Comment by aspenmayer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aspenmayer | Hacker News Reader

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Considering how the former leader of Wagner countermanded orders from above and was recalled, as well as Wagner’s usage of press-ganged convicts straight out of gulags, the unit was fairly irregular compared to the Russian military proper. Wagner’s other activities such as natural resource diversion from their legitimate owner/lessor seems to firmly put the organization proper in cyberpunk territory.

Cyberpunk as a concept is fairly subjective and subject to interpretation. Perhaps your conception of cyberpunk is more exclusive and prescriptive than others’? I wouldn’t interpret a difference of opinion about the tropes or ethos of cyberpunk in a normative way.

Just because folks see cyberpunk aspects in society or literature that you do not is not a contradiction of your own perceptions. It might be a case of prescriptivism vs descriptivism.

Does art imitate life, or does life imitate art, or both (or neither)? You seem to be saying that cyberpunk is only a literary genre, which is somewhat limiting the discussion when so many cyberpunk works have been adapted to other media, which then inspires other works which were never in written form to begin with. To limit your own discussion to written works is your prerogative, but it seems a needlessly narrow scope for the discussion of others who don’t share your view.

To say that we’re wasting our own time is to discount the fact that others are participating in the discussion in good faith for their own reasons. HN writ large isn’t a means to an end, HN and the individuals of HN are ends unto themselves.

>Wagner’s other activities such as natural resource diversion from their legitimate owner/lessor seems to firmly put the organization proper in cyberpunk territory.

What I said was that the Ukrainian war is not a corporate war. The composition or actions of the Wagner group are completely irrelevant. WG could be composed of anarchist hacker cyborgs who participate in armed conflicts to fund their struggle against what they perceive as a corporatocracy, and the Ukranian war would still not be a corporate war.

The points system whereby Ukrainian soldiers’ units earn credits for confirmed kills (with a bonus for live capture) of Russian and other nations’ hostile forces, which can be redeemed for drones and other materiel from plethora of international and domestic startups competing with established arms megacorps, as opposed to top-down procurement diktats reads to me as cyberpunk. The growing usage of (semi)autonomous ground drones on both sides also seems fairly cyberpunk in a Terminator sense. The participation of forces from other rogue states like North Korea in exchange for food and arms is cyberpunk.

Reasonable people can disagree, as I alluded to above, but I wouldn’t say that disagreement on the points or in itself is pointless or wrong, which seems to be where we differ. Whether something is cyberpunk is in the eye of the beholder, a subjective experience in the reader of art and of literature and of history. I don’t see how you can say what something seems like to others, as that is to second guess their own experience of reality (or as mediated by fiction, in the the case of artistic works).

To me, the cyberpunk ethos can be summarized as high tech, low life. Utilizing literal convicts as frontline soldiers by Wagner in Ukraine seems to fit that description to a tee.

In light of the above combined with the routine usage of AI on all sides, the conflict in Ukraine as a whole seems to be a literal expression of “sustainable war” as depicted in Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045, which is widely regarded as a cyberpunk work.

https://breezewiki.com/Ghostintheshell/wiki/Sustainable_War

> In effect, the G4 nations went to war with each other in a "sustainable" manner managed by AIs: fighting deliberately avoided damaging major cities and essential infrastructure, mercenaries, and autonomous war machines were heavily used, and the goal of most battles was to destroy enemy structures, vehicles, and equipment while taking reasonable measures to capture rather than fatally harm human combatants when possible. In other words, the conflict would be sustainable as almost all losses could, in theory, be perpetually replaced by the military-industrial complex.

>What I said was that the Ukrainian war is not a corporate war.

I won't let you move the goalposts.

It’s more corporate than any past war, and for the reasons stated, it is hard to imagine how it could be more corporate if the belligerents tried. The direct involvement of startups in weapons dev combined with the points system creating a market for material driven by individuals and small groups rather than a traditional procurement process is hyper capitalist. The absence of direct conflict between corporations à la Shadowrun doesn’t meaningfully change the calculus for my determination that the Ukraine was is a corporate war.

Regarding your edit:

> I won't let you move the goalposts.

I don’t know what this statement is referring to, but I haven’t changed any of my positions regarding what I perceive as cyberpunk or whether or not I view the Ukraine war as corporate (and cyberpunk).

Perhaps you view the discussion as one where points are scored, but I don’t. I view the discussion as a collaborative enterprise where we both express ourselves and develop our own ideas in the context of a wider discussion.

If there’s something specific I said you would like me to address, please let me know, as I don’t know what you mean.

Okay, fine. Then you're using the term in a different sense than I did. What's your point with this line of argumentation? Are you disagreeing with my definition of "corporate war", or are you disagreeing with the Ukrainian war not being a corporate one by my definition?

> What's your point with this line of argumentation? Are you disagreeing with my definition of "corporate war", or are you disagreeing that the Ukrainian war is not a corporate one by my definition?

It’s a discussion board. I’m discussing the topic and trying to get to know what you think and believe, and thanks to your prompting, I got to know what I think and believe a little better myself. I don’t have any desire to disagree with you, as I don’t think that either one of us are making statements that have an objective quality to them, as the context is too subjective and subject to interpretation.

I don’t know enough about your definition of “corporate war” in the context of this thread, since you said we’re using different definitions, so maybe you could share a little bit about what that term means to you? What would it take to make the Ukrainian war a corporate war, to you? What are qualities of corporate war, and how would you or I know it when we see it? Can you think of some examples that meet your definition of corporate war, either in fiction or in real life?

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