Is there a cyberpunk setting that depicts having cybernetics as a bad thing?Like the crippled get them as substandard cheaply made limb replacements. Or the most desperate laborers get them on credit in order to make their quotas as company workers?Wannabe tough guys who have awkward, oversized arms harvested from folks whose luck has ran out?Special forces guys who got kitted out with top of the line cybernetics only to find out they have to hand it back once they leave the force?Guys whose arms detach in the middle of the night and repossess themselves when they miss a payment?
>>93174072Oops wrong pic
>>93174072All of them? There's always some bs "loss of humanity" shit attached o it or something.
Cyberpunk punishes you quickly if you just want to slap shit on and ignore taking therapy and all that. Only War had low quality bionics that gave you maluses but were easier to get IIRC. Cyberpunk 2020 explicitly mentions that if you want to sign up with a corporation to get some cool stuff you're then sent off to some hellhole like south america.In setting fluff, it happens basically every time. In crunch, in most that I've tried out.
>>93174126realistically all of them make you vulnerable in ways not having them wouldn't.In GITS its a plot point that Togusa doesn't have a cyberbrain thus cannot be hacked. That issue of getting hacked or having factory backdoored cybernetics is basically omnipresent. You then have to pay a hacker to remove the backdoors, but the jerry-rigged firmware will make your arm prone to glitching out.And even if all the above wasn't an issue, voluntarily getting borged is the future equivalent of getting a face tattoo.You don't need any made up reasons to explain why cybernetics are bad. The core theme of cyberpunk is the man against the system. The system perpetuates itself through technologies of control. Putting any technology in your body is the devil's bargain both from an ideological and practical perspective.
>>93174072Pretty much every cyberpunk game if you are stingy with giving players money
Why would you want to make the big attraction of cyberpunk to make you a cripple? There may be disadvantages, but there's a reason people go out of their way to replace limbs for cybernetic ones.
>>93174072What do you think cyberpunk is? Did you just see the word used for anime girls you like and decide you liked it?
>>93174072Real life. Better hope the company making your metal bits remains in business for the next ten years its rated for.
See the dominant Western understanding of human nature before Darwin, and sometime after him of course, was that the human being is the realization of a kind of divine Blueprint, devised by God, a human had a divinely implantedessential human nature. This was an understanding with both ontological and moral implications. Ontologically it was a way to separate humans from the rest of nature, as that which is made in the image of God and has a soul. The ethical implications was that the more in line an individual was with this divine human nature the more moral one was and to deviate from this nature was morally prohibited.However, the theory of evolution had a profound impact on humanity self-understanding. While previously a human being was the realization of something essential and changing an eternal, evolutionary theory presented the human being as part of a constantly changing and contingent process involving transformations, combinations and mutations, which problematize the previously naive notion of a human essence. For many this was a sign of despair. How can the significance of humanity be maintained in light of this discovery? For others, however, this was a sign of hope. If humans evolved out of some previous form, then the future of what humans will evolve into is contingent as well and thus open and full of Possibility.In the cyborg there is this breakdown between the human and nature. It not only accepts the idea that humans were contingently produced, it embraces it. The acceptance of another breakdown between the human and Technology. Even something as simple as wearing glasses is already a form of technology, using some tool external to the body to enhance the body. Thus, technological embodiment is a process that has been going on for a long time and is still accelerating today with things like prosthetic limbs and pacemakers
>>93174746The cyborg accepts this fact and just as in the case of the breakdown between nature and humanity it embraces this fact as a source of potential. Thus, if we understand ourselves as cyborgs, there is no question of returning to some kind of human nature, returning to innocence, or restoring some kind of lost wholeness . Such things were always illusions.The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy and perversity. It is oppositional,utopian, and completely without innocence. The cyborgs would not recognize the Garden of Eden. It is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. A cyborgs is a disassembled and reassembled postmodern collective and personal self.
>>93174759There is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction. Unlike those who despair in the face of disintegrating boundaries, the cyborg takes pleasure in them, and if boundaries are unstable that means they can be reconfigured and so the cyborg takes responsibility in the construction of new ones.This is one of the themes of cyberpunk. People or more accurately cyborgs embracing the transgression of boundaries and recreating themselves through technology. Previously political solidarity was often understood as being possible on the basis of some common underlying Nature. But the cyborg instead calls for solidarity precisely on the basis of difference, not sameness.The protagonists of cyberpunk stories are often social outcasts, the socially marginalized and Delegitimized, in other words those that have been denied their claims to human nature. They embrace this position and organize with others, hackers, data pirates ,and guerrilla fighters, not on the basis of some underlying human nature but precisely through their differences, through the various machining connections that unleash their potentials.
Am I the only one the finds it weird that the image of people just randomly having a prosthetic arm or leg just to have one makes no sense? I don't imagine people are going out of their way to get into accidents or that everyone is some kind of hardened soldier/mercenary getting hurt on the job.I suppose if the world it takes place in is so violent that even the ultra wealthy catch a stray bullet every now and again when gangs clash or terrorist for hire plow through your office to steal some paperwork.
IRL prosthetics kind of suck compared to stock parts. Janky, heavy, imprecise, battery powered crap. It's expensive and fragile and uncomfortable. Even if you got bulletproofing and cyberninja strength and reflexes out of the deal, even if the tech improves more than the wildest predictions of anyone who can tell a servo motor from a toaster oven, you've still gone through invasive surgery to hang overpriced crap on your body and for what?You still run slower than a train and lift less than a forklift (leverage!) and are you any better at making breakfast than you were before? Being a super soldier is cool and fun but it's just a day job. Who cares about wholeness or connection to god or cyberpsychosis? Life's the same as before except you gotta charge your legs and swap into your civilian arms before you hit the club. Cyberware is inconvenient, expensive, scary to women and children, but cool as hell. Like a motorized wheelchair, or a missile launcher.
By 2050, improvements in interfacing devices with the nervous system will allow replacements of lost limbs with pressure & temperature sensitive prosthetics which will allow amputees to wear a prosthetic with a true sense of touch and reflexes sufficient to catch a ball, feel the difference between silk and sandpaper, and wield tools with able agility and responsiveness.
>>93174072CP literally has humanity loss, Shadowrun has them eat away something similar, and so on
>>93174922They're like electric cars. Techbros, fetishists, and wannabe gangstas would jump on the tech faster than the military or anyone with a real profession.
We have a tendency to incorporate circuitry into devices. By 2050 the improvements in miniaturization, production cost, and durability will have extended this to most clothing, either interwoven into garments or as routine accessories like buttons or belts. It will be fairly normal for cameras, data storage, wifi & phone antennas, and even limited power production & storage to be worn rather than carried, such a micro-solar panels built into clothes or generators tapping body motion. Combined with Augmented Reality and Cloud Computing, this would mean most people carried their computer and interface with them, and those interfaces would begin to switch away from keyboard, mouse, and touchpad to speech, body gestures, and eye motions. Sensor packets built into the garments would heavily enhance medical monitoring, remote control of drones & devices, and allow constant recording of day to day events, with an additional positive effect on emergencies involving accidents & crime, as well as search engines devoted to indexing and searching those recorded “Second Memories”.
>>93174967Enhancements in the cost, durability, and miniaturization of recording & storage medium will result in most people casually recording events around them almost continuously, with serious positive and negative effects on everything from crime & health to privacy & social relationships. Because this would be a digital and chronologically stored archive, search engines would be tailored to index and locate data in a fashion more consistent with human memory and objectives, such as a rapid search and recall of where you left your keys, how many times you ate a given meal, how many calories you consumed or steps you have taken this month, or what that joke was that a friend told you at a party last year and you can’t quite remember. Further ahead in time, improvements in Artificial Intelligence or Mind-Machine interfaces could cause this to be more like a personal assistant or a direct interface into your normal memory and recall.
>>93174922I imagine they're status symbol for some, like there's a purpose for gold teeth but they also show you can afford them
>cybernetics actually bad How incredible boring. Legletts the very lot of you.
>>93174952The military aspect of it also bothers my autism. I couldn't imagine the military just letting in any asshole who has a prosthetic limb for cosmetic reasons or otherwise nor would they go out of their way to borg up a soldier who might bounce after their enlistment if they last that long.>>93174992True but cutting off a perfectly good arm or leg is far in a way more drastic than getting gold teeth although I suppose doing so is a flex in and of themselves.I think for me part of that problem stems from how you view augmentations/prosthetics and their availability and ease of acquiring and using and that the people of that world are more sensible then I give them credit because only the rich and their posers could afford to cut off a hand to put a goldplated one they can beat their meat or tickle their nubs to cyber porn.
>>93174932yeah precisely, the only people who'd use cybernetics are either crippled, terminally desperate or are freaks.Yet most mainstream systems (CP and SR) consider getting chromed out just a fact of life.
>>93175066Nonsense. Everyone but the most conservative would gladly install themselves with stuff such as biomonitors to check one's health, cyber-eyes, internal comms, improvements to the digestive system to make themselves immune to alcohol and substances, extra memory, calculators etc. You limit yourself by just thinking about limbs.
>>93174746>>93174759>>93174778I appreciate the thoughtful argument, but the main issue with cybernetic accelerationism, is that transhumanism is a stopgap ideology compared to posthumanism.Building specialized robots not constrained by the human form or mind is probably easier than grafting an excavator arm on a human the required technology is higher and the end result will be worse.
As you get older, you'll wish to have a cybernetic spine that doesn't cause you episodes of excruciating back pain.
>>93175094All of which would come with helpful telemetry in order to improve the customer experience, uploading all of siad data to Corpo HQ servers in real-time
>>93175101>We'll give you a credit on your funeral services if you let us remove any usable prosthetics post-mortem.
I just had an idea of a progression system where you must buy DLC for your cyber arm to activate hardware that's already there
>>93175066A subtle aspect of Cyberpunk worldbuilding is that almost everybody is either a crippled, terminally desperate freak or one bad day away from being one. It's like a dystopia in here.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/XD3wphJyKDU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3n7eNFj_9Vk
>>93174072Sounds like Cyberpunk
>>93175133What a coincidence, I just had an idea of shooting you in the face.
>>93174072>Special forces guys who got kitted out with top of the line cybernetics only to find out they have to hand it back once they leave the force?Isn't that literally what's happening in Ghost In The Shell?
>>93175608They get replacement prosthetic bodies and their memories taken/wiped.
>>93175644Maybe.I just remember a scene where 2 characters were discussing retirement, with one admitting they had 0 original part left and saying retirement wasn't an option or something like this.Haven't seen it in literal decades tho, should probably re-watch it one day.
>>93175133Metroid: The RPG
>>93175651It's from the movie where Kusanagi and Toga are talking on the boat while also lamenting the fact that their prosthetic bodies can quickly break down alchohol so they don't have hangovers and can get to work quick fast and in a hurry.
The only one I can immediately think of is the 2000 AD comic Brink.Prosthetics are just prosthetics, and despite everyone being crammed into space stations, everyone is just normal flesh and blood.
>>93175019mah Jiannaif you're not 100% chrome you're walking loam
Poor people prosthetics doesn't really land. They went hard on it with that deus ex sequel and the problem is that it's fucking stupid. The money has to come from somewhere to give destitute people extremely complex surgery to add engineering tools to their arms. Those arms are more expensive than the person is, lol. It's entirely backwards.There's also an inherent problem in that if you're making a cyberpunk game, odds are cybernetic enhancements are just fantastic. You got amazing power and beyond human abilities and adding in some lines about repossession or faults or whatever into the fluff wont change that all your players are gonna be talking about what bit they're gonna replace with a landmine dispenser next. And if you don't make them cool, then why bother getting them at all?
>>93174072>do you know any space operas that are set in space?
>>93174922>what is opulence
>>93174072Johnny's Numonics's plot was built around a disease associated with too much exposure to electronics
>>93175040>the people of that world are more sensible then I give them creditLook up Kopi luwak
>>93178865You can approach it by making people indebt themselves to death just to keep up with the rat-race job requirements.
>>93174072Yeah, I like the idea of nanotechnology enhancements better than plain old cybernetics, you get the key benefits but a lot fewer downsides.
>>93174072Literally all of them.
>>93174072I've done the "give the ware back after your service is over" thing in Shadowrun and roleplayed my character's medical replacement arm failing, but the system didn't make me do it. You have to agree to this kind of thing with your group, really. It sucks that most people are shit at playing this kind of game and would rather have a shallow power fantasy
>>93179106Yeah but surgery and mechanical arms are mad expensive. It's fronting this huge cost so that you can have indentured servants that will clearly never make that money back anyway when they already exist that makes it weird. It's like a scifi setting coming up with a crazy new energy source to explain everyone using rollerskates to get around. We already have rollerskates. That's not the bit that you need to justify.>>93186644I mean considering these games are pretty shallow regardless, it's the choice between a shallow power fantasy or a shallow not very powerful fantasy. The writing isn't going to get better just because it's not cool anymore. I'd like the skullgun if I had the choice.
>>93186767What does the writing have to do with anything? You are the one making the game work when you're at the table. Reading every bit of the game's lore is for literal retards. The lore that matters is the stuff that comes up at the table which is functionally cherry-picked and if you have a good group that means it's quality controlled and probably altered to some extent.
>>93174072That's ever single cyberpunk setting ever. Have you opened a book once in your life?
>>93175066I mean those are two systems where you tend to play terminally desperate freaks who either cripple themselves constantly or need to be chromed out to avoid dying.
>>93174072Basically every cyberpunk thing?
>>93175133The future is fucking now, baby.
>>93174922I think it might just be that it's a clear and visible way for artists to communicate the idea of a character being part of a high-tech world, rather than a worldbuilding thing.>>93175040>nor would they go out of their way to borg up a soldier who might bounce after their enlistment if they last that long.I have a funky PDF for you to check out, if that's the way you're thinking.
>>93187077You know what? I stand corrected.
>>93175019Are his legs OK?
>old cyberpunk: it might make you faster, stronger, or more beautiful but it will never make you happier and in the end you'll realize what you lost can't be replaced>new cyberpunk: UwU slay queen you'll be the prettiest androgynous 'runner at the club with your new cyberheels, remember to thank the megacorps that invented these surgeries and tip your ripperdoc for making you happy ™Cyberpunk didn't fail us. We failed cyberpunk.
>>93188464>in the end you'll realize what you lost can't be replacedHumanity and Essence are balancing mechanics with a fluff justification stapled onto them, they're not actually sourced from the original inspirational media.
>>93188587This. Not only are they just balancing mechanics from the tabletop RPGs with no direct source, they're a 1:1 match for the feefees of people who are too chickenshit to modify themselves even in a game of make-believe. It taps directly into the obnoxious retard part of your brain that hates people with tattoos, piercings and color hair because they had the balls to do something you couldn't. Sour grapes mapped to literally calling bodymodders subhuman
>>93188961>actually pretending humanity loss isn't real.It's Anno Floydus 4, get with the program
>>93174072in Half-Life 2 all transhuman operatives are cybernetic slave-fodder for Our Benefactors of the Universal Union, which some small minds have labeled as the 'Combine'
When my war is over, I'll take it off and put it back into locker and move on. You will carry yours for the rest of your chromed up life.
>>93189559When your war is over, the you that tried to grandstand will be dust in the wind, replaced by whatever unguided version of you overwrote it in your sleep. I'm the sum of my choices, solid where I want permanence, fluid where I want change. You never chose anything at all, so you barely exist.
>>93174072Johnny Mnemonic
>>931749221. It looks cool 2. The rich are the most likely to afford the best prosthetic limbs.
>>93175101>>93175116What if the only major spine prosthetic is a used one? What if it's worn in subtle ways based on the personal characteristic of the previous user? Does a "ghost in the machine" exist? If not, what is the things you've been feeling since the installation?
>>93175172>like a dystopiaAnon, Cyberpunk IS a dystopia, just covered with shiny chrome and neon and corporate ads.
>>93191590Please, ESL-kun, please.
>>93191575I can't remember the specifics of where I saw it but I remember seeing something where a guy got something transplanted to him from a deceased doner and suddenly started expressing some habits the deceased had.I could imagine it being a thing with a major implant like spinal/nervous/brain stuff where suddenly you have experiences, memories, or muscle memory from the previous owner.
>>93189559The joke is that my war is never going to be over.
>>93186779>What does the writing have to do with anythingThat part of the lore is half the justification for the entire aesthetic, lol. You'd be ignoring the reason why most of the characters you meet are doing what they do, you don't just handwave that bit unless you're doing a fan setting or something. Why even play in an established setting if you'd have to actively rewrite the guiding motivation for any character that isn't corpo or military?>>93190107Big words for a guy who removed his cock and balls.
>>93189067Were the transhuman overwatch supposed to be evil? seemed like they were actively fighting to preserve the species.
>>93174072Kenshi
>>93174759>The cyborgs would not recognize the Garden of Eden.You cheeky bastard! You’re just quoting A Cyborg Manifesto!Haraway? On my 4chan?It’s more likely than you think.
>>93178865In Human Revolution/Mankind Divided the prosthetics were mostly installed by corporations who gave them on a student loan style payoff system. People still have them because the tech to give them back biological arms doesn't exist yet
>>93198613Sometimes, dead is better.
>>93174072Twig (long biopunk web serial) mentions that dockworkers often get cheap muscle implants that end up having bad side effects due to being poorly designed (e. g., not enough skeletal support).
>>93191900That could make for a cool bit of character and world-building. Someone who has implanted himself with reused body parts experiencing and displaying echoes from former owners.
>>93174746>>93174759Whenever you think of skipping leg day, remember that this is Feminist Ideology.
>>93175756Thing is that he can just put on a passive exo to get the load off the connection.
>>93198613Citizen: by this post you are here by allotted one hour of non-mechanical reproduction-simulation.
>>93198613Transhuman Overwatch are professional. The real scum were those in Civilian Protection. The metrocops are basically untrained street thugs who enjoy harassing citizens for entertainment, and they're exceedingly weak against someone who can fight back.
>>93174932>lift less than a forklift (leverage!)what about exoskeleton vests for workers?
>>93175040> or otherwise nor would they go out of their way to borg up a soldier who might bounce after their enlistment if they last that long.What do you mean? You get top of the line military hardware in your body while you enlisted. You want to retire? All of that gets ripped out and replaced with the cheapest replacements the government can source.As a soldier you have a robot arm that can punch through tank armor. When you leave the army they pop that off and give you something that struggles to left 15 pounds before they let you walk out the door. You don't own the military cyberware anymore than you own the tank you drive or the gun you carried.
>>93198613Its a matter of perspective. The combine are horrifying masters to serve, but serving them was the only viable way forward for humanity. If Breed had not negotiated with the Combine to take in humanity as a vassal race, there would not BE a humanity left by the time Halflife 2 begins. Thats a solid fact. No military victory against the Combine was possible. So its really a question of whether you accept taking the shitty deal that lets you live, or whether you would rather fight to the end in a battle that is literally impossible to win.
>>93207874>She can whistle while blowing you.
