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> Because we invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale and they took it at face value and decided to implement it for real. ... > Did you ever wonder why

by tivert 3y ago

> Because we invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale and they took it at face value and decided to implement it for real. ... > Did you ever wonder why the 21st century feels like we're living in a bad cyberpunk novel from the 1980s? > It's because these guys read those cyberpunk novels and mistook a dystopia for a road map. That is so true. I actually met someone who seriously wished to do what he could to make reality like a cyberpunk novel, completely oblivious to the fact that the books are dystopias. Tech people can be really, really, really dumb sometimes. That idiocy can go completely unchecked because they frequently arrogantly believe their type is smarter than everyone else.

beepbooptheory 3y ago
I think chalking it up to just idiocy is a tad unfair. There are incentives everywhere to think like a marketing person or startup CEO, its what makes you a valuable employee. You write your cover letter and say, "I am very excited to work on the Torment Nexus" because you need, plainly, a job. But then with everything after that, you are not only authorized but encouraged to believe in the Torment Nexus by the people who matter most (people who pay wages). It's understandable that merely placing yourself in this world will slowly infect your mind, because there isn't anybody really telling you its wrong, and if they are, they are easily dismissed as luddites or socialists or whatever. And its not like the naysayers have some alternative money to offer you.
- asdfman123 3y ago
  It's not borne out of stupidity: lots of the people involved know what they're doing. But when someone pushes an argument that could be disassembled by a bright middle schooler, it's okay to call it "stupid." If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
afroisalreadyin 3y ago
What I also find interesting and revealing is how surprised they are when others find their vision of the future (the near and the far) scary and dystopic, and challenge them. I used to tell crypto bros (most of whom have done a quick transition to AI-brohood recently) why and how their idea of the crypto-driven economy sucked, and they would just treat me like a weirdo who just didn't get it. This is all before the big crash, of course. I guess part of it is how crypto was getting insane amounts of funding, which legitimized and corroborated the idea, and also created a strong echo chamber where they were shielded from criticism. Money is great at making you ignore that you might, just might, be completely wrong.
- trinsic2 3y ago
  That's why I stay away from endeavors that look too good to be true. I if it's become too popular to quickly and causes people to not question their surroundings or other motives run as far away as you can. You'll have a much better life doing the right thing, then doing the wrong thing.
- kybernetikos 3y ago
  The core difference between crypto and tradfi is that crypto is open and hackable (in the creative sense) by anyone without having to receive the permission of the gatekeepers. To believe that that is a bad vision of the future betrays something of the exact pessimism about humanity and authoritarian bent that this article complains about.
  - afroisalreadyin 3y ago
    Pessimism is believing that there is no possible positive future for humanity. I don't get how rejecting one option is the same thing. How, again, rejecting one option due to clearly presented reasons is authoritarian is also beyond me.
- robinsonb5 3y ago
  Cat heaven is mouse hell.
asdfman123 3y ago
I'm on Bay Area tech Twitter and there's a growing movement called effective accelerationism. E/accs lionize tech billionaires and call for increased investment in futuristic technologies like AI, decreased regulation, generally more rigid social hierarchies, etc. I want to peacefully coexist with people in my social circles but it's hard to hide my disdain. I believe a lot of tech billionaires are essentially nihilists creating these stories as a way to increase their wealth and power. A lot of their values seem to stem from doing too much Adderall, too much coke, and too many hallucinogens. Sometimes it seems like they came up with a lot of this stuff while playing video games on LSD. Effective accelerationism doesn't value humanity. If anyone gets crushed beneath the wheels of technological "progress," if society turns out worse for the majority of people, well, that's not their problem.
- suoduandao3 3y ago
  I like the accelerationist story and I don't think I came to that opinion through manipulation. If I did it was by the club of Rome. The way I see it is - you're in a car heading for a cliff. You can go all in on the brakes and hope you stop in time, or all in on the gas and hope you can jump the gap. We don't really have enough data to know which is better, it comes down to feeling. And the time to slam the breaks was probably about 40 years ago. Since people back then elected Reagan instead, I'm of the opinion it's worth keeping the gas all the way down, just in case it works.
  - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
    The issue I take with this philosophy is it's all or nothing. Sam Bankman-Fried admitting to being willing to flip a coin that saves or kills humanity points to this. Either we give all of our hope and money to tech billionaires to save us, or we'll just _________ and then humanity will perish. Also we need to trust tech billionaires who have shown plenty of times that they shouldn't be trusted to save humanity, so I'm not inclined to do that. Especially when it's these same tech billionaires who are informing us about the risks in the first place.
    - 3y ago
carom 3y ago
People say this a lot but I think something else is true. The cyberpunk visions are obvious applications of certain technologies. When that technology becomes capable and people start to apply it, they name it after what was coined previously.
- tivert 3y ago
  In the case I'm thinking of, the person was interested in the technologies and the capabilities the protagonists display. He wanted them so much that he couldn't see the bad parts. He didn't comprehend: 1) the protagonist doesn't enjoy the cyberpunk environment as much as he enjoys reading about it, and 2) in a realized cyberpunk environment, he wouldn't even be a protagonist.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    How do you know whether they comprehended something?
    - tivert 3y ago
      > How do you know whether they comprehended something? How do you know anything at all? You don't need a sci-fi mind ray that extracts thoughts in raw form to figure out something like that.
      - MichaelZuo 3y ago
        Okay, so how did you figure it out with such certainty?
      - bee_rider 3y ago
        maybe we should build the mind ray just to see if it has any applications though
        programd 3y ago
        Here you go: https://www.science.org/content/article/ai-re-creates-what-people-see-reading-their-brain-scans https://www.science.org/content/article/ai-re-creates-what-p...
TigeriusKirk 3y ago
What specifically did they want to do?
trinsic2 3y ago
Recommend to them the solar punk movement, which is overtaking the cyber punk movement.
- colordrops 3y ago
  Is it though? I think I've seen one page shared multiple times. Where are the iconic books and stories and movies about solar punk? What are the salient ideas from it that will stick with us for decades?
  - suoduandao3 3y ago
    People are working on it. I recently had an AI make this coloring book of solarpunk images. https://www.amazon.ca/Beautiful-Futures-Solarpunk-Coloring-Book/dp/B0C91KL7W8/ https://www.amazon.ca/Beautiful-Futures-Solarpunk-Coloring-B... Artistically I'm more of a writer, but solarpunk is a surprisingly hard setting to write in. Not enough conflict.
    - jstarfish 3y ago
      > solarpunk is a surprisingly hard setting to write in. Not enough conflict Ha. Where man goes, conflict follows. A "perfect" world in total harmony is boring. Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood would be pillaged by neighboring warlords on first contact, if it wasn't first subverted from within by the resident entitled 12-year-old furry. Even in a natural utopia, nature abhors a vacuum. Cults strive to maintain a facade of harmony. The conflict is readily apparent to insiders. It just appears as though there is no conflict to outsiders. There was a solarpunk-ish epoch in the game Chrono Trigger (Zeal). Everything was peaceful and harmonious. This enlightened age was brought down when its scholars researched tech they shouldn't and birthed the harbinger of the apocalypse. If there's not enough conflict, you're not looking close enough at what's going on at street level. Write a story from the perspective of a cop, a farmer, a plumber, or any other blue-collar job in this world. People need to eat and drink. What happens when that's challenged? They can't live in their own shit. What happens when pipes collapse? They fight over dumb things. Where and how? Wherever two people coexist, there are politics. Where three exist, there are factions and intrigue. Where there's four, one is expendable...
inasio 3y ago
One point that I heard William Gibson make about cyberpunk as a dystopia is that it depends on your point of reference. There are many places in the world where a cyberpunk dystopia would be a welcome change
- jfil 3y ago
  One example of this is how online marketplaces for drugs are reducing real-life drug violence.
- trinsic2 3y ago
  I don't know man, I assume William Gibson didn't think that statement through. Even if you were bring something like a cyber punk universe to a Third World country, it would still be slavery. Anyway, the cyber punk movements being replaced by solar punk ideals, which are more in line with humanities needs.
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    I think he did. If you're a well-paid technocrat the cyberpunk future means unparalleled possibilities. Living like a god for 1% of the population and 10% does alright.
  - skjoldr 3y ago
    Given that my country, Ukraine, is already sliding there pretty rapidly, it really can't get worse tbh. I would take corporate wars over interstate wars any day. (wrote this from my home with a backup power generator while studying courses on how to fly FPV drones via goggles and on cybersecurity/electronic warfare)
    - JieJie 3y ago
      Hang in there, friend. <3
    - mcv 3y ago
      War is hell no matter what setting you're in. Or, going with Hawkeye Pierce from MASH, maybe war is worse than hell. I really hope things will change for you and your country.
ryandrake 3y ago
John Carmack noted during a Slashdot interview all the way back in 1999: "Making Snow Crash into a reality feels like a sort of moral imperative to a lot of programmers, but the efforts that have been made so far leave a lot to be desired."[1] 1: https://games.slashdot.org/story/99/10/15/1012230/john-carmack-answers https://games.slashdot.org/story/99/10/15/1012230/john-carma...
- J_Shelby_J 3y ago
  The true value of a liberal arts degree is learning how to not to be totally cringe.
  - ipython 3y ago
    I have been struggling for a long time to identify what you just so succinctly described in one sentence. Thank you.
  - lencastre 3y ago
    Reads like unpopular opinion but actually it’s like a hard pill to swallow
  - FFP999 3y ago
    I think it was summed up well by an ad (yeah yeah I know) I saw for some university's continuing ed program: "The sciences teach you how to clone extinct dinosaurs. The liberal arts tell you why that might be a bad idea." [adjacent to graphic of T. rex pursing scientists]
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      Which field will tell you that it's actually a perfectly fine idea, as long as you take correct precautions, and that taking them is literally what makes engineering a profession? Jurassic Park wasn't a "don't clone dinosaurs" movie, it was a "don't be an idiot" movie with a dinosaur theme.
      - 3y ago
Root_Denied 3y ago
It's not just them being dumb, some genuinely believe that they would be on top of the hierarchy in such a world, that their work to bring about that world would put them in a position of power and influence over others. They're effectively technological libertarians.
- creer 3y ago
  I don't expect many people feel they would end on top specifically. Challenging the current "status quo" is more modest and probably plenty enough.
keiferski 3y ago
I have been working on an essay for awhile that explores the "appeal" of supposedly dystopian cyberpunk worlds. The summary is: I don't think they're actually dystopian and in fact they have a lot of attributes that are lacking in today's world, specifically: a larger tolerance for experimentation on the body and in architecture, and an extreme urban density found almost nowhere on Earth today. It's the same reason why Kowloon Walled City was so intriguing. Calling people "dumb" just because you don't understand them isn't very insightful.
- j4yav 3y ago
  I'm sure if you asked Peter Thiel why he pumps the blood of young men into his body he'd say something similar, so maybe it's just one man's dystopia is another person's power fantasy?
- grotorea 3y ago
  And as the meme says, the tech is cool bro. Do the people who want to make cyberpunk real mean they want to make corporatocracy real or they think VR videogames would be fun? And aren't there degrees of "bad" to cyberpunk novels?
  - keiferski 3y ago
    Yeah, I don’t think most of the world presented in the Sprawl trilogy is all that dystopian. Maybe a bit overly-unequal, but also with more space for freedom. There are a lot of fascinating places in those novels that would never be permitted in our world today – a hydroponic garden covering the entire floor of a skyscraper, for example.
- I_Am_Nous 3y ago
  Dystopian cyberpunk worlds are usually described as hollowed out by corporations or a similar power structures to the point that it's every person for themselves. Some people have the resources to fight back, but most do not. That's what makes them dystopias in my opinion, that if you are not part of the privileged class there is no opportunity to change anything about your situation.
_teyd 3y ago
It's a bit like the people who watch South Park and think Cartman is the hero.
- wnevets 3y ago
  or tyler durden, patrick bateman, homelander, etc
  - ChainOfFools 3y ago
    I remember when 90's Beavis and Butthead was new, that a bewildering number of people I encountered who were familiar with the show seemed to think the titular characters' existence somehow validated the corresponding behavior of the real life versions of the people they lampooned. "someone made a show about selfish lizard brain idiots, and its like, popular, therefore being a selfish lizard-brain idiot is now confirmed a respectable cultural stock to trade in."
    - lawlessone 3y ago
      or 2010/20's version, R&M.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      I never watched B&B because from fragments and ads, I concluded that the attempt to validate such behavior was the cartoon's whole point. I mean, it's either that, or for some reason adults are supposed to enjoy watching fart jokes delivered among puke and dumb-ass stupidity. I found the first interpretation to be more comforting.
      - ChainOfFools 3y ago
        B&B was created by Mike Judge, who also gave us Idiocracy, which shows us pretty clearly where his head was at in both cases. The point of the show was partly stoner humor sandwiched in between video music segments on the then-new MTV channel. It's not exactly high art, but it is quite obviously intended as satire by the creator of the show. The intended audience point of view is not that of B&B, who are deliberately presented in such extreme absurdity in order to be unrelatable. The viewer is expected to see B&B the way the straight-man(ish) characters of the show do, as tiresome unfunny nuisances or worse, lacking any sense of self-awareness. Although it could be seen as being sympathetic to the characters themselves, especially given the much greater amount of screen time they get, this may have been simply necessary in order to secure protracted attention from the large fraction of juvenile manchildren in the original MTV audience, whom the show had to ensure it didn't turn off even as it was trolling them specifically. I think especially since idiocracy came out, it's evident that B&B was in part a crude attempt at social engineering, a gentle way to grant the sort of people who might find themselves symathizing with the main characters the crucial power those characters lacked, which was to see themselves from the outside. It's fair to say that if this is true, it hardly moved the needle in that respect, and may even have slightly backfired.
creer 3y ago
Or... you could try and look deeper than idiocy: there just might be something else. If only disenfranchising which can push people pretty far. You would think most of the world would be clear on that by now? The discussions within Cypherpunks for one place could get pretty "down to earth". It's still later than Neuromancer but people there seemed pretty thoughtful and explicit. This kind of issue comes up all the time: "why do the poor do X", "why do these employees do Y"... You can usually figure out incentives that go beyond "idiocy". Recently on HN "why do people do multiple ACH or ACH-equivalent transfers?"
bawolff 3y ago
Dystopians aren't just sadness and misery all the time. There are lots of elements that could be seen as positive. E.g. a lot of cyberpunk has the idea that anyone can be a big deal online regardless of race, gender, etc and that "real life" doesn't matter. There are some ways that is bad, but there are also ways that is utopic.
soerxpso 3y ago
An idea doesn't become inherently dystopian just because some authors chose to portray it as dystopian once. Have you considered that fiction isn't real life, and that maybe an idea is worth exploring even if a fiction novelist disliked it? It's not "really, really dumb" to refuse to take the opinions of science fiction writers as gospel.

by tivert 3y ago

beepbooptheory 3y ago

I think chalking it up to just idiocy is a tad unfair. There are incentives everywhere to think like a marketing person or startup CEO, its what makes you a valuable employee. You write your cover letter and say, "I am very excited to work on the Torment Nexus" because you need, plainly, a job. But then with everything after that, you are not only authorized but encouraged to believe in the Torment Nexus by the people who matter most (people who pay wages). It's understandable that merely placing yourself in this world will slowly infect your mind, because there isn't anybody really telling you its wrong, and if they are, they are easily dismissed as luddites or socialists or whatever. And its not like the naysayers have some alternative money to offer you.

asdfman123 3y ago
It's not borne out of stupidity: lots of the people involved know what they're doing. But when someone pushes an argument that could be disassembled by a bright middle schooler, it's okay to call it "stupid." If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...

afroisalreadyin 3y ago

What I also find interesting and revealing is how surprised they are when others find their vision of the future (the near and the far) scary and dystopic, and challenge them. I used to tell crypto bros (most of whom have done a quick transition to AI-brohood recently) why and how their idea of the crypto-driven economy sucked, and they would just treat me like a weirdo who just didn't get it. This is all before the big crash, of course. I guess part of it is how crypto was getting insane amounts of funding, which legitimized and corroborated the idea, and also created a strong echo chamber where they were shielded from criticism. Money is great at making you ignore that you might, just might, be completely wrong.

trinsic2 3y ago
That's why I stay away from endeavors that look too good to be true. I if it's become too popular to quickly and causes people to not question their surroundings or other motives run as far away as you can. You'll have a much better life doing the right thing, then doing the wrong thing.
kybernetikos 3y ago
The core difference between crypto and tradfi is that crypto is open and hackable (in the creative sense) by anyone without having to receive the permission of the gatekeepers. To believe that that is a bad vision of the future betrays something of the exact pessimism about humanity and authoritarian bent that this article complains about.
- afroisalreadyin 3y ago
  Pessimism is believing that there is no possible positive future for humanity. I don't get how rejecting one option is the same thing. How, again, rejecting one option due to clearly presented reasons is authoritarian is also beyond me.
robinsonb5 3y ago
Cat heaven is mouse hell.

asdfman123 3y ago

I'm on Bay Area tech Twitter and there's a growing movement called effective accelerationism. E/accs lionize tech billionaires and call for increased investment in futuristic technologies like AI, decreased regulation, generally more rigid social hierarchies, etc. I want to peacefully coexist with people in my social circles but it's hard to hide my disdain. I believe a lot of tech billionaires are essentially nihilists creating these stories as a way to increase their wealth and power. A lot of their values seem to stem from doing too much Adderall, too much coke, and too many hallucinogens. Sometimes it seems like they came up with a lot of this stuff while playing video games on LSD. Effective accelerationism doesn't value humanity. If anyone gets crushed beneath the wheels of technological "progress," if society turns out worse for the majority of people, well, that's not their problem.

suoduandao3 3y ago
I like the accelerationist story and I don't think I came to that opinion through manipulation. If I did it was by the club of Rome. The way I see it is - you're in a car heading for a cliff. You can go all in on the brakes and hope you stop in time, or all in on the gas and hope you can jump the gap. We don't really have enough data to know which is better, it comes down to feeling. And the time to slam the breaks was probably about 40 years ago. Since people back then elected Reagan instead, I'm of the opinion it's worth keeping the gas all the way down, just in case it works.
- I_Am_Nous 3y ago
  The issue I take with this philosophy is it's all or nothing. Sam Bankman-Fried admitting to being willing to flip a coin that saves or kills humanity points to this. Either we give all of our hope and money to tech billionaires to save us, or we'll just _________ and then humanity will perish. Also we need to trust tech billionaires who have shown plenty of times that they shouldn't be trusted to save humanity, so I'm not inclined to do that. Especially when it's these same tech billionaires who are informing us about the risks in the first place.
  - 3y ago

carom 3y ago

People say this a lot but I think something else is true. The cyberpunk visions are obvious applications of certain technologies. When that technology becomes capable and people start to apply it, they name it after what was coined previously.

tivert 3y ago
In the case I'm thinking of, the person was interested in the technologies and the capabilities the protagonists display. He wanted them so much that he couldn't see the bad parts. He didn't comprehend: 1) the protagonist doesn't enjoy the cyberpunk environment as much as he enjoys reading about it, and 2) in a realized cyberpunk environment, he wouldn't even be a protagonist.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  How do you know whether they comprehended something?
  - tivert 3y ago
    > How do you know whether they comprehended something? How do you know anything at all? You don't need a sci-fi mind ray that extracts thoughts in raw form to figure out something like that.
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      Okay, so how did you figure it out with such certainty?
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      maybe we should build the mind ray just to see if it has any applications though
      - programd 3y ago
        Here you go: https://www.science.org/content/article/ai-re-creates-what-people-see-reading-their-brain-scans https://www.science.org/content/article/ai-re-creates-what-p...

TigeriusKirk 3y ago

What specifically did they want to do?

trinsic2 3y ago

Recommend to them the solar punk movement, which is overtaking the cyber punk movement.

colordrops 3y ago
Is it though? I think I've seen one page shared multiple times. Where are the iconic books and stories and movies about solar punk? What are the salient ideas from it that will stick with us for decades?
- suoduandao3 3y ago
  People are working on it. I recently had an AI make this coloring book of solarpunk images. https://www.amazon.ca/Beautiful-Futures-Solarpunk-Coloring-Book/dp/B0C91KL7W8/ https://www.amazon.ca/Beautiful-Futures-Solarpunk-Coloring-B... Artistically I'm more of a writer, but solarpunk is a surprisingly hard setting to write in. Not enough conflict.
  - jstarfish 3y ago
    > solarpunk is a surprisingly hard setting to write in. Not enough conflict Ha. Where man goes, conflict follows. A "perfect" world in total harmony is boring. Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood would be pillaged by neighboring warlords on first contact, if it wasn't first subverted from within by the resident entitled 12-year-old furry. Even in a natural utopia, nature abhors a vacuum. Cults strive to maintain a facade of harmony. The conflict is readily apparent to insiders. It just appears as though there is no conflict to outsiders. There was a solarpunk-ish epoch in the game Chrono Trigger (Zeal). Everything was peaceful and harmonious. This enlightened age was brought down when its scholars researched tech they shouldn't and birthed the harbinger of the apocalypse. If there's not enough conflict, you're not looking close enough at what's going on at street level. Write a story from the perspective of a cop, a farmer, a plumber, or any other blue-collar job in this world. People need to eat and drink. What happens when that's challenged? They can't live in their own shit. What happens when pipes collapse? They fight over dumb things. Where and how? Wherever two people coexist, there are politics. Where three exist, there are factions and intrigue. Where there's four, one is expendable...

inasio 3y ago

One point that I heard William Gibson make about cyberpunk as a dystopia is that it depends on your point of reference. There are many places in the world where a cyberpunk dystopia would be a welcome change

jfil 3y ago
One example of this is how online marketplaces for drugs are reducing real-life drug violence.
trinsic2 3y ago
I don't know man, I assume William Gibson didn't think that statement through. Even if you were bring something like a cyber punk universe to a Third World country, it would still be slavery. Anyway, the cyber punk movements being replaced by solar punk ideals, which are more in line with humanities needs.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  I think he did. If you're a well-paid technocrat the cyberpunk future means unparalleled possibilities. Living like a god for 1% of the population and 10% does alright.
- skjoldr 3y ago
  Given that my country, Ukraine, is already sliding there pretty rapidly, it really can't get worse tbh. I would take corporate wars over interstate wars any day. (wrote this from my home with a backup power generator while studying courses on how to fly FPV drones via goggles and on cybersecurity/electronic warfare)
  - JieJie 3y ago
    Hang in there, friend. <3
  - mcv 3y ago
    War is hell no matter what setting you're in. Or, going with Hawkeye Pierce from MASH, maybe war is worse than hell. I really hope things will change for you and your country.

ryandrake 3y ago

John Carmack noted during a Slashdot interview all the way back in 1999: "Making Snow Crash into a reality feels like a sort of moral imperative to a lot of programmers, but the efforts that have been made so far leave a lot to be desired."[1] 1: https://games.slashdot.org/story/99/10/15/1012230/john-carmack-answers https://games.slashdot.org/story/99/10/15/1012230/john-carma...

J_Shelby_J 3y ago
The true value of a liberal arts degree is learning how to not to be totally cringe.
- ipython 3y ago
  I have been struggling for a long time to identify what you just so succinctly described in one sentence. Thank you.
- lencastre 3y ago
  Reads like unpopular opinion but actually it’s like a hard pill to swallow
- FFP999 3y ago
  I think it was summed up well by an ad (yeah yeah I know) I saw for some university's continuing ed program: "The sciences teach you how to clone extinct dinosaurs. The liberal arts tell you why that might be a bad idea." [adjacent to graphic of T. rex pursing scientists]
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Which field will tell you that it's actually a perfectly fine idea, as long as you take correct precautions, and that taking them is literally what makes engineering a profession? Jurassic Park wasn't a "don't clone dinosaurs" movie, it was a "don't be an idiot" movie with a dinosaur theme.
    - 3y ago

Root_Denied 3y ago

It's not just them being dumb, some genuinely believe that they would be on top of the hierarchy in such a world, that their work to bring about that world would put them in a position of power and influence over others. They're effectively technological libertarians.

creer 3y ago
I don't expect many people feel they would end on top specifically. Challenging the current "status quo" is more modest and probably plenty enough.

keiferski 3y ago

I have been working on an essay for awhile that explores the "appeal" of supposedly dystopian cyberpunk worlds. The summary is: I don't think they're actually dystopian and in fact they have a lot of attributes that are lacking in today's world, specifically: a larger tolerance for experimentation on the body and in architecture, and an extreme urban density found almost nowhere on Earth today. It's the same reason why Kowloon Walled City was so intriguing. Calling people "dumb" just because you don't understand them isn't very insightful.

j4yav 3y ago
I'm sure if you asked Peter Thiel why he pumps the blood of young men into his body he'd say something similar, so maybe it's just one man's dystopia is another person's power fantasy?
grotorea 3y ago
And as the meme says, the tech is cool bro. Do the people who want to make cyberpunk real mean they want to make corporatocracy real or they think VR videogames would be fun? And aren't there degrees of "bad" to cyberpunk novels?
- keiferski 3y ago
  Yeah, I don’t think most of the world presented in the Sprawl trilogy is all that dystopian. Maybe a bit overly-unequal, but also with more space for freedom. There are a lot of fascinating places in those novels that would never be permitted in our world today – a hydroponic garden covering the entire floor of a skyscraper, for example.
I_Am_Nous 3y ago
Dystopian cyberpunk worlds are usually described as hollowed out by corporations or a similar power structures to the point that it's every person for themselves. Some people have the resources to fight back, but most do not. That's what makes them dystopias in my opinion, that if you are not part of the privileged class there is no opportunity to change anything about your situation.

_teyd 3y ago

It's a bit like the people who watch South Park and think Cartman is the hero.

wnevets 3y ago
or tyler durden, patrick bateman, homelander, etc
- ChainOfFools 3y ago
  I remember when 90's Beavis and Butthead was new, that a bewildering number of people I encountered who were familiar with the show seemed to think the titular characters' existence somehow validated the corresponding behavior of the real life versions of the people they lampooned. "someone made a show about selfish lizard brain idiots, and its like, popular, therefore being a selfish lizard-brain idiot is now confirmed a respectable cultural stock to trade in."
  - lawlessone 3y ago
    or 2010/20's version, R&M.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    I never watched B&B because from fragments and ads, I concluded that the attempt to validate such behavior was the cartoon's whole point. I mean, it's either that, or for some reason adults are supposed to enjoy watching fart jokes delivered among puke and dumb-ass stupidity. I found the first interpretation to be more comforting.
    - ChainOfFools 3y ago
      B&B was created by Mike Judge, who also gave us Idiocracy, which shows us pretty clearly where his head was at in both cases. The point of the show was partly stoner humor sandwiched in between video music segments on the then-new MTV channel. It's not exactly high art, but it is quite obviously intended as satire by the creator of the show. The intended audience point of view is not that of B&B, who are deliberately presented in such extreme absurdity in order to be unrelatable. The viewer is expected to see B&B the way the straight-man(ish) characters of the show do, as tiresome unfunny nuisances or worse, lacking any sense of self-awareness. Although it could be seen as being sympathetic to the characters themselves, especially given the much greater amount of screen time they get, this may have been simply necessary in order to secure protracted attention from the large fraction of juvenile manchildren in the original MTV audience, whom the show had to ensure it didn't turn off even as it was trolling them specifically. I think especially since idiocracy came out, it's evident that B&B was in part a crude attempt at social engineering, a gentle way to grant the sort of people who might find themselves symathizing with the main characters the crucial power those characters lacked, which was to see themselves from the outside. It's fair to say that if this is true, it hardly moved the needle in that respect, and may even have slightly backfired.

creer 3y ago

Or... you could try and look deeper than idiocy: there just might be something else. If only disenfranchising which can push people pretty far. You would think most of the world would be clear on that by now? The discussions within Cypherpunks for one place could get pretty "down to earth". It's still later than Neuromancer but people there seemed pretty thoughtful and explicit. This kind of issue comes up all the time: "why do the poor do X", "why do these employees do Y"... You can usually figure out incentives that go beyond "idiocy". Recently on HN "why do people do multiple ACH or ACH-equivalent transfers?"

bawolff 3y ago

Dystopians aren't just sadness and misery all the time. There are lots of elements that could be seen as positive. E.g. a lot of cyberpunk has the idea that anyone can be a big deal online regardless of race, gender, etc and that "real life" doesn't matter. There are some ways that is bad, but there are also ways that is utopic.

soerxpso 3y ago

An idea doesn't become inherently dystopian just because some authors chose to portray it as dystopian once. Have you considered that fiction isn't real life, and that maybe an idea is worth exploring even if a fiction novelist disliked it? It's not "really, really dumb" to refuse to take the opinions of science fiction writers as gospel.