I've seen like three articles in the past couple of months about how cyberpunk dystopias got it all wrong because we're not slotting shards in our heads with our cybernetic arms to wage war against rogue AIs. Meanwhile, corporations rule every facet of our lives, inequality is worse than in the gilded age, war is a constant, and the technocrats who killed the planet are trying to convince us that they're the only ones who can save us. We're literally living in every cyberpunk dystopia imagined, minus the few cool things the writers had to include to make their stories interesting. Gibson, PKD, and Pondsmith were goddamned prophets.
It's not cyberpunk because we don't have cool robot arms and smart guns and flying cars, we just have all the lame parts they were explicitly trying to warn us not to do
Considering how much wasted technical development we have right now, I would argue that even predicting a techno future wasn't wrong per se. I think we could be or be getting there. It's just not actually all that profitable to shape society towards accomplishing innovation on the level of cyberpunk megacorps. So instead, we just get the regular punk future with cyber characteristics.
I've seen like three articles in the past couple of months about how cyberpunk dystopias got it all wrong because we're not slotting shards in our heads with our cybernetic arms to wage war against rogue AIs. Meanwhile, corporations rule every facet of our lives, inequality is worse than in the gilded age, war is a constant, and the technocrats who killed the planet are trying to convince us that they're the only ones who can save us. We're literally living in every cyberpunk dystopia imagined, minus the few cool things the writers had to include to make their stories interesting. Gibson, PKD, and Pondsmith were goddamned prophets.
Reject cyberpunk
Return to burgerpunk
Burgerpunk, the punk genre with the least punk in it.
thank God. Do you really want your arm to run on Windows. Remember the last time you couldn't get a printer to work, what if that was your kidneys
deleted by creator
this is a real thing, pretty much https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete
deleted by creator
they sold the patent to a company that requires you to pay a monthly subscription to maintain use of your eyes
deleted by creator
Trying to jailbreak my bionic eyes
MY BRAND!
It's not cyberpunk because we don't have cool robot arms and smart guns and flying cars, we just have all the lame parts they were explicitly trying to warn us not to do
Canonize Philip K Dick, OK?
Considering how much wasted technical development we have right now, I would argue that even predicting a techno future wasn't wrong per se. I think we could be or be getting there. It's just not actually all that profitable to shape society towards accomplishing innovation on the level of cyberpunk megacorps. So instead, we just get the regular punk future with cyber characteristics.