🐺 steve 🐺

Not only do we not live in cyberpunk, but cyberpunk will never happen for the exact reason it's such an alluring setting: The downtrodden underclass are never going to become super high agency computer wiz genius street samurai warriors, hacking into corpo supercomputers and committing acts of terrorism against THE MAN. They're actually just going to be fat degen gooners and addicts, outsourcing all cognitive function (and gambling action) to machines, eating kool-aid pineapple and sharing AI videos of African kids doing autobody work with brick and mortar. "Oh my God, can you believe this!?” And they'll drink fabric dye elixirs because their penis doesn't work, and shop at Walmart and traffic in novel hybrids of conspiracy theory on the techno-occult app. The great conceit of cyberpunk is that it assumes most people are transhumanists at heart. That they're incredibly savvy and talented, and they'd all do so well if THE MAN just got out of their way and let them upgrade. As it turns out, people can't even handle the internet. They could barely handle the television. The camera has stricken them in hypnosis, reorienting their gaze to see things for it rather than themselves. Ubiquitous access to food has destroyed their bodies. All communication now routed through a sensory deprivation box, and suddenly they want to end their life. There will be no laser katanas. The pioneering writers of the genre always assumed, like many people still do today, that technological pessimism relies on a corrupted design. There was nothing essential about it. The revealed dilemma is that man interacting with highly optimized systems doesn't need to be coerced into dysfunction much at all. We can do bad all by ourselves. You merely have to leave too much kibble in the bowl.