Cyberpunk feels outdated because conglomerates aren't actually very efficient and most companies stay in their own lane
>>107544409cyberpunk feels outdated because real life is somehow a worse dystopia
>>107544409No large organization is efficient. The fiction in science fiction includes human behavior.
Conspiravision fucking rocks tho
>>107546351What's that?
>>107546368op pic reminded me of this kino
>>107546383So it's a music album?
>>107544422fpbp, we're in the most boring phase I'd say. time will tell if we get cool shit later.
>>107546939> cool shitit'll all be subscription based proprietary corpo slop.they'll want to stream not even ads, but the desire itself to by more slop straight to your brain.
>>107544409cyberpunk feels outdated because all the good stuff came out in the 80s and 90s so even in their visions of the future people were using CRTs and floppy discs.
>>107546383It's a remix album of the original soundtrack from Deus Ex, made by the original composers.
>>107548411 meant for >>107546407
>>107544409cyberpunk feels outdated because somehow Japan is strong and powerful and at the bleeding edge of technological progress.
>>107544409Reminder that we live in cyberpunk dystopia without the cyber part. If you want to see the cool cyberpunk cities you will have to go to China, but otherwise it’s the same.
>>107544409Cyberpunk feels outdated because we're living in the cyberpunk age and we can see that it's lame and gay.
>>107544409>Cyberpunk feels outdated because conglomerates aren't actually very efficientwe only have indians to thank for that
>>107548411Cool, I'll give it a listen.
>>107544409Yeah, corpo wars would never happen unless we were in a full and unabashed corpratocracy. A lot of the corps in cyberpunk books were never that efficient but had efficient arms. Like hyper lethal kill squads but the business wasn't that great overall but it was a monopoly so it won no matter what. We don't even have a cool aesthetic going at the moment.
>>107544409>conglomerates aren't actually very efficient and most companies stay in their own laneyou say this like companies aren't colluding as we speak to give the usa the illusion of growth when compared with china
I imagine it feels outdated because its a vision of the future that originated in the late 80s and early 90s.
>>107544409not really. it feels outdated because it was made in the 80s when anti-trust laws were still a thing, so they imagined horizontal integration (conglomerates) instead of vertical integration (amazon, google, meta, tesla, etc.)conglomerates exist, mostly in the even more dystopian shape of investment funds and the different types thereoffor example, most glass bottles (>70%) are made by a single company, it is a giant monopoly, but you don't even know their name, and they prefer it that wayanother reason why it feels outdated is because it carried the premise that with deregulation of the economy there would come a deregulation of the individual: that it would be socially acceptable to dress however you want, to do whatever you want to your body, and so on. it didn't come to pass, nowadays you have the opposite, if you are a man you have to go to the gym and be chad, anything else is onions and cringeor the cramped cities: with deregulation (and regulatory capture) what you actually get is bland, boring suburbs with no public transport, let alone nightlife. another fantasy that feels outdated is that there was going to be a escape hatch from surveillance so normal people could still get away with crimes with the correct opsec. china has kind of adopted the aesthetics of cyberpunk but it isn't the same because like half of their economy is state owned, and you can disagree with it, but they have a greater goal (socialism), it isn't pure nihilistic private greed
>>107544409Cyberpunk is outdated because the economy doesn't value rationality whatsoever.
>>107549490If i had to describe it, it would be like if companies are paid to kill themselves so they just keep doing it en masse and everyone is stuck with them because there are basically no alternatives.
>>107548435isn't*
>>107548411Nice. I knew about the album, but I had no idea about the people who made it.
>>107544409conglomerates are more efficient, that is why chinese car companies are eating the western ones.what cyberpunk didnt get is that neoliberalism would kill any actual innovation on those conglomaretes in the west
>>107549487Suburbs are actually result of regulation preventing higher density housing, which is and was mostly done to segregate cheap high density housing from more expensive suburbs to legally get away from niggers. It also forgot or didn’t think about the fact that building houses is expensive and that you actually make more money not building houses and just driving property prices through the moon. However the most important part of it is that they completely ignored deindustrialisation and the effects of it on society. Today in the west nothing is being build because building everything costs 3 times over the budget and almost a decade to finish, so no new glowing skyscrapers, it’s all just paper money being bet on speculative assets, wealth solely on paper.
>>107544409>asian bitch with bobcut>blue and purple only colors>random ass lights all over the placecyberpunk sucks
>>107549818>conglomerates are more efficient, that is why chinese car companies are eating the western ones.Conglomerates are more efficient, but you don't actually know anything about Chinese car manufacturers. Very few of them are conglomerates. There are 80 or 90 domestic car manufacturers, because their political system incentivizes every province to have its own local champion for nationally strategic industries. This has pros and cons. They end up competing so hard that it drives extreme efficiency, but the worst ones never fail, because the provincial government will continue to subsidize their best local company in a sector, even if it is losing market share to a company from another province.But to reiterate the point: the efficiencies of Chinese automobile manufacturers is not due to them being conglomerates, because almost none of them are.
>>107549487>conglomerates exist, mostly in the even more dystopian shape of investment funds and the different types thereofThis guy gets it.
>>107544409>conglomerates aren't actually very efficientThey never were in cyberpunk either.>most companies stay in their own laneNo the big ones.
>>107544409Cyberpunk feels outdated because>1) We are living through a period of technological stagnation. The "tech boom", the vast amounts of money printed to play with HTTPS and see what it could do, is concealing the relatively unimpressive progress in other areas. Consumer ICE vehicles are basically the same as 25 years ago, with the only "improvement" of onboard computers being widely despised and fairly retardedThe essayist Freddie Deboer said something that really stuck with me. Someone from 1925 who is transported to 1975 would find the world populated by incredible new machines and social configurations they could scarcely conceive of. Safe commercial air travel; highways and suburbs, mass visual media in the form of film and television. Someone from 1975 transported to 2025 would find the world not drastically changed EXCEPT for HTTPS-based interactions smoothing every interaction they have out, often in ridiculous and marginal ways (lol instacart).>2) The Web was deliberately deconstructed.I can only partially explain this. But there is the pervasive sense that while early social media engines like Facebook and Myspace led to some genuinely interesting social formations that weren't really possible in the previous world of magazines and nailing flyers to posts. Over the last ten years, maybe because of elite panic or whatever, all social media sites have pivoted to becoming television or television-like substance. Every curated algorithmic feed is, in fact, NOT a person using the internet. However outrageous and stupid the content they're being fed is (and most of this "content" is genuinely socially corrosive), users of Tiktok and Reels and even X the everything app are essentially addicted to bad TV. They are the new Maury Povitch viewer.There are still "actual" websites. I would argue this is one of them... maybe Discord is too? Reddit is like 1/10th website and 9/10th television...
>>107552804...and I would even argue the Web is growing. But the Web is tiny compared to the number of people who just transitioned from watching TV to watching algoslop, a crowd that outnumbers us easily 50 to 1 if not 99 to 1, and it's just not very interesting or cyberpunk that most people sit in front of video they can't meaningfully interact with. Look at this essay I've written you. It's a pretty short essay, I banged it out in probably 20 minutes. Writing this essay would come across as DERANGED behavior to the group I'm describing. In so far as they've ever contributed to the project or output of linking computers together, they've submitted their face and voice to Tiktok, in what is basically a globally sourced iteration of American Idol. The love of networking and interaction does not flow through people who are happy in these places. The world depicted in Serial Experiments Lain simply did not transpire, sorry. The internet is for TV and video games and most people are TOTALLY disengaged from it.>3) Culture is broadly stagnantI'm not really super interested in the why of this but it's obvious. Many people have observed that if you transported an ordinary person from 2002 to your bedroom he would find your clothes fairly ordinary. This decade has seen a seemingly random revival in the popularity of Country music, literally pop-country is popular with college kids right now. This is not a culture where explosive technological development is engendering new and alien cultural forms and social organizations. There are lots of other examples. I think Spotify's back catalog pretty reliably outperforms new, popular music. Netflix's back catalog might follow this principle too. And there is, of course, the remake/remaster epidemic that frustrates people so much.
>>107552970As a final note (and this is the roughest and most theoretical thing I'm gaming out) I'd argue that genAI will choke things off further. We're already in a situation where basically the only important technological development of the last 40 years, the linking of computers to rapidly exchange complex information, failed to generate broader scientific explosion, and mostly turned into television. Now we are completely loading all our ammunition into something that does nothing but produce PREDICTIVE television. Yes, I'm aware of the productivity improvements, I have Copilot at work. But those productivity improvements are MINOR relative to the decline in trustworthiness of information and the general sense among people that the signal/noise ratio on the internet is getting much worse and rapidly. I think we're literally just walking backwards here, out of proto-cyberpunk back into village life. We're witnessing the return of "I don't know" as a thing people have to seriously sit with when wanting to know anything nontrivial. There are a couple of democratic institutions, like Wikipedia, that are obviously not dumpster fires, but those only go so far. Wikipedia is just an encyclopedia.A lot of my thinking is sourced from this essay I've come to view as fairly seminal, written a whole three years ago, if you'd like to see where I lifted a lot of this:https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-overSorry for rambling
>>107544409>Cyberpunk feels outdated because conglomerates aren't actually very efficient and most companies stay in their own laneJews did this to us.They even import poojeets now, all in the name of short-term profits. Based China is the cybertopia future.
>>107553062Screencapped your essay. Liked it a lot.What do you think, see and feel is "coming next"?
>>107544409Cyberpunk feels outdated because Capitalism is outdated.
