Imagine being a cyborg and having superhuman abilities but then immediately become disabled because a private equity firm took over the company that made your organs or limbs and pushed an update that required you to pay a subscription fee for a functioning liver or legs.
Let’s say you don’t like that situation so you try to fix those through a 3rd party ripperdoc and then you get sued for breaching the DMCA by bypassing restrictions on third party repairs. What they’re doing did John Deere (https://doctorow.medium.com/agricultural-right-to-repair-law-is-a-no-brainer-f4cb1fa9a3c5) or McDonald’s ice cream machines (https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war) they’d do to your body.
The controversy over right to repair and the DMCA is a really good example of how corporations don’t exactly want no regulations they just want regulations bind you and protect them. They want a situation where there are classes of people, them in particular that the law protects but does not bind. While you are in the class of people that the law binds but does not protect.
That is cyberpunk. That is the world we live in now. The dystopia of now is one where you don’t so much good superpowers but instead you get tech that promises to make everything better and becomes indispensable as it displaces a previously useful thing, only to gradually become worse than what was there before as it reinforces hierarchy.
In cyberpunk stories that tech replaces your heart or legs or whatever with a Faustian bargain for enhanced abilities. In real life, that tech replaces libraries and blockbuster and cable and viable small retail businesses only to turn into ad choked garbage and rising food prices and lower wages. (https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/)
Part of the intended horror of cyberpunk stories that feature cybernetics is not so much ‘I got cool robot arms and can do superhuman feats” but that the system itself is replacing our very bodies with machines that make us dependent on that system
Hypothetically if you lived in the worlds of cyberpunk 2020 or Deus ex and didn’t want to have your organs replaced with robot parts, You would be at a competitive disadvantage with people who did the replacement.
Also any kind of machine that is attached to you would require some kind of maintenance and/or external power. It’s also an allegory about how the corporations see us as machines and in such stories we are made more like machines for their benefit.
You might think that it is great you have super eyes, but if you don’t plug them in periodically, you’ll go blind. The wires that you use to plug into the cyberpunk internet, are like puppet strings that bind you. You are a tool. You are the machine to be hacked.
I had enormous amounts of fun playing cyberpunk 2077 but thematically it falls short of being “punk.” It has to fall short. Because it has to be fun, it has to be a spectacle to work as a video game. It should be understood that that setting is a nightmare but since we can parkour across rooftops and stab people with Japanese swords, the horror of that setting gets lost. It’s like what Francois Truffaut said, about there being no such thing as an anti-war movie. Whatever points cyberpunk has about the horror of it sitting our lost by the spectacle of its setting.
But even within the setting though, you see bits and pieces of this in the lore. War Veterans get body parts replaced to be super soldiers but then have to go home. They have downgraded implants that barely work and are treated like a used chew toy by the people that they fought and bled for.
The nomads exist because the homelessness rate was in the 40% range and they all had to band together in a mutual aid network. Corpo V grew up in what amounts to a company town and was groomed to be nothing but an Arasaka vessel but is unavoidably tossed aside like garbage because of intracompany politics.
The world itself is dying, the food is terrible processed even more than modern foods are processed. All of the ads, which bombard you at every waking moment and the products that they are selling are repugnant and disgusting. V’s favorite pizza has pepperoni made from locusts because agriculture is increasingly not viable and can’t support all of human life without resorting to eating bugs. Poverty is all pervasive with many individuals living in either shacks on the edge of the city or in tiny pods. V’s initial apartment is actually luxurious compared to other people’s living conditions.
Life is cheap and death comes easy in the lore and setting but V herself is laughably overpowered and the game is easy as V mows down gangsters by the dozen. Where are those gangers funerals? We saw a lovely funeral for Jackie Welles but everyone else in that neighborhood may as well be a carpenter ant for as easy as they get killed.
Phantom Liberty improved a lot of things but there’s still something of a mismatch between the game and the story’s themes, along with the genre’s themes.
Seriously though imagine if some of your organs or limbs could be made obsolete because Elon Musk pushed an update that bricked them like a piece of outdated tech hardware or Apple decided to once again change the plug that you use to charge your eyeballs. That’s why having your organs or limbs replaced with machines is so horrifying. You are completely at the mercy of a corporation to the point where you’re not even an organic person anymore.
TL;DR cyberpunk is a horror story and it is also the horror that we are living now, magnified. Playing as V may make you feel unstoppable but by and large, it is a world where nothing we do ever makes a dent in the savage injustices, where we live fast and die young or sell out to the boot on everyone’s necks and even the fun of having super human abilities is ruined by the capitalist system where you don’t even own your own body parts.
21 Comments
Are you telling me you’re JUST now realizing how CP is a reflection of mass consumerism and capitolism run amok? They don’t even try to be subtle about it. They couldn’t slap you in the face with it any harder if they tried.
Relevant link: [https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete](https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete)
Bro discovered the cyberpunk genre for the first time lol.
Whoa this is crazy, just wait till you watch this cool movie franchise called star wars and learn it’s not just about cool space wizards
Yes, thank you for this lesson. I’ll keep that in mind. I never knew.
It’s not the direction yet. So far, it remains a cautionary tale.
The only thing stopping the world from being like the one in that universe is that governments still maintain a power level higher than corporations, unions still exist and the public is somewhat aware that corporations need to be kept at bay.
In-universe, in the year 1996, the world economies collapsed, as did the USA, and the corporations stepped into authority. They “helped” the reconstruction of prosperity, but it was a facade to shift the world, so the system benefitted the corporations’ reach.
In the real world, Corporations are still under the surveillance of the government. For example, the EU forced Apple to ditch Lightning for USB-C, and VW was sanctioned and fell under heavy scrutiny over Dieselgate. There are consequences for corporations in the real world. In Cyberpunk, not even a slap on the wrists. Yes, there’s been corruption and corporations doing shady shit like pollution or data manipulation (big tech), and many times their shit comes to light and they are not as powerful as in Cyberpunk.
Arasaka has armies, trillions of dollars, nukes, an aircraft carrier, an air force, a navy, a tall ass building, a space station, super-soldiers, MIKOSHI AND RELIC, and an influence over the entire globe. The largest in real life, Apple, doesn’t have this type of power. They sell overpriced phones and live in a donut building.
We are not heading there. But we should remain cautious about the paths we take
*Documentary
No it isn’t. It’s about cool CYBORG powers and the direction our world is heading.
Cyberpunk among other things, examines the pros, and the cons of transhumanism, in a near futuristic dystopia.
One of the OG tabletop enthusiasts was speaking on this once. Cyberpsycho was watered down from its original intent. Its not a neurological disorder. The problem is your selling off pieces of yourself bit by bit until your body is owned wholesale by someone else. Someone that could take direct control of you if they so wished, or maybe just the knowledge that you dont own what now composes your body. Even chunks of your brain are owned by someone else.
Id be a ripperdoc personally. Those gloves they use seem like the right way to be modded without selling yoursoul.
I ain’t readin allat… So it’s basically Ghost in The Shell meet Fight Club
Well, yeah. Cyberpunk 2077 is a cyberpunk story, after all.
I mean….no shit? Lol
r/im14andthisisdeep
https://news.yahoo.com/people-bionic-eye-implants-going-170654452.html
What kills me is you didn’t use the most cyberpunk example.
> **it is a horror story about the nightmare direction our world is heading in**
Perfect definition of cyberpunk genre in general
I mean, duh
Who the hell ever thought Cyberpunk was just about “cool robot powers”?
Nobody tell him Animal Farm isn’t a kids story about a nice little farm.
This is what pretty much happens when morality was more or less no longer a thing post WW1 and WW2.
Add in the fall of Christianity in the West.
With morality more or less dead then we are on a slow path to what Cyberpunk is describing.
bing bong i love consumerism i cannot wait to rp in cyperpunk for free every day
> but that the system itself is replacing our very bodies with machines that make us dependent on that system Hypothetically if you lived in the worlds of cyberpunk 2020 or Deus ex and didn’t want to have your organs replaced with robot parts, You would be at a competitive disadvantage with people who did the replacement.
Reminds me of this: https://youtu.be/jN7mSXMruEo?si=4U3fA0fCYE1otUr_
In America, people buy light trucks to feel safe.
you don’t say