Cyberpunk 2077 a 'warning' about the future

isn't "whataboutism" about slightly different situation, namely when a person, as a defense, accuses their interlocutor of crimes?

situation in this thread is a bit different, it's about choices of a single person.

That's exactly the kind of political criticism that I consider very odd.

It barely admits that being able to choose genitals, independent of gender, is a step forward, only to then complain why CDPR didn't go much further by having players select pronouns and a non-binary voice.

Then it complains how the game is allegedly transphobic because it "objectifies trans bodies", a statement solely based on one poster in the game that made the rounds trough the Twitter-outrage-sphere a while ago, while completely missing how in the CP2077 world pretty much everything is commodified down to peoples memories and their individual body parts.

It's like there is some kind of agenda to paint the game, and it's developers, as transphobic since their PR Twitter account made a not so well received "Did you just assume my gender?" joke a couple of years back.

Along similar lines: Jeff Gerstmann complains about the lack of political correctness in some of the NPC lines, like when hardened gang-bangers proclaim "We are getting raped over here".

Which is just such an odd thing to complain about considering the setting: Here are these hardened criminals committing all kinds of unimaginable crimes like human trafficking, killing people, torturing people and pretty much everything else in the book, yet there's a weird expectation that they should be completely PC in their speech while engaging in these inherently anti-social practices.

Extra odd considering that a lot of the source material did something very similar for its time: The slang Gibson used in his books was inspired by very real criminal sub cultures like biker gangs and dope pushers. These kinds of sub-cultures where never particularly PC, still are not to this day.

So the expectation that criminal sub-cultures have to use socially progressive language, while abducting somebody to saw them apart for parts to sell, is just really weird and highlights a very odd double standard in our actual times: Depictions of all kinds of nasty things is okay, but as soon as the language gets nasty, that's where we want to draw very vaguely defined lines.

Happy pills were literally in Brave New World.

Metaverse, aspect of Snow Crash, is basically like MMOs such as World of Warcraft or Second Life, but once Facebook goes 3D (and to me the question is when with AR/VR), its more akin to Facebook.

Wealth is so unevenly distributed that some people have 3 jobs just to pay their rent, whereas others buy their entire street's housing just to have a privacy while being the CEO of one of the worst private collection companies in the world (Facebook).

Probably true. Nevertheless, positive change did happen. Let's hope that sanity prevails.

True. We have the progressives to thank for those.

Hmm. I don't think that those are the only two options, though; disparities can exist for reasons other than historical marginalization or unconscious bias, and by framing the debate exclusively in those terms, you are blinding yourself to other possibilities. I'm most concerned with the second option, however, as it's too broad a category. The "lingering side effects of discrimination" can be used to explain every negative outcome afflicting a community, and be used to justify pretty much any remedy. It's a dangerous tool, as it very easily obscures directly addressable causes of problems in favor of wide, epic narratives of historical oppression. And I suspect that certain people favor it for aesthetic rather than effective reasons - it is much easier to raise support from people by saying that their problems are caused by the malicious or ignorant other than that their problems are addressable and solvable at the community level.

For example, you can assert that urban violence and gang warfare are the results of generational poverty and discrimination of black people - you'd be right - but that assertion doesn't necessarily offer the most accurate or useful model of the issue. Most importantly, I would argue that it shifts the focus for the solution onto external factors (wider discrimination in society) rather than internal ones (such as, stop being violent with one another). The second option sounds ridiculous, but it has worked in the past. [0]

History is too easy a scapegoat for current problems. Thinking of outcome disparity only in the contexts of history and unconscious bias leads to distortions in the solution space. Unfortunately, by reframing debate around racial and historical lines, certain people have been able to extract wealth and influence from their communities without providing actionable solutions or illuminating easier interventions that would greatly aid in solving problems. I'm unfortunately a pessimist in this matter; the racial divide is a very useful one to certain interests. With a small investment of wealth and prestige to media outlets and academics, they can keep the people in lower economic classes biting at each other rather than focusing on the much more oppressive and harmful background radiation of wealth inequality that serves as a precondition to their actual struggles.

The social ramifications of slavery are negative; no one can reasonably dispute that. But the reason that the prison state is expanding, social programs are crumbling, violence seems ever-present, and the outcome of every successive generation is worse and worse is the ticking along of vast systems forming the bedrock of the American economy. These systems do not care about the race of the people ground beneath their wheels, nor the gender of the blood that slicks their gears; they accept all to offer their bodies and lives in supplication, to suborn their will to alien gods and inhuman reckoning.

That's just my opinion, though.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-23/disruptin...

Great comment. I think a big part of the problem, that I feel Cyberpunk actually highlights really well, is the degree to which problems are ultimately defined by and related to the individual. And, unfortunately, constrained.

Take the hippie movement. It's often associated with 'the left' but I'd argue that the navel-gazing focus on individual enlightenment caused immense damage to the ability of those without power to collectively have enough of it to see some changes.

Cyberpunk, intentionally or not, highlights this. The typical Cyberpunk scene is a person alone, getting by. Any kind of 'collective' behavior is nipped in the bud by surveillance and whatnot. Any solutions involve that lone person forming valuable relationships with other lone persons (or robits, I guess).

The dystopia, I feel, is usually not experientially the marketing, the massive corporate powers, and so on. It's the stifling isolation, and the only solution that's remotely viable is finding another single soul to share it with.

What I've found interesting about a show/book series like The Expanse, is that it dips into the Cyberpunk themes with the detective dude (I don't think it's a coincidence that Cyberpunk and film noir often overlap, the latter just an earlier iteration of the former). But eventually that guy, in the expanse of multiple planets, has options to find something bigger, more collective, to be part of.

Under your assumptions, countries like the US would be entirely white and Protestant, and asylum seekers would never be allowed to enter.

Neither would be a great thing.

The assumption that immigrants cannot assimilate into another culture, will not contribute or be productive workers and will likely be welfare cases or criminals is obviously not true in the general case, and is only a thinly veiled and obvious proxy argument against Muslim and Indian immigration into Europe, itself a proxy argument about maintaining white racial and ethnic homogeneity.

Unless it can be proven that the majority of immigrants to Korea or other Asian countries are as destructive as described, and demonstrate the same for European immigrants to other European countries, or even for Asians immigrating to Europe or the US, framing the argument in general terms is clearly specious.