I am going to say again, the popular aesthetic of cyberpunk as it is now, is hauntological, a lost future that looks cooler than the one we got; the practical material concerns of it, however, are something that we are living through to some degree or another, and getting worse. - ThreadSky

roryblank.bsky.social • 79 days ago

I am going to say again, the popular aesthetic of cyberpunk as it is now, is hauntological, a lost future that looks cooler than the one we got; the practical material concerns of it, however, are something that we are living through to some degree or another, and getting worse.

Reposted from Sharon ♨️🇨🇦

i think half the problem is that when people hear the term "cyberpunk" they think "neon aesthetics and technoorientalism" versus "what happens when a world accelerates with technological change and backslides morally into a rat race with every man for themselves?"

Comments

geodesicdoom.bsky.social•78 days ago

100%

Reality turns out to be much closer to the endless strip malls and Balkanized suburbia of Snow Crash

funniscrem.bsky.social•78 days ago

There's this one part in Mona Lisa Overdrive where a character's whole job is making up new names for companies through supercomputing and something about the lameness of that really resonates

sifu.tweety.fish•78 days ago

I went to a @greatdismal.bsky.social book signing for Agency, the last one, and he was rather bemused, in answer to a question, that cyberpunk had become a desirable retrofuturist aesthetic while all the actual dystopian shit he'd been noting kept on happening

musicmancer.bsky.social•79 days ago

Hauntological is my new favorite word

canray.bsky.social•78 days ago

psiop.kawaii.social•78 days ago

The aesthetics are just our way of coping with it by imagining if things were sexier and more exotic.

In reality it's just cold banal evil with no redeeming features.

redswirl.bsky.social•78 days ago

smarxy.bsky.social•79 days ago

when that happens i will simply become a nu-meth fueled street samurai with an obsidian technokatana

jmanva.bsky.social•78 days ago

I constantly say to people that we live in a cyberpunk dystopia with absolutely none of the cool shit.

leinaht.bsky.social•79 days ago

the drugs are way less cool than I was led to expect

axewave.net•79 days ago

That’s the secret they don’t tell you: the drugs are never as cool as they lead you to believe. Don’t need a dark future to know that. 🤷

ajjr82.bsky.social•78 days ago

My favourite definition of cyberpunk is that it's a genre where scarcity no longer exists but capitalism still does.

zetsubo.bsky.social•77 days ago

i was thinking just this

roryblank.bsky.social•79 days ago

We got a world more run by sociopathic corporations where everything is increasingly privatized and you have to dehumanize yourself to get through.
We didn't get the cool rain slicked cityscapes of glowing neon and we're not going to, we're going to get more gross suburban sprawl.

mpjohnson.bsky.social•79 days ago

I think we're headed towards the future at the beginning of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash; the US has balkanized into a number of independent countries and people are living in self storage units because that's all they can afford

flowstateneworleans.com•79 days ago

I can't thank you enough for writing this little thread. I think it woke me up to how I was starting to turn inward and hard because of these election results. And now that I've woken back up, I'm not going to let these people push me to dehumanize myself and turn off my empathy.

roryblank.bsky.social•79 days ago

The world of Bladerunner is built with more density and walkability in mind than anything your city planners are likely to build.

binaryape.bsky.social•79 days ago

I feel like a lot of the dystopia elements in classic cyberpunk settings are actually good things feared by people who are wrong: urbanisation, crowds of non-white people, foreign food, non-American companies dominating technology, etc. It's a dystopia for white middle-class suburbanites.

roryblank.bsky.social•79 days ago

I have also said repeatedly said that one one the central themes of cyberpunk is what if an American city was an Asian city.

otternaut.bsky.social•79 days ago

no housing crisis either 🤔

erinsopran.bsky.social•78 days ago

I feel like there definitely was in some cyberpunk - lots of folks squatting in condemned buildings, storage containers under and over bridges etc. The squats may have been from the kind of BS investment overbuying we're seeing now.

otternaut.bsky.social•78 days ago

in Blade Runner it's emigration to the off world colonies.. a new life awaits you!

roryblank.bsky.social•79 days ago

We are living instead in the age of, as my friend @hypercalcium.bsky.social termed it, spam-punk. It's like cyberpunk but louder and uglier and everything's slightly shittier.

fernoir.bsky.social•79 days ago

With friend I started called it boring cyberpunk. All the creeping dystopia none of the fun. Virtual reality is like real, because some people live totally disconnected from the real by absorbing simulacrum through social media. AI is here and it's a hallucinating bot that destroy job and reality.

fernoir.bsky.social•79 days ago

We live in state of total surveillance but it's mostly use to sell you things and can also be weaponize at any moment. The major aesthetical trend is one simulated from a luxury mall. Every production and output must be monetized, even if you don't want. Pedophilic billionaires runs the world.

fernoir.bsky.social•79 days ago

Just dystopia, no fun.

roryblank.bsky.social•79 days ago

None of this is to say I want a flying car, I don’t, I want functional high speed rail, all of this is to say that the paypal mafia and people of their ilk are enemies of humanity itself lol

theafroburgerman.bsky.social•79 days ago

This is why I would rather live in a Post-Cyberpunk world because we heading into a dystopian world and I don't want that.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Analysis/PostCyberpunk

mnemonicer.bsky.social•78 days ago

Humans drive for shit in two dimensions. I don't want to think about adding another dimension to that cognitive test.

greybunny.bsky.social•78 days ago

IIRC in one of Isaac Asimov's where humans piloting flying cars wasn't just illegal, it was nigh impossible, because any functioning 3 Laws robot within line of sight would rush to restrain any human attempting it.

presidenthellsatan.bsky.social•78 days ago

Spam-punk is one of the all time great descriptors

kwwrr.bsky.social•78 days ago

Our reality is a below parody cyber punk. This is how we can accurately gauge that we are WELL BELOW the "neutral" threshold in our current piece of shit Demiurge-driven vertical slice dimension.

jmarquiso.bsky.social•78 days ago

I mean the other part of Cyberpunk was megacorporations running the world and the downtrodden starved for information, so that's still there

hk1988.bsky.social•78 days ago

This dystopia could have the common courtesy of looking like a dystopia.

hk1988.bsky.social•78 days ago

THAT DOESN'T COUNT!

scribblechris.bsky.social•78 days ago

I've been saying the same thing! The concerns that the early cyberpunk authors and artists were responding to have either fully become a part of society or are irrelevant-- whatever contemporary "cyberpunk" should look like, it's not "babe with a mohawk and a robot arm"

Comments

Posting Rules

Reply