/plaza/ - General/Random

my brother in Omnisiah what do you think cyberpunk fiction was fucking cooking this whole time

>>27
Huh? I mean you can totally draw comparisons between people who are "very online" and the fiction of neuromancy, but it's not the exact same thing. Cyberpunk fiction is pretty much always dystopian, but cyberspace and its associated concepts are not always depicted negatively. I feel like most frequently, the critique is pointed at power structures or broader injustice. I know there's a lot of media illiterate people who just look at cyberpunk and go "woah epic" without really thinking about the themes, but I think it's equally reductive to act like the point is "technology bad", "cyberspace bad", "vr bad".

Just my two cents though, I might be reading too much into your post lmao

>>31
I think a certain level of cynicism to technology is essential for cyberpunk, but the OGs had a cynicism for something they saw coming, a future they speculated about. It's a lot different writing in a time where the technological overload cyberpunk novels wrote about has more or less come about. There's a difference in writing "coming doom of excessive technology" and writing "VR headsets are not good." It's hard to take that same kind of attitude to a "future" that's been here for a minute.

Cyberpunk is a weird genre anyway because of how specific the parameters are, so much that "protocyberpunk" and "postcyberpunk" are terms used to refer to cyberpunk stories that aren't cyberpunk but really should be.

>>11
We should reclaim "terminally online" to mean "people who know how to use the internet." We could start a revolution. A very small, terminally online revolution.

"Cyberpunk" aesthetics always felt hollow and romantic (negative value judgement) to me. I don't think the future will have the sort of underground freedom that is depicted in these works. It's not going to be epic Lain nightclub raves, but rather more police state shit with surveillance and mass unemployment, with fewer people going outside or really doing anything interesting at all.

So to OP's point, being "terminally online" probably is the real-world equivalent of "cyberpunk", but it's not actually cool.

Thanks for this, it got me thinking on the phrase "terminal illness"

>>219
>it got me thinking
oh? go on

>>208
Except chronic social media and 4chan users know as much about using the internet as most ordinary people.

Being chronically online and brainrotted isn't cool.

Alot of the people I have met that spend exorbitant amounts of time on the internet are either people who are incredibly passionate about something and use this modern plain of existence to pursue that thing further
OR
They have incredibly distressing or depressing lives and they use the internet as a form of escape and or a coping mechanism so that they can perform their societal duties without having a mental breakdown.
I fluctuate between these two positions myself.

I think ultimately you can boil the whole cyberpunk genre down to a simple form that can be expanded upon;
"What happens when a piece of technology comes into being, and how does it interact/affect human nature?"
>>27
Is pretty on the money. We are already living in the cyberpunk age, just without consumer cybernetics.

>>264
>"What happens when a piece of technology comes into being, and how does it interact/affect human nature?"
To me, this sounds like more of a broad description of sci-fi as a whole (though some types of sci-fi, like extraterrestrial encounters, might not strictly fall within it).
I think a work definitely needs more than just that to be readily classified as "cyberpunk", personally.

>>264
I would not agree that cyberpunk as a genre can be boiled down to that.
Cyberpunk less about the future tech concepts themselves and more about the tension between our increasing dependence on technology and the giant, broken, greedy system(s) that both creates and utilizes said technology. that's where the whole concept of robo-limbs n whatnot come from, what if you had to depend on a consumer electronics corporation like Apple to keep your ability to walk? Or to see or to pump blood throughout your body? What if you had to depend on the same giant evil corporations that planned the obsolesce of your phone to just exist every day?

this is what people mean by us already living in the cyberpunk future btw

>>274
>What if you had to depend on the same giant evil corporations that planned the obsolesce of your phone to just exist every day?
I think a lot about how a bionic eye company from the early 00s went under, and the people who had the hardware in them were left up a fucking creek with 20 year old undocumented tech that will be basically useless and stuck in them since there's no support anymore.

felt weird too, because I remembered reading about the tech way back then and seeing all this promise for it