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Comment by inasio | Hacker News Reader

One point that I heard William Gibson make about cyberpunk as a dystopia is that it depends on your point of reference. There are many places in the world where a cyberpunk dystopia would be a welcome change

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I don't know man, I assume William Gibson didn't think that statement through. Even if you were bring something like a cyber punk universe to a Third World country, it would still be slavery.

Anyway, the cyber punk movements being replaced by solar punk ideals, which are more in line with humanities needs.

Given that my country, Ukraine, is already sliding there pretty rapidly, it really can't get worse tbh. I would take corporate wars over interstate wars any day.

(wrote this from my home with a backup power generator while studying courses on how to fly FPV drones via goggles and on cybersecurity/electronic warfare)

Hang in there, friend. <3

War is hell no matter what setting you're in. Or, going with Hawkeye Pierce from MASH, maybe war is worse than hell. I really hope things will change for you and your country.

I suspect that we need to go through cyberpunk to get to solarpunk. Cyberpunk is basically AI tyranny (corporations are just the oldest form of AI) and humanity needs to be humbled by encountering something smarter than ourselves before any kind of solarpunk can really 'stick'.

Bureaucratic states are corporations too, brah. (Arguably more like AI than joint-stock companies, as there’s no one person in charge — just the collective incentive structures)

> solar punk

I'm starting to lose sight of what the word punk represents

it's used to describe flavors of angsty dystopia, much as -gate is used to refer to careless conspiracy scandals

Not really. Solarpunk is utopian, steampunk isn't angsty.

If anything it just describes aesthetics related to technology and energy in a sci-fi setting, that may or may not have political undertones.

I don't know if it's utopian, but it's hopeful. It's the way up after the corporations (or some other disaster) tore everything down.

Anti-centralization, anti-hierarchy.

But see also The Tyranny of Structurelessness.

1,. https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

I think he did. If you're a well-paid technocrat the cyberpunk future means unparalleled possibilities.

Living like a god for 1% of the population and 10% does alright.

Was he talking about Somolia or was he talking about "It's good to be the king, even though the techno-fuedalism that enables that position is overlayed on a collapsing physical infrastructure and society"?

For that matter, even when you're living in a cyberpunk dystopia it's still in a sense a matter of perspective (if you go by the textbook definition of a dystopia as a terrible place to live). This was really driven home to me when visiting Shanghai. Americans of course hear about the sweatshops, industrial espionage, oppression of ethnic minorities, and conflicts over disputed territory. But if you're a welcomed moderately upper-middle-class visitor in Shanghai and thus don't really see any of that, it's a really nice place to visit (except for the heat and smog, and probably not during a global pandemic). Not unlike how San Francisco is a lovely city as long as you avoid certain areas.

On the other hand, I think you can still overall call such places dystopias due to high disparity in available opportunity which goes hand in hand with all kinds of problems in society at large.

One example of this is how online marketplaces for drugs are reducing real-life drug violence.

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