One could also say that all of Gibson and Sterling's early novels were warnings, describing in some detail near future cyberpunk dystopias.
When reading Neuromancer and Count Zero, the cumulative sum of the evocative description of "the sprawl" and the post war environment led me to form a fairly bleak mental picture of the place. And floating above all that an ultra elite class of the 1% of the 1% (sensenet stars, the tessier-ashpools, etc).
Islands in the Net also paints a picture of radically even more unequal wealth distribution, coupled with massive economic disruptions and civil wars in developing nations.
Right. To me cyberpunk is about what happens when extreme wealth inequality is coupled to extreme technological advances such that the richest are immortal (for all practical purposes) and don't need the 99% since all production has been automated and any attempt at a revolution is made futile by military drones
I find it extremely ironic that the game touches upon themes of corporate greed and climbing the corporate ladder (I've only played it until I got a soft lock during the 3rd tutorial). How else do you get themes of technology being a boon to society? Isn't it these companies who indirectly dictate this (e.g by using your public data)?
CD Projekt Red is a great example of why publicly owned companies and creating expectations for unreasonable deadlines for any software is going to cause your employees to deal with crunch and release something that doesn't work that great. Unfortunately I'm sure that this game will entertain more than it will highlight horrible industry practices.
I have heard a lot of murmurs about "horrible industry practices" regarding CD Projekt Red, but nothing concrete. Is this just a smear campaign, or a half-truth being thoughtlessly repeated because it fits preexisting narratives?
Or more to the point, were they violating Polish or EU labor laws?
Combine that with the unoptimized, buggy state the game is in. Many streamers had the game crash, forcing them to redo the combat encounter because you can't save in combat.
I have a beefy pc setup that I purchased recently specifically for Cyberpunk 2077 and some other demanding PC games still in development (wink wink Star Citizen) and I have had one non-gameplay bug in my couple of hours of play where elevator doors didn't open for my partner but did for me. The situation is very different for people using the previous gen consoles though, it seems, and I feel bad for them. I have a couple of good friends in this cohort who were very much looking forward to the game.
(not to mention bus drivers in the capital driving under influence of metaamphetamine to keep up with the pressure)
Poland is the China of Europe. But in relations with the real China, Poland is like a colony: exporting raw resources(like copper), importing manufactured goods. And Polish president acts servile towards Xi Jinping.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yfjsZujQqc
Polish law specifies that the standard working time is 8 hours every 24 hours but we have reports of employees as early as one year ago who reported night and week-end hours.
Even if you don't believe anonymous employee reports, the studio's chief Adam Badowski announced in September that working time will now involve Saturdays.
To me, too many pointers are highlighting a toxic crunch culture in that studio to be ignored. I will not play Cyberpunk because of that.
Its a mixed bag. They promised no crunch, but there was crunch anyways. IIRC they gave bonuses and other forms of compensation for the extra work. From what I hear they have a very generous payscale relative to regional norms (Poland) and many team members stand to make a small fortune off the release of Cyberpunk 2077.
Of course executives and investors will make much more off the release then the individuals who made the game.
> I have heard a lot of murmurs about "horrible industry practices" regarding CD Projekt Red, but nothing concrete. Is this just a smear campaign, or a half-truth being thoughtlessly repeated because it fits preexisting narratives?
The crunch is very real, but the silent part is that insane working hours and crunching are a staple of gaming industry. Pretty much every single project ends up in this state and the stories can get pretty horrifying (Blood, Sweat and Pixels is an interesting read on this topic - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34376766-blood-sweat-and... ).
The strange part of this story is the way how it's set to snipe at certain companies - CDProjekt and Rockstar were target of these stories, but other development studios for some reason weren't.
I remember when the (then) anonymous EA Spouse posting went up bringing wider attention to the routine practices of the game industry. Long story short, game companies can abuse the enthusiasm of young people of the medium and burn them out, over and over, for little pay. There is always someone behind you to happily take your seat. It's one of the reasons I left that field early in my career.
Yeah, the targeting is the most interesting part of this story for me. All of the best AAA games are the best because a lot of people put a tremendous amount of effort into them. If you want to make a new game that's a serious contender for one of the best games of all time, and you want an ambitious, deep world and story in a realistic setting, you're going to have to match or exceed previous efforts. If you find enough people who are as interested in the concept and want to make it happen, it's possible and it will probably never be a walk in the park.
There's always a market for indie-scale games, 2D platformers, simple but innovative 3D games, etc, where good, simple ideas are more important than huge amounts of effort. But there's also a market for complex games, and if they're well done, people will happily pay for them.
source: over a decade in the modding and gamedev community, never done it professionally (yet) but have made some popular mods/minigames, and a decent grasp of how much work goes into large-scale games and how much you have to want to make it happen for it to happen, and sometimes, you're willing to spend these long days, and sometimes it's even enjoyable before the money and fame start rolling in, or at least enjoyable enough to stick with it.
I hope, and suspect, nobody who is working on AAA games has zero interest or joy in making big, complicated games.
You get the job because you have skills at it. You have skills at it because you were interested enough to learn them. Those skills are worth money. All of the articles criticizing gamedev seem to miss this.
I think that gaming is such a competitive industry that in order to stay relevant, you need to either essentially rip your customers off or overwork your employees. I hear that jobs at EA and King these days are relatively chill, and both are hated for their monetization strategies. While investor pressure certainly doesn't help, I think the same dynamic would exist even if all video game companies were bootstrapped.
I think you are partially right with the cynisism. And those companies are chill now because of scandals and making more money. But it is also a creative industry, many of those are hard to begin with. How do you compete with people/companies enjoying working seven days and sleeping in the office, and possibly at higher skill. Creating games can be extremely fun, and it can burn you out in the process. And people take paycuts to join the industry because it is fun. Every new game project is also like a startup because of all these factors.
I still have memories of writing code in my car with the heater on full blast because the building shut off all heat at midnight (middle of snowy winter) and by 1am you could see your breath in the office.
> The strange part of this story is the way how it's set to snipe at certain companies - CDProjekt and Rockstar were target of these stories, but other development studios for some reason weren't.
It seems to be cyclical that the company in the cross-hairs has a bad PR year and people talk about only the one company as if it isn't a systemic problem until memory gets blurry and people forget the last time it came up, and few people connect the dots to the systemic problem. (Almost every major publisher has been in the spotlight at some point in time or another. EA very famously had the "EA Spouse" cycle of bad press. Activision had one a few years later.)
If there is something interestingly strange here it's that CD Projekt Red tried to buck the system and do the right thing and its getting smeared so badly that it tried and failed. The takeaway for a lot of people is going to be subconsciously "it's better not to try at all to do better and stick with the status quo", which is hard not to assume is intentional this cycle from some of the members of the status quo. (It resembles other anti-union bullying tactics.)
I actually had really low expectations for this game precisely because of how much hype and marketing there had been surrounding it over the past couple of years. IMO anything in this world that requires that much in-your-face-evangelism is probably shady beneath the surface.
Therefore, I'm pleasantly surprised, it's actually a playable game with a decent looking world.
Same for fight club, that movie had a dumb title, kept being advertised on TV as a Cassette you could buy. Who advertise for a movie when you can’t watch it in theaters anymore? Then I watched the movie and... oh.
I have always been a patient gamer. I don't have much patience for jank and I don't usually go through multiple play throughs of a game like this.
And since, I haven't been able to get my hands on one of the new GPUs at an acceptable price, I would probably wait for at least a few months before purchasing this.
Looking at the bad press coverage CDPR got for handling their staff, I am tempted to think that they haven't handled their success with the Witcher series very well. Video Games production, in general, seems to rely a lot on careful management and highly organized work. So mishandling developer issues, like they have seemingly done, is very short sighted.
I hope they learn their lessons, as far as management is concerned and settle in for the long haul on this. If they can demonstrate good faith as they fix this game's issues, the real Rockstar type money would come pouring in for the sequel of this game.
Heh, maybe you remember Syndicate (1993) [0], "set in a dystopian future in which corporations have replaced governments, Syndicate puts the player in control of a corporation vying for global dominance. "
Ironically, the creators themselves at Bullfrog Productions got a very bitter tasting cookie [1] around that time selling to EA, cut from the same dough...
> Unfortunately I'm sure that this game will entertain more than it will highlight horrible industry practices.
This statement may still be true, but Cyberpunk 2077 actually did a great job at highlighting the gaming industry's horrible practices due to CD Projekt Red promising to keep away from the status quo of mandatory crunch time. Breaking that promise put mandatory crunch time in social media's limelight.
Software industry in general can be exploitative but the corporation itself is not. On the contrary, their commitment to DRM free software says the opposite.
Of course it would all be nicer without crunch in software, but I think many know how realistic that is with such a project. I hope employees get their deserved free time and compensation and I believe they will, even if there is still work to do.
So while CDPR might not be perfect, it behaves better than its competitors on user rights, which affects employees too. And this is not insignificantly better conduct.
"The technology is a couple steps higher, and so forth, but in this particular universe, technology is not good for people.
Pollution is rampant, crime is rampant and social and economic inequality is just accepted."
So what is the difference with our current world again?
Not trying to be a cynic here, but if we were to accept that most crimes aren't violent, then this description fits with what we have now.
The landscape of Cyberpunk 2077 itself looks exactly like many east Asian metropolis at night.
We’re living in a cyberpunk dystopia. Fiction of the past (1984, blade runner) were exaggerated extrapolations of the path we have been on. The path was clear then and it’s clear now. Nothing has changed.
But for a real dystopia we do have quite some freedom and wealth.
(That means, if the lockdowns go away at some point. If not, well, then yes. Total dystopia. Everything private total restricted, only corporate and state buisness allowed. Peoples private life only exist in virtual realities)
edit: everything is relative. I was born in east germany. A state where I would not have been allowed to openly say my opinion, or drive 30 km with my bycicle to the west or south, from where I live, as I would have been arrested or literally shot back then. Pretty dystopian in comparison. Also, people in north korea can say something today, about what dystopian feels like. That means, no they cannot, while they are there.
I don't know if we have freedom and wealth as correlated to happiness and fulfillment in life, however. And that's precisely what the cyberpunk genre originally was created as a commentary on- the ability to have so much advancement and also so much misery.
Society on average? Well, I guess by the amount of prescribed happy pills, probably yes. But I guess it will be hard to meassure, if past generations were really happier.
In any case, with freedom and wealth you can build up and life alternatives today. There are quite some people out there trying this, with various success.
Metaverse, aspect of Snow Crash, is basically like MMOs such as World of Warcraft or Second Life, but once Facebook goes 3D (and to me the question is when with AR/VR), its more akin to Facebook.
Wealth is so unevenly distributed that some people have 3 jobs just to pay their rent, whereas others buy their entire street's housing just to have a privacy while being the CEO of one of the worst private collection companies in the world (Facebook).
I find 'mandatory' to be a bit of a blurry concept, knowing what we know now about the malleability and susceptibility to various 'mind viruses' that we humans have.
Sure, it's definitely important to acknowledge the difference, but it's also important to realize that we are not rational creatures that use our freedom well when there are all sorts of well-crafted 'hacks' applied to our brains on a constant basis.
I think Cyberpunk understandably covers these themes with underline, highlight, and big red circles. Narratively it's easier to exaggerate.
But it's really just shades of gray between being forced to take a happy pill, and being told, explicitly or not, by experts, friends and family that you should do so.
> So what is the difference with our current world again?
Disagree.
IMO the worst thing is government surveillance, and our lack of true democracy. It makes me sad that when Snowden made his revelations, absolutely nobody did anything. However...
Electric cars and renewables are happening. Just look at the opening sequence of Blade Runner (staged in 2019?), and tell me we really live in that world.
It's definitely not the case that economic inequality is "just accepted". Yes, it's a part of our lives, but the social justice moment is also huge, and sometimes misguided. They have caused a lot of things to change though.
IMO, to create positive change, we really need to get away from the "it's just pointless" mindset.
What's that line, the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet?
Walking around SF and I definitely feel like we're pretty much at the radical inequality cyberpunk future we were promised. I walk outside and see self-driving cars right next to tent cities and people cooking over open flames on the sidewalk.
Having been to SF, I can see what you mean. I had never seen someone shoot heroin or smoke crack until I walked the streets of SF. I'm thankful that there are other cities and countries one can choose where to live. I hope they don't all end up that way.
What actual change has the social justice movement effected? I know it's very loud and powerful when turned against isolated individuals, but I was unaware of a successful track record against the actual systemic causes of the various injustices they oppose. I just assumed that as a leaderless movement without clear goals or a definable end state ("end racism and sexism" is as malleable as "end terrorism" is), they functioned more as a pressure release valve for the frustration of a generation denied the freedoms of their predecessors without being anesthetized by the numbing flood of meaningless content and nihilistic culture that will safely neuter their descendants, than an effective agent for change.
That's why I said sometimes misguided. We did get gay marriage. We are getting marijuana legalization and decriminalization of many drugs, which is good in terms of inequality and social issues, because it puts less people into private prisons for victimless crimes.
But I do agree that there is a flood of nonsense. When I was a kid, it used to be "race and gender shouldn't matter". Now they define you by your race and gender, it's the only thing that matters. Just throws gasoline on the fire IMO.
I don't want to start a flamewar or anything. I think you are misunderstanding the issues around race and gender. And it's not really your fault--messaging on this issue is not very clear and there has been a massively toxic tendency to end discussion by declaring someone "a racist" and shutting them out.
When I was young, my progressive, well-meaning parents taught me that I should be color-blind and not see race or gender, thinking that a generation of such people would naturally make a world with more equality of opportunity.
The problem is that that didn't work. All it did was create a generation of people who were illiterate in regards to the impacts of race and gender discrimination. It created a blind spot where those who wanted to discriminate could hide.
Data shows that race and gender have wide reaching impacts on one's ability to access services including education and healthcare, interactions with the justice system, and employment. The sad truth is that categories of race and gender have an outsized impact on your prospects and people have always been defined by them in this country.
In some sense, the earlier campaigns were successful--most people agree that overt segregation and discrimination are a bad thing. That's huge progress. But since we have mostly ceased practicing overt forms of discrimination, how is it that these disparities persist? There are two options either there are unconscious and unintentional biases that have a significant impact or the lingering side effects of discrimination keep historically marginalized groups at a significant disadvantage. (I think both cases are true, but that doesn't impact my argument.)
If we want to understand why we have these disparate outcomes, we have to pay attention to race and gender and how we behave in relation these categories. Only by doing so can we hope to resolve the underlying issues that drive social imbalance.
If you want to learn more about this from someone far, far more expert on the topic than myself, I recommend listening to some interviews with or articles by Ibram X. Kendi. His work is insightful and accessible.
Hmm. I don't think that those are the only two options, though; disparities can exist for reasons other than historical marginalization or unconscious bias, and by framing the debate exclusively in those terms, you are blinding yourself to other possibilities. I'm most concerned with the second option, however, as it's too broad a category. The "lingering side effects of discrimination" can be used to explain every negative outcome afflicting a community, and be used to justify pretty much any remedy. It's a dangerous tool, as it very easily obscures directly addressable causes of problems in favor of wide, epic narratives of historical oppression. And I suspect that certain people favor it for aesthetic rather than effective reasons - it is much easier to raise support from people by saying that their problems are caused by the malicious or ignorant other than that their problems are addressable and solvable at the community level.
For example, you can assert that urban violence and gang warfare are the results of generational poverty and discrimination of black people - you'd be right - but that assertion doesn't necessarily offer the most accurate or useful model of the issue. Most importantly, I would argue that it shifts the focus for the solution onto external factors (wider discrimination in society) rather than internal ones (such as, stop being violent with one another). The second option sounds ridiculous, but it has worked in the past. [0]
History is too easy a scapegoat for current problems. Thinking of outcome disparity only in the contexts of history and unconscious bias leads to distortions in the solution space. Unfortunately, by reframing debate around racial and historical lines, certain people have been able to extract wealth and influence from their communities without providing actionable solutions or illuminating easier interventions that would greatly aid in solving problems. I'm unfortunately a pessimist in this matter; the racial divide is a very useful one to certain interests. With a small investment of wealth and prestige to media outlets and academics, they can keep the people in lower economic classes biting at each other rather than focusing on the much more oppressive and harmful background radiation of wealth inequality that serves as a precondition to their actual struggles.
The social ramifications of slavery are negative; no one can reasonably dispute that. But the reason that the prison state is expanding, social programs are crumbling, violence seems ever-present, and the outcome of every successive generation is worse and worse is the ticking along of vast systems forming the bedrock of the American economy. These systems do not care about the race of the people ground beneath their wheels, nor the gender of the blood that slicks their gears; they accept all to offer their bodies and lives in supplication, to suborn their will to alien gods and inhuman reckoning.
Great comment. I think a big part of the problem, that I feel Cyberpunk actually highlights really well, is the degree to which problems are ultimately defined by and related to the individual. And, unfortunately, constrained.
Take the hippie movement. It's often associated with 'the left' but I'd argue that the navel-gazing focus on individual enlightenment caused immense damage to the ability of those without power to collectively have enough of it to see some changes.
Cyberpunk, intentionally or not, highlights this. The typical Cyberpunk scene is a person alone, getting by. Any kind of 'collective' behavior is nipped in the bud by surveillance and whatnot. Any solutions involve that lone person forming valuable relationships with other lone persons (or robits, I guess).
The dystopia, I feel, is usually not experientially the marketing, the massive corporate powers, and so on. It's the stifling isolation, and the only solution that's remotely viable is finding another single soul to share it with.
What I've found interesting about a show/book series like The Expanse, is that it dips into the Cyberpunk themes with the detective dude (I don't think it's a coincidence that Cyberpunk and film noir often overlap, the latter just an earlier iteration of the former). But eventually that guy, in the expanse of multiple planets, has options to find something bigger, more collective, to be part of.
> IMO the worst thing is government surveillance, and our lack of true democracy.
Agreed on the lack of democracy, although it is really nothing new. Gerrymandering has been an issue for decades now. Corporate lobbyists have been openly bribing bureaucrats for quite a while too. The 1980s are, on this regard, not that different from the present.
This is also compatible with a cyberpunk-esque world, though.
> Just look at the opening sequence of Blade Runner (staged in 2019?), and tell me we really live in that world.
Apart from the flying cars, I can think of several metropolis that look almost the same, including the pollution levels.
I was in Beijing five years ago, around September. Out of four days, I think I saw the blue sky only once, the day of my arrival, and it was because the authorities banned the circulation of 2.5 million cars for two weeks in August. I believe it was something related to a national holiday, but I'm not quite sure.
LA is not that far from it either.
> It's definitely not the case that economic inequality is "just accepted". Yes, it's a part of our lives, but the social justice moment is also huge, and sometimes misguided.
No comments on the "misguided" bit.
To be blunt, economic inequality is accepted, especially in the US. The ideas of the Protestant work ethic and the Prosperity theology, so deeply rooted in the American psyche, revolve around it. There is no movement that would change that in a generation or two, because too much is at stake.
Gay marriage took centuries to be legalized, and it wasn't until 2003 that SCOTUS ruled sodomy laws unconstitutional. Women's suffrage in the US was legalized in the 1920s, over a century after the country was founded, and still women struggle to enjoy full autonomous rights until quite recently. Many people of color couldn't vote until the mid 1960s! Or have the same access to essential services as other citizens.
My point is, these movements need to exert a constant pressure on society, for decades if needed, to achieve results. And, on the other hand, it may only take a few months or years to undo everything. I'm pointing here to the 1970s and 1980s, when many individual protections were repealed, and corporations of all kinds took advantage of that.
In summary, I respect your optimism, but a cyberpunk world also has electric cars and demonstrations on the streets.
China is ahead of everyone when it comes to electric cars and solar energy. They've fully embraced that this is a technological change that must and will happen. Precisely because of how aware they were of the air pollution issue.
> China is ahead of everyone when it comes to electric cars and solar energy.
Debatable. China solar output accounts for maybe 2% of their total electricity production. They are ahead on electric vehicle sales.
But I find quite ironic that you would use China as an example, when the measures taken to curb pollution in Beijing include, among others: forcing the switch from gasoline powered motorcycles to electric/gas ones, limit the number of citizens allowed to own or drive cars, and forbidding the use of coal powered broilers.
Because I thought you were worried about lack of democracy, and government surveillance.
I would strongly argue that lot's of technology is great for people. CyberPunk didn't really anticipate how cheap solar and wind power would become, and a lot of the 1980's projections expect rising energy costs. Beyond that, just look at things like the mRNA vaccines rolling out this week. The technology behind it is something you can almost work with in a home lab, but was unimaginable 10 years ago, and will save millions of lives.
> Pollution is rampant
This is true in place, but it's getting better. China is starting to clean up, and India looks to be making moves in this direction. The US is far cleaner and greener than it was in the 80s. The famous smog over L.A. is nearly gone.
> crime is rampant
Crime until 6 months ago in the US had been declining for 30 years.
> social and economic inequality is just accepted
People are making plenty of noise about this, and just this week the FTC, and EU regulators are taking on tech giants. I'm keeping an eye on this topic.
If we can get our shit together on CO2 emissions and how we utilize the ocean, the future isn't looking all that dim.
> crime is rampant (...) looks exactly like many east Asian metropolis at night
Dunno about that, I was in Seoul for a few months for work and I've never felt safer in my life, even while walking alone downtown in the middle of the night.
Or maybe having advanced economies with better safety and family networks than the west would do the trick. Save your barely secretly coded racism for another time.
One problem in understanding the actual issues with mass immigration is the intentional conflation of culture, religion, and race.
Religion and culture are HUGE parts of a community's behavior and race almost isn't at all. To use the largest and most brutal example, the UK rape gangs are 97% Pakistani. It isn't because of race, but because of religion and culture. A religion that doesn't respect women and a culture that doesn't respect the law.
The two people I know who got banned from FB for pointing this out are a Pakistani expat and a Qatari Arab. It's not a racial thing. They both very persuasively show that it's structural issues in both the country and in Islam that make this almost expected behavior. Much like how the thin-blue-line might seem noble to police but obviously just leads to abuse. So these people trying to criticize their culture to improve it, much like everyone calling out the USA, christians, police, etc, were shut down by the white people who assumed they were being racist - towards themselves... Much doublethink.
When you come along and call out reasonable issues as 'coded racism' you're never going to stop the rape, and at best you're just going to cause racism. "No," they may think, "I didn't say that person was X race, but you are, and you're really defensive about it. Maybe you're on to something." But it almost feels like that's the goal these days. Accelerationists picking fights in everyone else's name, trying to burn down the system at all costs.
> Not letting culturally incompatible people in...
South Korea does not have a "cultural compatibility test" as a requisite for immigration. But I see your point. It is a disgusting one to make, though.
If you take them at their word, why is it disgusting?
What is wrong with cultural compatibility? Why shouldn't a country want people who will help, and not want people who won't? Is this not what countries already do by trying to find productive workers instead of future welfare cases? By turning away people who have committed sexual assault or other crimes. By looking for people who say good things about their host country, not who denigrate it.
From my reading, you're the one assuming that white protestants are going to do better in these tests and that is racist etc.
Also, like most people, I differentiate between immigration and asylum. Asylum is like taking your neighbor in after their house burns down. Immigration is like inviting them to stay as a roommate. There are very few people I wouldn't extend a helping hand to, but not a lot who I'd want to live with.
The assumption that immigrants cannot assimilate into another culture, will not contribute or be productive workers and will likely be welfare cases or criminals is obviously not true in the general case, and is only a thinly veiled and obvious proxy argument against Muslim and Indian immigration into Europe, itself a proxy argument about maintaining white racial and ethnic homogeneity.
Unless it can be proven that the majority of immigrants to Korea or other Asian countries are as destructive as described, and demonstrate the same for European immigrants to other European countries, or even for Asians immigrating to Europe or the US, framing the argument in general terms is clearly specious.
That's not my assumption, but thanks for offering.
> framing the argument in general terms is clearly specious.
No. It is a general argument because it applies to everyone, everywhere, no matter your skin color or country.
If you had two potential immigrants, identical, and from the same country, would you not pick the one with a solid work history? Would you not pick the one saying "I'm looking forward to a great new life in <Your Country>" as opposed to the one bad-mouthing it? Which one would you assume would get the most value out of being there, someone who hated it, or someone who loved it?
> a thinly veiled and obvious proxy argument against Muslim and Indian immigration into Europe, itself a proxy argument about maintaining white racial and ethnic homogeneity.
No. You obviously just watch the USA news about Europe. For one, the actual racists aren't concerned with Indians. So you're just out of touch. There is racism, but ... it's complex and interwoven and generally more about the countries you traditionally fought against rather than some simplistic color spectrum. The USA is odd in that almost all racial strife comes from the Indian wars and slavery, both populations of which are internal and visible. In Europe you have silliness like Greeks hating Turks and vice versa, but being essentially indistinguishable by others.
But there is a huge "invisible" backlash against unrestricted Muslim refugees. Invisible because it's not the far-right narrative you hear. It's progressive people. For gay marriage, racial equity, etc. And they don't want religion bans or anything, but they do want ideology tests. For instance, there's near 100% support for asking "Do you respect women as the full equal of men, and could you follow the orders of a female police officer?" or such. The recent terrorists would have been blocked by such a screening. There is an obligation to take in refugees, but not to do so blindly. If you do take in a known criminal, perhaps jail them while they await the chance to return to their home country...
Your attitude is insultingly out of touch to, for instance, the victims and families of the UK child sex scandal. It's not a happy fact, but it is a fact, that 97% of those arrested were Pakistani. If you call that racist you crap on the victims, and you crap on all the non-rapists who should have priority over the criminals. Similarly, to pretend that Europe hates Muslims craps on all Muslims (the vast majority) who don't chop off the heads of people they disagree with.
>Your attitude is insultingly out of touch to, for instance, the victims and families of the UK child sex scandal. It's not a happy fact, but it is a fact, that 97% of those arrested were Pakistani.
For others' benefit, Britain has three groups from the Indian subcontinent:
* Indian Hindus
* Indian Sikhs
* Indian and Pakistani Muslims
Sikhs and Hindus have been very successful; they are more likely than the average to be part of the British middle class (http://www.theguardian.com/money/2010/dec/14/middle-britain-...). Muslims are, by contrast, worse than average in every single social measure despite being, racially speaking, indistinguishable from the other two groups to any outsider (since none knows, or cares, about the myriad of caste differences), much like your example of Greeks and Turks; they are all "Asians" in Britain.
COVID-19 has taken us so much closer now to a cyberpunk dystopia. The disruption of social life, the growing inequality as the wealth of the investor class grows to precipitous heights, the use of technology to avoid physical human contact as much as possible, we're getting there, no doubt about it.
Too bad the game is an unfinished mess and the PS4/Xbox One version is pretty much a scam in its current form. 20fps (not even stable!) and blurry ultra low 720p textures. Just unexcusable. I feel bad for everyone with last gen consoles getting this as a christmas gift. So as for the devs. Work 6 days a week for year and now continue to do the same for bugfixing and working on the PS5/Xbox Series X version
No offense but sub-20 FPS is unplayable, it's a slideshow. No matter what, how good the story, it ruins the whole game. Each to its own I guess but considering the historicity of the game this shouldn't have been released in this state.
I've gotten to accept 30 FPS on console, but honestly I avoid getting too used to more than that right now because the difference is definitely very noticeable.
I did something similar back when most gaming moved to 1080p. I could accept 720p as long as I stuck with it. Once I got used to better, going back was a challenge.
I think it depends on art direction. A game with a solid artstyle designed for low resolution can be fine even if it doesn't really look the best, like alot of Nintendo games. But if the art style is riding on super high definition textures and eye candy then it can be really bad and jarring when it doesn't actually achieve that.
I thought the same thing until i started playing rdr2 on a 4k screen after using 1080 for months. Immediately i was able to detect ambushes, see much more detail in everything, and generally it was just easier to play.
I've been enjoying the game thus far, albeit on the PC. No issues, no bugs encountered. Granted I'm only 6 hours in, but still. I think people go out of their way to find things to complain and be negative about.
Frankly 1.0 releases of just about anything these days are buggy.
I don't expect initial releases of anything to be error free, and in a world of internet based distribution and continuous updates of games, I'm turned off by constant complaints about initial releases.
Cyberpunk 2077 was pushed back to address problems and people complained. They released with problems and people complain.
Game companies can't win in any scenario.
Announce too soon? Complain. Release when you say you will, but with bugs, complain. Release late to address bugs, complain.
Tangentially related, IMO the term "beta release" has evolved from being a true "help us test and find bugs" as a marketing tool to excuse negative feedback.
I already knew that, but for me, it was more a warning about how difficult it is to get complex software systems right, and how grotesquely they can fail, with implications for life-critical systems that depend on them, and more and more things being controlled by software with such couplings.
Funny enough the biggest criticism of the game I have seen in the reviews (apart from technical problems) is that it uses Cyberpunk as a pretty setting but touches on its themes very superficially. IMO it's futile to try and stay away from politics and controversy when you're in a genre that is so deep rooted in it.
Reviewers that lean extremely far left weren't happy that a video game didn't espouse their ideology at every second. What a surprise. Depending on what path you chose the start of the game literally has a corporate employee order the execution of elected officials. But I guess that wasn't on the nose enough?
The game has corporate leaders and the rich killing and trampling over poor people throughout the game. While walking through the city you will have people randomly hit the ground in front of you because they jumped from a building. Do we really need a character to come out and tell us how bad this is in words for it to be a critique?
That's exactly the kind of political criticism that I consider very odd.
It barely admits that being able to choose genitals, independent of gender, is a step forward, only to then complain why CDPR didn't go much further by having players select pronouns and a non-binary voice.
Then it complains how the game is allegedly transphobic because it "objectifies trans bodies", a statement solely based on one poster in the game that made the rounds trough the Twitter-outrage-sphere a while ago, while completely missing how in the CP2077 world pretty much everything is commodified down to peoples memories and their individual body parts.
It's like there is some kind of agenda to paint the game, and it's developers, as transphobic since their PR Twitter account made a not so well received "Did you just assume my gender?" joke a couple of years back.
Along similar lines: Jeff Gerstmann complains about the lack of political correctness in some of the NPC lines, like when hardened gang-bangers proclaim "We are getting raped over here".
Which is just such an odd thing to complain about considering the setting: Here are these hardened criminals committing all kinds of unimaginable crimes like human trafficking, killing people, torturing people and pretty much everything else in the book, yet there's a weird expectation that they should be completely PC in their speech while engaging in these inherently anti-social practices.
Extra odd considering that a lot of the source material did something very similar for its time: The slang Gibson used in his books was inspired by very real criminal sub cultures like biker gangs and dope pushers. These kinds of sub-cultures where never particularly PC, still are not to this day.
So the expectation that criminal sub-cultures have to use socially progressive language, while abducting somebody to saw them apart for parts to sell, is just really weird and highlights a very odd double standard in our actual times: Depictions of all kinds of nasty things is okay, but as soon as the language gets nasty, that's where we want to draw very vaguely defined lines.
This sort of criticism isn't about content. Simply having something like that happen in the plot is different from saying something interesting about it. Those sorts of plot elements are core to the genre, and are an expected part of anything within it. The genre gets most of its appeal from philosophizing about its content though.
Tell me what you think the game was lacking. BTW, this belief that all cyberpunk stories need to have some explicit critique of current economic systems is wrong and doesn't accurately represent the genre. Cyberpunk has always been primarily about style.
All the most well-known cyberpunk media, afaik, is extremely political. Sure, style plays a role, but even the stylistic trappings have strong political undercurrents. There's a reason 'punk' is part of the name.
One could create 'high fantasy' games, movies, books, and infuse it with any number of political views. But with cyberpunk the most common themes are highly political (and I'd say relevant to our time).
That said, I don't believe it always has to neatly fit into a 'left-wing' perspective. If anything, I'd say one of the defining characteristics is libertarianism, perhaps with leftist tendencies, but not necessarily so.
The average Call of Duty title makes you kill thousands of people, but that doesn't automatically mean the series has done a good job exploring the themes of war, PTSD, politics, military industrial complex etc.
I feel like if there's a video game that comes out with cyberpunk themes for our time, Zuckerberg won't allow it to buy ads on Facebook in the same way Hearst tried to prevent Citizen Kane from having newspaper coverage.
For a 2014 game, Watch_Dogs 1 was more prescient and innovative. Watch_Dogs 2 didn't innovate much and was instead tapping a 90s esque "Hackers" vibe but in a 2010s setting which I feel has been overdone in the media.
Watch_Dogs 1's tone was more serious and the mechanics really drove home the subtle but negative consequences of widespread surveillance capitalism.
Honestly, outside of all the bug reports that was a big red flag for me. In their past success (Witcher 3), storytelling was pretty much what lifted it from being a mostly mediocre game.
If they went for Witcher 4 or whatnot, it's fine to avoid certain themes. But Cyberpunk has some serious themes at its very core, and avoiding those or only touching upon them superficially was worrying to me.
"At some point, you'll look down at your character's hands and say 'wow, my hands are metal all the way up to my elbows? Well, that's kind of creepy, it feels kind of wrong'."
The article doesn't really dig into any of Pondsmith's thoughts here, but to my reading, Cyberpunk's fantastical body-modification tech is very much intended as a mirror of our real technology.
We've all been wired in with cyberware for the past decade; we just didn't notice because the hardware stays in our pockets instead of under our skin. But the effect has not been entirely different: We are now persistently linked to our contacts wherever we go; we can instantly look up contextual information whenever the need arises; we can store anything from a date and time we need to remember to an entire scene of sight and sound, all in an external extension of our memories that can be called up almost as quickly as the ones in our heads.
Smartphones made us all cyborgs, just ones with lower-bandwidth implants.
I don't believe that is accurate. When we recruit obviously we don't take race or gender into account, but 90% of applicants are white males. The issue happens earlier "in the pipeline", why don't girls get into engineering? I think the reason for that is complex, but I'm not sure companies are to blame for that one.
We tried a "girl focused" advert once but got so much flack for sexism that we never made that mistake again.
Could it be that the problem is much latter in the 'pipeline' but it feeds back to earlier stages? i.e. work environments being toxic feeds back to career choice.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] threadWhen reading Neuromancer and Count Zero, the cumulative sum of the evocative description of "the sprawl" and the post war environment led me to form a fairly bleak mental picture of the place. And floating above all that an ultra elite class of the 1% of the 1% (sensenet stars, the tessier-ashpools, etc).
Islands in the Net also paints a picture of radically even more unequal wealth distribution, coupled with massive economic disruptions and civil wars in developing nations.
That's the original core of cyberpunk, it was in no small part a condemnation / reversal of the utopian post-war SF.
And the Cyberpunk TRPG (which is the universe / setting of Cyberpunk 2077) is very much set in that genre / ethos.
CD Projekt Red is a great example of why publicly owned companies and creating expectations for unreasonable deadlines for any software is going to cause your employees to deal with crunch and release something that doesn't work that great. Unfortunately I'm sure that this game will entertain more than it will highlight horrible industry practices.
Or more to the point, were they violating Polish or EU labor laws?
Including, but not limited to, 6 day work weeks for over a year. Sounds like 966 and China.
https://www.polygon.com/2020/12/4/21575914/cyberpunk-2077-re...
Combine that with the unoptimized, buggy state the game is in. Many streamers had the game crash, forcing them to redo the combat encounter because you can't save in combat.
So not true!
Greets from Poland!
Any bugs I've encountered have been minor.
Makes me wonder what people's "rigs" are actually like. It's no Doom Eternal but it plays about as well as GTA at launch going from memory.
https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/human-resources/workin...
https://bezprawnik.pl/crunch-cd-projekt-red/
Polish law adheres to EU guidelines and limits working hours to 8 hours/day 40 hours/week with no more than 8 hours/week of overtime - paid extra.
75% of Poles work overtime (2017): https://strefabiznesu.pl/czy-polacy-umieraja-z-przepracowani...
One fifth (20%) of those working overtime don't receive any compensation (2019): https://bezprawnik.pl/polacy-zmieniaja-prace/
Transport equipment and services is one of Poland's specialties, but even there it mostly competes on price: https://oko.press/polska-i-wegry-przegraly-spor-o-pracowniko...
(not to mention bus drivers in the capital driving under influence of metaamphetamine to keep up with the pressure)
Poland is the China of Europe. But in relations with the real China, Poland is like a colony: exporting raw resources(like copper), importing manufactured goods. And Polish president acts servile towards Xi Jinping. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yfjsZujQqc
Even if you don't believe anonymous employee reports, the studio's chief Adam Badowski announced in September that working time will now involve Saturdays.
To me, too many pointers are highlighting a toxic crunch culture in that studio to be ignored. I will not play Cyberpunk because of that.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-29/cyberpunk...
situation in this thread is a bit different, it's about choices of a single person.
Of course executives and investors will make much more off the release then the individuals who made the game.
The crunch is very real, but the silent part is that insane working hours and crunching are a staple of gaming industry. Pretty much every single project ends up in this state and the stories can get pretty horrifying (Blood, Sweat and Pixels is an interesting read on this topic - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34376766-blood-sweat-and... ).
The strange part of this story is the way how it's set to snipe at certain companies - CDProjekt and Rockstar were target of these stories, but other development studios for some reason weren't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Hoffman#%22EA_Spouse%22_b...
There's always a market for indie-scale games, 2D platformers, simple but innovative 3D games, etc, where good, simple ideas are more important than huge amounts of effort. But there's also a market for complex games, and if they're well done, people will happily pay for them.
source: over a decade in the modding and gamedev community, never done it professionally (yet) but have made some popular mods/minigames, and a decent grasp of how much work goes into large-scale games and how much you have to want to make it happen for it to happen, and sometimes, you're willing to spend these long days, and sometimes it's even enjoyable before the money and fame start rolling in, or at least enjoyable enough to stick with it.
I hope, and suspect, nobody who is working on AAA games has zero interest or joy in making big, complicated games.
You get the job because you have skills at it. You have skills at it because you were interested enough to learn them. Those skills are worth money. All of the articles criticizing gamedev seem to miss this.
It seems to be cyclical that the company in the cross-hairs has a bad PR year and people talk about only the one company as if it isn't a systemic problem until memory gets blurry and people forget the last time it came up, and few people connect the dots to the systemic problem. (Almost every major publisher has been in the spotlight at some point in time or another. EA very famously had the "EA Spouse" cycle of bad press. Activision had one a few years later.)
If there is something interestingly strange here it's that CD Projekt Red tried to buck the system and do the right thing and its getting smeared so badly that it tried and failed. The takeaway for a lot of people is going to be subconsciously "it's better not to try at all to do better and stick with the status quo", which is hard not to assume is intentional this cycle from some of the members of the status quo. (It resembles other anti-union bullying tactics.)
Cyberpunk 2077 Review First Impressions: A Brutally Honest Overview (Gameplay, Bugs, Worth)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2AkZVPZkbI
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJKeBbk-9YA
Therefore, I'm pleasantly surprised, it's actually a playable game with a decent looking world.
So, that's me.
And since, I haven't been able to get my hands on one of the new GPUs at an acceptable price, I would probably wait for at least a few months before purchasing this.
Looking at the bad press coverage CDPR got for handling their staff, I am tempted to think that they haven't handled their success with the Witcher series very well. Video Games production, in general, seems to rely a lot on careful management and highly organized work. So mishandling developer issues, like they have seemingly done, is very short sighted.
I hope they learn their lessons, as far as management is concerned and settle in for the long haul on this. If they can demonstrate good faith as they fix this game's issues, the real Rockstar type money would come pouring in for the sequel of this game.
Ironically, the creators themselves at Bullfrog Productions got a very bitter tasting cookie [1] around that time selling to EA, cut from the same dough...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndicate_(1993_video_game)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullfrog_Productions#Acquisiti...
This statement may still be true, but Cyberpunk 2077 actually did a great job at highlighting the gaming industry's horrible practices due to CD Projekt Red promising to keep away from the status quo of mandatory crunch time. Breaking that promise put mandatory crunch time in social media's limelight.
Of course it would all be nicer without crunch in software, but I think many know how realistic that is with such a project. I hope employees get their deserved free time and compensation and I believe they will, even if there is still work to do.
So while CDPR might not be perfect, it behaves better than its competitors on user rights, which affects employees too. And this is not insignificantly better conduct.
So what is the difference with our current world again?
Not trying to be a cynic here, but if we were to accept that most crimes aren't violent, then this description fits with what we have now.
The landscape of Cyberpunk 2077 itself looks exactly like many east Asian metropolis at night.
It's more an alt history at this point.
(That means, if the lockdowns go away at some point. If not, well, then yes. Total dystopia. Everything private total restricted, only corporate and state buisness allowed. Peoples private life only exist in virtual realities)
edit: everything is relative. I was born in east germany. A state where I would not have been allowed to openly say my opinion, or drive 30 km with my bycicle to the west or south, from where I live, as I would have been arrested or literally shot back then. Pretty dystopian in comparison. Also, people in north korea can say something today, about what dystopian feels like. That means, no they cannot, while they are there.
Society on average? Well, I guess by the amount of prescribed happy pills, probably yes. But I guess it will be hard to meassure, if past generations were really happier.
In any case, with freedom and wealth you can build up and life alternatives today. There are quite some people out there trying this, with various success.
Metaverse, aspect of Snow Crash, is basically like MMOs such as World of Warcraft or Second Life, but once Facebook goes 3D (and to me the question is when with AR/VR), its more akin to Facebook.
Wealth is so unevenly distributed that some people have 3 jobs just to pay their rent, whereas others buy their entire street's housing just to have a privacy while being the CEO of one of the worst private collection companies in the world (Facebook).
Kind of a big difference.
Sure, it's definitely important to acknowledge the difference, but it's also important to realize that we are not rational creatures that use our freedom well when there are all sorts of well-crafted 'hacks' applied to our brains on a constant basis.
I think Cyberpunk understandably covers these themes with underline, highlight, and big red circles. Narratively it's easier to exaggerate.
But it's really just shades of gray between being forced to take a happy pill, and being told, explicitly or not, by experts, friends and family that you should do so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solarpunk
Disagree.
IMO the worst thing is government surveillance, and our lack of true democracy. It makes me sad that when Snowden made his revelations, absolutely nobody did anything. However...
Electric cars and renewables are happening. Just look at the opening sequence of Blade Runner (staged in 2019?), and tell me we really live in that world.
It's definitely not the case that economic inequality is "just accepted". Yes, it's a part of our lives, but the social justice moment is also huge, and sometimes misguided. They have caused a lot of things to change though.
IMO, to create positive change, we really need to get away from the "it's just pointless" mindset.
Walking around SF and I definitely feel like we're pretty much at the radical inequality cyberpunk future we were promised. I walk outside and see self-driving cars right next to tent cities and people cooking over open flames on the sidewalk.
But I do agree that there is a flood of nonsense. When I was a kid, it used to be "race and gender shouldn't matter". Now they define you by your race and gender, it's the only thing that matters. Just throws gasoline on the fire IMO.
You are giving way too much credit to the SJW millennial crew. None of those things were enacted because of them.
When I was young, my progressive, well-meaning parents taught me that I should be color-blind and not see race or gender, thinking that a generation of such people would naturally make a world with more equality of opportunity.
The problem is that that didn't work. All it did was create a generation of people who were illiterate in regards to the impacts of race and gender discrimination. It created a blind spot where those who wanted to discriminate could hide.
Data shows that race and gender have wide reaching impacts on one's ability to access services including education and healthcare, interactions with the justice system, and employment. The sad truth is that categories of race and gender have an outsized impact on your prospects and people have always been defined by them in this country.
In some sense, the earlier campaigns were successful--most people agree that overt segregation and discrimination are a bad thing. That's huge progress. But since we have mostly ceased practicing overt forms of discrimination, how is it that these disparities persist? There are two options either there are unconscious and unintentional biases that have a significant impact or the lingering side effects of discrimination keep historically marginalized groups at a significant disadvantage. (I think both cases are true, but that doesn't impact my argument.)
If we want to understand why we have these disparate outcomes, we have to pay attention to race and gender and how we behave in relation these categories. Only by doing so can we hope to resolve the underlying issues that drive social imbalance.
If you want to learn more about this from someone far, far more expert on the topic than myself, I recommend listening to some interviews with or articles by Ibram X. Kendi. His work is insightful and accessible.
https://www.ibramxkendi.com/
For example, you can assert that urban violence and gang warfare are the results of generational poverty and discrimination of black people - you'd be right - but that assertion doesn't necessarily offer the most accurate or useful model of the issue. Most importantly, I would argue that it shifts the focus for the solution onto external factors (wider discrimination in society) rather than internal ones (such as, stop being violent with one another). The second option sounds ridiculous, but it has worked in the past. [0]
History is too easy a scapegoat for current problems. Thinking of outcome disparity only in the contexts of history and unconscious bias leads to distortions in the solution space. Unfortunately, by reframing debate around racial and historical lines, certain people have been able to extract wealth and influence from their communities without providing actionable solutions or illuminating easier interventions that would greatly aid in solving problems. I'm unfortunately a pessimist in this matter; the racial divide is a very useful one to certain interests. With a small investment of wealth and prestige to media outlets and academics, they can keep the people in lower economic classes biting at each other rather than focusing on the much more oppressive and harmful background radiation of wealth inequality that serves as a precondition to their actual struggles.
The social ramifications of slavery are negative; no one can reasonably dispute that. But the reason that the prison state is expanding, social programs are crumbling, violence seems ever-present, and the outcome of every successive generation is worse and worse is the ticking along of vast systems forming the bedrock of the American economy. These systems do not care about the race of the people ground beneath their wheels, nor the gender of the blood that slicks their gears; they accept all to offer their bodies and lives in supplication, to suborn their will to alien gods and inhuman reckoning.
That's just my opinion, though.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-23/disruptin...
Take the hippie movement. It's often associated with 'the left' but I'd argue that the navel-gazing focus on individual enlightenment caused immense damage to the ability of those without power to collectively have enough of it to see some changes.
Cyberpunk, intentionally or not, highlights this. The typical Cyberpunk scene is a person alone, getting by. Any kind of 'collective' behavior is nipped in the bud by surveillance and whatnot. Any solutions involve that lone person forming valuable relationships with other lone persons (or robits, I guess).
The dystopia, I feel, is usually not experientially the marketing, the massive corporate powers, and so on. It's the stifling isolation, and the only solution that's remotely viable is finding another single soul to share it with.
What I've found interesting about a show/book series like The Expanse, is that it dips into the Cyberpunk themes with the detective dude (I don't think it's a coincidence that Cyberpunk and film noir often overlap, the latter just an earlier iteration of the former). But eventually that guy, in the expanse of multiple planets, has options to find something bigger, more collective, to be part of.
> IMO the worst thing is government surveillance, and our lack of true democracy.
Agreed on the lack of democracy, although it is really nothing new. Gerrymandering has been an issue for decades now. Corporate lobbyists have been openly bribing bureaucrats for quite a while too. The 1980s are, on this regard, not that different from the present.
This is also compatible with a cyberpunk-esque world, though.
> Just look at the opening sequence of Blade Runner (staged in 2019?), and tell me we really live in that world.
Apart from the flying cars, I can think of several metropolis that look almost the same, including the pollution levels.
I was in Beijing five years ago, around September. Out of four days, I think I saw the blue sky only once, the day of my arrival, and it was because the authorities banned the circulation of 2.5 million cars for two weeks in August. I believe it was something related to a national holiday, but I'm not quite sure.
LA is not that far from it either.
> It's definitely not the case that economic inequality is "just accepted". Yes, it's a part of our lives, but the social justice moment is also huge, and sometimes misguided.
No comments on the "misguided" bit.
To be blunt, economic inequality is accepted, especially in the US. The ideas of the Protestant work ethic and the Prosperity theology, so deeply rooted in the American psyche, revolve around it. There is no movement that would change that in a generation or two, because too much is at stake.
Gay marriage took centuries to be legalized, and it wasn't until 2003 that SCOTUS ruled sodomy laws unconstitutional. Women's suffrage in the US was legalized in the 1920s, over a century after the country was founded, and still women struggle to enjoy full autonomous rights until quite recently. Many people of color couldn't vote until the mid 1960s! Or have the same access to essential services as other citizens.
My point is, these movements need to exert a constant pressure on society, for decades if needed, to achieve results. And, on the other hand, it may only take a few months or years to undo everything. I'm pointing here to the 1970s and 1980s, when many individual protections were repealed, and corporations of all kinds took advantage of that.
In summary, I respect your optimism, but a cyberpunk world also has electric cars and demonstrations on the streets.
China is ahead of everyone when it comes to electric cars and solar energy. They've fully embraced that this is a technological change that must and will happen. Precisely because of how aware they were of the air pollution issue.
Debatable. China solar output accounts for maybe 2% of their total electricity production. They are ahead on electric vehicle sales.
But I find quite ironic that you would use China as an example, when the measures taken to curb pollution in Beijing include, among others: forcing the switch from gasoline powered motorcycles to electric/gas ones, limit the number of citizens allowed to own or drive cars, and forbidding the use of coal powered broilers.
Because I thought you were worried about lack of democracy, and government surveillance.
I would strongly argue that lot's of technology is great for people. CyberPunk didn't really anticipate how cheap solar and wind power would become, and a lot of the 1980's projections expect rising energy costs. Beyond that, just look at things like the mRNA vaccines rolling out this week. The technology behind it is something you can almost work with in a home lab, but was unimaginable 10 years ago, and will save millions of lives.
> Pollution is rampant
This is true in place, but it's getting better. China is starting to clean up, and India looks to be making moves in this direction. The US is far cleaner and greener than it was in the 80s. The famous smog over L.A. is nearly gone.
> crime is rampant
Crime until 6 months ago in the US had been declining for 30 years.
> social and economic inequality is just accepted
People are making plenty of noise about this, and just this week the FTC, and EU regulators are taking on tech giants. I'm keeping an eye on this topic.
If we can get our shit together on CO2 emissions and how we utilize the ocean, the future isn't looking all that dim.
Dunno about that, I was in Seoul for a few months for work and I've never felt safer in my life, even while walking alone downtown in the middle of the night.
Religion and culture are HUGE parts of a community's behavior and race almost isn't at all. To use the largest and most brutal example, the UK rape gangs are 97% Pakistani. It isn't because of race, but because of religion and culture. A religion that doesn't respect women and a culture that doesn't respect the law.
The two people I know who got banned from FB for pointing this out are a Pakistani expat and a Qatari Arab. It's not a racial thing. They both very persuasively show that it's structural issues in both the country and in Islam that make this almost expected behavior. Much like how the thin-blue-line might seem noble to police but obviously just leads to abuse. So these people trying to criticize their culture to improve it, much like everyone calling out the USA, christians, police, etc, were shut down by the white people who assumed they were being racist - towards themselves... Much doublethink.
When you come along and call out reasonable issues as 'coded racism' you're never going to stop the rape, and at best you're just going to cause racism. "No," they may think, "I didn't say that person was X race, but you are, and you're really defensive about it. Maybe you're on to something." But it almost feels like that's the goal these days. Accelerationists picking fights in everyone else's name, trying to burn down the system at all costs.
South Korea does not have a "cultural compatibility test" as a requisite for immigration. But I see your point. It is a disgusting one to make, though.
What is wrong with cultural compatibility? Why shouldn't a country want people who will help, and not want people who won't? Is this not what countries already do by trying to find productive workers instead of future welfare cases? By turning away people who have committed sexual assault or other crimes. By looking for people who say good things about their host country, not who denigrate it.
Neither would be a great thing.
From my reading, you're the one assuming that white protestants are going to do better in these tests and that is racist etc.
Also, like most people, I differentiate between immigration and asylum. Asylum is like taking your neighbor in after their house burns down. Immigration is like inviting them to stay as a roommate. There are very few people I wouldn't extend a helping hand to, but not a lot who I'd want to live with.
Unless it can be proven that the majority of immigrants to Korea or other Asian countries are as destructive as described, and demonstrate the same for European immigrants to other European countries, or even for Asians immigrating to Europe or the US, framing the argument in general terms is clearly specious.
> framing the argument in general terms is clearly specious.
No. It is a general argument because it applies to everyone, everywhere, no matter your skin color or country.
If you had two potential immigrants, identical, and from the same country, would you not pick the one with a solid work history? Would you not pick the one saying "I'm looking forward to a great new life in <Your Country>" as opposed to the one bad-mouthing it? Which one would you assume would get the most value out of being there, someone who hated it, or someone who loved it?
> a thinly veiled and obvious proxy argument against Muslim and Indian immigration into Europe, itself a proxy argument about maintaining white racial and ethnic homogeneity.
No. You obviously just watch the USA news about Europe. For one, the actual racists aren't concerned with Indians. So you're just out of touch. There is racism, but ... it's complex and interwoven and generally more about the countries you traditionally fought against rather than some simplistic color spectrum. The USA is odd in that almost all racial strife comes from the Indian wars and slavery, both populations of which are internal and visible. In Europe you have silliness like Greeks hating Turks and vice versa, but being essentially indistinguishable by others.
But there is a huge "invisible" backlash against unrestricted Muslim refugees. Invisible because it's not the far-right narrative you hear. It's progressive people. For gay marriage, racial equity, etc. And they don't want religion bans or anything, but they do want ideology tests. For instance, there's near 100% support for asking "Do you respect women as the full equal of men, and could you follow the orders of a female police officer?" or such. The recent terrorists would have been blocked by such a screening. There is an obligation to take in refugees, but not to do so blindly. If you do take in a known criminal, perhaps jail them while they await the chance to return to their home country...
Your attitude is insultingly out of touch to, for instance, the victims and families of the UK child sex scandal. It's not a happy fact, but it is a fact, that 97% of those arrested were Pakistani. If you call that racist you crap on the victims, and you crap on all the non-rapists who should have priority over the criminals. Similarly, to pretend that Europe hates Muslims craps on all Muslims (the vast majority) who don't chop off the heads of people they disagree with.
For others' benefit, Britain has three groups from the Indian subcontinent:
* Indian Hindus
* Indian Sikhs
* Indian and Pakistani Muslims
Sikhs and Hindus have been very successful; they are more likely than the average to be part of the British middle class (http://www.theguardian.com/money/2010/dec/14/middle-britain-...). Muslims are, by contrast, worse than average in every single social measure despite being, racially speaking, indistinguishable from the other two groups to any outsider (since none knows, or cares, about the myriad of caste differences), much like your example of Greeks and Turks; they are all "Asians" in Britain.
But I am also worried, that much of the emergency legislation is here to stay. It is rare, that laws get softened, once they are implemented.
I much prefer gameplay, wide freedom of action, an interesting world and characters, and good writing than eye candy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvtPgetQ0VI&feature=youtu.be...
It's like watching a movie in 240p. Sure you can enjoy it but is this really how you want to experience a good movie?
I did something similar back when most gaming moved to 1080p. I could accept 720p as long as I stuck with it. Once I got used to better, going back was a challenge.
Frankly 1.0 releases of just about anything these days are buggy.
I don't expect initial releases of anything to be error free, and in a world of internet based distribution and continuous updates of games, I'm turned off by constant complaints about initial releases.
Cyberpunk 2077 was pushed back to address problems and people complained. They released with problems and people complain.
Game companies can't win in any scenario.
Announce too soon? Complain. Release when you say you will, but with bugs, complain. Release late to address bugs, complain.
Tangentially related, IMO the term "beta release" has evolved from being a true "help us test and find bugs" as a marketing tool to excuse negative feedback.
It barely admits that being able to choose genitals, independent of gender, is a step forward, only to then complain why CDPR didn't go much further by having players select pronouns and a non-binary voice.
Then it complains how the game is allegedly transphobic because it "objectifies trans bodies", a statement solely based on one poster in the game that made the rounds trough the Twitter-outrage-sphere a while ago, while completely missing how in the CP2077 world pretty much everything is commodified down to peoples memories and their individual body parts.
It's like there is some kind of agenda to paint the game, and it's developers, as transphobic since their PR Twitter account made a not so well received "Did you just assume my gender?" joke a couple of years back.
Along similar lines: Jeff Gerstmann complains about the lack of political correctness in some of the NPC lines, like when hardened gang-bangers proclaim "We are getting raped over here".
Which is just such an odd thing to complain about considering the setting: Here are these hardened criminals committing all kinds of unimaginable crimes like human trafficking, killing people, torturing people and pretty much everything else in the book, yet there's a weird expectation that they should be completely PC in their speech while engaging in these inherently anti-social practices.
Extra odd considering that a lot of the source material did something very similar for its time: The slang Gibson used in his books was inspired by very real criminal sub cultures like biker gangs and dope pushers. These kinds of sub-cultures where never particularly PC, still are not to this day.
So the expectation that criminal sub-cultures have to use socially progressive language, while abducting somebody to saw them apart for parts to sell, is just really weird and highlights a very odd double standard in our actual times: Depictions of all kinds of nasty things is okay, but as soon as the language gets nasty, that's where we want to draw very vaguely defined lines.
One could create 'high fantasy' games, movies, books, and infuse it with any number of political views. But with cyberpunk the most common themes are highly political (and I'd say relevant to our time).
That said, I don't believe it always has to neatly fit into a 'left-wing' perspective. If anything, I'd say one of the defining characteristics is libertarianism, perhaps with leftist tendencies, but not necessarily so.
I don't think this is true.
Watch_Dogs 1's tone was more serious and the mechanics really drove home the subtle but negative consequences of widespread surveillance capitalism.
If they went for Witcher 4 or whatnot, it's fine to avoid certain themes. But Cyberpunk has some serious themes at its very core, and avoiding those or only touching upon them superficially was worrying to me.
The article doesn't really dig into any of Pondsmith's thoughts here, but to my reading, Cyberpunk's fantastical body-modification tech is very much intended as a mirror of our real technology.
We've all been wired in with cyberware for the past decade; we just didn't notice because the hardware stays in our pockets instead of under our skin. But the effect has not been entirely different: We are now persistently linked to our contacts wherever we go; we can instantly look up contextual information whenever the need arises; we can store anything from a date and time we need to remember to an entire scene of sight and sound, all in an external extension of our memories that can be called up almost as quickly as the ones in our heads.
Smartphones made us all cyborgs, just ones with lower-bandwidth implants.
"I am seeing some extremely good creators showing up, a lot of really good people of colour and women coming into the field,"
It always amazed be that in a supposedly capitalist country, companies do not take advantage of talent, not matter what their background is.
We tried a "girl focused" advert once but got so much flack for sexism that we never made that mistake again.
Aren't they called helicopters?