11 ms·

Cyberpunk in the Nineties (1998)

122 points by gnoll_of_gozag 3y ago

ArtWomb 3y ago
>>> Now imagine a cyberpunk version of Frankenstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrochicken https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrochicken
- mutant 3y ago
  https://chat.openai.com/share/3d5d3fd1-57d3-4d17-b367-acbd17aa660a https://chat.openai.com/share/3d5d3fd1-57d3-4d17-b367-acbd17... Ok. I imagined it.
- Animats 3y ago
  ...the Monster would likely be the well-funded R&D team-project of some global corporation. Resident Evil, the Umbrella Corporation. Or, further back, Bubblegum Crisis, Genom Corporation.
- stevenwoo 3y ago
  Almost every significant character in the recent limited series Cyberpunk: Edgerunners was a Frankenstein's monster and there were multiple doctor Frankensteins, some corporate and some freelance, competing against each other.
  - Terr_ 3y ago
    I disagree: Frankenstein's monster is new life bereft of history or precedent, as opposed to a regular man converted into strangeness and exiled by acquired differences. Most of those cyborg stories (Edgerunners, the newer Deus Ex's games, Ghost In The Shell) are more like... Hmm, perhaps Phantom of the Opera.
    - chupasaurus 3y ago
      Ghost in the Shell's main storyline is about a rogue AI which thinks of itself as the next step of evolution.
      - Terr_ 3y ago
        That's true for Project 2501, but not the cyborg protagonists of Section 9. They aren't Frankenstein's monsters, especially not in a society where some degree of augmentation is so normal. That includes Motoko Kusanagi--even when it's been hinted she has relied on artificial bodies since childhood, that's still a very human form of alienation.
        chupasaurus 3y ago
        Agree on that, but my point is still that GitS isn't a good example because cybernetics are there because of setting, not necessary the "modern Prometheus" thingy.
      - mcpackieh 3y ago
        GiTS creator Masamune Shirow's earlier works also feature androids or other sorts of synthetic life. Particularly Buaku's gang and Crolis in Dominion, and the military androids in Black Magic M-66.
- hotnfresh 3y ago
  I’m not really sure how you’d put the parts of Frankenstein that really matter into cyberpunk and come out with anything but a farce, unless you ditch all the awful-but-sympathetic-creature bits somehow. Motherhood (and an intertwined nigh-irresistible drive toward and revulsion of pregnancy and giving birth), responsibility for one’s works in the world, the nature of man, abandonment, revenge, sympathetic villains… it’s great stuff, but I think if you try to do that in cyberpunk and keep anything like the Creature you’re gonna be drawn into parody or some other unfortunate hole.
  - flir 3y ago
    I'm unconvinced that motherhood is a theme of Frankenstein? The subtitle ("The Modern Prometheus") suggests "a second, technological Creation" is more the intent. I'm hoping you're going to be able to convince me I'm wrong, though. Alien/s, now that's SciFi about motherhood. I guess if I was going to approach "cyberpunk Frankenstein" I'd end up somewhere adjacent to Michael Marshall Smith's Spares ("human clones, the ultimate health insurance").
    - hotnfresh 3y ago
      The simultaneous nigh-unavoidable impulse toward creation (which takes some months, of course) coupled with body horror and more than a little revulsion, and sudden, transformative “birth” at the end (the monster isn’t intolerably, fundamentally, stomach-turningly repulsive until that spark of life enters it) is rather on the nose. It’s a man giving birth, more or less, and parental responsibility (which he whiffs at—he can’t tolerate the monster, especially at first, either) of a sort follows. Given that, and that particularly fatherhood-connected motifs and themes are not strong in the book, I think one would have to justify all that not having having to do with motherhood. Given the author’s bio and stuff like her mom dying from giving birth to her, yeah, I’d say it’s there. A very particular point of view and concern with it, not exactly “ain’t pregnancy and motherhood beautiful?”, yes, but it’s there. “Death of the author”, sure, but it’s there in the book even if you don’t know Shelley’s bio.
      - flir 3y ago
aidenn0 3y ago
The easiest way to describe how gonzo cyberpunk had gotten at this point is that people debate whether or not Snow Crash is a parody of it or not.
- jhbadger 3y ago
  I don't see how anyone could consider it not a parody. I mean the main character himself is named Hiro Protagonist (a pun on the literary term "Hero Protagonist") and Hong Kong exists as a chain franchise nation.
  - Retric 3y ago
    Lampshading something is different than parody it’s goal is to push suspension of disbelief just a little bit further, where parody doesn’t try to maintain it. You can’t watch “Are We the Baddies?” as a war story. It introduced such elements simply to establish who’s getting made fun of. They remain in character but that’s it, the war story plot doesn’t progress the skit just keeps hammering the parody. Some parody has a more complete story but “Scary Movie” progresses the underlying plot to make fun of different elements of the movies it’s making fun of. Harry Potter on the other hand calls out many of the tropes it’s using. House of the lions vs house of the snakes, guess who’s supposed to be the hero and who the villain. Except the characters once introduced are telling an actual story. Snow Crash is between those extremes but focuses too much on the underlying story and its characters to be an actual parody. Over the top elements exist in the world, but they are played straight more Gulliver's Travels than Spaceballs.
  - 0xf00ff00f 3y ago
    Parody or not, I wish I could apply for citizenship at Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong
  - michaelbrave 3y ago
    I forget the term for it but there is a thing in anime subgenres where something comes out that is a kid of rejection/critique of the previous genre and acts as a kind of pseudo parody that afterwards sets a new direction and redefines the genre. Often these are hard to understand unless one is already familiar with the trends and tropes that it is critiquing. A good example is neon genesis evangelion, it's a critism of the mecha subgenre that came before it, but changed the way the mecha subgenre was afterwards. I'm told hunter x hunter is the same kind of redefining pseudo parody with the battle shonen genre, but I'm less familiar with that. I feel like snow crash it's kinda along those lines.
Animats 3y ago
The real world caught up, and passed cyberpunk. The whole concept of a counterculture is gone. The closest thing we have to a counterculture in the US today is the MAGA/militia/Q-Anon movement.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- IggleSniggle 3y ago
  Wow. I can't believe I'm on this side of the fence.
  - suoduandao3 3y ago
    It's worth remembering, by definition the majority of people are. Our civilization (and if you're American, your nation) just happens to fetishize successful rebels. It's probably a very unusual attitude, historically speaking.
- dfxm12 3y ago
  Maybe militia, if you're talking about people who've more or less removed themselves from regular society to live in a compound, likely off the grid, similar to the group who took over the national wildlife preserve in OR several years back. MAGA is way too mainstream to be a counter culture. QAnon is more like a belief in certain conspiracies than an ethos you live by, no?
  - ta988 3y ago
    The problem of militias in the US is that they are not removed from society. A lot of them were part or are still part of law enforcement and are keeping really close ties. They are a really strong culture and spreading fast. The thing is that they look so much alike and share so much with the "official" law enforcement, that could keep them in check, that not much is done to them or they even get support. Unfortunately America is just getting ready for a coup (there was one attempt already) and forces are gathering for the next one. Almost half of the population wouldn't be opposed to it. That's the reality, and from my point of view that's a little scary.
Calamitous 3y ago
I want the dystopia I was promised in my youth, not the one I got.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- emikulic 3y ago
  I want flying cars and moving sidewalks like I was promised by The Jetsons. :(
  - blooalien 3y ago
    > "I want flying cars and moving sidewalks like I was promised by The Jetsons. :(" And worse yet, as promised in Popular Science / Mechanics; "A flying car in every garage by the year 2000!"
- suoduandao3 3y ago
  Move to LA? Everyone says they have squats and ineffectual policing. Not much work for shadowrunners yet that I've heard of, but then, I would would I?
- yankput 3y ago
  You CAN move to China I guess?
photochemsyn 3y ago
Petition to rename cyberpunk to cybernoir.
- jhbadger 3y ago
  That (also called "future noir") actually is a separate genre, related to cyberpunk, but not exactly it. A lot of works loosely called cyberpunk have noir tendencies with detectives, femme fatales, and an overall 1940s feel, but other works really do have the 1970s punk feel.
  - A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
    There's a common thread. Literary cyberpunk, and "future noir," are both centered around crime: Hackers, contraband-smugglers (from new nano-drugs to brain implants,) people who have found themselves caught between the gears of criminal conspiracies, etc. The defining characteristic of 80s-90s cyberpunk is that it's about near-future crime. So it shares an awful lot -- if not absolutely everything -- with noir. The "punk" aspect is that cyberpunk stories are often told from the perspective of the criminal rather than the detective. The r*dditors who go on and on about "i-it's all about urban dystopia and corporate conspiracies!" are dead wrong, because both elements don't always (-- indeed very rarely --) feature in the foundational literary works of the genre. Take Burning Chrome, for instance: All of the stories are about crime, but the features of the settings are rarely clear. So much for literary cyberpunk. Cyberpunk in art -- e.g. www.cyberpunk.tech -- is its own thing, and just as old.
tyrells 3y ago
I recently watched a documentary series about cyberpunk on YouTube by Indigo Gaming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sttm8Q9rOdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sttm8Q9rOdQ There are currently 3 parts to the series, and it is an interesting overview of the genre.
anthk 3y ago
I still play Shadowrun in Mednafen, but a hacked ROM (enhanced one), Shadowrun 2058. It has all the vibe of cyberpunk except for the magick, but if you mentally replace magick with "quantum futuristic alien tech masked as godly one" it still fits with the lore.
criddell 3y ago
My introduction to cyberpunk culture came from Mondo 2000. Aside from reading about William Gibson, they also had articles on music and movies and smart drugs! The 90's are 30 years ago(??). I've often wondered if the people taking piracetam or whatever it was back then have had any long term effects, good or bad. It felt like dialing up your IQ and awareness was possible. You just had to figure out the right combination of substances to take. I just spent 20 minutes looking over google results for nootropics and seems like little has changed. Edit: Thought archive.org might have this magazine and, of course, they do! It's a lot harder to read than I remember and the ads are better than I remember. There's also more nudity than I recall... so maybe don't open this at work. https://archive.org/details/Mondo.2000.Issue.14.1995 https://archive.org/details/Mondo.2000.Issue.14.1995
- generalizations 3y ago
  Just finished flipping through Issue 14 you linked. Wow, that's a time I wish I'd been old enough to appreciate. I wonder if anything like Mondo 2000 exists these days. Or maybe it's a time that's just passed us by.
  - bpiche 3y ago
    We just have to keep creating the culture. Hacker culture is everywhere. It's here now, you're experiencing it on HN. This board is the spiritual successor to the great BBNs of the 80s and 90s. It might not be at Wired - I think KK tried to dethrone R U Sirius once - but it's out there. Even Mondo is still around. Check out the blog Acceler8or. It's the next chapter of Mondo, and it isn't updated frequently, but it exists. It's gonna be at DNA for their yearly screening of Hackers. It's at your local pawn shop, when you pony up for a used laptop! We might not have the great hacker collectives and hackerspaces of the past, but the culture is still out there. L0pht might be gone from Boston, sure. But these kids give me a ton of inspiration. [0] Don't mean to 'go off', but life has no meaning beyond that which you give it. If you 'fictionalize' your existence in the context of cyberpunk, and great science fiction books, and compelling video games, you become a character in those stories. Life is richer for it. https://www.wired.com/story/mtba-charliecard-hack-defcon-2023/ https://www.wired.com/story/mtba-charliecard-hack-defcon-202... [0]
bobvanluijt 3y ago
Ah - Sterling, always great. He didn't do his iconic closing speech at SXSW this year. Does anybody know why?
r9550684 3y ago
cyberpunk in the 90s was a lived experience, particularly so in Eastern Europe. I read Neuromancer, watched johnny mnemonic and blade runner on pirated VHS tapes, and armitage and bubble gum crysis on pirate tv[0]. there were old grandmas selling cd releases from RAZOR 1911 and PARADOX all over the place. "ooh, little munchkin, you're into 3d modeling? here's a new cd I got lightwave 3d, 3d studio max and Maya, cracked[1], $3". there were dozens if not hundreds of BBSes, and your local friendly FIDO point administrator. there were several large markets where you would buy computer parts grand bazaar style[2], so you buy an AMD K6 (in a box? dude, it's back of the truck OEM in an anti-static bag, better pray it works when you bring it home) that runs at 166 mhz or whatever and overclock it to a whopping 300 mhz, which necessarily implies that your desktop box was in a constant state of messing around with. no amount of LEDs and glass covers of a modern gaming rig will give you the same feeling as a boring 90s beige box did, because inside the beige box you had a 3dfx voodoo 6 months after it got released, and it's the first time consumer grade 3 acceleration is within your personal reach. of course some Finn in the demoscene has already made a back of a napkin C program, that you can compile in your pirated copy of Visual Studio, that shows you how to draw a shaded rectangle using your voodoo. everybody was on the same page: scene releases, demos, themes, background pictures, music, bbs styles, nicknames and scene group names were all incorporating cyberpunk aesthetic and contributing the aesthetic at the same time. reality was providing cyberpunk, and cyberpunk authors were providing the way for us to see the reality. [0]you had to buy a descrambler to watch it [1]she would never explicitly say it was cracked, because of course everything was cracked [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjDHhdx_tGY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjDHhdx_tGY
Sirioso 3y ago
I post lazily and at random on https://www.mondo2000.com/ https://www.mondo2000.com/ trying to remember why I stopped taking memory drugs R.U. Sirius
bpiche 3y ago
A reminder that DNA is doing their regular Cyberdelia party again on Sept 9.

>>> Now imagine a cyberpunk version of Frankenstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrochicken https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrochicken

mutant 3y ago
https://chat.openai.com/share/3d5d3fd1-57d3-4d17-b367-acbd17aa660a https://chat.openai.com/share/3d5d3fd1-57d3-4d17-b367-acbd17... Ok. I imagined it.
Animats 3y ago
...the Monster would likely be the well-funded R&D team-project of some global corporation. Resident Evil, the Umbrella Corporation. Or, further back, Bubblegum Crisis, Genom Corporation.
stevenwoo 3y ago
Almost every significant character in the recent limited series Cyberpunk: Edgerunners was a Frankenstein's monster and there were multiple doctor Frankensteins, some corporate and some freelance, competing against each other.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  I disagree: Frankenstein's monster is new life bereft of history or precedent, as opposed to a regular man converted into strangeness and exiled by acquired differences. Most of those cyborg stories (Edgerunners, the newer Deus Ex's games, Ghost In The Shell) are more like... Hmm, perhaps Phantom of the Opera.
  - chupasaurus 3y ago
    Ghost in the Shell's main storyline is about a rogue AI which thinks of itself as the next step of evolution.
    - Terr_ 3y ago
      That's true for Project 2501, but not the cyborg protagonists of Section 9. They aren't Frankenstein's monsters, especially not in a society where some degree of augmentation is so normal. That includes Motoko Kusanagi--even when it's been hinted she has relied on artificial bodies since childhood, that's still a very human form of alienation.
      - chupasaurus 3y ago
        Agree on that, but my point is still that GitS isn't a good example because cybernetics are there because of setting, not necessary the "modern Prometheus" thingy.
    - mcpackieh 3y ago
      GiTS creator Masamune Shirow's earlier works also feature androids or other sorts of synthetic life. Particularly Buaku's gang and Crolis in Dominion, and the military androids in Black Magic M-66.
hotnfresh 3y ago
I’m not really sure how you’d put the parts of Frankenstein that really matter into cyberpunk and come out with anything but a farce, unless you ditch all the awful-but-sympathetic-creature bits somehow. Motherhood (and an intertwined nigh-irresistible drive toward and revulsion of pregnancy and giving birth), responsibility for one’s works in the world, the nature of man, abandonment, revenge, sympathetic villains… it’s great stuff, but I think if you try to do that in cyberpunk and keep anything like the Creature you’re gonna be drawn into parody or some other unfortunate hole.
- flir 3y ago
  I'm unconvinced that motherhood is a theme of Frankenstein? The subtitle ("The Modern Prometheus") suggests "a second, technological Creation" is more the intent. I'm hoping you're going to be able to convince me I'm wrong, though. Alien/s, now that's SciFi about motherhood. I guess if I was going to approach "cyberpunk Frankenstein" I'd end up somewhere adjacent to Michael Marshall Smith's Spares ("human clones, the ultimate health insurance").
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    The simultaneous nigh-unavoidable impulse toward creation (which takes some months, of course) coupled with body horror and more than a little revulsion, and sudden, transformative “birth” at the end (the monster isn’t intolerably, fundamentally, stomach-turningly repulsive until that spark of life enters it) is rather on the nose. It’s a man giving birth, more or less, and parental responsibility (which he whiffs at—he can’t tolerate the monster, especially at first, either) of a sort follows. Given that, and that particularly fatherhood-connected motifs and themes are not strong in the book, I think one would have to justify all that not having having to do with motherhood. Given the author’s bio and stuff like her mom dying from giving birth to her, yeah, I’d say it’s there. A very particular point of view and concern with it, not exactly “ain’t pregnancy and motherhood beautiful?”, yes, but it’s there. “Death of the author”, sure, but it’s there in the book even if you don’t know Shelley’s bio.
    - flir 3y ago

aidenn0 3y ago

The easiest way to describe how gonzo cyberpunk had gotten at this point is that people debate whether or not Snow Crash is a parody of it or not.

jhbadger 3y ago
I don't see how anyone could consider it not a parody. I mean the main character himself is named Hiro Protagonist (a pun on the literary term "Hero Protagonist") and Hong Kong exists as a chain franchise nation.
- Retric 3y ago
  Lampshading something is different than parody it’s goal is to push suspension of disbelief just a little bit further, where parody doesn’t try to maintain it. You can’t watch “Are We the Baddies?” as a war story. It introduced such elements simply to establish who’s getting made fun of. They remain in character but that’s it, the war story plot doesn’t progress the skit just keeps hammering the parody. Some parody has a more complete story but “Scary Movie” progresses the underlying plot to make fun of different elements of the movies it’s making fun of. Harry Potter on the other hand calls out many of the tropes it’s using. House of the lions vs house of the snakes, guess who’s supposed to be the hero and who the villain. Except the characters once introduced are telling an actual story. Snow Crash is between those extremes but focuses too much on the underlying story and its characters to be an actual parody. Over the top elements exist in the world, but they are played straight more Gulliver's Travels than Spaceballs.
- 0xf00ff00f 3y ago
  Parody or not, I wish I could apply for citizenship at Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong
- michaelbrave 3y ago
  I forget the term for it but there is a thing in anime subgenres where something comes out that is a kid of rejection/critique of the previous genre and acts as a kind of pseudo parody that afterwards sets a new direction and redefines the genre. Often these are hard to understand unless one is already familiar with the trends and tropes that it is critiquing. A good example is neon genesis evangelion, it's a critism of the mecha subgenre that came before it, but changed the way the mecha subgenre was afterwards. I'm told hunter x hunter is the same kind of redefining pseudo parody with the battle shonen genre, but I'm less familiar with that. I feel like snow crash it's kinda along those lines.

Animats 3y ago

The real world caught up, and passed cyberpunk. The whole concept of a counterculture is gone. The closest thing we have to a counterculture in the US today is the MAGA/militia/Q-Anon movement.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
IggleSniggle 3y ago
Wow. I can't believe I'm on this side of the fence.
- suoduandao3 3y ago
  It's worth remembering, by definition the majority of people are. Our civilization (and if you're American, your nation) just happens to fetishize successful rebels. It's probably a very unusual attitude, historically speaking.
dfxm12 3y ago
Maybe militia, if you're talking about people who've more or less removed themselves from regular society to live in a compound, likely off the grid, similar to the group who took over the national wildlife preserve in OR several years back. MAGA is way too mainstream to be a counter culture. QAnon is more like a belief in certain conspiracies than an ethos you live by, no?
- ta988 3y ago
  The problem of militias in the US is that they are not removed from society. A lot of them were part or are still part of law enforcement and are keeping really close ties. They are a really strong culture and spreading fast. The thing is that they look so much alike and share so much with the "official" law enforcement, that could keep them in check, that not much is done to them or they even get support. Unfortunately America is just getting ready for a coup (there was one attempt already) and forces are gathering for the next one. Almost half of the population wouldn't be opposed to it. That's the reality, and from my point of view that's a little scary.

Calamitous 3y ago

I want the dystopia I was promised in my youth, not the one I got.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
emikulic 3y ago
I want flying cars and moving sidewalks like I was promised by The Jetsons. :(
- blooalien 3y ago
  > "I want flying cars and moving sidewalks like I was promised by The Jetsons. :(" And worse yet, as promised in Popular Science / Mechanics; "A flying car in every garage by the year 2000!"
suoduandao3 3y ago
Move to LA? Everyone says they have squats and ineffectual policing. Not much work for shadowrunners yet that I've heard of, but then, I would would I?
yankput 3y ago
You CAN move to China I guess?

photochemsyn 3y ago

Petition to rename cyberpunk to cybernoir.

jhbadger 3y ago
That (also called "future noir") actually is a separate genre, related to cyberpunk, but not exactly it. A lot of works loosely called cyberpunk have noir tendencies with detectives, femme fatales, and an overall 1940s feel, but other works really do have the 1970s punk feel.
- A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
  There's a common thread. Literary cyberpunk, and "future noir," are both centered around crime: Hackers, contraband-smugglers (from new nano-drugs to brain implants,) people who have found themselves caught between the gears of criminal conspiracies, etc. The defining characteristic of 80s-90s cyberpunk is that it's about near-future crime. So it shares an awful lot -- if not absolutely everything -- with noir. The "punk" aspect is that cyberpunk stories are often told from the perspective of the criminal rather than the detective. The r*dditors who go on and on about "i-it's all about urban dystopia and corporate conspiracies!" are dead wrong, because both elements don't always (-- indeed very rarely --) feature in the foundational literary works of the genre. Take Burning Chrome, for instance: All of the stories are about crime, but the features of the settings are rarely clear. So much for literary cyberpunk. Cyberpunk in art -- e.g. www.cyberpunk.tech -- is its own thing, and just as old.

tyrells 3y ago

I recently watched a documentary series about cyberpunk on YouTube by Indigo Gaming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sttm8Q9rOdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sttm8Q9rOdQ There are currently 3 parts to the series, and it is an interesting overview of the genre.

anthk 3y ago

I still play Shadowrun in Mednafen, but a hacked ROM (enhanced one), Shadowrun 2058. It has all the vibe of cyberpunk except for the magick, but if you mentally replace magick with "quantum futuristic alien tech masked as godly one" it still fits with the lore.

criddell 3y ago

My introduction to cyberpunk culture came from Mondo 2000. Aside from reading about William Gibson, they also had articles on music and movies and smart drugs! The 90's are 30 years ago(??). I've often wondered if the people taking piracetam or whatever it was back then have had any long term effects, good or bad. It felt like dialing up your IQ and awareness was possible. You just had to figure out the right combination of substances to take. I just spent 20 minutes looking over google results for nootropics and seems like little has changed. Edit: Thought archive.org might have this magazine and, of course, they do! It's a lot harder to read than I remember and the ads are better than I remember. There's also more nudity than I recall... so maybe don't open this at work. https://archive.org/details/Mondo.2000.Issue.14.1995 https://archive.org/details/Mondo.2000.Issue.14.1995

generalizations 3y ago
Just finished flipping through Issue 14 you linked. Wow, that's a time I wish I'd been old enough to appreciate. I wonder if anything like Mondo 2000 exists these days. Or maybe it's a time that's just passed us by.
- bpiche 3y ago
  We just have to keep creating the culture. Hacker culture is everywhere. It's here now, you're experiencing it on HN. This board is the spiritual successor to the great BBNs of the 80s and 90s. It might not be at Wired - I think KK tried to dethrone R U Sirius once - but it's out there. Even Mondo is still around. Check out the blog Acceler8or. It's the next chapter of Mondo, and it isn't updated frequently, but it exists. It's gonna be at DNA for their yearly screening of Hackers. It's at your local pawn shop, when you pony up for a used laptop! We might not have the great hacker collectives and hackerspaces of the past, but the culture is still out there. L0pht might be gone from Boston, sure. But these kids give me a ton of inspiration. [0] Don't mean to 'go off', but life has no meaning beyond that which you give it. If you 'fictionalize' your existence in the context of cyberpunk, and great science fiction books, and compelling video games, you become a character in those stories. Life is richer for it. https://www.wired.com/story/mtba-charliecard-hack-defcon-2023/ https://www.wired.com/story/mtba-charliecard-hack-defcon-202... [0]

bobvanluijt 3y ago

Ah - Sterling, always great. He didn't do his iconic closing speech at SXSW this year. Does anybody know why?

r9550684 3y ago

cyberpunk in the 90s was a lived experience, particularly so in Eastern Europe. I read Neuromancer, watched johnny mnemonic and blade runner on pirated VHS tapes, and armitage and bubble gum crysis on pirate tv[0]. there were old grandmas selling cd releases from RAZOR 1911 and PARADOX all over the place. "ooh, little munchkin, you're into 3d modeling? here's a new cd I got lightwave 3d, 3d studio max and Maya, cracked[1], $3". there were dozens if not hundreds of BBSes, and your local friendly FIDO point administrator. there were several large markets where you would buy computer parts grand bazaar style[2], so you buy an AMD K6 (in a box? dude, it's back of the truck OEM in an anti-static bag, better pray it works when you bring it home) that runs at 166 mhz or whatever and overclock it to a whopping 300 mhz, which necessarily implies that your desktop box was in a constant state of messing around with. no amount of LEDs and glass covers of a modern gaming rig will give you the same feeling as a boring 90s beige box did, because inside the beige box you had a 3dfx voodoo 6 months after it got released, and it's the first time consumer grade 3 acceleration is within your personal reach. of course some Finn in the demoscene has already made a back of a napkin C program, that you can compile in your pirated copy of Visual Studio, that shows you how to draw a shaded rectangle using your voodoo. everybody was on the same page: scene releases, demos, themes, background pictures, music, bbs styles, nicknames and scene group names were all incorporating cyberpunk aesthetic and contributing the aesthetic at the same time. reality was providing cyberpunk, and cyberpunk authors were providing the way for us to see the reality. [0]you had to buy a descrambler to watch it [1]she would never explicitly say it was cracked, because of course everything was cracked [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjDHhdx_tGY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjDHhdx_tGY

Sirioso 3y ago

I post lazily and at random on https://www.mondo2000.com/ https://www.mondo2000.com/ trying to remember why I stopped taking memory drugs R.U. Sirius

bpiche 3y ago

A reminder that DNA is doing their regular Cyberdelia party again on Sept 9.