4 ms·

It looks like the D.C. after Washington means "Default Country" - so deep is the assumption that the only interesting things are happening in the USA. Since the

It looks like the D.C. after Washington means "Default Country" - so deep is the assumption that the only interesting things are happening in the USA. Since there's the Net, it's inevitable that there will be hacking scandals and there will be some cyberwarfare in action, but it's a tiny part of the bigger world and the local events like the recent presidental election in USA do not define the image of modern civilization. There's no cyberpunk in the hot air and sunlight among the ruins of Syria, in the alcoholic reality of Russian monotowns or in the frozen technoutopia of silently ageing Japan. Cyberpunk today looks the same as steampunk: the form without the content, something without the grounds to exist.

krapp 10y ago
>so deep is the assumption that the only interesting things are happening in the USA. I never assumed only interesting things are happening in the USA. I mentioned one thing that happened in the USA. >There's no cyberpunk in the hot air and sunlight among the ruins of Syria, in the alcoholic reality of Russian monotowns or in the frozen technoutopia of silently ageing Japan. First, that doesn't invalidate the premise. Cyberpunk is about the fringes of society and the cutting edge of technology, and liberation from the corruption of authority though anarchy and transhumanism, not about the mainstream. If you were to extrapolate many settings depicted in cyberpunk fiction, you would probably find that there isn't "cyberpunk" in most of them, either. As far as cyberpunk is concerned, none of that is interesting. Second, I can't believe you unironically used "frozen technoutopia" to argue against the presence of cyberpunk in the modern world.
- ivan_gammel 10y ago
  There's a good saying that cyberpunk is "high tech low life", which is not the reality of today. USA may be close to it, because social progress is not linked to the technical progress there, but in the rest of the world it's not like that. There are lo-tech areas with low quality of life and balanced and sustainable high-tech societies. Cyberpunk is usually about dystopia: mentioning utopia as an example against it is thus perfectly valid (and if you go to Japan, which might was an inspiration for cyberpunk writers in 1980s, today it's everything but cyberpunk).

krapp 10y ago

>so deep is the assumption that the only interesting things are happening in the USA. I never assumed only interesting things are happening in the USA. I mentioned one thing that happened in the USA. >There's no cyberpunk in the hot air and sunlight among the ruins of Syria, in the alcoholic reality of Russian monotowns or in the frozen technoutopia of silently ageing Japan. First, that doesn't invalidate the premise. Cyberpunk is about the fringes of society and the cutting edge of technology, and liberation from the corruption of authority though anarchy and transhumanism, not about the mainstream. If you were to extrapolate many settings depicted in cyberpunk fiction, you would probably find that there isn't "cyberpunk" in most of them, either. As far as cyberpunk is concerned, none of that is interesting. Second, I can't believe you unironically used "frozen technoutopia" to argue against the presence of cyberpunk in the modern world.

ivan_gammel 10y ago
There's a good saying that cyberpunk is "high tech low life", which is not the reality of today. USA may be close to it, because social progress is not linked to the technical progress there, but in the rest of the world it's not like that. There are lo-tech areas with low quality of life and balanced and sustainable high-tech societies. Cyberpunk is usually about dystopia: mentioning utopia as an example against it is thus perfectly valid (and if you go to Japan, which might was an inspiration for cyberpunk writers in 1980s, today it's everything but cyberpunk).