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Comment by the_af | Hacker News Reader

> "the majority of derivatives of the cyberpunk genre I've seen have all usually been cheap cash grabs with less than any real messaging behind it"

Agreed, and it's important to note that the message "evil corporations are greedy and use tech in soulless and alienating ways" used to be a radical message but it's not anymore. Now it's just a trope. So I disagree with what some are saying that cyberpunk is currently used to convey a message; it's not, in general. It's used to convey a trope that's lost most of its barb.

All in my opinion, of course. And Gibson's.

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>Agreed, and it's important to note that the message "evil corporations are greedy and use tech in soulless and alienating ways" used to be a radical message but it's not anymore.

I have to express a hard disagree here. I think the message can be made at higher or lower resolutions, in vague or deep ways, and can comment not just on broad vague themes but in deep ways about specific mechanisms.

The merit and pertinence of the message as radical criticism is going to have everything to do with ground level execution of details, depth of world building, clarity of vision, etc., which will turn out different depending on any particular media.

I do think it's fair to say that most things downwind from Neuromancer can be fairly assessed as tropey, but I think that's a sturgeon's law thing rather than something unique about the genre as distinct from other genres.

> evil corporations are greedy and use tech in soulless and alienating ways" used to be a radical message but it's not anymore.

It seems like you would have to go pretty far back to find a time where that would be a genuinely radical message. The 19th century saw the trusts and rail barons. There was also the East India Trading Company and its affect on India.

I haven't read Gibson's work specifically (though I'd like to), but I always got the sense that humanization and dehumanization were the primary themes of cyberpunk and the dystopian world created by corporations was one of the dehumanizing factors. That may not be fair, though.

I think in retrospect you can say what you said. But think about your stereotypical grandfather whose big ambition was to be a company man, to work his way through life and be rewarded with a modest pension and a reasonably comfortable retirement. Think also about the fact that while in the US this is less of a dream now, in Japan this sentiment seems alive and well.

Your sterotypical grandfather who worked 9-5 and earned enough every five years to buy a new house in a relatively middle-of-the-road job did so because of a prosperity boom following WW2 which was built on the back of repairing economic hardship and was a rather unique time in history even for being a boom portion of the cycle. Compare that to your father working in the 70s where twice annual cost-of-living adjustments to account for rapid inflation were the norm - or the 1920s and earlier in America where the majority of people suffered under absolutely atrocious working conditions and lived entire lives trapped in debt cycles to a single company.

It ebbs and it flows - there are times in history you can fondly remember for their plenty and times you can remember for their scarcity.

The only really new trend, IMO, is that in the modern world (I think for the first time ever) working continuously for the same company is a financial trap. The strangest innovation of the current day is that churn is accepted and retaining skilled employees is de-emphasized compared to... hiring new replacement employees with less skill. This incredibly bonkers habit has gained wide enough acceptance that it's sort of the default business state.

> I haven't read Gibson's work specifically (though I'd like to), but I always got the sense that humanization and dehumanization were the primary themes of cyberpunk and the dystopian world created by corporations was one of the dehumanizing factors. That may not be fair, though.

A quote from one of the RPGnet moderators, something to the effect of...

"Transhumanism is about how technology will fundamentally reshape how we live, and how we perceive what it means to be human. Cyberpunk is how it won't."

Just because "evil corporations are greedy and use tech in soulless and alienating ways" isn't radical any more doesn't make it any less true.

>Agreed, and it's important to note that the message "evil corporations are greedy and use tech in soulless and alienating ways" used to be a radical message but it's not anymore.

"The Nazis are evil" is also an overused trope and is hardly radical but by reusing it it helps protect us on a civilizational level from actual nazis.

Tropes can be sort of like cultural T cells. I'd rather see more "nazis are bad" and cyberpunk stories and less disney shit for this reason alone.

It'll start getting old for me when the risk of it coming true goes away.

Well, but evil evolves and the pitfalls of society do too. You cannot stick to representations of the past. Also, cyberpunk was supposed to be a vision of the future (used as an excuse to look at the then-present time)!

More books and games about how evil the Nazis were, unless presented in an innovative way, feel derivative and boring to me.

I don't think Gibson would object to a cyberpunk game that went beyond the aesthetics and merely replicating a message that has become a trope.

Most books and games feel derivative and boring to me. That isnt about the use of well worn tropes thats just sturgeons law in action.

> "The Nazis are evil" is also an overused trope and is hardly radical but by reusing it it helps protect us on a civilizational level from actual nazis.

...or helps a dictator dehumanize the population of a country he wants to conquer for propaganda purposes.

Yeah, so creating a nazi military batallion out of a nazi paramilitary to fight an ethnic civil war against Russians may not have been the genius military move Poroshenko thought it was :(

Yeah, so you're basically pushing Putin's narrative, which is bullshit.

The invasion would have happened anyway because it's motivated by fascist imperialism, and the propaganda is mostly made up and would have been the same as well, minus some specifics.

Putin's narrative? The Ukrainian government are entirely open about what Azov is.

Putins narrative is that the Ukrainian government is run by Nazis. Thats obviously false, but yeah, they absolutely used Nazi paramilitaries to cling on to Russian speaking territory and dont deny it.

It sort of sounds like you're saying that this means Nazis arent the bad guys we thought they were and we should stop villifying them, which is an interesting hill to choose to die on.

No, I'm saying that the use of Nazi paramilitaries is not in fact a cause of the Russian invasion. It has certainly been a welcome opener for Russian propagandists, but they're using the Nazi card so indiscriminately that they never really needed it. To the Russian propaganda, every Ukrainian who doesn't welcome the invaders enthusiastically (which nowadays includes the vast majority of Russian speaking Ukrainians) is a Nazi.

> "The Nazis are evil" is also an overused trope and is hardly radical but by reusing it it helps protect us on a civilizational level from actual nazis.

Hows that working out? Cuz it doesn't look like it's doing much except creating painfully generic stock villains.

People forgot how popular the Nazis were, both in the US and elsewhere. And no one can really articulate why they're popular now outside of "day racis", which is a thought terminating cliche.

>How's that working out? Cuz it doesn't look like it's doing much except creating painfully generic stock villains

Those tiki torch people arent exactly running the country now are they?

they were a couple of years ago

and they might be again in a few years

>"The Nazis are evil" is also an overused trope and is hardly radical but by reusing it it helps protect us on a civilizational level from actual nazis.

It's enabled people like Valdimir Putin, who managed to invade a country on the grounds that it's full of Nazis.

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