cyberpunk is fake

I see a lot of people here soykafting on fans of CP2077 and how they are larpers hooked on corpo slop. this is true no doubt. but hasn't life imitating art what cyberpunk has always been about. gibson writes a novel. it becomes a sleeper hit and wins a bunch of mainstream awards. journalists call this new style of writing cyberpunk. along come hordes of tech addicted teenagers and self styled hazxxxx000rzzssz who go around calling themselves cyberpunks. isnt this just the same thing as CP2077 fans? the only real differen ce is the quality of writing was a lot better in the past and corporate scum like elon and thiel werent trying to rape it. but its always been fake larping. before it was nerds and tech geeks larping as cyberpunks. now cyberpunk is just another fad like cottagecore or dark academia core or whatever garbaeg normal society has come up with. everything is 100% fake now and everyone is a larper sold on a style. everywhere i go everybody is obsessed with putting on a performance. evangelical christians, retards from politically correct, communists, zionists. like if a guy is a trucker he's like "oh kay to be real trucKKKer I have to have a beard and wear flannel shirts and have a dumb radio and post about it online and call up strippers on the radio because thats what it means to be a real trucker" woo! now we have truckercore. do traditional catholics really care about religion? no they just like the cool aesthetics and being a retard. this whole larper culture is obscene and disgusting.(USER WAS WARNED FOR THIS POST, You should always elaborate on your opinions rather than just spilling the soykaf. This post is fake soykaf.)

>but hasn't life imitating art what cyberpunk has always been about. Stopped reading there. No, it's always been a warning of a dystopian future along the lines of 1984 or Animal Farm. It's not supposed to be an aesthetic and anyone who buys into it as an aesthetic is a larper. The only reason it might seem "cool" is because in reality we're already on our way to a worse dystopia without all the technological advancements. Imagine if someone said "1984 is so cool! Collectivism is great! I want to destroy my sense of individuality and all beauty in the world in the name of socialism!" (oh wait, tankies are kind of like that)

Society has become superficial because eventually everything becomes commodified products in capitalism including people's identities or otherwise how they present themselves. Not that this is entirely from capitalism though some of it is just human stupidity and leftovers from distant past views. >>42188 But George Orwell was a Democratic Socialist, not to be confused with Social Democrats. A lot of the Tankies you see online that display tyrannical views are just the same people who LARPed as Nazis but got bored playing that part. Cyberpunk is a critique of how Capitalism and the state lead to dystopias. This was later contrasted with Solar Punk how Socialism / Anarchism and eco planning creates brighter futures. Basically meaning to give hope by helping people envision how things could be instead of what they are becoming.

>>42191 >people advocating authoritarianism online are tired nazi larpers IDK the people I see advocating it IRL are neurotic women but I repeat myself >>42185 >everything is fake now and everyone is a larper I dont think those guys getting years of prison for tweets are larping, cyberpunk is a lot less cool when the boot is literally on your face forever, not merely literarily. also different cultures are real and do exist. Do you think muslims wear funny clothes and funny hats and funny beards and funny scarves because they're larping ? IDK maybe, but its also just the way they are, the way their grandparents were, and old habits die hard. Not everyone is like you, and its a sometimes dangerous mistake to assume that they are.

>>42191 I thought Orwell was an anarchist? And cyberpunk feels more like a postmodern exploration of where capitalism, the state, and modern bureaucracy is taking society instead of an outright critique of it. I guess the cyberpunk response to those who claim socialism/anarchism are creating a brighter future is to show how these ideologies are in their own way dystopian and lead to identical outcomes.

>>42192 Are those women saying they are Maoists? I noticed Maoists in the West are just Liberals pretending to be Communists. Maoists in the East tend to be just Reactionaries and poorly educated farmers. >>42193 Orwells liked the Anarchists of the Spanish civil war but there isn't a clear indication he himself was an Anarchist. He did criticize the Soviet Union but that wouldn't mean he is an Anarchist either. He probably could fall under Left Libertarian which is more broad a term than Anarchist. Anarchists also are Socialists too anyway. Or maybe you are thinking of a different famous author such as Oscar Wilde who was what seems to be an Individualist Anarchist which is what it seemed to me in his essay called The Soul of Man Under Socialism. > cyberpunk response to those who claim socialism/anarchism are creating a brighter future is to show how these ideologies are in their own way dystopian and lead to identical outcomes. No, that's backwards. Cyberpunk at least originally was largely Anarchist in ideology where the dystopian future is often capitalist resulted with an oppressive state or a mega corporation that acts like a state. Solar Punk came much later. Diesel Punk and Steam Punk are primarily just aesthetics I think. Post Cyberpunk is also more an aesthetic because it has a fairly neutral take on the future and doesnt focus on capitalism and the state to the same degree, more liberal minded. I cant say this much from experience though since i dont have much time to read a bunch of novels on a regular basis.

>>42194 When did cyberpunk ever have a defined ideology? Like OP correctly stated, it was a phrase coined by journalists. Its anti-authoritarian and anti-corporate/capitalist but those values can also be applied to anarchist and socialist utopias like the USSR or modern China. Its only really anarchist in a vague post-modern way that's not really tied to a strict ideology or capital A anarchism of actual black bloc types and lefty orgs. Cyberpunk settings are always dystopias which show how the modern ideologies of the 20th century have more or less failed or created degenerated oppressive societies. Its a good way of exploring the flaws and false promises of these systems.

>>42197 It's just a simplified explanation of common themes into an ideology not that any is explicit or inherent.

>>42194 >Are those women saying they are Maoists No they say they're liberal/progressive >>42197 >Its anti-authoritarian and anti-corporate/capitalist the ideology might be this, but the setting is almost of necessity capitalist, and I dont think the ideology is even anti free market. talking about cyb as an ideology is and always will be weird, because its fundamentally just a fiction genre. It has ideological commentaries but most people who are 'into cyb' are into the aesthetic. You can't stick it to the Man if the Man's not there, cyberpunk without Zaibatsu is meaningless.

>>42185 People interpret cyberpunk as a "critique", when it is often a gratuitous celebration of "late capitalism" which passes itself off as "critique" in order to be lauded by urbanite intellectuals. I am really tired of people trying to shoehorn some kind of far-left ideology into what is effectively an aesthetic. Even if it superficially references leftist or anarchist ideology, it does not mean that the aesthetic thereby gains some sort of elevated "reality" or that the leftist ideology is at all core to genre. Most cyberpunk novels or media I've seen are just futuristic neo-noir crime drama. If it does "critique" capitalism, it certainly doesn't wholly condemn it. What people need to understand is that soykaf like "anarchism" is just a set of subcultural attitudes and trends. It has no more substance than being "emo". The fuarrrking Clash appropriated anarchist ideology. Insisting on this point, as if cyberpunk failed because it is no longer a vehicle for leftist propaganda, and that that is where the substance in the genre comes from... it's a way for people who are left-leaning to demean people that are right-leaning who enjoy the genre, or even just people who have a different interpretation of it. Solar punk is more explicitly politicized in its application of socialism/anarchism, and it's fuarrrking awful and lacks any commercial viability. Cyberpunk 2077 also tried to do the "anarchist fighting against the man" nonsense, and it was bad. The story was uninteresting. The success of cyberpunk media is despite and not because of whatever element of leftist "critique" people decide it represents. Personally, I think it primarily consists of the talents of prominent creators in the genre and the unique visual style. For some reason, many leftists can't think about something in isolation. Maybe it's because they've been drawn into this faux-materialism, where everything of consequence is ultimately explained by the wider conditions and relations to production, as well as other social dynamics characterized by inequity. But people who don't have the same priors are going to approach this media in a very different way, and so even if the author intended for it to be a leftist "critique", it totally falls flat. If I read Altered Carbon, I read the scenes of Kovacs going a revenge killing spree, or him having sex on experience enhancing drugs, and I think, "This is fuarrrking cool." I do not think, "Oh my god, look how oppressive this society is. So sad. Such alienation, millions must cry."

>>42185 What's wrong with people taking a Gibson novel and making a subculture out of it? Minor Threat puts out Straight Edge and a generation of impressionable teens turned it into a movement. Were they being fake? What's wrong with being inspired by fiction? >>42199 Capitalism isn't necessary for the setting. You could have a dystopian Marxist state as the setting and it would work fine. Cyb doesn't have an ideology and it isn't one. To me its just exploring what techno-modernity on steroids would look like. Its generally anti-authority and anti-capitalist, but not glued to one of the big ideologies like anarchism, libertarianism or communism with their grand theories and narratives. Cyberpunk environments are set in the aftermath of social breakdown when those big ideas have either turned into monsters or collapsed and lost their relevance. Cyb is low life. Its looking at dystopia from the perspective of rats down in the sewers and sprawling urban ghettos. >>42203 Anti-authoritarianism and anti-capitalism aren't left wing ideas only and there's no conspiracy theory to soykaf on non-leftists who like the genre or push communism. They are just two common political themes in cyberpunk lit going back to the 80s and dystopian fiction in general. Cyberpunk is critical because it questioned common wisdom about technology, what it means to be human. Before cyberpunk, virtually all sci fi was optimistic and propagandist. Star Trek is basically a liberal's wet dream. Sci fi was either pointless fantasy or about how capitalism/communism and tech were going to create this amazing utopia end of history. Cyberpunk writers were really the first to say actually no the future will probably be a cruel disgusting soykafhole and the personal computer is more important than massive space ships.

>>42206 >There's no conspiracy theory to soykaf on non-leftists who like the genre or push communism. This is a complete strawman. I never claimed there was. I said that leftists interpret cyberpunk as a genre as vehicle for propagating leftist ideas, and use it as a way to demean people on the right interested in it. This happens throughout many different forms of media. It's exceedingly obvious, and you'll often be told that you don't really understand the story if you don't agree with the conclusions they draw from it. You're using the term "conspiracy" to evoke the image of some shadowy group of people getting together in a room and planning this. That's not even implied in my post.

>>42207 Pretty much everyone reads their own ideas into literature and holds their interpretation as key to understanding it and try to put it above other interpretations. This is not behavior particular to leftists. All of us do it. A Heideggerian is gonna look at Neuromancer in a different way to a postmodernist. A leftist will interpret it differently from a paleoconservative or a neoliberal or a gnostic. And if people didn't push for the correctness of their interpretations, they wouldn't believe in them to begin with. People read stuff and debate about it and use it to advance their beliefs and that's not necessarily a bad thing. I don't see anyone going around saying you need to be a radical leftist to understand cyberpunk. If you go looking for people like that you will find them, but I don't see leftist ideology being hammered into people as the only way to understand cyberpunk. If any group established interpretive authority over cyberpunk it would be postmodernists, in part because they influenced it and postmodernism is something most leftists detest.

>>42206 >capitalism isnt necessary for the setting I guess you're right, but I've basically never seen one that wasn't with capitalism, not that I've read every cybook under the sun. FWIW I do think it does need the little guy contrasted against the big inhuman organization, and maybe at the scale of the average gibson book's inhuman organization, or even at the scale of lockheed martin, is it really a capitalist entity or is it just a branch of government. >>42210 smart people can imagine themselves in others' shoes

>>42214 smart people are usually assholes whose autism stops them from understanding other people

>>42214 Distinction doesn't matter. Usual cyberpunk = megacorp owns city. Consider megacorp = government and its the same as communism... Lots of stories are also completely divorced from economic system since the characters are outside the system and have to rely on stealing for food etc. or use some outlaw currency not even condoned by gov >>42222 imagine being stuck working with toddles permanently. Thats the equivalent of actually smart people having to work with avg people. And adults unlike kids arent even willing to learn, they rather insist on being right even if they know they are wrong to protect their ego and social standing.

>>42191 Yeah I'm comparing Cyberpunk to 1984 as it's dystopian literature, and Cyberpunk larpers as the kind of useful idiots that would lead us to such a future. >This was later contrasted with Solar Punk how Socialism / Anarchism and eco planning creates brighter futures. fuarrrk off.

>>42222 hey its four twos OK maybe he should have said smart people can imagine themselves in other smart peoples' shoes, and who really cares about the stupids anyway

>>42224 IDK its been ages since I read it so my memory may be imperfect but 1984 is awful close to cyberpunk if not cyberpunk in fact, you have the massive technoppressive state squashing the little guys and dragging them along, a boot pressing into everyone's face, forever, etc etc etc. The only thing its missing is the computers, but for being written in the forties, cmon its basically there. >cyberpunk larpers would lead us to such a future Who would you say is responsible for the UK currently arresting people and sentencing them for multi year prison terms for such heinous crimes as posting on facebook? I dont think its cyberpunk larpers but I dont follow UK politics that closely.

>>42228 I think you just imagined the techno part of 1984 that wasn't at all a focus. It was even implied that technological advancement was stunted because the only place big brother cares about factual reality is in the military. Cyberpunk is about capitalism, over population and climate change. 1984 is a warning about socialism. The UK being oppressive to right wingers is closer to 1984 than cyberpunk, and I'm sure tankies are loving it. On the other hand cyberpunk larpers are usually soyboys looking for an aesthetic to compensate for their lack of personality so their interest in "high tech" often makes them enthusiastic about things like Tesla, VR, cryptocurrency, AI slop etc. Thinking these things will make their lives better when in reality it will harm society in the long run if left unchecked.

>>42229 the ubiquitous two way telesurveillance devices are clearly scifi future tech for a book written in the forties. sure it wasn't exactly the focus but it was present.

1984 isn't cyberpunk even if its dystopian. Its too grandiose with a focus on geopolitics, there are clear good and bad guys, there is a central authority controlling everything. Orwell is pretty clear that he believes humans can be free and all we need are some heroes to stand up to authority. This is too optimistic to be cyberpunk. 1984 is classic liberal humanist literature. There exists a human nature (good), perverted by an evil authority who controls everything (Ingsoc), and all we need are some heroes to stand up and pull to pull the system down. Classic cyberpunk authors question if a human nature really exists, if technology has destroyed it or if humans are even good in the first place. Society hasn't been hijacked by an evil authority, everyone is more or less invested in the system and serve to perpetuate it. And instead of big geopolitics, cyberpunk lit was always focused on the little things going on in the system and people on the lower end of the social ladder e.g. Chase in Neuromancer, cops like Deckard. Cyberpunk is essentially soft post-modern fiction. >>42229 1984 is really a warning about national socialism and Stalinism. Ingsoc are basically a bunch of nazbols.

>>42233 >1984 is really a warning about national socialism and Stalinism. Ingsoc are basically a bunch of nazbols. There's nothing racial in 1984. Orwell was explicitly against the USSR.

>>42234 he was also a socialist, he was part of the foreign volunteers in Spain.

>>42235 Yes, and? Stop trying to twist literature to fit your worldview.

>>42234 Orwell was a left winger. He didn't like the USSR under Stain and never step foot there. 1984 is based on Nazis. Everybody knows Nazis were all commies at one point and fascism grew out of commie totalitarianism. Mussolini and Hitler were ex commies. This is well known in history. Ingsoc started out as commies but became English socialists so basically natsocs. [spoiler][/spoiler]

>>42237 Yes I'm aware orwell was a leftist, it's still established fact that the book was about the USSR. Saying Ingsoc is supposed to mean national socialism because of this mental gymnastic wordplay is like saying the CCP is national socialist because they call their ideology "socialism with chinese characteristics".

>>42234 the fake evil guy of 1984 that theyre all supposed to hate for 5 minutes each day is named emmanual goldstein. his name is based on Emma Goldman's and he has stereotypical jewish features. the ingsoc government also makes racial claims about their allies / enemies as they sporadically change throughout the novel. >>42237 >>42238 i interpreted 1984 as making the claim, loosely, that all authoritarian governments have fundamental similarities, but also that the paranoid control of airstrip one / oceania and suppression of information was so total that it was difficult to know whether the oceanic superregion empire's enemies were basically equivalent empires or the delusional projection of big brother - who seems very evidently modeled after Mussolini. George Orwell wasn't a super deep guy, more of an idealistic journalist than political philosopher or historian. But there's something I feel like the underlying political message is when O'brien hamfistedly rants to Winston at the end of the story that war is a necessary economic engine to maintain the structure of society. for some reason, the anti-war message of the story reminds me of Bataille's Accursed Share as well as something I thought attributed to Heidegger about there being 3 final world-orders, but can't find now and would nevertheless feel like a pseud invoking with certainty.

>>42236 The point is that he was critical of the USSR, that doesn't mean he didn't like socialism.

I always feel that what I interpret as underlining leftist sentiments could easily be nazism. Like Blade Runner for example, some people don't see movie as having any leftist sentiment in the film itself. But yet, if blade runner is not leftist then it is surely fascist. Since I like some Japanese media, you get a sense that the underlining message is somewhere between being leftist and right wing, which doesn't sound surprising coming from Japan, which would almost make it fascist. The nazis were both left and right wing at the same time.

I would never imagine people larping as being cyberpunk, it's always been kind of fringe and isn't a real subculture or anything like that. I think what we have is that maybe as we progress into the future people more often appropriate terms like cyberpunk because the ideas and forms become closer to the reality we perceive. I haven't encountered the label cyberpunk being misappropriated too often, but those are good points you make with Elon Musk. I think the precedent for what is considered to invoke the future in people's mind has become molded largely by cyberpunk then anything else. Before the idea for what the future would look was way different, and it has continually changed to where as now it's closer to resembling this dystopian cyberpunk vision, hence why someone like Elon Musk would seem cyberpunk in his designs for his products. The 1980s has become a longer time ago, and cyberpunk became popular in the 80s. It's all about attempting to understand the current landscape we live in, how things have shifted and changed. I guess Elon Musk wants to be that bad corpo, I don't know, it's probably not entirely his own doing, it's just that when they envisioned the future, that's just what it happened to look like in our present era, by a lot of deliberation and research and studying probably. Elon Musk is kind of a nerd anyway, but in the future, will most people be able to afford to drive and own their own vehicles? Because the people who make the future will probably be corpos.

I wanna see irl robocops walking around telling me to have a nice day

>>42185 Cyberpunk was just another of these sci-fi fantasy subgenres that tried to guess how life will be looking in the near future (that currently is more or less the present). While some elements of it are correct, a lot of aesthetics and details are actually less impressive and soykafty, which seems to be a general thing of "outdated" sci-fi works. The "Fi" in "Sci-Fi" stands for fiction, and it stops being fun when it's put next to reality corresponding to it. Cyberpunk's death is the same as the death of early 00s sci-fi anime that hinged on combining era-appropriate aesthetics with "futuristic" ideas like AI, holograms, the Internet, etc.

LOL, all cultural lore is fiction. There is no space, no planet, no god, no love. It's strange that you were pissed off by the game, and not by all of humanity with all its sciences and arts.

I kind of feel like cp2077 perfectly embodies cyberpunk, not the same way old school cyberpunk like blade runner and neuromancer did, but precisely the corporative side of it that glamourizes the kind of reality that old school cyberpunk wared us against. That is to say, an old cyberpunk may have been drawn to the aesthetic as a sort of warning of the dark side of a high technology society, and a ""modern"", cp2077 kiddipunk fan is attracted to the aesthetic because they themselves are the exact other side of the coin, the very high-tech society and it's evils that the previous generation denounced. Only the values here are inverted: the corporate domination that old cyberpunk dreaded is here, and it's precisely represented by 2077. As a work of cyberpunk genre 2077 lacks the very soul of what cyberpunk was about, but it's a kind of fitting consequence of the very reality in which the genre originally spawned. What I am trying to say, cp2077 is not cyberpunk, but it's the outward expresssion of the warnings of cyberpunk manifesting in reality.

>>42185 >everything is 100% fake now and everyone is a larper sold on a style Well, let's re-invent "punk", and be so original that we spin our own thread to make our own clothes. Then watch again as a grassroots "counter" culture falls to entry-ism, attracts megacorp attention, is comodified and then sold back to us at "hipster" stores like Hot-Topic. Meh, I've been living as a low-life under a bridge near the IBM Softlayer building designing my own high tech Virtual Machine software that is quickest in the world at a few things... IMO, LARP or not, for me "Cyberpunk" is now. The old tech of the "ancient" past is slowly coming back into common use as new tech... IIRC, George Orwell said something like "The ideas in 1984 aren't new", he just recontextualized them for the present / sci-fi future. Dystopia has been around for a very long time, see "Hydraulic Despotism".

>>42185 >>42188 Political action is no longer possible due to the dominance of the technical automaton. You see the stripping away of prescriptive political messages from things like "cyberpunk" and say it is inauthentic/larp because it captures the surface while ignoring the deeper meaning, but the deeper meaning is meaningless. There is no longer such a thing as ethics wrt politics, because political decisions are no longer made by humans. The real larp is feeling righteous by pretending that such a thing exists.

>>46301 The only way to get around it is do everything away from the capitalist system. Grow your own food and harvest materials, build tools and machines or only acquire them second hand and do so in a group so nothing is on any individual.