141–150 of 165 posts
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Uh... The combatants are members of the armed forces of political entities, not of the private armies of corporations? Checkmate atheists?
Since the conflict began in 2014, Wagner Group PMC has been involved in many operations in Ukraine, which seems to contradict your line of reasoning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner_Group_activities_in_Ukr...
What even is this argument? Why are you people wasting my and your time on this?
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Yes, and it's always been hot in summer! > go to your local record store, look at their wall of employee recs, or gasp talk to them and ask them. What local record store? What local cinema? What local bookshop? Congrats, if you're resistant to addictive algorithms and same-day delivery convenience, but it's ignorant to deny the new baseline.
I understand your point, but it's slightly exaggerated. At least in Europe, any decently-sized city will have at least one of any of those. Not as many as there used to be, sure, but at least one.
At least in Germany, book shops and (small) cinemas are artificially kept alive through regulations (e.g. Buchpreisbindung) and public funding. Theaters got that too, techno clubs not so much. Lucky are the ones who still got a nice deal on rent, because without a solid revenue, your new whatever local scene experiment won't be in the city. Then recently, conservative politicians also decided to attach ideological strings to the funding. What's a good book shop and what's a bad book shop gets intransparently decided by the domestic intelligence service now. The stories our times need will get you demonetized. As we speak, lobbyists are relentlessly trying to push the compliance machinery onto our devices, so we're not tempted by anything outside of commercial supervision either.
It's all converging towards the brave new mainstream. Pretending like all these trends are just fads is wilful ignorance. Media attention may come and go, but the insects remain dead, temperatures unprecedented and art compliant.
We are hardly in need of cyberpunk fiction anymore, tho.
So much of this space has been collapsed into homogenized entertainment. Nowadays, by the time a child is ten years old they have seen every form of the hero’s journey in the cartoons they watch, to the degree where there are tropes and nods to source material or even sometimes derivatives of source. Sci fi, fantasy and other genres are blended in as hooks because cartoons have to keep viewership and eye balls, so th…
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I'd go the other way and say Cyberpunk was meant to be capitalism taken to its logical extreme (unregulated industries rife with corruption, with markets/regimes perturbed only through acts of violence and espionage). As life begins to imitate art, we're met with a The Thick Of It type situation where the satire of reality is no longer applicable and would be further diminished by continuing it > "Time and again, The…
Yeah, the issues of political critique that were key to early cyberpunk have largely been lost. It's partially the fault of the first Blade Runner movie, which exploded the genre while also sanitizing it of the harshest elements.
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When society is affluent enough, people say it will become corrupt and fall apart. But when society has truly deteriorated, stories of heroes come to mind. If you look back at the era when cyberpunk social critiques emerged, the world that led that movement was wealthy, with a thick middle class. But when society starts to become poorer, those kinds of stories become stressful for the public. When you have room to br…
I’ve toyed around with this hypothesis about dark music and edgy culture. The roaring 90s were full of this: dark music exploring critical themes or things like depression and addiction, lots of social criticism, and edgy offensive humor. The mid to late 90s were an economic boom time for a broader segment of people and were optimistic in a way that’s hard to explain today. I like to put it this way: it’s not that th…
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Since the conflict began in 2014, Wagner Group PMC has been involved in many operations in Ukraine, which seems to contradict your line of reasoning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner_Group_activities_in_Ukr...
First, the bulk of the Russian forces are still armed forces personnel. Second, even if most of the Russian forces consisted of mercenaries, their pay and their tactical objectives would come from the Russian government, which also directs the strategic objectives. A cyberpunk corporate war is fought entirely between corporations, for corporate reasons. What even is this argument? Why are you people wasting my and yo…
Cyberpunk as a concept is fairly subjective and subject to interpretation. Perhaps your conception of cyberpunk is more exclusive and prescriptive than others’? I wouldn’t interpret a difference of opinion about the tropes or ethos of cyberpunk in a normative way.
Just because folks see cyberpunk aspects in society or literature that you do not is not a contradiction of your own perceptions. It might be a case of prescriptivism vs descriptivism.
Does art imitate life, or does life imitate art, or both (or neither)? You seem to be saying that cyberpunk is only a literary genre, which is somewhat limiting the discussion when so many cyberpunk works have been adapted to other media, which then inspires other works which were never in written form to begin with. To limit your own discussion to written works is your prerogative, but it seems a needlessly narrow scope for the discussion of others who don’t share your view.
To say that we’re wasting our own time is to discount the fact that others are participating in the discussion in good faith for their own reasons. HN writ large isn’t a means to an end, HN and the individuals of HN are ends unto themselves.