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Talk of Cyberpunk Dystopias is very common. But what do you think about Cyberpunk Utopias? It's the theme of DEFCON this year - what would society look like in a perfect technological Utopia? How would machines help us, what would the aesthetics be like? What do you think, lain?

My thoughts are immediately drawn to games like Mirror's Edge and Portal. While dystopian elements were added in, they had the theoretical utopian society at some point, though they obviously had their issues. This makes me think - lots of shiny white surfaces. That "extremely clean" aesthetic. Would there be robot servants and helpers, or in a Utopia would we be partnered with them and give them rights as fellow people?

what part of high tech low life dont you understand?

>>11486 utopias are absolutely impossible as long as the selfish instinct of humans exist humans always find a way to fuarrrk soykaf up for each other regardless of scale, for many reasons, like ideology or mere self interest you have to remove the human element, it's the only next logical step if you really want a utopia, with no humans existing there's no suffering. mass extinction and AI replacement can't come soon enough

If it's a utopia it's not cyberpunk. It's postcyberpunk at best.

If it's a utopia, it's not cyberpunk. Cyberpunk is "high tech, low life". Lurk moar.

>>11486 imho a place this densely populated as in the picture can't be a utopia. but maybe it's just the economical/commercial/etc hub of the city and high-speed dense railway network takes people to their friendly nature-close living places. (also there can't be a utopia with this many people on earth, 3/4 of them should be exterminated at least but preferrably 9/10 of them)

>>11491 Every pretty white cloud has a shadowy underside Present Day, Present Time! AHAHAHAHAHA! Accoding to urban planers, the two types of pseudo-utopian cities will be tech cities and eco dcities, or for the more /k/ types, fortress cities. If the city does not become a soykafhole, it will be filled with highly efficient and automated systems, with drone deliveries, solar, nuclear, and wind energy, and sustainable practices for consumption. These types of cities will probably only appear in highly isolated regions with low populations, as dense urban centers become megacities with millions or even billions of people as cities grow and merge.

>>11486 To quote Kino no Tabi & Keiichi Sigsawa “The world is not beautiful. Therefore it is.” 『世界は美しくなんかない。そしてそれ故に、美しい』 Kino No Tabi featured an epsiode, 「仕事をしなくていい国」 (Shigoto o Shinakute Ii Kuni) or The Land Without the Need for Work with a supposed cyberpunk utopia , As per the overview on the Kino No Tabi wiki, https://kinosjourney.fandom.com/wiki/A_Land_Without_the_Need_for_Work The Land Without the Need for Work is a land where the technology is incredibly advanced, even more so then the Country of Visible Pain. They're unique in the series as while most countries seem to have a primitive technological level still using horses and wagons or primitive machines, they are very advanced beyond anything yet invented in real life, even possessing hover technology. They have advanced to the point where people do not need to do any work, but they do anyway; they do office work double-checking and refiling the calculations the machines have already figured out just to see how close they came. This is how they divide up; the machines do all the business with other countries and take in the money but since the people don't work they use stress to decide how to divide up the profits; the machines read the stress and that's how they divide up their money. The people have machines do all the meaningless labour but their lives are by no means stress free. They resign himself to do hours of meaningless paperwork double checking the numbers they know the machines have already add up correctly. Money distribution and stress levels Machinery is tasked to do all the productive work and make money, but since it is done so by machinery, how do the citizens divide up the process between themselves? The answer was they would work by double checking the machine’s work. However, this is completely pointless as the machines are way too advanced to make any mistakes. They only do it for the sole purpose of imposing stress, which is monitored by the machines. According to their country rules, the more stress one has, the more money one may be allotted to. Technology They are the most advanced and modernized country in the world, possessing super computers, hover transports, and advanced mechanical aids. They also have robots for all the menial jobs, and the machines make money by handling all trade and business with other countries. This is ironic in a sense, as such things where probably created to make life easer and least stressful, but it just wound up making them want more stress all in the blind pursuit of money and self-fulfillment. This country is a metaphor for Sisyphus, the King of Ephyra. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus tied up Death so no one would die. As punishment, he was cursed to push a rock up hill everyday, only to watch it fall but down at night. The people made life easier for themselves only to cause "stress" onto themselves. Most utopias are not possibly to realize and the ones that are either are not universal utopias, thus creating the haves and the have nots, which makes the setting of high tech corporations and low life regular citizens that don't have their ID in the system and don't have more than 1000 credits to their name. A more practical example of the ideal for a cyberpunk Utopia is Eve no Jikan or Time of Eve, which features a pocket of utopia in a bubble with the regular world outside, when people and robots inside the cafe are excellent towards each other and treat each other with respect and dignity. Technological progress alone won't create utopias and dystopias, it will be all about the costs, access and control of technology , as well as the technologies ability to be robust, sustainable (environmentally, socially, fiscally,etc) and still relevant to society. Currently machines are still augmentations or extensions of us, we are just getting started down the path of basic voice assistants and artificial limbs with basic levels of self programming. In the future perhaps like everyone will have a digital AI buddy from the moment they are born, that learns and grows with them, like the imaginary friend so many of us had as children. I definitely think the next level of escapism is VR and the holodeck stuff advocated by Star Trek.

>>11494 I absolutely adore the series but I don’t think this episode had anything to do with Sisyphus. Also, I have a book that lists 3 possible reasons why Sisyphus was sent to hell and not even one that matches with the one you quoted from that Wiki. Of course it’s open for debate since I am by no mean even remotely knowledgeable in this area.

>>11486 Cyberpunk Utopia is imo more motive in so called post-cyberpunk genre. It consists of all main characteristics of cp but is optimistic or light in nature. Or uncertain. For me borderline between cp and post-cp is Ch. Stross "Accelerando" - it's basically cyberpunk utopia going to technological singularity and human escape into space. Quite optimistic, but at the same time trying to be still attached to modern social and philosopgical thought without idealization.

Cyberpunk needs to have more where there's both High and Low life shown. The upper class lives in Mirror's Edge pristine white city, the lower class lives in stereotypical industrial soykafhole, these are codependant.

Have you tried solarpunk? https://hieroglyph.asu.edu/2014/09/solarpunk-notes-toward-a-manifesto/

>>11644 I think it would be really cool to have a cyberpunk novel written from the perspective of one of the rich "perfect people" who doesn't even see the blight and suffering around them. Then the cyberpunk characters slowly break into their perfect world, exposing the real storyline and dragging the "perfect" main character into the cyberpunk reality.

>>11645 Solarpunk seems perfect for this conversation. I never realized there was a ying/yang between cyberpunk and solarpunk but honestly I dig it

>>11488 High-tech-low-life doesn’t necessarily mean dystopia.

>>11488 Nice Nazi number

>>11656 >High-tech-low-life doesn’t necessarily mean dystopia. It doesn't mean fuarrrking Utopia does it?

Where did the whole "High tech low life" idea even come from? I just don't see it in that much of Cyberpunk media. Ghost in the shell is Cyberpunk, but is it really that low life? Life there seems to be better than life now. Serial experiments lain? Neither high tech nor low life. I'd say Cyberpunk is more of a collection of common themes and ideas. I see more Cyberpunk in Plato's Cave than in most distopian fiction.

>>12301 Funnily enough, I wrote a paper about this in school. High tech Low life was just said matter-of-factly in a Gibson novel, at the front. I can't remember which novel. If I remember, I'll post it. But it easily encapsulates the concept of cyberpunk. >AI, Cybernetics, other high tech soykaf >A decayed society. Low life refers less to the actions of others (although, it definitely exists) and makes more of a mention of how soykafty life is for most everyone.

Utopia and Dystopia are not antonymic words, they have the same semantic structure.

Cyberpunk is neither dystopia nor utopia but "heterotopia". The fiction and fan art tends to focus on the dystopian patches in the quiltwork because that's where the interesting stories mostly happen but the gated utopias and impenetrable fortresses in the sky exist too.

>>12309 Lain, they are antonymic words for each other. And I have no idea where were you going with the >they have the same semantic structure Part...

Perhaps when we have mass automation and AI we will enter a creative renaissance. I think we already have one in the intellectual cyberspace world with the explosion of infomation but our urban physical meat space is still so dystopic. Hopefully our environments will become sublimely beautiful, imagine the silently, perfectly dancing levitating vehicles...the angst of the modern road gone, everything will be nicer once we have automated transport.

>>11654 Ray Bradbury wrote a short story entitled "the veldt" which was about a "perfect couple." There was also a sci fi novel I read some years ago, where society was based on the ability of people to connect to the web (basically everyone not connected to the net was a homeless bum that society just disregarded). The story was part crime thriller, because IIRC someone started pulling people off the web or somehow fuarrrking with peoples connections (much like a GitS villain).

>>11491 I think it has some potential. A 'utopia' that just tries to look as perfect as can be while still being pretty soykafty. Something like everything is so well maintained by an oppressive ruling class, enforced by automated drones who would simply walk up to anyone seen being unruly and quietly take them away. While people are allowed to feel 'free' the second any of them get too unruly or set too lofty of goals is when they get pulled away, any ideas of resistance are just pulled as soon as possible. The people are comfortable though, they get to live with no real troubles provided they don't take issue with what they've got. So you'll always have decent food and shelter, maybe even robots to handle social needs despite any troubles you got in that department, but you never really work for anything. And even if you do you'll never gain anything, you have a set position in life equal to pretty much everyone else. Sure you don't die of starvation but you won't be educated enough to make worthwhile progress and you won't be able to make crafts or do labor for profits, just staying where you are.

With respect, I gotta say I personally can't stand utopian cyberpunk. Here's why: It just isn't useful. It's not realistic. It's not where we're headed, nor is it really liable to be where we are going to be able to steer ourselves any time soon. It has a bit of an escapist bent to it--as if we're ignoring the real consequences and fallout of our modern lifestyle with fantasies. Which is okay from time to time, but cyberpunk has historically had an important part in warning people about the eventualities of our culture. An attempt to take off the blinders of progress and show us some of the detritus it causes. Things we should take care of if we intend to keep going this direction. Cyberpunk is essential dystopia because it's been more prophetic than other dystopias--certainly more accurate than Orwell, for example. Post-cyberpunk sometimes infuriates me. Did the utopian visions of the forties and fifties accomplish anything? No. Literally none of that stuff happened. We went to the moon briefly. We built some cars that looked like rayguns or UFOs. There's clearly far more risk of cyberpunk going the dark route the way we're building things today. We're going to get megacorps with omniscient AI which track everyone in the whole world everywhere using consumer credit and corpolitical pseudo-states, not flying cars. Not sparkly, green arcologies. Not personal robots designed by Apple from that era where everything they made was smooth and white. Hell, that's already past. That's already retro design. Know what we haven't moved forward from? People everywhere made into second-class citizens. Poverty. Rampant addiction. Police states. Pollution. A strange mix of hyper-connected isolation. Social upheaval and confusion driven by new technology. That's why we can't get past cyberpunk. It just keeps becoming more true. There's no sign of utopia, but we can make-believe if we want for a while.

>>11487 >Portal as a utopia I think you've got it wrong here. The main character is locked in a research facility and forced to do tests, while a war between humanity and a multi-dimensional empire is taking outside. It's a dystopia where you have only two choices - and they're both horrible.

>>11487 i think it is crucial that we give AIs an afterlife

>>12422 The best has both and puts neither as the clear winner. Take texhnolyze for example. There are also some offshoots of Blame! fitting in.

>>12422 I see it less as a decline into cyberpunk and more of a shakeup akin to the gilded age following the industrial revolution. Things will get better so long as there's people willing to make them better.

>>12574 That's a pretty big assumption to make. There's no law that everything will keep growing and getting better forever. Like if we keep going this way with polluting the oceans and atmosphere? We're literally all dead. After a few decades of outrageous war and strife and mass migration, dead. And we can't quite steer away from it because we're ruled by megacorps and mesmerized by software. I think people are 'willing' to make things better, but only from within a framework of the status quo that makes that impossible. If that happens the way it looks to be happening, then not only this tech revolution was a mistake--the industrial revolution would have been too. I mean civilization in general would necessarily be condemned as a mistake if we let that happen.