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Comment by Porthos9K | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised more cyberpunk authors didn't anticipate that wars between corporations wouldn't be fought using hackers or "street samurai", but with teams of propagandists competing to do a better job of bullshitting the general public.

Yes, I'm calling marketers and advertisers propagandists. As far as I'm concerned, marketing and advertising are nothing but private-sector psyops.

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As a recovering marketer I take no offense to that statement. I started my exit from the field when I was working with a PR firm that was running a "behavior modification" campaign. Psyops presumably has regulations and oversight; marketing has nothing of the sort. Want to convince a billion people to drink an addictive chemical known to cause colon cancer? Classic.

Was that a hypothetical..? If not, are you at liberty to share which chemical?

I'm thinking high-fructose corn syrup or brominated vegetable oil.

I was referring to Coca-cola, consistently among the top advertisers in the world. Often things that are so large and commonplace, its difficult for us to see them as anything but 'normal'.

That's what I figured from the "Classic." bit, but I didn't want to spoil it for everybody else. :)

I thought to myself "that's a bit much, like advertising could trick me into drinking a dangerous beverage" then read your follow-up comment and realized I'm holding a coke in my other hand.

Insidious, isn't it? It's moments like this that I wish to all the devils ever worshiped by man that the left had jumped on the "red pill" metaphor from The Matrix instead of leaving it for misogynists and reactionaries to appropriate.

Because until the Wachowski sisters brought in the "Neo is the One" plotline with the attendant messianic tropes, the relationship between Morpheus and Thomas Anderson/Neo was one of a union organizer showing a worker blinded by false consciousness exactly how he allowed himself to be conned by his bosses.

Are you referring to alcohol or something else?

Check out the ingredients on your favorite soft drink. There's probably all sorts of stuff listed that has been shown to cause cancer in rats.

What about in humans at normal doses?

We're running a half-assed trial on the general public right now, only without a defined "normal dose", control group, compensation, or informed consent.

It’s odd how that goes. We are never going to subject as many monkeys to coke as people drinking the stuff. So we need to compromise, but rats are not a great model resulting in some false positives. However, presumably some false negatives exist that are silently killing hundreds of thousands of people.

I would like to think that any scientist who dared propose giving to monkeys the equivalent by body mass of the amount of Coca-Cola many humans consume per day would get publicly crucified by an ethics board.

Oranges, Mangos, Black Pepper, and lots of other natural things cause cancer in rats

I don't know about you, but I find it easier to consume massive quantities of Coca-Cola than I do black pepper.

Oranges and mangoes, on the other hand...

I've never been able to eat an entire orange or an entire mango. But drinking an entire two-liter bottle of Coke over the course of a couple of hours while coding or writing?

That's easy. That's why I'm fat.

Drinking the same amount of OJ will also make you fat. If OJ is too tart choose another type of orange like mandarin oranges. They're just as cancerous to rats and you can drink them like fruit punch as they are not tart.

The point is "gives rats cancer" bascially has no meaning. As another example chocolate is poison to dogs. Does that mean humans shouldn't eat chocolate foods or drink chocolate drinks?

Humans also eat plently of things that are toxic. Most spicy peppers are toxic if eaten in the quantities needed to induce by other substances in rats. So is vinegar, wine, cheese, pickles, ...

Ever heard of that super toxic dihydrogen oxide. About 360,000 people die every year from it, some with as little 120grams (1/2 a cup)

I would recommend "The Space Merchants" by Cyril Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl, and also the sequel, "The Merchants' War" by Frederik Pohl. They predate the cyberpunk era, but you'll find what you're looking for in them.

Thanks. Adding them to my TBR list now. Frederick Pohl is one of those classic sf authors that I know I should read but have yet to get around to.

Framed that way, it actually appears quite logical, because hacking and killing is illegal, whereas bullshitting is not, so it's the path of least resistance. Sueing is legal too, so propagandists and lawyers it is…

It bears mentioning that SLAPPs (strategic lawsuits against public participation) can extremely effective if you want to create a chilling effect against opposition.

Case in point: how much negative media coverage of Peter Thiel do you see after he sued Gawker into the ground for dragging him out of the closet?

Thiel claimed that being exposed as gay "ruined lives", but involuntary public exposure prominent closeted individuals has long been an effective tactic in non-violent combat against conservative public officials and religious leaders who use their position to infringe on the rights of LGBT individuals. A man of Thiel's wealth and influence is surely fair game for similar treatment.

This world truly is a boring dystopia.

Yeah, I know. I mean, what kind of half-assed dystopia can be described by lyrics from a thirty-year-old rock opera like Queensryche's Operation: Mindcrime (EMI, 1988)?

Amazing quote. I love the concept of "Boring Dystopia." Might have to name a song that.

How about "Beige Tyranny"?

There’s a good subreddit which focuses on the boring dystopian subject. Highly recommended if it’s your type of subject matter.

Echos of "banality of evil".

I recommend "Jennifer Government". Still plenty of violence, but all in the name of PR. And a darn good read.

I've read that. But I don't think that's what many people think of when they think of cyberpunk. I was thinking more along the lines of works like Neuromancer and Snow Crash, and all of the writers who rode William Gibson's coattails (or parodied the genre as Neal Stephenson did). Not to mention cyberpunk RPGs like Shadowrun and Cyberpunk 2020.

Hm. Maybe it's taking the "punk" part to literal that prevents getting better stories. I mean, the point (as far as there is one) of punk is anti-corporatism, anti-fascism, combined with direct action.

That'll end up in street warfare one way or another. I'm honestly not sure how an actual punk story involving psy-ops would even look like. (Sure, the setup might be different, but sooner or later, heads are going to be knocked)

I think that a "-punk" story with direct action and psy-ops would probably incorporate culture jamming. Are you familiar with the term?

https://www.thoughtco.com/culture-jamming-3026194

I wasn't - thank you for introducing me to it!

I first heard about it from AdBusters.

https://www.adbusters.org/

IIRC "Distraction" by Bruce Sterling covers that sort of thing.

Thanks. I'll have to check that out.

Oh, Brave New World, that has such creatures in't!

(Ok, not corps, but definitely psyops.)

Some Stephenson gets close, most especially the Snowcrash / Diamond Age arc.

(Which I'd like to see him continue.)

How is that not what Nineteen Eighty Four is partly about?

I was trying to stick to the topic, rather than going off on a tangent about corporate newspeak. Not to mention the doublethink we all engage in just to remain employable in the tech industry.

1984 has newspeak, doublethink and a protagonist who's job is falsifying the newspaper archive. But everything is state owned, so it's "us vs the system" not the cyberpunk "Walmart vs Amazon" happening here.

Makes sense, competing vs. centralized fascisms.

By that logic, my Tinder profile is nothing but self-sanctioned psyops manipulating people into liking me.

I can use scary words to describe mundane things too.

You're like the Devil on the cover of Iron Maiden's The Number of the Beast album[1]. You think you've got Eddie dancing to your tune, but you don't see the strings Eddie is using to make you dance to his tune.

1: https://imgur.com/a/XOzzWnZ

dude that’s deep and all but are you gonna pass the blunt or what

If you're going to be like that, then I think I'll bogart it. :)

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