11 ms·

A Cyberpunk Manifesto – Revised

84 points by jwfxpr 10y ago

SideburnsOfDoom 10y ago
> 5. Even in the most developed and ‘democratic’ countries, the System imposes misinformation. Even in the countries that pretend to be the cradle of free speech, misinformation is the System’s primary weapon. A weapon they use very well. I wonder how that would be revisited today. Now misinformation comes from all corners, many factions all vying to misinform their way into being "the system". The idea that some cyberpunk underground stands in resistance to this "system" is frankly hopeless. Do you want 9-11 truthers and Obama birthers? That's how you get them. Do you want antivaxers and chemtrails believers? Then let them think that they have a secret truth. Do you want the "alt-right" ? This is where it grew.
- throwanem 10y ago
  It was ever thus. The rate's increased, for which we have the Internet to thank, but that's the only change, and one not of kind but of degree. Truth and lies compete, and sometimes lies win out. Would you rather there be only pravda?
  - SideburnsOfDoom 10y ago
    > Would you rather there be only pravda? No. You're right. But then I also wouldn't write a manifesto about taking down the Establishment Media. That comes across completely differently now.
    - kortex 10y ago
      I don't think there is a risk of cyberpunks completely censoring the Establishment Media. The point is to level the playing field. Improve the signal-to-noise ratio.
      - SideburnsOfDoom 10y ago
        My point is that the playing field in the intervening time has indeed become much more level. And the signal-to-noise ratio has certainly not improved: the most noticeable effect is that now the likes of Breitbart and Infowars have seat at the table. Even tables in the White House. I don't want to see a manifesto asking for this outcome that we already have, I want to see a manifesto for how we can mitigate the worst of the resulting damage, while keeping the good parts such as they are.
  - kortex 10y ago
    Indeed. You can't know what's truly true (istina) without some crucible in which free ideas flow, to enable the discourse which moves toward that truth. Free speech is quintessential to escaping the pravda, truthiness-es and alt-facts fed to us. The side effect is that some alt-facts find a safe space to thrive and multiply. I don't think this can be avoided, I think it ultimately is a feature of nature. To use a machine learning analogy, all the pravda out there - everyone's relative truths - is your training set. If you limit your training set, you lose some ability to generalize to the real world.
    - 131012 10y ago
      I love the analogy. I would precise that by doing this kind of ML training, you would learn a lot about those speaking, but not so much about what they talk about.
    - 131012 10y ago
      I love the analogy. I would precise that by doing this kind of ML training, you would learn a lot about those speaking, but not so much about what they talk about.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 10y ago
      > discourse which moves toward that truth Can you demonstrate that the discourse does move towards truth? > all the pravda out there - everyone's relative truths - "relative truth", eh? Is vaccine denial is relative truth? How about "Sandy hook was staged?" how about "Obama is a foreign muslim, and he founded ISIS" ? I know that these beliefs come from a place of ignorance, anger and fear, but weaponising ignorance and fear is not a "discourse which moves toward that truth" and these memes are not a "relative truth", they are a near totality of the opposite. And yet they affect the fate of nations. I certainly don't have answers, but I know that you first have to ask the right questions, and that this manifesto no longer does.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >I wonder how that would be revisited today. Now misinformation comes from all corners, many factions all vying to misinform their way into being "the system". The System was never a single entity (e.g. just the government) in the first place. As for smaller independent fractions, those are not really relevant, because its a power law that defines what people believe. 20% of the media/outlets/social media accounts/etc set the tone for 80% of reality (and recursively, 20% of those set 80% of the tone).
- narrator 10y ago
  Why do you even care about what cyberpunk is if you think resisting "the system" is hopeless? If everything's just fine and any kind of change tp the way things are currently working is futile then it's just a bunch of nerds playing with a grandiose fantasy ultimately leading nowhere. Might as well be Trekkies learning to speak Klingon and arguing about whether Deep Space Nine was better than The Next Generation for all you care.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 10y ago
    Everything is far from fine, I did not indicate otherwise. I did not say that "resisting the system is hopeless", read again. Trying to change things is not futile, but the idea that this cyberpunk media underground will help us has borne toxic fruit, any fix must first grapple with the reality that this strategy was hopeless.
davidgerard 10y ago
HN-dotted already. Google cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:DmPqryjtK_oJ:https://www.neondystopia.com/cyberpunk-fashion-lifestyle/a-cyberpunk-manifesto-revised/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:DmPqry...
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  TIA is a more socially useful feed. https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.neondystopia.com/cyberpunk-fashion-lifestyle/a-cyberpunk-manifesto-revised/ https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.neondystopia.com/c... Archive.is / Archive.fo another: https://archive.fo/3GFSF https://archive.fo/3GFSF
Asooka 10y ago
Wow I'm from Bulgaria and didn't know this existed. Disinformation accomplished.
delinka 10y ago
Revised to fix translation errors, rather than revised for the current political climate. I'd have preferred the latter.
- falcolas 10y ago
  What has really changed, though? > 1. The Society surrounding us is clogged with conservancy, pulling everything and everybody to itself, while it sinks slowly into the quicksand of time. > 3. The System must impose its truth upon us so that it can rule. The government needs us to follow it blindly. For this reason, we live in an informational eclipse. When people can only acquire information from the government, they cannot distinguish right from the wrong. So the lie becomes a truth – truth, fundamental to everything else. Thus, leaders control with lies and ordinary people have no notion of what is true and follow the government blindly, trusting it. > 12. Those who control the Net, control the information. These seem as relevant today as they were yesterday. And it's quite likely they will still be relevant tomorrow; human nature is slow to change.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 10y ago
    > When people can only acquire information from the government, they cannot distinguish right from the wrong. So the lie becomes a truth Is that really as relevant today as it was yesterday? It seems to me now far more complex and entangled than the monolithic "resist the government system" set out: In the US, rather than the government controlling the truth, a certain clique of fringe peddlers of a distorted narrative - the likes of Breitbart and Infowars, have done so well as to attempt a hostile takeover of government, and so far are succeeding. Is the name "Infowars" not a self-conscious echo of the sentiment that you quote above? But the content is poisoned fruit. In the UK, the Murdoch press drives government policy, not vice versa. And has for a long time.
ivan_gammel 10y ago
It's a very strange feeling to see that cyberpunk has become irrelevant today, while still being right on some judgments. Corporations are bigger than ever, the Net has become vital resource for billions of people, climate is changing and air became unbreathable in many giant megalopolises but... it's not a dystopia, it's just the future that came and felt different from what we had expected, a sort of normality that is not worse than anything in the history before. Probably, the reason is that we've got 404 in our search of the ultimate evil to oppose to. There's no single ultimate evil to resist, there are many smaller ones and many come from the resistance itself, because there's no ultimate truth to defend. The future has come and there's no cyberpunk in it.
- krapp 10y ago
  >The future has come and there's no cyberpunk in it. It's likely that the last Presidential election was decided, in no small part, by the efforts of a neo-anarchist site publishing classified information and a group of meme obsessed netizens attempting to disrupt and undermine the establishment. That seems pretty cyberpunk to me.
  - orblivion 10y ago
    My favorite was when this neoanarchist site published a video of the military killing people, and the credit card companies refused to continue to serve them. And then an amorphous non-organization known as "Anonymous" brought down the credit card companies' websites. Meanwhile the neoanarchists switched to a newly emerging "crypto-currency" created by a shadowy entity known only as "Satoshi Nakamoto".
    - krapp 10y ago
      A Holocaust museum had to stop people from coming inside to catch augmented reality poison gas monsters with their cellphones. That's some Neal Stephenson stuff right there.
    - beaconstudios 10y ago
      and said amorphous non-organisation also arose from a neo-anarchist online collective. And the digital crypto-currency was used to buy drugs and other contraband from digital bazaars hidden in the "deep web". It's quite funny when you think about it, cyberpunk fiction predicted many of the most recent technology intrigue stories/events.
biofox 10y ago
I used to have a print-out of this on my bedroom wall as a teenager, next to the Hacker Manifesto. Looking back at this as an adult, having not read it for many year, I'm shocked at how antisocial it is. Did I really believe this stuff? I'm guessing it was a way for an intelligent, yet powerless, kid to gain some sense of control -- identifying strongly with my skills to feel superior to the society that denied me the freedoms I desired. Now, as an adult member of society, I'm acutely aware how much I depend on the established systems for my security and well-being. Young people shouldn't feel the need to withdraw and create their own subcultures to gain a sense of belonging or security. We should be incorporating them into society, giving them a sense of purpose and belonging, and equipping them to make meaningful contributions. Any thoughts how we can achieve that?
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Not quite sure. But perhaps treating them as persons and not as pests may be a start. I think the primary problem humanity has is that adults kinda forget that we learned our way as much by experiencing things first hand as being lectured on what was good and what was bad. Forbidden fruit and all that. BTW, i seem to recall reading that giving kids responsibilities early results in them grouping up to behave responsible. The example used was a kid watching the family store while the parent was out running and errand or some such.
- xg15 10y ago
  > Young people shouldn't feel the need to withdraw and create their own subcultures to gain a sense of belonging or security. We should be incorporating them into society, giving them a sense of purpose and belonging, and equipping them to make meaningful contributions. I'm not sure if this at all possible or even desirable. I'm not a psychologist, but my impression is that a certain degree of exploring identities is an important part of growing up - and that often involves separation from established structures and a change of relationship to family, school, etc, at least for a while. In the past, those spaces were physical, today they are a mix of physical and virtual. That said, not everyone is rebellious as a teenager and there are many people who easily find their identities as parts if well-established groups. However people are different and I don't think those groups would at any time be desirable for everyone. ( Or if they were, we'd have a scarily homogeneous society) Of course some subcultures and alternative groups can lead people in bad directions and be in fact harmful to them. But then the task should be to protect against those bad groups - or even better, give people the strength to protect themselves. Even in those cases, it's important to keep in mind why exactly the groups are harmful. Seeing the existence of sub-cultures per se as the problem seems too simple to me.
c3RlcGhlbnI_ 10y ago
The original has a rhythm, it reads like a poem. Shouldn't the corrections have tried to maintain that? This version is awkward to read and that draws attention to how silly some of its statements are. Like that you might just want to take a little walk sometimes is not a crucial component of the manifesto, it just helped that paragraph flow before.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
unixhero 10y ago
[meta] Fantastic discussion

84 points by jwfxpr 10y ago

> 5. Even in the most developed and ‘democratic’ countries, the System imposes misinformation. Even in the countries that pretend to be the cradle of free speech, misinformation is the System’s primary weapon. A weapon they use very well. I wonder how that would be revisited today. Now misinformation comes from all corners, many factions all vying to misinform their way into being "the system". The idea that some cyberpunk underground stands in resistance to this "system" is frankly hopeless. Do you want 9-11 truthers and Obama birthers? That's how you get them. Do you want antivaxers and chemtrails believers? Then let them think that they have a secret truth. Do you want the "alt-right" ? This is where it grew.

throwanem 10y ago
It was ever thus. The rate's increased, for which we have the Internet to thank, but that's the only change, and one not of kind but of degree. Truth and lies compete, and sometimes lies win out. Would you rather there be only pravda?
- SideburnsOfDoom 10y ago
  > Would you rather there be only pravda? No. You're right. But then I also wouldn't write a manifesto about taking down the Establishment Media. That comes across completely differently now.
  - kortex 10y ago
    I don't think there is a risk of cyberpunks completely censoring the Establishment Media. The point is to level the playing field. Improve the signal-to-noise ratio.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 10y ago
      My point is that the playing field in the intervening time has indeed become much more level. And the signal-to-noise ratio has certainly not improved: the most noticeable effect is that now the likes of Breitbart and Infowars have seat at the table. Even tables in the White House. I don't want to see a manifesto asking for this outcome that we already have, I want to see a manifesto for how we can mitigate the worst of the resulting damage, while keeping the good parts such as they are.
- kortex 10y ago
  Indeed. You can't know what's truly true (istina) without some crucible in which free ideas flow, to enable the discourse which moves toward that truth. Free speech is quintessential to escaping the pravda, truthiness-es and alt-facts fed to us. The side effect is that some alt-facts find a safe space to thrive and multiply. I don't think this can be avoided, I think it ultimately is a feature of nature. To use a machine learning analogy, all the pravda out there - everyone's relative truths - is your training set. If you limit your training set, you lose some ability to generalize to the real world.
  - 131012 10y ago
    I love the analogy. I would precise that by doing this kind of ML training, you would learn a lot about those speaking, but not so much about what they talk about.
  - 131012 10y ago
    I love the analogy. I would precise that by doing this kind of ML training, you would learn a lot about those speaking, but not so much about what they talk about.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 10y ago
    > discourse which moves toward that truth Can you demonstrate that the discourse does move towards truth? > all the pravda out there - everyone's relative truths - "relative truth", eh? Is vaccine denial is relative truth? How about "Sandy hook was staged?" how about "Obama is a foreign muslim, and he founded ISIS" ? I know that these beliefs come from a place of ignorance, anger and fear, but weaponising ignorance and fear is not a "discourse which moves toward that truth" and these memes are not a "relative truth", they are a near totality of the opposite. And yet they affect the fate of nations. I certainly don't have answers, but I know that you first have to ask the right questions, and that this manifesto no longer does.
coldtea 10y ago
>I wonder how that would be revisited today. Now misinformation comes from all corners, many factions all vying to misinform their way into being "the system". The System was never a single entity (e.g. just the government) in the first place. As for smaller independent fractions, those are not really relevant, because its a power law that defines what people believe. 20% of the media/outlets/social media accounts/etc set the tone for 80% of reality (and recursively, 20% of those set 80% of the tone).
narrator 10y ago
Why do you even care about what cyberpunk is if you think resisting "the system" is hopeless? If everything's just fine and any kind of change tp the way things are currently working is futile then it's just a bunch of nerds playing with a grandiose fantasy ultimately leading nowhere. Might as well be Trekkies learning to speak Klingon and arguing about whether Deep Space Nine was better than The Next Generation for all you care.
- SideburnsOfDoom 10y ago
  Everything is far from fine, I did not indicate otherwise. I did not say that "resisting the system is hopeless", read again. Trying to change things is not futile, but the idea that this cyberpunk media underground will help us has borne toxic fruit, any fix must first grapple with the reality that this strategy was hopeless.

davidgerard 10y ago

HN-dotted already. Google cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:DmPqryjtK_oJ:https://www.neondystopia.com/cyberpunk-fashion-lifestyle/a-cyberpunk-manifesto-revised/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:DmPqry...

dredmorbius 10y ago
TIA is a more socially useful feed. https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.neondystopia.com/cyberpunk-fashion-lifestyle/a-cyberpunk-manifesto-revised/ https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.neondystopia.com/c... Archive.is / Archive.fo another: https://archive.fo/3GFSF https://archive.fo/3GFSF

Asooka 10y ago

Wow I'm from Bulgaria and didn't know this existed. Disinformation accomplished.

delinka 10y ago

Revised to fix translation errors, rather than revised for the current political climate. I'd have preferred the latter.

falcolas 10y ago
What has really changed, though? > 1. The Society surrounding us is clogged with conservancy, pulling everything and everybody to itself, while it sinks slowly into the quicksand of time. > 3. The System must impose its truth upon us so that it can rule. The government needs us to follow it blindly. For this reason, we live in an informational eclipse. When people can only acquire information from the government, they cannot distinguish right from the wrong. So the lie becomes a truth – truth, fundamental to everything else. Thus, leaders control with lies and ordinary people have no notion of what is true and follow the government blindly, trusting it. > 12. Those who control the Net, control the information. These seem as relevant today as they were yesterday. And it's quite likely they will still be relevant tomorrow; human nature is slow to change.
- SideburnsOfDoom 10y ago
  > When people can only acquire information from the government, they cannot distinguish right from the wrong. So the lie becomes a truth Is that really as relevant today as it was yesterday? It seems to me now far more complex and entangled than the monolithic "resist the government system" set out: In the US, rather than the government controlling the truth, a certain clique of fringe peddlers of a distorted narrative - the likes of Breitbart and Infowars, have done so well as to attempt a hostile takeover of government, and so far are succeeding. Is the name "Infowars" not a self-conscious echo of the sentiment that you quote above? But the content is poisoned fruit. In the UK, the Murdoch press drives government policy, not vice versa. And has for a long time.

ivan_gammel 10y ago

It's a very strange feeling to see that cyberpunk has become irrelevant today, while still being right on some judgments. Corporations are bigger than ever, the Net has become vital resource for billions of people, climate is changing and air became unbreathable in many giant megalopolises but... it's not a dystopia, it's just the future that came and felt different from what we had expected, a sort of normality that is not worse than anything in the history before. Probably, the reason is that we've got 404 in our search of the ultimate evil to oppose to. There's no single ultimate evil to resist, there are many smaller ones and many come from the resistance itself, because there's no ultimate truth to defend. The future has come and there's no cyberpunk in it.

krapp 10y ago
>The future has come and there's no cyberpunk in it. It's likely that the last Presidential election was decided, in no small part, by the efforts of a neo-anarchist site publishing classified information and a group of meme obsessed netizens attempting to disrupt and undermine the establishment. That seems pretty cyberpunk to me.
- orblivion 10y ago
  My favorite was when this neoanarchist site published a video of the military killing people, and the credit card companies refused to continue to serve them. And then an amorphous non-organization known as "Anonymous" brought down the credit card companies' websites. Meanwhile the neoanarchists switched to a newly emerging "crypto-currency" created by a shadowy entity known only as "Satoshi Nakamoto".
  - krapp 10y ago
    A Holocaust museum had to stop people from coming inside to catch augmented reality poison gas monsters with their cellphones. That's some Neal Stephenson stuff right there.
  - beaconstudios 10y ago
    and said amorphous non-organisation also arose from a neo-anarchist online collective. And the digital crypto-currency was used to buy drugs and other contraband from digital bazaars hidden in the "deep web". It's quite funny when you think about it, cyberpunk fiction predicted many of the most recent technology intrigue stories/events.

biofox 10y ago

I used to have a print-out of this on my bedroom wall as a teenager, next to the Hacker Manifesto. Looking back at this as an adult, having not read it for many year, I'm shocked at how antisocial it is. Did I really believe this stuff? I'm guessing it was a way for an intelligent, yet powerless, kid to gain some sense of control -- identifying strongly with my skills to feel superior to the society that denied me the freedoms I desired. Now, as an adult member of society, I'm acutely aware how much I depend on the established systems for my security and well-being. Young people shouldn't feel the need to withdraw and create their own subcultures to gain a sense of belonging or security. We should be incorporating them into society, giving them a sense of purpose and belonging, and equipping them to make meaningful contributions. Any thoughts how we can achieve that?

digi_owl 10y ago
Not quite sure. But perhaps treating them as persons and not as pests may be a start. I think the primary problem humanity has is that adults kinda forget that we learned our way as much by experiencing things first hand as being lectured on what was good and what was bad. Forbidden fruit and all that. BTW, i seem to recall reading that giving kids responsibilities early results in them grouping up to behave responsible. The example used was a kid watching the family store while the parent was out running and errand or some such.
xg15 10y ago
> Young people shouldn't feel the need to withdraw and create their own subcultures to gain a sense of belonging or security. We should be incorporating them into society, giving them a sense of purpose and belonging, and equipping them to make meaningful contributions. I'm not sure if this at all possible or even desirable. I'm not a psychologist, but my impression is that a certain degree of exploring identities is an important part of growing up - and that often involves separation from established structures and a change of relationship to family, school, etc, at least for a while. In the past, those spaces were physical, today they are a mix of physical and virtual. That said, not everyone is rebellious as a teenager and there are many people who easily find their identities as parts if well-established groups. However people are different and I don't think those groups would at any time be desirable for everyone. ( Or if they were, we'd have a scarily homogeneous society) Of course some subcultures and alternative groups can lead people in bad directions and be in fact harmful to them. But then the task should be to protect against those bad groups - or even better, give people the strength to protect themselves. Even in those cases, it's important to keep in mind why exactly the groups are harmful. Seeing the existence of sub-cultures per se as the problem seems too simple to me.

c3RlcGhlbnI_ 10y ago

The original has a rhythm, it reads like a poem. Shouldn't the corrections have tried to maintain that? This version is awkward to read and that draws attention to how silly some of its statements are. Like that you might just want to take a little walk sometimes is not a crucial component of the manifesto, it just helped that paragraph flow before.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

unixhero 10y ago

[meta] Fantastic discussion