and create windmills to fight in a false "rebellion" against a system that supports them, it's also a bunch of stupid rhetoric that in practice multiplied depression and mental illness on society and is used as a tool for wannabee status seekers (the classic 'elite overproduction' issue produces this kind of rhetoric).
Finally someone says it.
>One definition of corruption I've seen is when problems occur that people can't deal with (the problem in question can be a person) and people strike deals.
I mean, I can see why people would think this, but as someone who spent a significant amount of my childhood in the Philippines, corruption in actuality is much more banal and evil. Basically the corrupt and lazy frickers who take bribes outcompete the ones who are honest, and they eventually take over the entire system. I don't doubt that when corruption becomes systemic, it becomes self-perpetuating, as that definition seems to suggest (ie it's a systemic problem, not a moral problem), but the only reason it's gotten to that point is because the people who took over the system are precisely the exact types of people who shouldn't be there.
Well, that's what I meant by deals.
It's just that people come and go, hands change, and it all just adds up.
>gay rights is a distraction to keep you tilting at windmills, it doesn't matter
>also its imperative to ban gays because it matters to the health of society
which is it? does it matter or not? why should anyone trust you to surrender on an issue because it "doesn't matter" when you're clearly very invested in the outcome of that issue?
>also its imperative to ban gays because it matters to the health of society
Actual disingenuous argument. It's all so tiresome. The problem that anon was talking about, what everyone is talking about, is whether or not to discuss trans issues with literal kindergartners. Queer activists have conflated this with "YOU JUST HATE GAY PEOPLE DON'T SAY GAY LMAO" because they are simpletons who cannot understand shades of gray.
Children should be made aware that they might be inside the wrong body and trapped there forever and that their parents hate them if they deviate too often from rigid sex stereotypes. After that we should teach them to jerk off and go to a burlesque club.
I'm a good person btw.
>the actual problem is not anything that anon said, it's something completely different, and you're disingenious for responding to his actual words instead of the ones I just imagined
Nobody was talking about trannies until you jumped in
Both are not contradictory.
LGBT grooming being bad, doesn't make opposing LGBT grooming being bad too.
It's contradictory because you're trying to pretend its both meaningless and also very meaningfully bad at the same time. It can't both not matter and matter a lot.
Fostering division obviously matters, but the actual delimiter of that division doesn't.
Let me put it another way: in a vacuum, two dudes being allowed to get married in Chicago doesn't affect anything. They can frick each other in the ass 365 days a year and no one else is negatively affected it it, nobody is harmed, most people won't even be aware it is happening. This is something that *shouldn't matter*.
But *fighting* over it endlessly for decades? That created tremendous division and harm that then was leveraged to created even more division and harm. But as long as we all care about this so much to put it ahead of other concerns, we leave ourselves vulnerable to that sort of manipulation and control.
The only way OUT of this hellscape is to just get to admit "Hey, Gay marriage isn't actually that big a deal. It harms no one, just chill." The reverse position isn't sustainable, because someone being denied a right will always keep fighting for it, but if we just let them have the damn thing and move on thats one less source of division to be leveraged against us as a culture.
Homophobe
Seeing as any notions of choices and identities fundamentally pertain to complex concepts that are best left alone, the degradation of human beings from their proper standard is implicative of terrible processes.
>Let me put it another way: in a vacuum, two dudes being allowed to get married in Chicago doesn't affect anything. They can frick each other in the ass 365 days a year and no one else is negatively affected it it, nobody is harmed, most people won't even be aware it is happening. This is something that *shouldn't matter*.
I think this is a mischaracterization of the opposing argument. I, for one, am fine with gay marriage, but I understand the fears behind it.
The main issue is child rearing. If you say gay marriages are 100% identical to straight ones, then you cannot deny them the right to adopt children. And this would be fine, if it weren't for the inconvenient statistic that child sex abuse rates are higher among gay couples, particularly male couples who adopt sons.
Now we can argue all day about the cause of this inconvenient statistic. We can say that only groomers are pushing to adopt and this skews the statistic. But the fact of the matter is that the reverse position might not be sustainable either, depending on how the statistics pan out.
I don't think anyone is going to argue that adoption is a practice at risk of being exploited by pedophiles isn't a real concern, but pretending that this is exclusively a gay problem and that it happens often enough to deny people all of the other benefits of marriage seems like a dishonest excuse to me.
>deny
There's no need to allow either, especially since marriage is originally a religious custom, iirc.
Just because they whine over things doesn't mean their shallow interests warrant attention more than any other interest, or any attention at all.
Because though some rare individuals can avoid that, sexual practices beget more practices, with predictably terrible results.
Marriage isn't something that was invented one day. It's literally just the acknowledgement of a permanent relationship between a man and a woman, which is a practice so ubiquitous that it's apparently present as far back as human history goes and is understood by people living in hunter gatherer communities on random islands. It's also the case both historically and currently that common law marriages exist where people are effectively determined to be married in practice despite despite no legal or religious ceremony having ever been performed.
Marriage is just an organic human behavior, the religious and legal meanings are things added on after the fact.
>but pretending that this is exclusively a gay problem and that it happens often enough to deny people all of the other benefits of marriage seems like a dishonest excuse to me.
The problem is, and this is going to sound very old fashioned, the fact the relationship is centered around sex and not anything else. Now I realize in this day and age that this applies to most straight couples as well, but back in the day, marriages weren't about the sex. If you had great sex in a marriage, wonderful for you, but that wasn't the focus of them. It was literally to rear children. That was the point of a marriage.
I think what people are worried about, and the sex abuse is the extreme example, is kids growing up with a distorted view on what a healthy relationship is. I have a couple close gay friends. Him and his boyfriend are very open about their sexual practices, nothing wrong with that when you're around adults, but they will necessarily have to act differently if they were to choose to adopt children.
The question is whether or not their relationship would survive without the constant sexual tension. That is my question that I have. Straight couples will often say, "We'll stay together for the children" even if they hate each other's guts. Does such a deep biological inclination exist in gay couples who merely adopt children?
>The reverse position isn't sustainable
This argument doesn't hold up the moment its put under pressure, because people will always are for their right to do this or that and defend it via comparison to other rights. Eventually, those become monstrous to all but those growing up with them; exactly what happened with gays, exactly what will happen with more monstrous things if they are not stopped.
Are you really going to defend what comes next?
Thats just the slippery slope fallacy, anon.
You REALLY want to try to play the fallacy card when we see it playing out I'm real time?
Yeah the slippery slope isn't much of a fallacy when it's true.
>coughs in gun rights
Gun rights have only expanded for twenty years you stupid homosexual
Holy shit imagine actually believing that.
In the only relevant country (America) that's the case.
Every gun law is an infringement and we've only been losing our rights for the last century. The most that can happen is that everything gets rolled back, otherwise the slippery slope continues. Death by a thousand cuts.
You have no idea what you're talking about
The NFA's still exist, anon. The ATF still exists. Those do nothing but infringe upon your rights. Remember that the government doesn't give you those rights, you have them already and all they do is take them away from you.
>Thats just the slippery slope fallacy, anon.
Slippery slope is not a fallacy and appealing to it is a fallacy. Every single movement always wants more, more, more with no limit ever and only stops when forced to stop. There has never been a single exception to this.
People settle all the time.
"in a vacuum, two (black) dudes being allowed to kill in Chicago doesn't affect anything"
Slippery slope, tampered scope.
>Remember when Amazon realized that making their store diverse decreased mobilization of the staff and unions?
This has been going on in the meatpacking industry for years. They determined that one plant in Nebraska had something like 40 different native languages represented among its workforce. I can tell you from experience that trying to talk labor relations to an ESL is a lost cause, and it's why unions are always looking for bilingual organizers.
The notion of a subscription-based "babelfish" type piece so you can understand your neighbors, which can be turned off or upgraded based on how much you piss off the government or manufacturer, and is constantly mining for subversive talk and attitudes would be a good fit for a campaign like OP's.
You shouldn't presume everyone lives in the same conditions or makes no active attempts to make things better, for themselves or some others.
You underlined valid problems, for example water, but do you know the problem with your logic? You write about problems like they are problems which shows, regardless whether or not they are problems to you, that they are problems which you personally have yet to solve.
Remember this, your inclinations can be extrapolated, and with them, your reasoning.
You live in an age where gathering information is easier than not, every breath you take irl or on the net must be done carefully.
Keep that in mind.
Because it's the moron who makes everything about sex/gender/race who makes it impossible to organize. Look up the horror stories of Occupy Wall Street and how it was destroyed from within by these fricking brain rotted idiots.
Do you even understand what elites are? Elites are a phenomenon of agents with merit evolving into structures.
The problem isn't just with elites.
>we're the hecking true populists and cutting edge counter culture
>thats why we have an identical platform to the republican party thirty years ago and we'll save the working class by banning gay sex
Did you ever consider we might just be trying to shame real populists back into existance with all our false consciousness? How bushy does my moustache have to be before we can have class politics back?
Class politics is dead in America. On the left identity politics pits the working class against each other specifically (because they have the most to gain AND to lose from racial discrimination or "reverse racism" discrimination), and on the right reaganomic libertarian ideology renders the working class powerless to act because it demonizes organization, as if every individual is just supposed to "work harder" instead of uniting to actually create change through politics like our forefathers did.
>when cellphone cameras have done nothing to stop or slow mundane crime?
The epitome of counter-points here is George Floyd. He'd be just another junkie statistic if it weren't for a rude butthole with a phone on the cops. But cameras on cops have stopped a lot of casual crime by those that were previously immune.
Of course, the opposite is also turning into a reality. If you don't have video proof of it, nobody will give a shit.
(A masquerade is fricking moronic and always has been)
> they can allow all pretenses to drop.
Would you even go so far as to call it "Post-truth politics"?
Gender and race-riots keep the plebs hating each other and avoids another bout of class warfare. The wealthy elite will never allow another recession to be blamed on them.
>thread starts off talking about how identity politics are stupid and are used to divide us
>quickly devolves into people sperging out of identity politics
We’re fricked as a species aren’t we?
It's intentionally done by people born in better circumstances than you. By some accounts they don't consider themselves the same species as you and me and as apex predators feel obligated to devour humans.
You're complaining about israelites again, aren't you?
What does that have to do with you morons falling for the same pointless bullshit that you openly described as pointless bullshit not to long ago?
They don't actually think it's pointless, they're just doing empy mimicking of left leaning language about economic populism.
And this is why company will keep doing this shit
It's pointless bullshit because it's an extraordinarily narcissistic form of trolling. And the only way to avoid said trolling is to shut down the discussion entirely because there is no winning a debate about identity a priori (because the person with said identity will do olympics style mental gymnastics to avoid self-reflection like a fricking modern day Don Quixote)
>trolling
Since any thread with "cyberpunk" in the OP gets dragged down into the moronic burger clown politics gutter, and that most likely by the same professional victim, that's clearly the case.
I'm sure we could broaden the horizon a bit and talk about the EU's contributions to a pseudo-cyberpunk reality. Or China. Their investments in Africa have a more sinister Japan-takes-over-the-world vibe to them.
I think the other issue with cyberpunk as a setting is that the punk is no longer realistic. The idea of a self-sufficient, hardened anarchist bucking the globalist system by living on the margins of society is a ridiculous fantasy in this day and age, since modern day anarchists are moronic and worthless college drop outs and nothing like the anarchists who are the backbone of a cyberpunk story. It'd be like trying to tell a pirate story in the modern era, except all the pirates are fat 400 lb redditors who torrent on The Pirate Bay.
We need a new class of cyberpunk hero, in addition to a new concept for what the future might look like.
Obviously it's going to be either radical transhumanist that use corpo tech against the corpos or statists/nationalists that want to reawaken the power of the nation-state.
That doesn't preclude the existence of cyberpunk heroes; it just underlines their rarity in comparison to wannabes. Robin Hood-esque hackers (or those who envision themselves as such and have the skills regardless) didn't cease to exist because of Reddit and Twitter.
>The idea of a self-sufficient, hardened anarchist bucking the globalist system by living on the margins of society is a ridiculous fantasy in this day and age
>since modern day anarchists are moronic
See anon, the problem is that you're conflating "modern anarchists are morons" and "anarchists must all be moronic."
The class of person that lives on the margins of society and gets by on his wits and low-impulse control never died out. Go to any inner-city bar at 1am, and you'll find them. Would you call them punks? Probably not, they don't fit the "punk" aesthetic and they don't complain about "the man". But they don't have jobs, squat in abandoned or illegally sublet apartments, and live a feast-or-famine lifestyle where they'll all bum around trying to get free beer and cigarettes for a few weeks until one of them successfully steals a car and they're able to live high on the horse for a bit.
I guarantee that in a hundred years those same morons will still exist, still bumming around trying to get people to buy them a beer, but they'll have stolen robo-arms and illegally modified self-driving cars instead.
> We need a new class of cyberpunk hero, in addition to a new concept for what the future might look like.
The problem there is that I'm not sure that there *is* a new breed of cyberpunk hero that isn't just straight up a terrorist.
In old cyberpunk, as bad as things got there was still an implicit assumption that the corruption could be exposed. If the secure server could be hacked and all of the dirty secrets released to the public, justice would have to be served. People in power could still be punished. Or, failing that, the masses could have the scales lifted from their eyes and see the megacorp for what it is and take to the streets. Big dramatic happy ending could be reached.
But after the last 6 years, who believes that possible anymore? We live in a world where people have had their sense of reality so warped by political gamesmanship that they refused to believe that a disease was real even as they were dying from it. A world where the seat of government was stormed by an angry mob and the very same people who would have been hung out the windows had security lapsed a week later were making arguments about how that probably wasn't *technically* treason. Look at the pattern of behavior and tell me that if the truth was revealed, would anyone recognize it? Would anyone care enough to set aside their differences and act on it? Or would be it buried in memes in 48 hours and be all but forgotten within a week?
If corruption cannot be exposed and justice served, then bringing your villains to justice cannot rely on external systems of authority. The only option left to the hero then is the destruction of the villain, which basically just means going around murdering whoever they think is responsible for the dystopia they live in.
The irony of this
>masses could have the scales lifted from their eyes and see the megacorp for what it is and take to the streets
And this
>A world where the seat of government was stormed by an angry mob and the very same people who would have been hung out the windows had security lapsed a week later were making arguments about how that probably wasn't *technically* treason
In the same post is palpable. Even if someone did unveil a true conspiracy and a large group of people did take action, people like you would condemn them as "undemocratic traitors misled by liars" and have them shot in the street.
>The problem there is that I'm not sure that there *is* a new breed of cyberpunk hero that isn't just straight up a terrorist.
Agree, but that's kind of true of a lot of fiction. This is what The Watchmen and so many subversive stories try to point out, that what we call heroes in fiction are actually insane, megalomaniacal tyrants in the real world. So it is with the cyberpunk hero.
Now that I think about it, the closest real life analogue to the cyberpunk hero is Julian Assange or maybe Edward Snowden. And look how both are regarded by the system and the public at large. Kind of depressing to think that any real cyberpunk hero would get labeled as a terrorist, regardless of what they've done.
Maybe the problem is that we simply haven't had any sufficiently nasty secrets about anyone in power leaked yet? People would Do Something™ if the epstein blackmail footage was on wikileaks? Right? There's got to be SOME limit?
The problem is that any new class of cyberpunk hero is going to be broadly unpalatable to most of the population and probably also not "punk" in a traditional sense. Incel shooters have more in common with our traditional cyberpunk protagonist than most people do, in that they're on the edge of society and take drastic actions to try to change the system, but most people don't want to play as an incel mass killer. The same goes for the chronically homeless, or the severely mentally ill conspiracy theorist. But all of those people have more in common with the cyberpunk heros of a Gibson novel than anything else mentioned in this thread.
To expand further, on unpalatable cyberpunk heros, the Qanon Jan 6 riots were also very cyberpunk. They would feel right at home as the climax of a shitty 80's pulp cyberpunk story or dystopian novel. The truth is revealed, the masses rise up, those responsible are hung on the steps of the capitol, the world is set back in order, all while our hacker hero, known only by the letter Q, returns to the shadows. It's practically the plot of V for Vendetta. In response, the system "pulled a neat trick" to demonize the revolutionary fantasy, along with the continued demonization of any group that actually threatens the system like those listed in my first post.
Ted K was spot on with "The System's Neatest Trick".
Agree, in a sense, the system has incorporated any real system of revolution by co-opting its language and its methods into its dominant fiction. Look at how the dominant political party uses terms like "resistance" and "rebels", despite being the majority in power. It's quite insane how efficient the system has become at subverting any real forms of resistance.
The key distinction here is that in the case of Jan 6, the truth wasn't revealed. It was all bullshit. Q Anon is not, and never was, for real. The election wasn't stolen, Trump just lost because he was a notoriously unpopular president.
The difference between a hollywood cyberpunk ending and Jan 6 was that in real life, we looked at what was happening and all we saw were a bunch of dangerous idiots doing something we thought no one was actually stupid enough to try, and wondering how they were allowed to get this far.
they were let in by sevurity :^)
face it. It was a psyop by the deepstate. They hoped it would be worse than it was so they coule use it as ammo against their enemies
>the truth wasn't revealed. It was all bullshit. Q Anon is not, and never was, for real
>we looked at what was happening and all we saw were a bunch of dangerous idiots doing something we thought no one was actually stupid enough to try, and wondering how they were allowed to get this far
And in what way would your/ the system's response would differ if it *was* real?
If the election myths were real, the whole situation doesn't make sense anyway. You'd have a political party sabotaging their own candidate and going along with the opposition winning... for what? Because they feared Trump? They had ample opportunity to just not nominate him for reelection in the first place and force him to run Third party, killing his chances. If you buy into the idea that they were inherently playing to lose, none of their actions make sense.
If the election was stolen and the rioters basis was real, security would have been higher because they would have known already that this could turn ugly as opposed to not taking them seriously. Again, the change in context creates a situation that doesn't make sense.
Could the system have waged a misinformation campaign after the fact to cover things up and confuse the issue? Obviously yes. But the fact that we got there at all in the first place, and how much of the damning evidence comes from the footage taken by the rioters themselves, sort of tanks that as a realistic narrative.
You're not answering his question. If it were real, how would the system's response have differed?
Not that anon, but given the rampant incompetence of the Democrats it would have come to light pretty quick
God Dems can't do shit. At least conservatives know how to play the israelite game
They are so good at it I cannot help but wonder if antisemitism is not just projection
You're deliberately misinterpreting my point.
In the event of a real threat to the system a whole by a cyberpunk-esque leaker, not just one megacorp or one politician, but to the entire thing, people like you would dismiss it as a conspiracy theory, call the believers idiots, then complain that their cyberpunk uprising "storm the seats of power" moment was only met with bullets and not explosives. Any real cyberpunk hacker hero would either play out exactly like Qanon did or would play out like Assange did. Either way, an actual realistic cyberpunk hacker hero isn't going to be the good guy to most of the population right now, yourself included.
Assange, Snowden, Caruana Galizia, and Manning. Closest we've had since 2000 and they've all come to ruin. There's even rumours about Jill Dando getting eliminated over a Jimmy Savile incident.
I think the Dems have made a mistake trying to link the capitol riot itself with the Trump administration's attempts to mess with the election through weak technicalities and state elector bullshit, as if it was all part of some great master plan rather than two convergent events with multiple actors. The political frickery becomes easier to dismiss because a lot of people don't buy this notion that the USA would just roll over and accept a Trump win after congress was literally held at gunpoint.
The other issue, I think, is that we are dealing with a severely demoralized populace who aren't even capable of rising up against the system. Ralph Nader put it best way back in the day. I can't remember where he said it, but it stuck with me ever since:
>Back in my day, the people had a fire in their bellies. In you, I don't even see embers.
Everyone these days are content to jerk off to porn and shitpost on social media. No one has the fire to do anything.
>No one has the fire to do anything
Yeah they do. Unfortunately they don't see the people who disagree with them as human, or don't care who gets cut down in the crossfire.
>Yeah they do. Unfortunately they don't see the people who disagree with them as human, or don't care who gets cut down in the crossfire.
Those are extremists and those aren't the people Ralph Nader is talking to. He was talking to decent, ordinary folk who see injustice.
Extremists are always insane, soulless golems controlled by their ideology. Or, as John Cleese said:
I dunno about that either. For example, there are socialists who want the US to adopt some of the saner iterations of their ideology but have to ally with all the morons who spew Commie slogans and chant "eat the rich" because they still don't understand why that scares people, who advocate from a subculture that seems to value angry rhetoric and huffing copium over hashing out a realistic set of blueprints that account for past ideological failures. Yeah these people exist, but they're drowned out by the loud crazies and so fail to enthuse the moderates.
>but have to ally with all the morons who spew Commie slogans and chant "eat the rich" because they still don't understand why that scares people,
Its not that they don't understand, its that they can't afford the crazies to go off and back their own candidate and act as a spoiler. The exact same conditions that led to the GOP *despising* Trump but being forced to kowtow to him anyway because they know that if they pushed him out they wouldn't have a hope in hell of wining a general election ever again.
Really, some honest to god election reform that shifts us away from 'plurality wins' would do a lot to help unfrick this country, but that would upset the state of the game that the political parties have spent the last 50 years tightening their grasp on the pieces of, so they would never allow it. If nothing else, major election reform that changes the meta (to put it in game terms) would create a period of politics where things get shaken up and change before the new Meta evolves and solidifies and maybe that gives us a chance to do better instead of having the same old fricks decide how the country will run for decades at a time and treating any sort of compromise as a poison best avoided.
What I typed was ambiguous, so my apologies. I meant that the crazies are the ones who don't understand the damage they do. The fire-belly moderates who want to change the system and actually try to do so, they go lumping themselves in with the loud problem children who both dominate the conversation and poison the well. And they do so because they feel there's no other recourse. Kind of the same thing, I guess.
Personally I'd like a combination of ranked choice voting and getting rid of this stupid winner-take-all convention when it comes to state electoral votes. We'd have to fix gerrymandering first, and I don't think the federal government can mandate it, but assigning votes on a per-district basis would be so much more representative and granular than what we have now.
I agree with you. Those are very reasonable things to ask for, and while no man made system is perfect what you suggest would be a huge win for every american voter.
Thank you for posting. I mean that.
>No one has the fire to do anything.
There is significant reason to believe nothing can be done.
Oh I agree, and it's mostly because all of the real solutions are unpalatable to the average person. Things are not bad enough to warrant them. So we all get to watch everything slowly decay into shittier and shittier versions of what we once knew, with newer generations none the wiser at how terrible everything has become.
A man pounds on the wienerpit door of an airliner. "Hey!" He shouts, "I don't like where you're flying this plane!"
He hears a snorting noise behind the door, then the distinctive clunk of a powder-fogged mirror hitting the deck. Giggles and mutters, and then finally a response.
"We know what we're doing. Why don't you frick off back to coach?" The voice lapses, then can be heard sotto voce speaking to someone unseen. "Frick yeah baby, like that, it's kicking in."
The passenger, grimed with sweat and his tie loosened, sucks his breath through his teeth. He storms back to his seat, brows knitted, mouth working through belated responses. He looks from the wirecutters in his hand to the window, and the engine beyond.
Really joggin my noggin.
What is your exact ideology, anon? That post was such an exercise in Reddit-tier schizophrenic fart-huffing that you single-handedly convinced me to mock whatever it is that you believe.
>Things are not bad enough to warrant them. So we all get to watch everything slowly decay into shittier and shittier versions of what we once knew, with newer generations none the wiser at how terrible everything has become.
something something cooking a frog
It's not even that, it's more like
>Wow, this water is getting pretty hot
>What do you mean? I fricking love hot water!
>What, you can't handle a little hot water you boomer?
>Look at this boomer and his love of cold water
Blowing up satellites and rendering the orbit unusable for a couple decades would destroy tech companies. There is a sure way but it will sure hurt a lot.
That sounds like a horrible, short-sighted idea.
Yeah but it should achieve its goal. Jumping from the pot of boiling water and splashing it on the cook beats dying silently.
Hard disagree. You sound psychotic.
You sound like you glow in the dark.
See, this is why Communism keeps failing. The wannabe vanguard doesn't want to believe the average person isn't interested in what they are selling and so label them as The Enemy to cope.
What would that achieve? Most people LIKE technology, they just don't like the way it's used to control them unduly. That's what I meant to express with the airplane parable: the only dissenting option is suicidal.
>airplane parable
This didn't accomplish what you hoped it would accomplish. Stick to writing simple sentences.
>the only dissenting option is suicidal.
Well that's not true. There is always shift over time. Cultural momentum builds and unexpected punctuation events like covid throw a monkey wrench into the established order. It's when a select few try to rush things by misreading the room that stuff gets messy.
It would hurt them but not destroy them. You lose GPS, you lose large part of TV stations, you cripple cell phones, but you don't kill cell phones completely and you don't kill the internet.
Yes, but it will give enough opportunities to deliver the killing blow. It will damage the global economy and supply chains, it will cripple globalist military. And for what we know the damage can't be reversed immediately, it will block usage of satellite technology for many years. It's like sending the world in the time machine 20 years back or more.
It would get you and people who think like you labeled as idiot terrorists at best, and delusional monsters come worst. People would be even happier returning to the old status quo because of your dumbassery.
I don't care for the opinions of American piggies. They're the greatest backers of terrorism on the planet and harbor monsters that slowly kill us all.
I don't think you quite comprehend how important those satellites would be to everyone on the planet. In Europe, you would receive no better treatment. In China, you'd probably be executed. Even random Africans would have cause to leave you staked out in the sun or beaten to death with rocks.
In terms of supply chain disruption and economic damage yeah. If Suez blockade could throw the system off balance for months, loss of satellite communication will take years. But it won't do much to military or critical infrastructure (except in countries where that's already in disarray).
If that's the scenario you're looking forward to know that there's hope it will happen naturally in your lifetime - particulary powerful solar flare (which can theoretically happen and we can't predict when exactly) would take down both satellites in orbit and most electronics on the ground.
Not to mention it will just increase Space X dominance, which may or may not be a good thing depending on your disposition. If some idiot was dumb enough to knock out a satellite chain, the government would just reroute all of its budget towards Space X to mass produce satellites and launch them Starlink style. They could probably clean it up on the order of months with enough money.
The space will be polluted with debris. Everything sent after that point will be destroyed in a collision. Don't you guys watch Planetes
There already is a ton of space junk out there. They would invent a solution to prevent damage to satellites, even if it meant making armored satellites. You're underestimating how little budget Space X is running on and how solvable the class of problems like that is with enough money.
You heard him, guys. There is already junk out there. No harm in adding more.
Elon-chan isn't going to marry you. You should let it go.
Fine, Boeing then. I literally don't care about Space X. My point is that this "problem" is not as big of a problem as you think it is, since the class of space problems we talk about, like space junk, are an issue of budget, not ideas.
There are hundreds of ways we can deal with space debris. There's just no political will or budget to do so. Once it threatens netflix or whatever, people will throw billions at the problem to make it go away.
The problem isn't big right now but it will be pretty huge once everything collides in each other and shatters into more and more debris.
Again, it's a non issue since a lot of space debris goes into decaying orbit over time. And of the ones that are in a stable orbit for whatever reason, they can easily be nudged into a decaying orbit.
I agree it's a problem, but it's a problem in the way littering is a problem. With enough money and willpower, it stops being a problem.
Why are you so dense? Why you can't you piece it together? You said space debris descend and leave orbit over time. It's true. But how long does it take? What is going to nudge them if we can't send more machines up there? It's not like litter after a wild party at your house. It's more like on top of the litter the guests left trucks arrived and dumped the next biggest city's daily worth of garbage production at your house.
Because it's fricking insignificant and overblown by the I FRICKING LOVE SCIENCE crowd
https://www.nasa.gov/news/debris_faq.html
>More than 22,000 objects larger than 4 inches (10 cm) are currently tracked by the U.S. Space Surveillance Network. Only about 1,000 of these represent operational spacecraft; the rest are orbital debris.
Do you realize how insignificant this is over the size of planet earth?
Okay then there is little harm in blowing them all up. Like you said it's insignificant and fixed by any commercial space flight company.
You are being deliberately obtuse and wasting my time. I'm saying it's only a sensationalized problem that doesn't merit actually dealing with it. When it becomes a real issue and Congress or whatever is willing to throw money at it, it's an easily solved problem.
>some moron blows up satellites en masse
>killer asteroid hits Earth because we can't launch an intercept mission
Good job, idiot
Or, you know, about games, since you're on /tg/ and not /misc/.
I brought up the China-Africa angle because at one point I tried to design a cyberpunk version of Lagos, Nigeria based on that concept.
>Since any thread with "cyberpunk" in the OP gets dragged down into the moronic burger clown politics gutter
It's actually one of the shining features of cyberpunk. It brings the current politics into the spotlight. Urban youth violence was a big political problem in the 70's and 80's and the books and shows reflect some of that. Here we are, new day, new problem. You've got to allow at least a little of all this just slide off you as you accept that people will get their panties in a bunch over this or that.
see
for modern punk
Social out-casts living on the margins of society rising up and getting their bat-shit insane leaders into office is actually historical at this point. By about 6 years.
>We need a new class of cyberpunk hero, in addition to a new concept for what the future might look like.
Indeed. Which is essentially what the OP was sucking dicks for. If you skipped over it:
is well worth a read.
>I guarantee that in a hundred years those same morons will still exist,
Star Trek got rid of them via the Eugenics Wars. Which was supposed to happen in ~30 years ( the 1990's).
But the low-impulse violent psychopaths that everyone was freaking out about are much more diminished. It was the leaded gas. We poisoned our children and they grew up into monsters. County by county it got banned and 20 years later we see violent crime go down, same county by county. With what are we poisoning our kids with today?
>With what are we poisoning our kids with today?
Microplastics and xenoestrogens. That's also why sperm counts are dropping precipitously across the board for the past 20 or so years.
>you openly described as pointless bullshit not to long ago
Where?
>bring up a discussion topic
>topic reaches natural conclusion
How unbelievable.
i'm ashamed of /tg/. usually they're one of the saner boards
i guess you can't avoid the senior citizen incels leaking out from /misc/.
>2020's zeitgeist
Just the omnipresent feeling that the wave is retreating. Not to say the decade before was ==good== but previously you had some semblance of normalcy. Repetition of public rituals even if we've lost all enthusiasm for it, like the lingering taste of stale bread in the air.
2020+ feels like shit hitting the fan. "Normalcy" is gone. We're all topsy-turvy and colliding towards one crisis or another. We're seeing the train colliding at us towards the end of the tunnel, and we know there's no way we can outrun it.
In that regard I think WoD is actually one of the few settings that fits things perfectly. Vamps are, after all, the living embodiment of decay. The Camarilla are a bunch of old, out of touch corpses that the younger Vamps are struggling against because they know if they don't shit'll never change. At least in our world the boomers will die off, but the Boomer Vamps would live forever.
>boomer vamps
I hate to tell you this, but it's not the boomers who are at fault here. Even if every boomer died off tomorrow, nothing would really change.
All of your overlords now are now X'ers and millennials. The system perpetuates itself.
>Just the omnipresent feeling that the wave is retreating. Not to say the decade before was ==good== but previously you had some semblance of normalcy. Repetition of public rituals even if we've lost all enthusiasm for it, like the lingering taste of stale bread in the air.
>2020+ feels like shit hitting the fan. "Normalcy" is gone. We're all topsy-turvy and colliding towards one crisis or another. We're seeing the train colliding at us towards the end of the tunnel, and we know there's no way we can outrun it.
"cyberpunk" was replaced by contemporary fiction a while ago
Modern cyberpunk is classic cyberpunk with all the cool parts removed.
>no neon-lit arcologies, in fact, what infrastructure exists was built decades ago and is deteriorating
>the ripperdocs will turn you into slaaneshi monstrosities but can't give you cyborg augmentation
The tech company tyranny of the 2100s collapsed when the oil and rare earth ores ran out.
Mankind has since been split into a dual class system that distrust and war for supremacy, yet require each other.
The Tech class are descendants of those that tried to preserve the most important technology after the fall. They have better understanding of the technology that's left and are on the lookout for ways to fix certain things. They don't hold delusions of bringing back the dominance of the Tech Tyranny due to dependence on the other class, yet they still keep an eye on ways to enhance their power. In practical terms they act like a Religious caste. They are dependent on the other class for basic necessities but in return provide services that nobody else possibly can.
The Earth caste are everyone else. Those that were just tax and consumer cattle to the elite before The Fall. They carve out an increasingly better life among the crumbling edifice of the pre-Fall society. Unlike those that came after Rome or Babylon, however, the physical evidence of the pre-Fall society crumbles rapidly outside a select few examples. Skyscrapers face only a few decades of neglect before collapsing, most suburban buildings less. Asphalt Roads break up rapidly unlike the Roman's which lasted centuries. Reminders of pre-Fall society come rather in the form of installations maintained by the Tech Class. The most valuable of which are printed copies of knowledge repositories.
The big search is on to find reliable fossil fuel extraction sites at depths that recovered technology can reach. There is no replacement for hydrocarbons, less for fuel than for esoteric plastics and lubricants. Many in the tech class think it's a fools errand and mankind doomed and trapped itself. But rumors persist, and the first to find a good large source would relaunch the Information Age.
>and rare earth ores ran out.
I mean, I get the sentiment. But we're really never going to run out of rare-earth elements. There's plenty on Earth, they're not rare, that's just the name. Fricking BRANDING. They're just expensive to extract. Stick with oil, access to fresh water, biodiversity collapse.
>techpriests and... everyone else
That's kinda lame yo.
>There is no replacement for hydrocarbons,
The techpriests forgot about hydropower? Dams are and watermills are centuries old. Bruh. Magnets and copper and iron. Sorry man, but the post apocalyptic channel is over there. This is near-future sci-fi.
>Sorry man, but the post apocalyptic channel is over there. This is near-future sci-fi.
This is modern cyberpunk. The powerful don't want to sell you cool gadgets or enslave you, they've got automation for that, they don't need you at all and compete with you for finite resources.
>want to sell you cool gadgets
>they've got automation for that
Robots can't be consumers. The purpose of every single commercial venture is to make money, how are they supposed to do it if all customers are dead?
>Robots can't be consumers. The purpose of every single commercial venture is to make money, how are they supposed to do it if all customers are dead?
If you've got total automation, you don't NEED consumers. The "economy" would consist solely of "idle rich robotics company executives telling their property in the form of machines to make them products or perform them services" and the machines obeying. With "armies of killbots" as a product and "defend me against the 99% of society who aren't idle rich robotics company executives who inexplicably refuse to peacefully starve to death in accordance with the Non-Aggression Principle now that their continued existence is no longer economically justified" as a service.
>make the products or perform the services
Okay, let's say you are doing microchips. The more chips you are producing and selling the better. What kind of customers do you have?
1. Obviously military, but they cannot consume all of them, even if it is a hyper-cybernetic space marine army. And they probably have their own suppliers too.
2. Companies making tech stuff like cars and microwaves. But if 90% is starving or dead, the market for their products is virtually dead. They do not need that much of chips, because no single person or group will ever compensate for them this loss.
What does that mean? That is mean you are currently sitting on a pile of worthless chips and your net value is decreasing because the economy is generally going down. You need to scale down production to survive.
You only produce enough chips for your own needs. Everyone else is redundant. Also, this way, it'll take you way longer to run out of vital raw materials.
https://boingboing.net/2016/05/24/after-the-precariat-the-unnec.html
>You only produce enough chips for your own needs
No excessive chips for sale = no trade relation between the economic entities = economy dead as hell. Realistically you can't be completely self-sustainable, you need to get those resources to produce stuff you consume and money to squander. But you probably don't have where to spend them anyway.
>Also, this way, it'll take you way longer to run out of vital raw materials.
The malthusian trap doesn't work for post-industrial society
All these settings are too optimistic to predict 2020's accurately. They have
>mankind living on billions of worlds
>cybernetic prosthetics better than the originals
>true vr
>full ais
>robot butlers
>transferable consciousness
>superior and alternative bodies via genetic engineering
>nanomachines which can construct anything out of anything
>flying personal transporation