No cyberpunk thread? I guess the megacorporations really have won

minimalistic sleek edges and postmodern social movements

>I guess the megacorporations really have won.

Is there any way for them to not win? Even if you waged a full-out war against one and destroyed it, wouldn't that just be helping out that megacorporation's rivals, who very well may have been funding your resistance from the start?

How do you win against the megacorporations?

Social revolution.

>brought to you by Pepsi

Sorry, user, but there's one thing that rivals the "common good" and that's money. Besides, what if the Corp. is "good"? Like they do shady things but keep the people safe, feed, and have freedom...within reason for them.

that sounds like it would be bad really quickly

Kill them all, institute communism.

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I actually prefer older cyberpunk. The design style helps emphasize the major thematic components of the genre better unless you are going for Transhumanism or a loss of self/humanity. Anyone have some recommended movies and literature?

You don't win. You either keep fighting or you make money off of them.

Is it better to try and get into the little nitty gritty details with your cyberpunk, or just let it be vague and let imagination fill the gaps?

Should various parts of the world be at different technological levels? Should the traditional balance of world powers be flipped?

>kill all corporations
>replace it with a single giant one

The world... is a business.
youtu.be/NKkRDMil0bw

So help me understand something.

I understand how the Big Corporations are often the badguys of the setting but looking at the way the world works they are that way because governments allow them to be (or, rather want them to be) which makes it strange to me now seeing settings where the Big Corps string along governments like puppets rather it being a sort of two way street with one being on the higher road then the other (i.e. Government doesn't get to deep in your shit so long as you give them money, when you fuck up you have to pay what they ask ro they bend you over and fuck you and leverage whatever populist feelings are at play to do it)

Thats not freedom user.
Look at it this way. You wearing a shirt? Check that shirt. Tell me, does it have a label? What about your pants, or your food, or your water, what about the wood in your home? How about that computer monitor? What was the food your mother fed you as a baby? YOU have become a conglomeration of labels, user. Right down to the very atoms in your body.
We have to break that all down. No corporations, no labels. Sure it will be a difficult transition but the world wide EMP wave will hamper industrialized processes enough to give it a chance. Think of it! Everyone drinking their own water, eating their own food, and wearing their own clothes! All provided by themselves and only themselves! We weren't ready for all this technology and the worlds suffered for it, user. This revolution, this reform, will buy us that needed time for not only us but the entire world to recover and adapt. Maybe next time around we'll learn how to conduct ourselves properly.

The way I see it is that more people are dependent on the corporations than their governemnts. You work for some shell company of mega-Corp X, go home in your cat produced by X or its subsidies, and eat your food that is produced by X cooked by appliances made by X. The government can't stop them because over night they can do more damage than any government would want done to a populous. The corporations also have a GDP higher than the government's so politicians are depend on donations from the mega-corps to run and are then owned by them. Transportation also tends to be super fast making the travel time between countries negligable.

I think extreme corruption within the government is the usual handwave.
The idea is that the voted officials are being given privileges and bribes from the megacorps and that's why they allow the corps to act the way they do.

Or it could be that the economy can't handle the megacorps going out of business or even just changing how they operate so the government is forced to bend over backwards to keep the country running.

Alternatively, it could be an anarcho-capitalist or corporate republic. In which case, who ever owns the law enforcement can act however they like. Then the "government" is for show.

Its like japan. The mafia types have a massive say in corporate business which in turn has a massive say in their government. Originally they were kind of ignored, much like our corps in the west, which let them gain enough power to not only threaten the status quo they managed to get people in power from their organizations. Money helps this process a lot but its not all of it and now the mafia has indirect say in how the government leans, namely in legal proceedings and leniencies towards corps which in turn makes money which they can use to keep bribing.
Basically it takes one party gaining enough power and another party missteping.

Who /EuroCorp/ here?

>governments allow them to be

Megacorporations own the governments. The own the news. They own the people.
They run the media, control the flow of information and popular opinion (and can report and invent any lies they wish), have all the politicians in their pockets, and ultimately rewrite the laws to suit themselves and maintain their power. It's a dsytopian nightmare world, where there is nothing keeping the corporations in check because they snowballed past the point where a government could control them.

But this still posits a one sided relationship when I'm saying it's an monsterous wedding of two equally terrible beings.

They both have a stake in their relationship working but to us on the outside it may seem like it's only ever one side or the other who's wearing the pants in the relationship.

Personally I think that is what would encompass a modern day "Cyberpunk" is that you have two powerful entities that are nothing without each other: A being who can leverage your people to create money, and a being who can leverage it's laws to let it work.

That's just two heads on one snake.

When Gravity Fails is pretty good, as is Hardwired

fiction2.com/when-gravity-fails-online-george-alec-effinger

I don't know so much about different, but inconsistent tech can be pretty interesting - take Japan, they're still in love with the fax even though they're renowned for being high-tech (partly explained by the older people in the workforce, but that's by no means all of it), and African farmers who get weather updates on their smartphones, for their crops, even if they don't have mains electricity - things like that are pretty interesting to have, alongside the tech imbalances that you'll get from rich/poor areas

>but to us on the outside it may seem like it's only ever one side or the other who's wearing the pants in the relationship

Are you proposing that we do something about it?
We're just punks who can barely afford working cybernetics or a decent VR setup.

But seriously...
>A being who can leverage your people to create money, and a being who can leverage it's laws to let it work.
Does this system really speak to modern society the same way megacorps taking over government spoke to the 80's?

When I look at the societal pressures of today, what I notice is the use of media for social causes such as activists organizing and policing through social media or corporations using traditional media to push their political agendas. If we were to try to imagine the pathos of modern cyberpunk, I'd imagine that theme would be more important than the usual "money is power, the corporation owns you" trope.

What are we to do about it? It's a endless circle that perpetuates itself and when it's torn down it'll rebuild itself the same way over and over again regardless of whatever feelings the people who tore it down in the first place may have had.

I mean, when I look at the cyberpunk of yester years I don't just see the Megacorporations having complete dominance over everything but also culture being over run as well. I mean, how much imagery do we see of the Japanese Megacorps who buy up Dear old America so now you see neon signs with Katakana or people using words and phrases (more so) from whatever the invading source is. I think it's a bit of the red scare that spilled over and found it's new home in foreign money coming in and taking over replacing the things we think and hold dear with their own.

Now it's expressed as people fearing the lose of their national identity to globalism that somehow being French, Being British, or Being American won't mean anything anymore and that frightens people.

Social media just doesn't seem scary yet.
It's kind of how Idiocracy was a comedy instead of a horror film. Sharing cat videos just lacks that steel-boots-and-riot-gear type fear.

So what would you say the theme of modern cyberpunk is? The media is ever-present and overwhelming, and everything feels like some sort of scam?

>Social media just doesn't seem scary yet.

Facebook is trying to tell a friend of mine that he should be facebook friends with my sister. They have never interacted with each other online or in real life and I don't have a facebook account. Facebook has managed to spy on me enough to determine that I know both of them. I don't know about you but I find social media pretty scary.

No matter what you do, search engines and social media sites know your entire browser history.

Fear them.

About the only thing separating modern society from a cyberpunk dystopia is the cybernetic enhancements and the fashion sense.

Shadowrun actually tries to stay relatively current with the times. It's why wireless internet got big in 4e.

The issue might be that someone else in your family posts using the family name in which case it goes backwards from them to friends to friends of friends.
So your mother might know someone on facebook who knows someone on facebook who happens to know your friends mother who also uses your friends family name.
It then tries and connects those "loose" threads by seeing that you're less than 3 degrees away from someone who's also less than 3 degrees who happen to share similar family names.
This is also why you get rando's no one knows cause they might also know an -insert name- Smith but entirely unrelated to your particular Smith family.

Millitech was here, Arisaka a shit

Not really a scam. There is a lot of self awareness to the bullshit, it's that we're trying our hardest to live in a world we want to believe is true so it's more self inflicted and there are people who cater to making you feel that way.

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There are Chinese construction companies waging war in the streets, private companies have toppled nations, and all major world governments are beholden to corporate interests in some way. I'd say the megacorps have won. All hail Disney!

Please god just kill me now. I don't want to see good shit turned into bad shit any more.

That's fucking ages ago, man.

Even Staples being able to predict pregnancies before the mothers is old news. We're already being manipulated by corporate spying in ways we can't even imagine. Everyone thinks they're above it and savvy to all the tricks and gentle psychological nudges, but that's just what they want you to think.

There was nothing you could have done. The wheels were in motion likely before you were born.

Yeah, you can put some kind of spin on this. Some kind of government, corporation or terrorist group using technology to invade people's privacy? I don't know.

That could be one. Honestly, all the modern cyberpunk media I'm aware of are more interested in cybernetics and singularity. Beyond that, it's all the usual megacorp consumerist themes we've been seeing since the 80's.

Doesn't help that they casted a manlet for Batou.

I think the Megacorporation lost some scary points for the reason other people above have mentioned, people like Google and Facebook, who are interested in selling you books, just aren't as threatening as Lockheed Martin or General Motors.

Amazon has been authorized to have a swarm of drones in every city. I'd be afraid if it was Fairchild Republic, but it isn't as scary when you remember it's meant to bring you your doujins faster.

Boston Dynamics sounds like a villainous mega corp that makes Gundams and funds war, but Google bought them to help make self-driving cars 'cause they are so rich.

It is scary that they know so much about you. But seriously, they can be defeated by GOING OUTSIDE and stop texting so much.

If you're too busy stalking the profile of that girl from your highschool and reading those doujins you have flown in via quaddrone, you don't have many scary points for them either.

Well lookie here, another movie I'm not going to see.

Please, I don't wish to know any more. Let me carry on in blissful ignorance.

And if there is ever a live-action version of Cowboy Bebop don't inform me, I'll hurl myself into traffic.

But what if they grow corrupt in the future?

But user! Typecasting by race is racist! Typecasting by body type is objectification! These are characters not people! There can be creative divergences from source material! why do you think they're making roland black in the dark tower movies? This is about wide spread global acceptance using a media everyone readily consumes.

But then how would you know keanu is going to be spike (cause keanu admitted he loved cowboy bebop and actively tried to model himself after the fact for a while), and vin diesel as jet just cause they're both bald and jacked?

You can't, user. No matter who you cast, you will never be able to recreate what that show made people feel.

The feels in that show were too real.

>this was the guy who did casting for that movie about Egypt that featured no ethnic Egyptians

I mean, I sometimes feel a bit /pol/ about certain ideas, but being angry that the person is going to be white instead of black just seems stupid to me. Unless you're racist enough to think that everyone not white is super dumb and a bumbling Buffoon, you should care a lot more about the acting talents of the person, rather then their skin color.

And my decision has nothing to do with that.
I like GiTS. I like the manga and the anime and the anime movies. What I don't like is seeing a live action version of an anime and it being inevitably shit. And it will be. They all are. The only time I've ever been happy with a western adaptation of an anime or manga was Edge of Tomorrow and that was precisely because it had almost nothing in common with the source material. It was its own thing. A fun sci-fi movie staring everyone's favorite scientologist. This will not be like that. I can tell already because it will be like all the others of which none were good, and none ever WILL be goo-
On second thought, I would see this because Keanu and Vin are based.

I'm convinced anyone who didn't cry when that music kicked in when Spike descended those stairs at the end isn't human.

I too would see that train wreck because a buddy movie between 2 very different types of fight movie badassery would just be hilarious to see and i could imagine vin being keanus foil IRL.

Fuck you I'm gonna cry just remembering it you baka.

But who would play Faye and Ed?

More importantly, how will they find a Corgi smart enough to play Ein?

>that one fucking literal space cowboy

Oh god.

Nathan Fillion could be a good Andy IMO even without the blond hair.
And as long as Ein is a real dog and not a cg mess, I could care less.

heh

>tfw their personalities in reality temper nearly perfectly with those of the characters

By Odin's beard.

But who would play Vicious?

I think he'd be hardest to cast, because acting out his role without coming off as THE BIGGEST DOUCHE would probably be very difficult.

I honestly have no idea who could pull him off, if anyone.
I just pray to God it's not Cucumberbitch or that guy who played Loki in the MCU.
Maybe Fassbender?

Nah nathans over the hill and injured. can't imagine him doing fight scenes or crazy antics like he used to.

drone overwatch standing by

heavy retaliation standing by

You'd wind up with a Source War. Google operatives infiltrating Microsoft servers to add instability to the OS while Amazon uses their drones to target Google's infrastructure.

Are you a bad enough IT intern to take on the Google Ninjas and NSA Greyhats trying to hack your Gibson?

You live in a nice bubble.

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Network is such a fucking great movie.
You might be thinking to deeply about this. Most cyberpunk is not characterized by its deep or realistic understanding of how economies. political or otherwise, work.

I'd like to run as rules light of a cyberpunk system as possible, preferably one with Deus Ex style cybernetic enhancements.

Anything out there that's a good fit?

Desu Ex or Deus Ex:HR style?

HR/MD, should have specified.

Shit taste senpai.

Any ideas? It can be a class based system or not, either is fine. Something that lets players use points to buy augmentations and such would be ideal if there's a tradeoff of some kind.

Yep, it's so much better when the government does shady things but keeps the people safe, fed and allows them such freedoms as it seems acceptable.

I thought cyberpunk was all about the megacorps, and megacorps meant that the line separating goverments and countries from corporations is thin or non existant. For e.g.
China is not China anymore, it's Samsung.

>Personally I think that is what would encompass a modern day "Cyberpunk" is that you have two powerful entities that are nothing without each other:
You are under false impression that government and business are two separate entities. They always work together, intervene together. I guess, you live in US but have you never noticed how plutocratic families control the government?

Anyone ever mixed cyberpunk settings with Lovecraft? Secret societies and cults serving spacey horrors would be fun to tackle as a sci-fi noir group.

Stop right there, user

Why?

Because you are trying to derail the thread with flame war about that one game. You should feel bad.

I'm not trying to derail shit, I want to know if that can work. What game are you talking about?

But user, the only derailer here is you.

You know it can be done without running CTech right?

...

Have you actually run this before?

Its fucking terrible either play it alone or don't play it at all please god don't torture actual players with this.

What's wrong with it?

Everything.

Like what?

I don't know who that other guy is, but I'm the one who asked, can you tell me specifically what you do not like about the system?

Literally everything. Just read it and make your own opinions of how shit it is.

You are the absolute worst kind of advisor. At least have one or two specific gripes or complaints to list off.