/lit/ - Literature

the fact that it was made in response to real life conditions

Basic socialist pessimism

I ran into Bruce Sterling once at a thing, and I was just some dumb kid, so I resorted to fandom-style flattery to get him to talk to me. So, I said "Bruce... Islands in the Net was amazing." And then he said "thanks but I only killed one guy with a drone." I appreciate that self-deprecating and dark sense of humor where he was disappointed in himself for underestimating the death toll from drones in the future. He just flipped it around on me.

>>18341709
There's a kind of dialectic to it when it's good. A lot of political debates, particularly western ones, feel dumb and linear to me because if you're on the left (or a sort of liberal-left) then there's this feeling that history is always moving forward, and that means better, so the right "halting" that feels like an existential crisis or something. They have a Whiggish, booster-ish, "woo progress" kind of ideology. Whereas the right seems to recognize certain problems but typically "misses the forest for the trees" like complaining about women dying their hair blue.

But it's like, dude, you're just the guy in Blade Runner. You're surrounded by an overwhelming, crushing amount of state and corporate power which have fused together, and the chick with the blue hair next to you at the food-slop machine is the problem? You're just a bunch of little bugs. But this kind of "war of all against all" is part of how people are atomized and controlled. Everyone is lonely and alienated from each other.

https://youtu.be/opDlMeqRACI

All of us find our lives massively articulated by a world completely beyond our control, so whatever we come to believe, I think we have to be true to that experience, at least.

>>18341850
I just realized how much A Scanner Darkly influenced the Blade Runner 2049 writers, thanks.

>>18341850
>crushing amount of state and corporate power
I don’t see much of a state presence. I heard Gibson’s cyberpunk was inspired by the “libertarian” dream. But absolutely right about the all against all social atomization

>>18341655
I think the answer is "relatively" simple.
Which is as follows; tech doesn't automatically mean progress or betterment. Tech is a tool, not a solution and a tool can be used in multitude of ways.

As wacky as it sounds, it reminds me of Lovecraft's theme of "forbidden knowledge" or something of that sort, although very distantly.

>>18341655
it's grimy.
all other sci-fi tries touch the finger of god or some shit. cyberpunk is the only sci-fi that is aware that the spectacular becomes mundane in a couple years.

>>18341900
Right. Or like Stephenson's Snow Crash where everyone is living in these little privatized micro-states. I liked the joke in that novel about how the only things Americans do in the future is software, weapons, entertainment and high-speed pizza delivery. And there are also data-info gatherers who are covered in cameras which reminds me of some of the "protest paparazzi" in the U.S. last year who sell their footage to corporate media outlets.

I was thinking of Blade Runner where it's not really clear there is a state, or it is one-and-the-same, like the police lieutenant is committed to social order and stability but is also just crushed by the evil megacorporation when she gets in the way. The massive buildings are obviously symbolic of overwhelming corporate power with spotlights symbolizing omnipresent surveillance.

Last thing, you'll see conservatives talk about woke military stuff now in America, which they call a "boring dystopia," pointing out how this corporate state has absorbed progressive liberal values into itself so you can become an LGBT drone operator. But the other side of the coin is this U.S. Marine Corps ad:

https://youtu.be/bCjEV75F2tM

It's pretty amazing because he's the guy living in Blade Runner who is bummed out and alienated and encounters his own holographic image fed back to him doing basedfaces and posing with consooomer products. And then he lashes out in an act of masculine, fascist rebellion against his own commodified image -- and is then absorbed into the Marines. You rebel against this by... joining the Marines and fighting to defend the thing you're rebelling against.

>>18341963
I think of it like a Katamari ball of junk but with history being like a series of collisions.

>>18341655
Cyberpunk was prophetic the same way White Noise or Infinite Jest were prophetic. They took current trends, pushed them within a reasonable technological scope (the great cloud, face video phones) and grounded them in a reality that was an absurd rendition for the time (the 80s and 90s) respectively. Looking at the two books now, neither are that shocking because the moderate predictions of culture for both of them came true and the rest has become incorrect or kitschy in hindsight. The same factors apply to cyberpunk. Blade runner, neuromancer, snow crash, ubik, etc. All these media from the roughly same time period of 1980s boom and bust capitalism were pushed to their logical extremes within a scope we can logically understand as a future possibility. We look back on these works and their realities seem dull in comparison to what already exists because what these books predicted, predictably, came true. The reason modern cyberpunk seems so bland and bad is because it's purely an aesthetic choice. The façade of Cyberpunk no longer provides actual critique of where our society is going. It's purely a visual or world building excuse to put in particular tropes as story telling devices. They are the result of lazy writing and development. Cyberpunk 2077 is a perfect example of this. Trite plots, dull gunplay, all crammed into a shitshow purely to make claim to the iconic ideations of cyberpunk as a medium. It is a simulation of what was, back then. When, back then, it already was an ironic parody of previous science fiction. Thusly, modern cyberpunk is pure simulacra. It is a nostalgia for what the past thought the future would be. It is lost futures all over again, but the genre itself believes itself to be beyond lost futures. Just look at the movie Streets of Fire. It's a film made in the 80s trying to take what the 50's thought the 60s would look like. Modern cyberpunk is the inevitable remake of Streets of Fire. The backlash will be about what actor is cast instead of Whilhem DaFoe, instead of the more pressing issue of why the movie would be remade in the first place.

Cyberpunk is preconditioning.

whoa it is the same tint basedjack.xcf

>>18341850
>the chick with the blue hair next to you at the food-slop machine is the problem?
Commie systems dont work unless people actively participate. That blue hair chick is signaling. I can be bought.

>>18342152
Yeah. I think interesting stuff now are novels like The Windup Girl. Biopunk instead of cyberpunk.

>The Windup Girl is set in 23rd-century Thailand. Global warming has raised the levels of world's oceans, carbon fuel sources have become depleted, and manually wound springs are used as energy storage devices. Biotechnology is dominant and megacorporations (called calorie companies) like AgriGen, PurCal and RedStar control food production through 'genehacked' seeds, and use bioterrorism, private armies and economic hitmen to create markets for their products. Frequent catastrophes, such as deadly and widespread plagues and illness, caused by genetically modified crops and mutant pests, ravage entire populations. The natural genetic seed stock of the world's plants has been almost completely supplanted by those that are genetically engineered to be sterile, forcing farmers to buy new seeds from the calorie companies every season.

>Thailand is an exception. It maintains its own reserve of genetically viable seeds, fights off engineered plagues and other bioterrorism, and keeps its borders firmly closed against the calorie companies and other foreign biological imports. The capital city of Bangkok is below sea level and is protected from flooding by levees and pumps. The current monarch of Thailand is a child queen who is essentially a figurehead; the three most powerful people in Thailand are the Somdet Chaopraya (regent for the child queen), General Pracha (the chief of the Environment Ministry), and Minister Akkarat (the chief of the Trade Ministry). Pracha and Akkarat are longtime enemies, and represent the protectionist/independent/isolationist and internationalist/accommodationalist factions in the government, respectively.

>>18342395
It's delusional to think you can't be, or won't be. It's hard to be anti-anything if you've been immersed in it from birth. Therefore, you can't really be anti-capitalistic without being a hypocrite unless you run off inna woods, but that's a retreat away from society, so it's doomed. I'd also watch that Marine Corps ad. The reactionary rebellion ("I won't / can't be bought") has also been recuperated. So, the sellout moment is always approaching, the question is over the price tag (the signing bonus), and it just so happens that the right-wing reactionaries are not worth very much, so you get shoved into the Marines.

Another example I like to use is K-pop, which would look very cyberpunk by the 1980s but is just globally popular music now:

https://youtu.be/zndvqTc4P9I

One interesting thing though is that modern South Korea emerged out of a right-wing dictatorship which then liberalized, which allowed Confucian values to reproduce themselves into the modern era. Confucianism traditionally puts entertainers near the bottom in terms of the social order, they're little different from whores, which is why these disposable dancers are often taken advantage of by creepy old men and politicians. South Korea also attached itself to the U.S. in a feudal-like relationship, hence the dancers lightening their skin, mixing in English words and getting lots of plastic surgery.

The European parallel to this is Poland and Ukraine. Like the South Koreans, they're proud relative to their accomplishments and also deeply ashamed at having been occupied, and now having "converted" they adopt a "West Is Best" mentality looking at white Westerners as their superiors, like "Robin" to "Batman." But I'll give the neo-fascists in the Azov Battalion credit for being an actual threat with a Squad-like video game aesthetic:

https://youtu.be/iFFXBsEQ7SY

But the actual end-goal for their mission, if they are successful, will be to incorporate Ukraine into the same neoliberal globohomo empire that they think they're fighting. Just like that guy in the Marine Corps ad who resists the globohomo by joining the Marines. In a few decades, it wouldn't surprise me to see Polish teenage girls grinding like whores for businessmen (well they already do) and these rough-and-gruff Eastern European men converted into fairy boy bands.

>>18342546
Oh, btw, I think Blade Runner started to kinda get this with the police assassin who hunts down replicants while not being aware he's also a replicant. The implanted memories and self-denial that he's a replicant is necessary for him to serve the system. When he realizes it, he doesn't know what to do, and they're probably going to kill him, so escapes inna woods. Of course, that doesn't solve the problem, but what will? Blade Runner 2049 developed on this theme: the replicant now knows he's a replicant, but is programmed to do his job anyways. The cynicism is programmed in from the start.

Then the movie starts to hint at something potentially revolutionary. Replicants who escaped form a collective, and they're hinting at a resistance movement to come. But they recognize that there is no difference between replicant and human, because the replicants are now reproducing like humans. This knowledge is dangerous though, and if it gets out will blow up the whole system; i.e. we're through the looking glass, we're all replicants, basically.

https://youtu.be/cdF_ZZOADEY

That's why I always industrial music too, because it would play with these themes. Or like Laibach and Hatari. This is cyberpunk music but the subversion comes from overidentifying with the subject and expressing its logic in a really extreme form:

https://youtu.be/CZH96P71ak0

>>18342546
I've always been really disappointed in K-pop. It could be so fantastically...Dystopian, but no, It insists on being unbelievably formulaic, trite nonsense. The V-tuber stuff's better; men congregating around a real women projecting herself as a virtual waif? Fantastic; they throw money at her like it's nothing? Bliss; the money that they've been given by the government created by the very economies of scale and outsourcing that have made their idols in the first place? Poetic.

I saw some really cool J-pop stuff a while ago. They were wearing all those cool futuristic wigs, strutting in this nutty staging where they appeared in front of scarily lighted pods which looked as if they were being advertised as living accommodations; fun stuff.

I really hope for this you know, just a complete ;masks-off' moment whence we can all finally admit the horrific stupidity of modern existence and stop acting like any of it makes sense.

>>18341655
Jesus Christ, these replies are like a mile long each, so I’ll make mine really short

After years of books being published, and movies being made along with tv shows, not to mention video games, it’s not really surprising that one of these made a few accurate/semi-accurate predictions for the future. It’s not clairvoyance, just statistics at work.

>>18342640
That's amazing. I've been interested in the aesthetic of these Chinese girl bands now because of the contrast. It's very modern and they'll mix in the megacities but I don't see consumer products for sale, and it's also very "trad" too in some ways. It's suggestive of course but they don't show as much skin like in the K-pop videos. The music also sounds like turbofolk. I think it's part of an ideological project to update / modernize the culture while also resisting perceived "excesses" of Western culture:

https://youtu.be/wGGpYw9Iyf0

>>18341655
Prophetic in what way? Imagine if more skyscrapers got put up. Crazy shit. You're a poo muncher

>>18342703
You've got it exactly right, China's a unique example, the fact that their state is so intimately tied to all culture means that they're a good example to see what a state actually does fear from this modern sub-culture; hence why we see them trying to steal a march on this stuff, guiding it from its birth towards a more 'useful' path. They identified that you can't swim against this (technologically enabled) phenomena, you can only direct it, partially, towards a direction that's more to your preference. I can understand the reason and cause of this, yet still, I can't help but feel that it's just throwing a facade over the base reality of the situation.

I just really want this idealised cyberpunk dystopia. No Apples, no Amazons, just 'Yamaha heavy industries sub-branch, Pop and clothing division'. I think soon we'll get to the point where, whilst the greater and more competitive states—China, The US, India and the like; those with pretensions—will keep the game up, those with less expectations for great-power status shall simply give up and let the havoc of modernity fly.

>>18342006
>I liked the joke in that novel about how the only things Americans do in the future is software, weapons, entertainment and high-speed pizza delivery
that's how America is today