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> Did you ever wonder why the 21st century feels like we're living in a bad cyberpunk novel from the 1980s? I don't think it does. Imagine a pandemic without t

> Did you ever wonder why the 21st century feels like we're living in a bad cyberpunk novel from the 1980s? I don't think it does. Imagine a pandemic without the comms and tech invented in the last 15 years.

rideontime 3y ago
Conspiracy theories relegated to usenet and little-heard AM radio stations. Sounds good to me.
- airstrike 3y ago
  And my neighbor who believes the construction noises she's hearing at night are from the pedophile ring (led by Biden and Hillary) digging tunnels to transport children they sell online with their names disguised as SKUs on regular-looking furniture websites True story
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    She sounds like she likes to use her brain to solve exotic puzzles, she should take up Sudoko or something, instead?
uoaei 3y ago
Would have been a pretty straightforward response with maybe less statistics. Increase production of masks and provide temporary assistance for people who would otherwise spread it at work. The most we could say tech did was allocate just-in-time logistics outputs a little more efficiently, except that just-in-time logistics were only a result of the tech you're referring to. We would still have contract warehouses across the country and world that could store and distribute basic provisions with a little bit of planning. Abundant visibility breeds a sense of abundant control, but when that sense goes beyond material reality we see technocrats fail. Vaccines did help a lot, that's true, but that success doesn't really generalize across tech per se.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > The most we could say tech did was allocate just-in-time logistics outputs a little more efficiently No, the most we could say is millions of families could stay in touch across high-bandwidth lines; online shopping was already a reality that needed a bit of a scale up; secured remote work was possible for many millions of people; etc etc. Try and imagine the same pandemic, but no one has a laptop, all shopping is done in person apart from what Amazon already stocks, and that's only in a few countries, most things are paper based, and every home has sub-1Mb internet and no way of doing a video call at the push of a button.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - uoaei 3y ago
    Amazing how the countries without all those amenities ever made it out alive... you're conflating dependence on those technologies with necessity of those technologies.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      > Amazing how the countries without all those amenities ever made it out alive... you're conflating dependence on those technologies with necessity of those technologies Can you say where in this sentence I said that they were necessary for existence? > Imagine a pandemic without the comms and tech invented in the last 15 years.
      - uoaei 3y ago
        > millions of families could stay in touch across high-bandwidth lines; online shopping was already a reality that needed a bit of a scale up; secured remote work was possible for many millions of people Bringing these up in the discussion in this way implies that these outcomes were unachievable "without the comms and tech invented in the last 15 years". I'm not so interested in some pedantic retroactive interpretation of your comment when it's clear from the tone and presentation that you intended this to be some reach toward a techno-utopian narrative of progress. My point is that that narrative hides within it the absurd notion that we can't do without these things, when obviously we can and it is really quite easy to imagine a pandemic being addressed adequately without those things in place. Indeed in many ways some aspects of the response would have been more robust. I brought up just-in-time because lack of inventory as a buffer (of masks in particular, but also basic necessities) was a huge driver of the virality in the early days. With such a buffer it's feasible, plausible even, that we could have weathered the early days easier and anxious people could have had less severe overreactions to mask mandates and the like, and the total death count could have been 10% or 1% what it was without adequate reserves in place.
kstrauser 3y ago
Like one where social media algorithms weren’t shoving anti-science conspiracy theories at half the population?
- ben_w 3y ago
  I think that didn’t make much difference relative to the Influenza pandemic a century ago? Modulo what tools they had at the time, things like masking.
- ianlevesque 3y ago
  Social media? Try world leaders directly. Hell, try reading an HN thread anytime it comes up. The lies find a way.
  - ploika 3y ago
    HN is social media.
    - red-iron-pine 3y ago
      and there are clear, active shillbots here. HN is a lot simpler than a lot of other platforms, too.
  - sneak 3y ago
    The church was responsible for making sure that useful lies were the only legal source of truth for millennia. Now it's the fault of a website?
    - jprete 3y ago
      Religions act like governments - their first inherent preference is stability. SV ideology is explicitly anti-stability, exemplified by the phrase “move fast and break things”.
      - teamonkey 3y ago
CharlesW 3y ago
Doesn't it? • A global health crisis forces a generation of children to socialize and be educated via primitive virtual reality, while corporate headquarters (and some cities) become ghost towns. • Groups resist technology (vaccines, masks) because of conspiracy theories about origin, control, and autonomy. Resistance screeds and memes are spread by politicians and corpos built to profit from personal information and engagement uber alles. • Countless deaths prevented by previously unheard-of biotech advancements created by global pharmaceutical companies in a suspiciously short timeframe. Fragile global systems like supply chains shatter like uncooked spaghetti. Surveillance technology deployed to people's personal devices. Etc.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  It is a good set-up. We’re just perpetually in the “events leading up to the international cybercorp wars” stage. I think the real world is not separated nicely into backstory and actual story, so we’ll kind of bumble along for better or worse instead of hitting some grand moment of change. Near future fiction needs that dramatic moment to neatly jump from the present to the setting.
  - BirAdam 3y ago
    Well, corporate warfare is just warfare since the megacorporations have essentially purchased the governments of the Earth. Much of government regulation and market intervention is a result of regulatory capture, and voting effectively achieves very little other than keeping the people fighting each other while the megacorporations and ultra wealthy divide the spoils.
- krapp 3y ago
  None of that is really cyberpunk, though. The second is the result of people believing they live in a post-apocalyptic dystopia when they don't, but in an actual cyberpunk story the conspiracy theories would have been correct. The health crisis would have been manufactured by black ops pharmaceutical companies working with the CIA, and COVID vaccines would have contained nanotech that let corporations insert AI code into people's minds through the screens that people were now forced to spend an inordinate amount of time in front of. The protagonists would be a ragtag group of antivaxxers and anarcho-primitivists simply trying to survive outside without getting eaten by cyberzombies or sniped by Boston Dynamics killbots while the New World Order tries to force the populace into some kind of capitalist Instrumentality. We're not there yet, but give it ten, maybe fifteen years. At least one (maybe two or three, to account for cultural osmosis from parenting) generation entirely raised in a world in which consensus reality and culture are entirely created and managed by AI, genetic engineering and cybernetics (particularly AR and brain-machine interfaces) become common, and the breakdown of large-scale and complex societal structures due to climate change really begins, leading to corporate micronations, crypto economies and autonomous government. When relationships between people and technology become primarily parasocial and psychosexual.
dleslie 3y ago
I really can't name a single cyberpunk novel from the 80s that is even a close approximation of the present. Mmmaybe the Akira manga, or Patlabor manga? If only because they're intended to be taking place roughly the day after tomorrow.
- bitwize 3y ago
  That's because we got all the bad bits of cyberpunk without any of the cool bits. Megacorporations running everything and owning everyone, but no badass cyber-enhancements and only rudimentary (by comparison) VR.
  - jprete 3y ago
    For what it’s worth, much of the cyberpunk skeleton is in place - good and bad - but it’s not clearly visible from a thematic perspective, because human life isn’t as cheap as in genuine cyberpunk environments. We’re also, frankly, moving towards larger levels of human commoditization. Cyberpunk might make people disposable but it doesn’t make them totally irrelevant, certainly not the way the modern world does, because otherwise the story doesn’t have main characters anymore.
    - bitwize 3y ago
      And yet social media is giving people a profound sense of entitlement that comes from believing you're the main character of some story -- colloquially called "main character syndrome". Maybe that just speeds the personal commoditization? (Syndrome (Incredibles) voice) "When everyone's the main character... no one will be."
  - PoignardAzur 3y ago
    > Megacorporations running everything and owning everyone, but no badass cyber-enhancements and only rudimentary (by comparison) VR. Did we get the same cyberpunk media? Because "megacorporations running everything" isn't a massive hyperbole in cyberpunk like it is in real life. I'm not seeing corporate security with machine guns when I walk into Google. Cyberpunk 2077 starts with a brain-implants company straight-up murdering half the European council before a strategic vote. There's an ocean-wide margin between "corporations can influence home politics" and "corporations rule the world".
Khelavaster 3y ago
Like one where scientists couldn't communicate about SARS modifications and then induce them in labs? It would have been a lot less scary..

rideontime 3y ago

Conspiracy theories relegated to usenet and little-heard AM radio stations. Sounds good to me.

airstrike 3y ago
And my neighbor who believes the construction noises she's hearing at night are from the pedophile ring (led by Biden and Hillary) digging tunnels to transport children they sell online with their names disguised as SKUs on regular-looking furniture websites True story
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  She sounds like she likes to use her brain to solve exotic puzzles, she should take up Sudoko or something, instead?

uoaei 3y ago

Would have been a pretty straightforward response with maybe less statistics. Increase production of masks and provide temporary assistance for people who would otherwise spread it at work. The most we could say tech did was allocate just-in-time logistics outputs a little more efficiently, except that just-in-time logistics were only a result of the tech you're referring to. We would still have contract warehouses across the country and world that could store and distribute basic provisions with a little bit of planning. Abundant visibility breeds a sense of abundant control, but when that sense goes beyond material reality we see technocrats fail. Vaccines did help a lot, that's true, but that success doesn't really generalize across tech per se.

robertlagrant 3y ago
> The most we could say tech did was allocate just-in-time logistics outputs a little more efficiently No, the most we could say is millions of families could stay in touch across high-bandwidth lines; online shopping was already a reality that needed a bit of a scale up; secured remote work was possible for many millions of people; etc etc. Try and imagine the same pandemic, but no one has a laptop, all shopping is done in person apart from what Amazon already stocks, and that's only in a few countries, most things are paper based, and every home has sub-1Mb internet and no way of doing a video call at the push of a button.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- uoaei 3y ago
  Amazing how the countries without all those amenities ever made it out alive... you're conflating dependence on those technologies with necessity of those technologies.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    > Amazing how the countries without all those amenities ever made it out alive... you're conflating dependence on those technologies with necessity of those technologies Can you say where in this sentence I said that they were necessary for existence? > Imagine a pandemic without the comms and tech invented in the last 15 years.
    - uoaei 3y ago
      > millions of families could stay in touch across high-bandwidth lines; online shopping was already a reality that needed a bit of a scale up; secured remote work was possible for many millions of people Bringing these up in the discussion in this way implies that these outcomes were unachievable "without the comms and tech invented in the last 15 years". I'm not so interested in some pedantic retroactive interpretation of your comment when it's clear from the tone and presentation that you intended this to be some reach toward a techno-utopian narrative of progress. My point is that that narrative hides within it the absurd notion that we can't do without these things, when obviously we can and it is really quite easy to imagine a pandemic being addressed adequately without those things in place. Indeed in many ways some aspects of the response would have been more robust. I brought up just-in-time because lack of inventory as a buffer (of masks in particular, but also basic necessities) was a huge driver of the virality in the early days. With such a buffer it's feasible, plausible even, that we could have weathered the early days easier and anxious people could have had less severe overreactions to mask mandates and the like, and the total death count could have been 10% or 1% what it was without adequate reserves in place.

kstrauser 3y ago

Like one where social media algorithms weren’t shoving anti-science conspiracy theories at half the population?

ben_w 3y ago
I think that didn’t make much difference relative to the Influenza pandemic a century ago? Modulo what tools they had at the time, things like masking.
ianlevesque 3y ago
Social media? Try world leaders directly. Hell, try reading an HN thread anytime it comes up. The lies find a way.
- ploika 3y ago
  HN is social media.
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    and there are clear, active shillbots here. HN is a lot simpler than a lot of other platforms, too.
- sneak 3y ago
  The church was responsible for making sure that useful lies were the only legal source of truth for millennia. Now it's the fault of a website?
  - jprete 3y ago
    Religions act like governments - their first inherent preference is stability. SV ideology is explicitly anti-stability, exemplified by the phrase “move fast and break things”.
    - teamonkey 3y ago

CharlesW 3y ago

Doesn't it? • A global health crisis forces a generation of children to socialize and be educated via primitive virtual reality, while corporate headquarters (and some cities) become ghost towns. • Groups resist technology (vaccines, masks) because of conspiracy theories about origin, control, and autonomy. Resistance screeds and memes are spread by politicians and corpos built to profit from personal information and engagement uber alles. • Countless deaths prevented by previously unheard-of biotech advancements created by global pharmaceutical companies in a suspiciously short timeframe. Fragile global systems like supply chains shatter like uncooked spaghetti. Surveillance technology deployed to people's personal devices. Etc.

bee_rider 3y ago
It is a good set-up. We’re just perpetually in the “events leading up to the international cybercorp wars” stage. I think the real world is not separated nicely into backstory and actual story, so we’ll kind of bumble along for better or worse instead of hitting some grand moment of change. Near future fiction needs that dramatic moment to neatly jump from the present to the setting.
- BirAdam 3y ago
  Well, corporate warfare is just warfare since the megacorporations have essentially purchased the governments of the Earth. Much of government regulation and market intervention is a result of regulatory capture, and voting effectively achieves very little other than keeping the people fighting each other while the megacorporations and ultra wealthy divide the spoils.
krapp 3y ago
None of that is really cyberpunk, though. The second is the result of people believing they live in a post-apocalyptic dystopia when they don't, but in an actual cyberpunk story the conspiracy theories would have been correct. The health crisis would have been manufactured by black ops pharmaceutical companies working with the CIA, and COVID vaccines would have contained nanotech that let corporations insert AI code into people's minds through the screens that people were now forced to spend an inordinate amount of time in front of. The protagonists would be a ragtag group of antivaxxers and anarcho-primitivists simply trying to survive outside without getting eaten by cyberzombies or sniped by Boston Dynamics killbots while the New World Order tries to force the populace into some kind of capitalist Instrumentality. We're not there yet, but give it ten, maybe fifteen years. At least one (maybe two or three, to account for cultural osmosis from parenting) generation entirely raised in a world in which consensus reality and culture are entirely created and managed by AI, genetic engineering and cybernetics (particularly AR and brain-machine interfaces) become common, and the breakdown of large-scale and complex societal structures due to climate change really begins, leading to corporate micronations, crypto economies and autonomous government. When relationships between people and technology become primarily parasocial and psychosexual.

dleslie 3y ago

I really can't name a single cyberpunk novel from the 80s that is even a close approximation of the present. Mmmaybe the Akira manga, or Patlabor manga? If only because they're intended to be taking place roughly the day after tomorrow.

bitwize 3y ago
That's because we got all the bad bits of cyberpunk without any of the cool bits. Megacorporations running everything and owning everyone, but no badass cyber-enhancements and only rudimentary (by comparison) VR.
- jprete 3y ago
  For what it’s worth, much of the cyberpunk skeleton is in place - good and bad - but it’s not clearly visible from a thematic perspective, because human life isn’t as cheap as in genuine cyberpunk environments. We’re also, frankly, moving towards larger levels of human commoditization. Cyberpunk might make people disposable but it doesn’t make them totally irrelevant, certainly not the way the modern world does, because otherwise the story doesn’t have main characters anymore.
  - bitwize 3y ago
    And yet social media is giving people a profound sense of entitlement that comes from believing you're the main character of some story -- colloquially called "main character syndrome". Maybe that just speeds the personal commoditization? (Syndrome (Incredibles) voice) "When everyone's the main character... no one will be."
- PoignardAzur 3y ago
  > Megacorporations running everything and owning everyone, but no badass cyber-enhancements and only rudimentary (by comparison) VR. Did we get the same cyberpunk media? Because "megacorporations running everything" isn't a massive hyperbole in cyberpunk like it is in real life. I'm not seeing corporate security with machine guns when I walk into Google. Cyberpunk 2077 starts with a brain-implants company straight-up murdering half the European council before a strategic vote. There's an ocean-wide margin between "corporations can influence home politics" and "corporations rule the world".

Khelavaster 3y ago

Like one where scientists couldn't communicate about SARS modifications and then induce them in labs? It would have been a lot less scary..