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But at that point, society would basically be full-on Cyberpunk. Screw suicide, form a gang of runners and start planning heists on manufacturing facilities and
by leggomylibro 9y ago
But at that point, society would basically be full-on Cyberpunk. Screw suicide, form a gang of runners and start planning heists on manufacturing facilities and factories, lay traps for driverless truck shipments or hijack them electronically, etc. Hide in the margins, among the slums and tenements to which overpopulation and consolidation have relegated vast swarms of people. Heck, I've already gotten transdermal implants set and removed by people who maybe weren't, you know, licensed practitioners.
The moral rule of law is already out the window, and financial laws had already may as well not exist. The only practical compulsion that law has left is that many people can still have an acceptable life while complying with it. Enriching yourself by skimming the margins of those with enough capital to print money wouldn't exactly be immoral.
Automation of force, or something along those lines, would pretty much cinch it. I think plenty of people would decide it's time to have a chat with a local lathe/mill owner, stick a flamethrower on their quadcopter, and loot the few places where opulence still existed. Get away with a couple decent jobs, and you could pretend you were in that upper echelon of 'people with lots of money' all along.
Right now, if you're good at a trade like construction, welding, medicine, engineering, etc, you can probably find stable employment options and at least afford to exist. But when those people of practical means start to get systemically marginalized, I'll bet we'll see a huge resurgence of people trying modern versions of The Italian Job.
- hnaccy 9y agoCyberpunk is a fiction because it peddles the naive fantasy that anarchistic actions would be feasible in such a world. There's not going to be any clever tricks to avoid being picked up the mass physical surveillance network. Hacking is simply infeasible for the vast majority of people given the complexity of systems and how much intelligence and knowledge is required. Action movie heists of high value targets are basically impossible to get away with these days let alone in a decade or two.
- leggomylibro 9y agoWell yeah, but if your other consolation idea is 'suicide,' I'd take the million-to-one shot.
- westmeal 9y agoWell sure if we're talking about cyberpunk 'heist' novels/rpgs like Shadowrun & Neuromancer. But it's really interesting to see just how 'cyberpunk' our society has become isn't it? We even have most of the technology in place nowadays. (Well other than the advanced tech they use like cyberdecks and stimsims which aren't really feasible)