Why is cyberpunk such an easy genre to fuck up?Also cyber punk general I guess

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is there any cyberpunk stuff about governments trying to control cyberspace?

I'd agree with in some respects, though I can't think of anything recent, fiction-wise that's had me thinking "yeah, this is some good cyberpunk right here" - not that I've caught all that much new stuff lately (I've missed Mr. Robot and Black Mirror, which I've heard would both partially count and are good)

Also, I think that being willing to make your protagonist characters flawed is important in cyberpunk, and a lot of people don't like to be shit

That's a pretty good pun - British cities make for some decent cyberpunk settings imho

what's middle class life like in a cyberpunk universe?

Wake up, go to work, go home, fall asleep with a bottle of synthahol-wine in hand while watching the trideo to stave the existential dread away. Repeat ad nauseum with no chance to advance until you are too old for the company to extract any meaningful amount of work out of you. Kids/wife optional, but expected by society.

So... basically like right now but the booze is worse and the TV is better.

Because the heroes of cyberpunk are supposed to be marginalized but its fans are usually the most boring, privileged asshats who just turn it into more white male power fantasies.

On the RPG side, most people that play Cyberpunk could give two shits about the punk, and would rather wank off furiously to being operators operating, while being well compensated by the Man.

And well the term and aesthete have been co opted into meaning a grimy, slightly futuristic dystopia, with lots of neon and Asian people.

CP2020 is contemporary with much of original cyberpunk, and it still lets you be a cop or corp. Why do people keep trotting out this argument?

Truthfully it just pisses me off because almost everyone of my fucking cyberpunk games turns out like that. A fucking vicious DNDesque loot cycle, with cyberware replacing magic items.

To steal from shadowrun terminology, there is nothing wrong with black hat shit, but when everything is black hat and nothing is pink mohawk, well fuck I'd rather just play a modern game, where I don't have to deal with some chucklefuck becoming superman through cyberware.

I think it's because people don't remember that Cyberpunk is specifically described as "High Tech, Low Life." Probably one of the best shows that ever really embodied this concept was the show Incorporated (it was fucking canceled, fuck!) because it was about a guy from the slums infiltrating an evil corporation with high tech gadgets. Every episode they would go back and forth between the red zone and the green zone, the red zone being the shittiest urban slum you can imagine and the green zone being a perfect, clean place for employees of the Corporation.
The contrast was exactly what Cyberpunk is about, even if it wasn't 80s style punk.

>white male
Why specifically did you bring this up? Explain your reasoning and try to avoid buzzwords. What's that got to do with marginalization and privilege?

Well, I'm downloading the hell out of this shit.

>mfw/10
>inb4 more baiting

Other identity groups can bitch, moan, and be ineffectual if they want to. Overcoming hardship through Teh Power of Agency is a white male speciality, user. You could say white men are the PCs of history.

Well, I sort of get it. I don't think the average patrol cop/corp enforcer is The Man, after all it's him and not the CEO or police chief who's in the line of fire.

Thus, those kinds of games could do with a more adversarial bent between the leadership and the guys on the field. That way you can still have the punk.

Could also go from Black Hat to Pink Mohawk at the drop of a hat, if the characters are moral at any level... hell, even immoral characters can have a revenge rampage, if, say, a rival corp sets atrap for them that they only barely survive, compromising their mission and killing their employer or something.

Basically rip off MGR is what I'm saying

Sometimes i think some pretty good cyberpunk can be based on Russia. Well, in some kind of fantastic scenario where "High tech" would become applicable.
It would, i presume, work with some mono-city set in Far East, based around RosNano processing facility. Although there would be deficit of skuscrapers, there would be enough asians of all kinds, and enough of low life to go around. And don't getn me started on all-powerful corrupt corporations that are a state unto themselves

The shadowrun term is Black Trenchcoat - Black Hat is a general term for a hacker who's doing bad shit and is used to a degree IRL (it comes from old cowboy movies with no-name actors, you tell who's good and bad by the hats).

I agree though, Shadowrun is it's own thing, and is so tied to fantasy that dungeon crawls at least make some sense, but the way it's become the standard is a bit lame.

Even if you're playing 'agent-y' types there's often a really big emphasis on flashy action that is really divorced from the sort of thing you see things like Johnny Mnemonic (where they mostly run away) or especially the likes of New Rose Hotel (a personal fave), where a the besuited freelance middle men steal a scientist from one corp for another... all without a shot being fired and the only gun mentioned is a their partner-in-crime's handbag pistol, and there's no cyberware to be seen

>all without a shot being fired and the only gun mentioned is a their partner-in-crime's handbag pistol, and there's no cyberware to be seen

That requires far more planning, nuance and intelligence than most roleplayers are capable of.

>could give two shits about the punk, and would rather wank off furiously to being operators operating
This is 98% of cyberpunk games I've seen or participated in, including my own games. Failure all around. Everybody just wants to be John Wick, not Abdul Hussein the street rat running a long con.

Jeez, that applies to most RPG sessions.

Because fans are autists who can't agree on that the genre it beyond that it must be EXACTLY like blade runner and neuromancer. Incidentally blade runner wasn't cyber punk because dekard was an authority figure and all cyberpunk is about fighting the authority now and forever except when it isn't REEEE

There's no middle class. Since a lot of Cyberpunk shows the horror scenario of rampant capitalism, it often means that that the middle class died and that only the haves and the have-nots are left.

>RosNano
Nice.
Base the main/starting area around a special economic zone - an industrial one, or perhaps a trade-based one near an asian border (could be a port if you want the main asian influence to be japan, could be china, could even be korea if you don't mind tackling that issue)

I mean, there's nothing wrong with wanting to be well compensated (its the driver for many cyberpunk protagonists), or working for, or even being part of the authority, but realising you are NOT a big deal is vitally important

What sort of game did you try and run, and how did it go wrong?

Often true, though it doesn't make all that much sense - someone's got to buy all these consumer goods, work for the corps and produce the tech people, sararimen and managers.
But quite often that's ignored to tell the horror story, which is fine I guess - not like they were the focus much anyhow

>corporations being gateways to hell
>surpestition

>Deckard
>Case

I know it's bait, but c'mon

Cyberpunk
Cyber.
Punk.

I think the real reason is that many people like the cyber, but not so much the punk part.

I myself am guilty of this. I like all the tech and aesthetic but dont really care to get the themes right.
Once I realized this I sort of stopped trying to run cyberpunk.

We're already seeing a 'death of the middle class' across the West, the US has been doing its best for sure at least.

Assuming full-on unregulated capitalism (which is the norm in cyberpunk, with megacorps controlling everything, including the goverment), there wouldn't be much of a middle class. Automation and outsourcing of jobs, combined with lack of laws that protect the rights of employees (those would be one of the first things to go if corporations would replace the goverment, as they get in the way of makign profit) would mean most employees would be wage-slaves that either make the bare minimum needed to live, or just get deeper and deeper in dept due to company providing them with housing and food but deducting it from their (minimal) pay. Besides that you have a small group of people working on particular fields (doctors, scientists, engineers, etc.) that require considerable training who would get decent pay in order to get people to study for those professions and work for you instead of a rival company.
Basically, look at Victorian era or turn of the century society and add more cyberware, and you have a pretty good idea of how a cyberpunk society function (the East India Trading Company is probably the most cyberpunk thing ever).

What's everyone's opinion on military in cyberpunk? I'm talking paramilitaries in the employ of corporations, corporations using gangs and mercs as proxies and corporations deploying private armies in open warfare. Do you count that open warfare in a cyberpunk setting as being 'cyberpunk'?

It can be but is often not the focus it happens offscreen. A large part of cyberpunk is the veneer of normalcy or prosperity that lays over a rotten and corroding society. Being born out or the 80s, cyberpunk warfare takes the form of guerilla campaigns, revolutions, proxies, false flag operations and war profiteering

They're less middle than they used to be, but there's still a big group who make up the white collar workers, and they're richer than the group below them doing menial work for marginal money, even if their lives aren't all that good

There's also the oddity of the entrepreneur in cyberpunk - the corporations are huge (sometimes very huge, as points out) and stifling, but there's also the rare cases of the dynamic success - your Musks, your Jobs, your Gates and your Buffets - people who do manage to rise on the back of something they made... and then immediately join the ranks of the super-elite in making sure that they keep hold on that, that no-one else gets it.

As long as the open warfare is sneaky and proxied out the ass to protect brand image, it's pretty cyberpunk. Also, any truly open warfare should take place elsewhere in some third world shithole they use for resources, manufacturing and waste dumping.

Basically, if Regan did it

>there's also the rare cases of the dynamic success - your Musks, your Jobs, your Gates and your Buffets

SPINRAD
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I'm not someone who thinks that cyberpunk automatically means there's no government, but I agree with and , that it should be mostly offscreen, and mostly anti-insurgency and/or protecting corporate interests in some way

Also contractors, lots of contractors - maybe the boots are Army (made mostly of people too dumb for the corps to hire, and the occasional patriot), but pretty all the support service is being provided by corporate contractors for large kickbacks

But middle class is a bit of a nebulous term. In Holland (where a live) politicians like to talk about 'the averge joe' (modal joe to be more precise) but what that means has shifted over time. It also means different things, to different parties. When they say, the average Joe, they just mean their constituency that they want to score points with.

The gap between income has only become bigger in the last ten year, people that might at some point would have been equals on the economic scale, are now no longer seen like that.

Cyberpunk, at least in my opinion, takes all the issues we currently have and enlarges them, with new technology used as a tool to create these more cynical circumstances.

>Why specifically did you bring this up? Explain your reasoning and try to avoid buzzwords. What's that got to do with marginalization and privilege?
Not that user but he probably meant that
>the heroes of cyberpunk are supposed to be marginalized

however
>its fans are usually the most boring, privileged asshats

and as a result the fans
>just turn it into more white male power fantasies

Hope that clears things up for you!

Yeah I'm talking massive grindfests of battlesuits, light infantry, tanks, with aircraft carriers and amphibious carriers parked offshore, all just fighting over some abandoned pit mine in the middle of Africa.

Well considering that in the 80's the west was quite afraid of Japan taking over, having a (formerly) privileged protagonist in your cyberpunk story might make sense.

It can be an introspection on losing your status and position in society due to the march of progress.

Different user, the problem is that cyberpunk as played is missing the punk aspect. The response to being an entire generation in a certain class that society has failed and ignores that then gets marginalized for doing their own thing in response to it is what's missing. The social landscape has changed too much for cyberpunk and the ethos as written to be relevant.

It CAN happen but if it does it's usually a one sided curbstomp of a first world nation 'liberating"' a third world one before being endlessly bled by a protracted and ruthless guerilla campaign sponsored by political rivals.

Well considering the economic downswing that the millenial generation is now a victim to compared to the babyboomers, the 'punk' element might become relevant again.

Something akin to: We were promised the world and inherited a ruin. Optimism turned to cynism over a world rapidly spinning out of control.

I feel the themes of cyberpunk are still relevant but aren't as 'punk'. The left behind today aren't poor inner city youths (though those are still a problem, by in large they conglomerated into large narco gangs and aren't the plucky rebels of yesteryear) but rather the increasingly abandoned working middle class sliding into obsolescence. The blue collar and white collar workers alike

Thank you for your reply, of course in his (your) original post you may have noticed a heaping helping of suppositions, assumptions and buzzwords targeted at a particular gender/race combination that had gone completely unreferenced or alluded to heretofore. Just looking for some clarification since it reads as terribly ignorant and racist. Thanks!

Also rebellion increasingly takes the form of digital and social warfare

>Well considering the economic downswing that the millenial generation is now a victim to compared to the babyboomers, the 'punk' element might become relevant again.
>Something akin to: We were promised the world and inherited a ruin. Optimism turned to cynism over a world rapidly spinning out of control.

Tangent ahoy:

This conversation reminded me of how there were so many WW3 terror movies in the 1960s and 1970s where the terrifying threat of nuclear war that would destroy our middle-class way of life was the big draw, but by the late 1970s and early 1980s, people were already bored with the idea of the upcoming apocalypse itself and wanted to skip ahead to the cool post-apocalypse that was sure to follow because it would destroy our middle-class way of life.

But the most important part is that it can be relatable, which imo is a very important factor for good fiction.

Or alternatively, considering that we are getting closer and closer to a 'cyperpunk reality' it might be time to take the themes of cyberpunk further and into the 21st century.

There's a difference between unregulated capitalism and corporatism. The corps have free reign to do anything in a corporatist society, if they want a middle class they can make it exist. You'd think a nation of powerless serfs would be more convenient for them, but who knows, they might be entrenched in some service industry and too bureaucratic to change.

There's no middle-class in the sense of what we call middle-class now. You have a super-rich top-exec, SimSens star class. Then, you have a rich class composed of skilled specialists employed by the class previously mentioned. At the end of the Ladder you have the unemployed beggars who barely survive by scrounging, sorting garbage in recycling centers and unclogging sewers. Between this and the rich class you have the class of the temporary employees. Not rich, not poor. They do ok as long as there is a job for them, but this can change very fast. In the same category you have the people working on the street full-time dealing, hustling and selling their asses full-time. All those people might have some skill, but they aren't valuable enough to be kept on the corporate payroll.

With all the real threats that actually plague us like total environmental collapse that will hit before the cyberpunk dystopia comes to term, I see a shift to either surviving on a dying world or rebuilding after the collapse in a post-cyberpunk future (assuming there's any oil left).

Cop campaigns are totally underrated. As a cop, you're undergunned by most corporate-sponsored crime syndicates. Corrupt colleagues, high-ranking officers, judges and politicians make your job more difficult - and I don't even speak about competing services and police precincts. At the same times streetgangs rampage through the city, junkies go crazy because of new synthetic drugs, and psychopaths are out for blood. Medias stirr more shit up every day.

I would agree with that, on pretty much all points - who "the middle class" is very much depends on who you are I think, and who you're talking to.

That said, the income gap between any of the middle class and the top tiers has done nothing but grow though.

I'd say rare, but that shouldn't stop all that stuff being built for governments who try and make up for weakening real power by buying military prestige in carriers, drone-ships and tech from their military industrial complexes (the fact that the corps behind said complexes can lobby with the best of them would help, of course)

This is what I originally meant to say. For me personally, Middle Class is defined by stability. And we now an increasingly large group of people that used to have a secure base of income and social standing that is rapidly eroding.
Considering that inequality is almost always a theme of cyberpunk, at least the stuff that's made in the west, but the middle class, at least in Holland used to be very sharply defined. With the increasing uncertainty facing a lot of people and the splintering of the political landscape, politicians have taken their run with the 'average joe'. If they are in power, they will find statistics that they have done well for the(ir) middle class and if they are part of the opposition they will find statistics to prove how the current government is killing the middle class. Since killing the middle class is considered the cardinal sin in Dutch politics(blame our calvinistic heritage).

This. Corporatism is the problem, not capitalism. A corporation by it's nature is required to have ever increasing profits. This is it's sole pressure and drive. Not to be competitive, not to acquire market share, not to produce a good product - but to make ever increasing amounts of money.

Gentlemen, no thing can ever undergo limitless growth. Eventually you hit market saturation. Eventually you have up years and down years for intangible reasons born from a million uncontrollable variables.

In a capitalist society, as long as A profit is being posted, that is acceptable - you're making money, you're a success. It may be more or less than last year, but you're still in the black and paying your employees.

Corporations MUST have MORE than the previous year, FOREVER, and must ACCOUNT for why when they don't. A CEO who fails to produce this can even be sued and is liable for failing his investors.

Capitalism is, like democracy, an imperfect system that allows over time for improvement. Bad ideas are tried and everyone is given a shot, and with persistence and luck and excellence eventually you can make it

Corporatism locks progress down, it retards the growth of society by pidgeonholing all economic measurement and growth into a single facet, rather than holistically acknowledging an entire market.

The supreme irony is the laws that turned corporations into these monsters were enacted to protect consumers and the public from predatory brokers

And yet so many 'successful' companies nowadays can't seem to make a profit or even project reliable revenue.

Totally. There's a whole generation of temporary workers, lousy-paid trainees coming. All people that won't be able to plan their life on longterm, because everything is temporary. Everything has to be cheap, for rent and one-use.

That does sound punk as hell. A generation of condom people, cheap, disposable and mostly used for someone who owns you to cum in.

That's the thing with corporatism. If they can't make it they change the rules.
A corporatist society isn't a hyper libertarian one where the government does not have the power to stop irresponsible corporations, it's a society where irresponsible corporations have taken control of the government and use it to give themselves all sorts of benefits. It's a society where the government is stronger than ever, only now it serves just the priviliged few.

Punk was 'never' going to remain important part of cyberpunk, hell the word probably only got attached to the genre because the Punk 'movement' happened to be relevant at the same time as the information revolution and some aesthetics and bit character archetypes were borrowed.

IF anything Cyberpunk plots and heros play far more to the pulp and detective noir genres of half a century earlier than a droppout clothing rock fad.

At best the punks generally serve the same narrative purpose as 'ye motley crew of grimy but ultimately good-hearted pirates/hooligans/bikers.' They serve as your entertainingly destructive mob to sweep in at the last moment and carry away the villains to a well deserved hell (often of their own creation, as the punks/pirates/hooligans/biker gang usually only exist as they do because of the villianous force's direct upset of the 'natural order'.)

That's a truism, sure enough - more and more things are becoming things you use and lease, rather than things you own - and why WOULD you own something, when it'll lose half its value in a year or two?
And this totally applies to people, like says - just look at Uber, the biggest taxi firm in the world, that owns exactly 0 taxis

>A generation of condom people
How vulgar and yet cromulent. I'm stealing this. It is absolutely applicable to the mentality and feelings of the millennial generation - everyone and everything is disposable. No person has any inherent value beyond how much they can be used and no person is above being discarded when that use has been expended.

Like an elephant trained to think it's bonds can't be broken...

Yup. And with open border policy within the EU there will always be cheaper skilled workers you can be replaced with. Unemployment hits all classes - unskilled people and academics as well. In cyberpunk the cheap foreign laborer, the Polish plumber, was replaced by robots and A.I.s.

>only now it serves just the priviliged few.
That's a very common thing though - at most it could be said it waxes and wanes every generation or so.

Who the few are also changes sometimes too, though they've always got money

The birthing pangs of a society that wants to have gobalist trade and exchange but pretend nation state sovereignty and isolation can and should still exist.

All the more connected, but ever more divided

Their lack of profits is an accounting illusion that helps them escape taxes. People are making money. Just not governments.

Although I would be careful with certain analogies. One thing the last Deus Ex game kinda failed in was the whole racism analogy.

It's not really racism when a fear or dislike is quite justified. Not to drag /pol/ into this. But an augmented citizen with a murder switch(that was triggered for almost 100% of the augmented population) that can be turned on at a moment's notice who also has the strength of a gorilla or some other super power ís something to be afraid of and I can understand that people might want to segregate those people.

Which is fine, but the game wants to do the whole look at this bad behavior, such a good analogy for the times we live in...
Yeah, I suppose that's true, there's been a case of certain corporations creating disadvantageous loans that hurt their profitability. Except that the loan is being held by a shell company that is part of the same organizations, so that 'loan' is just an easy way to evade tax.

By the way, are there actual European cyberpunk works? It always struck me as more of an asian/american genre. Not just authors, but like where it takes place.

The "cyber" in "cyberpunk" comes from "cybernetics," the science of controlling populations. The association with high tech came years later through association.
So I hate to tell you this, but you don't really like the "cyber" either. You just like cool tech (not that there's anything wrong with that)

Sounds like a decent enough reason for people to throw in with localized corps as makeshift City State identities, not that it would really work out, but once fabricators and local power generation tech makes living in an archology vaguely viable you're likely to see a resurgence in a sort of neofeudalism, with of course, augmented superhuman elites making up your new nobility.

"Divine Right to Rule 2: No, really I actually bred to be better than you."

Probably. Companies and insurances always bitch they make no profit, but just before going on the stock market they magically make profit (e.g. Zalando). I'm already awaiting the real estate bubble to explode here in Switzerland. All those people who bought their overestimated properties and 1.5% mortgage will have a real painful awakening. And with that a good part of my retirement plan will go down the shitter leaving me with nothing. Good thing, I played Cyberpunk 2020 and I'm ready for the Grand Slam.

If you're any self-respecting corporatist you cement your dynasty as the elite for many generations to come.
Right now we don't live in a corporatist society.
Some countries have a sustained elite. Like the US, but they're not as strongly intertwined with the production sector as in a true corporatist society. They're merely a political class that have forged a democracy where connections and are everything.

Oddly enough, in some cases it even applies to shareholders - Amazon doesn't make money (well it does, but barely), and has never paid a dividend, but its still hugely valuable, and has made the owner stratospherically rich

Remember Me? Or was that just the look?

Ever really felt the racism thing in Neuromancer or Hardwired. I assume that if cyberware will be available, it will be heavily regulated (at least in corporate controlled zones). It is also probable that some religious cults will condemn cyberware and genetics.

>neofeudalism
You already see it with global oil companies, who consider themselves to be nations unto themselves

Imagine: a noblebright corporatist setting.
It should be possible. Corporations are only collections of people after all. And there's plenty of carefree happy feudal settings.
The VOC was pretty sweet for all the shareholders in the home country. It was the colonies whose opression was the source of all that value creation who suffered. Take them out of the equation and have the company do less evil stuff and you've got a nice start.

>"cybernetics," the science of controlling populations
It's actually controlling anything, not just populations - it's the science of control systems and communication in a general sense (so not like studying phone systems, though that can come into it much like a lot of other things), which is why the word also got associated with robot limbs - they're just a dumb prosthesis if you can't control them

In that vein, pic related is incredibly badass - it's a control system that was linked to machines in hundreds of factories and used to improve efficiency of transport systems during outages immensely.

Did I mention this was in the early 70s, using teletext, and implemented in a socialist country to help the workers manage themselves (the whole "means of production" shebang), and that it actually worked?

Of course the second part, the socialist bit, meant the US came along and coup'd the place, but it was cool while it lasted

It can be argued the cyberpunk dystopia has already hit, though, and is a leading cause of environmental collapse.
Depending on how it's played Apocalypse World can be either a "dying world" or a "rebuilding" game. Interestingly, the most popular dying world of all time was Dark Sun in the early 90's, which was around the time climate change was really starting to get attention.

Being a corporation can only take you so far. If you want to really enrich yourself and control the population you need to make the shift towards a country.
All those megacorporations in cyberpunk are artificially gimping themselves, they should have turned themselves into sovereign nations long ago. But I guess that doesn't sound as evil.

Not counting shady banks, trusts and Hedgefonds.

>noblebright corporatist setting.
Universal income and education that allows for people to freely choose and rechoose their profession.

I think your definition of capitalism is inaccurate and more appropriately refers to market economies.
Capitalism refers more specifically to those markets where all economic power lies with owning capital (land, equipment, etc.) and labor has low bargaining power. In such economies, not everyone is given a fair shot, because the barriers to entry can be quite high.

I'd argue that you don't - countries have responsibilities, they have inordinate expenditures a corporation doesn't need or want, even as they provide services to every need of a government

>All those megacorporations in cyberpunk are artificially gimping themselves

Son are you joking? Corporations don't want to be countries, they want sovereignty. They want to be laws unto themselves. Being a country involves controlling land and providing for a populace. A corporation can just hide in a dozen different countries legal systems and benefit themselves by gaming the system, or in Shadowrun case gaining extraterritoriality and becoming governments unto themselves within governments.

Any particular reason why you said universal income and not unemployment benefits? Just personal preference, or is there a reason it fits more with corporatism?
You could say the policy is that you're on the payroll of your home corp even if you're "between assignments". The justification for why this doesn't lead to abuse is the same as for why there's no opression. It's a noblebright setting an the people are just nice and good.

...

>The justification for why this doesn't lead to abuse

Is the same as it is in real life, because it doesn't, studies have shown this, and contrarian opinions have mostly amounted to reactionary reeee at the idea of people getting money for nothing.

There's nothing in the definition of a country that implies responsibility and care for their citizens. You can be just as opressive and evil as Syria as you could as Walmart.
The countries in these settings are completely irrelevant. There's nothing to hide behind. In shadowrun, with extraterritoriality, the megacorps are already countries and they can hevy taxes on their citizens. They just keep the label because they like being evil.

Cybersyn reminds me of a post-apocalyptic cyberpunk setting I had imagined.

A global war destroyed much of the planet leaving only one city. The whole city is administrated by a corporation. An A.I. regulates everything in the city. Electricity production, life support systems, traffic lights, automatic hydroponic farms outside the city, automatic trains, human population, etc. Humans are divided in different categories according to their usefulness. Some belong to a all-powerful cyber-aristocracy, while the poor are merely drones, the A.I. sends to do jobs it seems too dangerous for valuable machines (unclogging the air filters on the walls, repairing the train tracks, hunting down raiders, scavenging the ruins of old cities, getting rid of mutants in the sewer system...).