How to spice up cyberpunk so that's it's fresh again?

Watch the new Blade Runner 2049 movie when it comes out to get some ideas
t. not PR

A cyberpunk campaign, or a steampunk one?

>tfw you actually like parts of the Steampunk aesthetic
>tfw nobody ever focuses on the cool side of stuff, the Industrial Revolution era machinery and the Jules Verne level speculative science.
>Everyone just goes "I'm a creatively bankrupt fuck so I'll just hot glue gears on fucking everything, lol aren't I so quirky"

Cyberpunk. The creation of proper clones and the companies behind it made it fit better there.

I don't think you need to make it about Shadowrunner types, though. A Corporate Executive who thinks a project goes too far would make a fine story, not all of them have to be about down on their luck self-inserts.

It's dead, Jim. We are already post-cyberpunk IRL and the corps won big time.

3D printing everywhere. LEDs and touchscreens and modern tech, not stuck-in-the-80s clunky wired crap.
Everything is online. The internet is everywhere. The corps are everywhere, splashing adverts over your vision unless you use illegal adblock software. Your INS will direct you to a corp hivestore or burbclave if you don't keep an eye on it, or start singing advertising jingles when you're not going to need a direction for a while.

The world is shit, and the corps aren't fucking helping with their constant shit.
WARNING, THIS ACTION IS NOT TOLERATED BY YOUR CORPORATE CODE OF CONDUCT
WARNING, DO NOT LOOK AT THE ADVERTISEMENT TO YOUR LEFT.
YOU HAVE BEEN DEDUCTED A DAY'S PAY FOR LOOKING AT THE ADVERTISEMENT ON THE LEFT

Bring back the punk, bring back the dystopias, bring back the pounding electronic beats instead of this memewave techno crap.

Bring back the gritty underworlds where you have to fight and scrape for every scrap of food and every drip of water, but at least you're free.

Cyberpunk but with Indian tech support.

INCLUDE RAPE

I remember a thread on here a pretty long time ago where people brainstormed a post-cyberpunk setting.

I don't remember much of it and wish I still had a link but the gist of it is that it was about the "punk" aspect of cyberpunk becoming meaningless. Corporations saw profit in the punk aesthetic and started heavily advertising and selling punk merchandise which of course made "punk" lose all of its meaning.
Al the old real punks were starting to get jaded, between their lifestyle becoming a parody of itself and the uncertainty of whether they are going to earn enough cash that they could party in a penthouse or have to sleep in abandoned buildings each month many consider the choice of selling out and just working for the corporations directly.

It was pretty cool but that's all I remember.

No thanks, Edgester McEdgy.

it won't be a fresh again, because we are living in a cyberpunk world. Even the old movies and books from this genre were just exaggerations of how things really were in the inner cities of the time. The logical predictions have mainly become true, what with advanced digital technology, changes in communication, law and order, sharp wealth divides and extreme decadence. Not to mention that even the aesthetic of modern cities matches

DOUBLE THE RAPE

You only need to do the same shit then. Take our world and exaggerate it. Lead it to it's logical conclusion. Have an internet controlled by corporations where you have to pay for every services, constant information wars to win the public opinion, rampant hypocrisy and corruption, politics slaves to corporate interests, etc.

That's just regular cyberpunk, nothing new.

>Formerly anti-corporation rebellious groups fracture between a loss of group identity and the mounting pressures of living a high-stakes activist lifestyle that never seems to make any meaningful difference for their cause.
>Corporations welcome these highly skilled individuals who know all of the tricks and backdoors that hackers and other activists use with glee, although they naturally keep any interactions at arm's length for security purposes.
>Start doing deniable asset jobs for corporations in return for paychecks that can actually be used outside of the black market and a place to live that isn't covered in black mold.

I mean, congratulations on your Shadowrun prequel. I'm sure you guys thought it was very innovative and groundbreaking at the time.

If you put it that way it probably only was interesting to me because I have little knowledge of cyberpunk besides the bare basics you pick up from browsing this board, I suppose this means I have to get into Shadowrun lore now.

>implying cyberpunk isn't now
I mean, sure there is no excessive body modification or consumer-available true AIs, but the main theme of technology and corporate oppression is relevant as fuck today.

You and me both. the Gear Meme is just the most annoying thing ever.

Post cyberpunk is just the inevitable collapse of society finally coming to fruition.

I'd do terrible things to get more "The Difference Engine" steampunk and less "gears lol" steampunk.

Why not just let feminism kill the patriarchy but still keep the society work through cucks?

I would say hit on the disillusionment between both sides of the coin. The corporations are oppressive but they provide stability. The punks are idealist but ultimately many are just common criminals following the money and getting cronies to do the dangerous jobs for them by doing the song and dance of revolution and change

I unironically recommend looking into the setting of Sunless Sea and Fallen London. They're heavily focused on the aspects of steampunk that cover societal upheaval and progression in spite of ethics and human decency.

>instead of punks, have kids who evolved durig numerous campus riots as protagonists
>they don't rise against machine, instead, they are tools for politicals blocks in the country
>goverment is loosing it's grip on the country
>most the grand visions of today bombed in the future because of lobbying, no self driving cars, no mars colonization
>machine learning bloomed and it took away most of the jobs, you have machine learning systems creating other machine learning systems
>throw biological modifications into the mix

>Unimaginably high unemployment
>Tons of homeless
>Drug addiction has skyrocketed in the lower classes
>Through a mixture of backstabbing and lawmakers trying to sabotage the opposing party for cheap votes, everything that gets passed by the federal government is either horribly flawed or is blatantly biased to favor whichever company managed to get enough congressmen in its pocket to screw over its competitors in that industry.

>Steampunk was supposed to talk about "punks",

The creators preferred the term Gaslamp Fantasy if they wanted one at all. The Difference Engine was more alt-history than anything. The term Steampunk was applied by reviewers and publishers looking for an easy way to compare and compartmentalize.

Which is why genres are essentially a lie and you should judge a book based on it's merits, not accept or deny it based on what it's grouped with.

The thing about cyberpunk is that it became real and it turned out fine. Prosthetics, the Japanese and netflix aren't the dehumanizing horrors early writers would have thought they were.
What we have nowadays is called post-cyberpunk. In which technology and business can be forces for good as well as evil.

Yes, but we need to bring it back. No need to be contrarian about it.

> BUT IT HAS TO BE FRESHHHHH TROPES AND STANDARDISATION IS BAAAADDDDDDD
Shut up. You are why steampunk turned to cogfop. The world is not for special snowflakes.

IIRC, that's what happened to punk in the first place.

So glad I stuck with metal. Resist megacorp influence, start your own corps with your own legions of fans paying for merchandise. Let them take time out from their worthless megacorp-funded lives to find real meaning for a few hours at a time.

The leftist-feminists win and with the help of social media megacorporations institute a reign of thought-policing not seen since the Stasi. Neurological pharmaceuticals and cybermind implants are used to enforce official politically-correct doctrine. Anyone who doesn't conform is considered a dangerous punk deviant in need of re-education and mind-monitoring.

Mindless atheism and decadent hedonism replace most forms of religion and culture in the west. In the east Islamic totalitarianism dominates.

I wouldn't change it too much. Just update the tech and the aesthetic. That's it. The tropes can stay the same. It's about noir characters set in a dystopian, near-future world, where some struggle is occurring, and new technologies are changing the world.

>spice
>fresh
Kind of depends, but I'd suggest herbs, lemon, some lighter chilli and maybe ginger.

add futas to it

Is this what the outrage police though this game was going to be about?

>business
>force for good
wew lad

criminally underrated post

Elon Musk is the tesla of the modern era.

Took me a while to understand what was going on there. Any backstory? Was he a tattoo artist before losing his hand?

Nah. Elon Musk is actually a competent businessman.

>The thing about cyberpunk is that it became real and it turned out fine.
This. Oh, sure, everyone likes to get up in arms about how shitty everything is, but if you look at the actual data instead of the thin veneer of panic the media paints on everything to gets views, the First World has never been safer. It's been more profitable, sure, but things are actually really good right now. Plus, the main bad guys of cyberpunk (Corporations and the Government) have been repeatedly exposed as just "guys doing a boring job" at best and "hilariously incompetent and trapped by a system that doesn't let them fuck EVERYTHING up" at worst. You can't really hate them anymore because they aren't mysterious and threatening. They're just wealthy, which is only threatening if you honestly believe they could turn the world into a dictatorship without losing all that wealth and power in the process. Which they can't, obviously.

And a force for good.

You know he's going to turn Mars into a corporate citystate, right?

Mind you, THAT will be cyberpunk as fuck.

So far yes you are mostly right but is not going to last long. Inequalities will increase along with troublesome population changes (pushed by those you are defending, in part).

Mediocre. Rape was already extremely common. The game isn't supposed to turn into Rapepunk 2020.

Implying I haven't already added loli/shota/futa biosculpts to my cyberpunk 18 years ago. I even had a chart to calculate the price of prostitution and the chance to get STDs. And I'm not even mentioning the sexware. Try harder.

I suppose it's better than what everybody else will do with Mars, which is FUCKING NOTHING.

And it will be fine, a perfectly suitable first-world place to live in.

Income inequality only matters if the majority of people are losing "quality of life." Speaking as someone living just above homelessness for most of my life, personal things are looking up, so I don't really care how much richer people are than me. And population changes are only a provable negative when regarding OVERpopulation, demographics don't matter outside of cultures and political votes. Neither of which affects the quality of life.

Keep in mind, I'm speaking as an American. I can't really say how well things are going in Europe, so I shouldn't have said "First World" and included them.

We are in the "early" days of cyberpunk if anything. Now I am not saying it will turn into EVILCORP 2022...but many techs like VR/robotics/automation/ai are just not there yet.

With all that said we aren´t talking about the far future here, more like Soon™

The real danger is the mid to long term future is the rise of automation making economic productivity disconnected from the health and wellbeing of the populace.

The first world model of healthcare and education is a practical thing as much as it is a statement of values- A well educated and healthy populace make more money, which means more taxes for the government and profits for the corporations. The conditions in a lot of third world countries aren't just due to their leaders being evil or incompetent, but that their industries and sources of wealth don't benefit from an educated populace, and attempts to start that long term investment in diversifying their economies are often undermined or opposed by groups who want the money for themselves right now.

In a future where first world governments and corporations no longer have a financial incentive to care about the wellbeing of their population at large, we'll either need to see a paradigm shift or we are in for some very dark times.

The capital class has an attentionspan of exactly one quarter. It's just a bunch of workaholics diddling numbers for a high score and being too autistic to care about external effects.
Nobody is engineering society, at worst you'll see people trying to ensure continued wealth for indefinite generations for their offspring like they're some sort of aristocracy.

Subversive identity politics for individuals, groups, agencies, and corporation. Technology is wholly secondary and focused on a streamlined fully connected world.

The punk side is the anti-establishment alternate isentities of folks fighting an oppressive system of technological and monetary usurpation of individual liberties.

Replace corporations by banks, hedge funds and trusts. They own the corporations but remain invisible. Only a few very large corporations resist them.

They have to care at least a bare minimum degree.

After all, you can't make any profit if you have no consumers.

>no longer have a financial incentive
Well, I suppose that's when the "keeping our necks in one piece" incentive comes in. Or, more likely in today's violence-averse America, keep people happy because machines can't vote.

As long as you're an employee of SpaceX. Who knows what'll happen to those who are fired for incompetence? Maybe they get to Earth again, maybe they just get tossed out an airlock, maybe they just get packed off to Earth as insensitive cargo.

Maybe that's how we can spice up Cyberpunk? Set it on Mars, where the corps really DO supply your air. Want to live under the grid? Better hope you can spoof the cameras well enough not to flag up a warning for not paying your air tax.

Well, that's the hope. The majority of corporations need a large customer base to exist, so hopefully they'll see the necessity in subsidising a universal basic income or equivalent to ensure they still have customers.

Otherwise, we'll see an increasingly desperate group of corporations cannibalising one another for a shrinking group of customers, until the only people left with wealth are the super elite who own the automated systems and everyone else is fucked, unless you're a personal asset to them in some way.

That works for governments, yeah, but if we do reach the point of automation where a small group of people who control the machines could be entirely self sufficient, I worry that they wouldn't have much incentive to just stop giving anyone else the benefit of it. If you make all the food, build all the tanks and control the internet, why not just roost in your ivory tower, let the world starve, and then spread out into a place no longer cluttered up with annoying plebs?

Sure it's an absolute nightmare scenario, but it still worries me.

GOD I MISS TH GOOD OLD FASHIONED CORPS
I am not even using sarcasm against you, user

I worked on an idea for a weird idea for an alternate Shadowrun Mars setting with a friend a while back, although we went weird with it, introducing some Sword and Planet elements along with echoes of the american frontier.

>If you make all the food, build all the tanks and control the internet, why not just roost in your ivory tower, let the world starve, and then spread out into a place no longer cluttered up with annoying plebs?
Because, despite what everyone has been telling you for your entire life, people aren't heartless monsters. If even ONE person in that group cares about someone outside of it, that won't happen. Because that one person outside the group has a family, and they have friends, and THEY have a family, and on and on and on it goes to the point it becomes totally fucking pointless to enact the genocide because you have to find the dividing line of people you can kill without pissing off the survivors. And even then, that only works if EVERYONE in that group is fine with mass murder and won't object on moral grounds.
It's the same principle that stops people from murdering you when you make that annoying sound while standing in line at the DMV. It pisses them off, sure, but they still don't want to actually kill you, because they aren't the Orcs of Fucking Mordor.

>because machines can't vote.
They could, but the 18 years old bit is the kicker.

Technically, since serving in the military for at least 1 year naturalizes a person, all the terminators and killbots of the US army would be able to register to vote after their 18th year.

However, they'd most likely be obsolete long before then, so we could reach a hilarious point in history where the robots vote in a candidate who promises to bring back jobs to all of the obsolete robots.

Once those things get automated their value will also drop immensely though. People talk about the society needing basic income to continue to be able to function, this is not true if food and housing become as easy to get as tap water. Right now even the most destitute of vagrants don't die of thirst in the developed world. (You should still introduce basic income but only because it's fairer than welfare and government charity projects, not as suggested here because if you give your money to poor people those poor people might use it to buy your products)

Corporations will have a financial incentive to care about the population as long as their income is dependent on the population liking them. Right now we have an example of what the future might look like with internet media. It costs next to nothing to host some data and so next to nothing is charged for clicking data, so little that looking at an ad is a reasonable surrogate. Even though consumers sacrifice only their time in consuming a product from these companies there's enough competition that they can just switch to somebody else for moral or political reasons. (That's why these companies are so overly paranoid about political correctness and outrage is such a powerful tool in the modern era, but that's irrelevant to the point)

And that also ties into my point here Presumably, we're trying to make AI as human as possible, so by that point, they probably have humans they care about and don't want to hate them.

Judging by the very obvious transsexual in O.P.'s picture, with his strong, lantern jaw & rugged, manly, features, I'd say he already has.

The problem there is that we're also living in an increasingly segregated society, by wealth and class rather than by ethnicity or faith. The globalist wealthy are getting more and more insular, and it could reach the point that they don't have those outside connections you speak of. At that point, it would only take apathy, not malice, to doom us all.

>Who knows what'll happen to those who are fired for incompetence? Maybe they get to Earth again, maybe they just get tossed out an airlock, maybe they just get packed off to Earth as insensitive cargo.
If he's in it for the long term, Musk'd probably have Mars cyclers set up, wouldn't be too hard to send an employee or anything else back to Earth.

You could envision a setting in which a society is so stratefied that the different castes don't even think of each other as human anymore.
Would that even be cyberpunk anymore?

But THAT assumes that the poor majority is just going to sit on their hands and wait to die.
If it gets to that point, you can safely assume that the new subraces are perfectly capable of providing for their own needs, either themselves or with machines they have exclusive access to.

Okay are you roleplaying? Because if that's supposed to be a comment about today's society it wins fucking hyperbole of the year award and it's only july.

If the elite minority control all the automated systems, I'm not sure what any number of the disenfranchised poor could accomplish.

Then that group will just cut off the one person, m8. This has happened countless times in history.

The poor majority might not have a choice, considering with wealth it becomes easy to control the means of, well, control.

Okay, here me out on this one:

Set it...IN THE PAST!

I was going to say.
Wouldn't they just revert back to a caveman society and start history anew?
I mean, if they don't have any jobs working for the richies anymore, since it's all automated, and they can't buy anything from the richies anymore, since they don't have jobs (the richies supposedly still buying and selling stuff to each other) wouldn't they just be disconnected from the richies and have their own society that doesn't have these automation problems?
Hell, they wouldn't even have to be caveman. They have all the knowledge they need. They're just people. People that have nothing to do with richies.

"Bullshit, your name is not Pete! Put your manager on the cerebro-link!"

>The wealthy are becoming more segregated from the rest of the population
>They make hand over fist money while the poor suffer
>To the Blacks, Latinos, and Arabs, they say "Those whites, middle class jews, and asian people are the real enemy"
>To the Whites and Asians, they say "Look at those bottomfeeding blacks, latinos, and arabs, they're blaming you for everything wrong in their lives. Maybe if they stopped being such lazy subhumans, your lives would be better."
>SJWs swallow the bait
>/pol/ and the alt-right swallow the bait

And the puppets dance on their strings for the amusement of their masters.

I'm exaggerating for the purposes of corporate dystopia, but it's also something that kinda worries me.

I was lucky enough to be born in a first world country to a wealthy family, even though I'm not directly involved with the source of that wealth, but seeing who my family associate with makes me concerned. They have friends all over the world, of many races and colours... But they're all rich. Meanwhile, they can barely remember the names of people who don't live five minutes from us and they see every day. The bubble of their social world just seems to be shrinking and getting more and more distant from the rest of the world.

They could eke out an existence in the post-apocalyptic ruins as farmers, survivors, etc; or they could pool some money into a co-op and buy their own super-3d-printer.

People are forgetting what Punk is. It's a sad byproduct of the commercialization and popularization of the genre.

My suggestion would be to start off thinking of the political landscape and find one thing that really pisses you off. Rise of big corporations, citizens attacked over political beliefs, the inequality gap between rich and poor, terrorism, etc... Then put on some music by Dead Kennedys, The Queers, The Misfits, The Clash, Husker Du, etc... while you write your story. Multiply your problem 10 fold and place it in a cyberpunk setting and have your story revolve around it.

You could go the opposite route and let your stories be more about the man/machine dichotomy, but while there's more philosophical substance there, it doesn't make for as interesting a story to play through - that's better left to print and screen.

tl;dr choose either Cyber or Punk, let one be the foundation for your stories and the other be the asthetic if you want to tell compelling cyberpunk stories.

Actually update the look to be a blend of modern and old stuf instead of all old or all modern

Rip off Crime thrillers and non genre fiction more often. The best cyberpunk writer right now is Don Winslow and the man writes noir because he gets the tone down, not some hack SF writer that writes like he's never outside his house.

... Making their own automated system? I mean, it's fucking automated. They could probably just steal a construction bot and have it build the system for them.
Okay, the two of you are being fucking ridiculous now. There has never been a point in history where a small group of global elites has mercilessly slaughtered an entire lower caste of civilization by apathy. Evidence: See; My Fucking Existence.
Well, speaking as one of those nameless plebs your family doesn't give half a fuck about, I'm doing fine.

>Day firestarters took over was great day for tribe.
>Fire good. Fire warm. Fire keep out wolves and make fish taste good.
>But firestarters bad. They keep fire. They only share with big chief and tribesman of many shinies
>now big chief and firestarters live up hill, eat many fish, have many shinies
>poor us starve in cold, flee from wolves
>when try to take hill, when try to take shinies, big chief burn with fire
>fire bad

Cyberpunk doesn't need spicing up.

>One day, outsider come
>Say he has new thing
>Calls it...Pointy Stick
>Will outside save us, or take Hill for self?

That's exactly what happened, and it was bound to. Metal isn't dangerous. There's no ideas attached to it that make it a threat to governments. Punk is exactly the opposite - it was founded with political motives, always had a political narrative, and was always anti-government. It had to be coopted and controlled in order to prevent the spread of such ideas.

Also, second generation punk musicians were all aesthetic and no substance. They sold out harder than than a crack dealer in Chicago.

So, you have fun with your substanceless music. I'll stick with youtube.com/watch?v=JUpidCc7wwY (A song that an entire cyberpunk campaign could be based around).

>Metal isn't dangerous. There's no ideas attached to it that make it a threat to governments.
Do you even listen to metal?
80s thrash was all about politics. Megadeth still is, along with the entire metalcore genre.
It's not all about vikings or killing nazis or dying slowly from your wounds on the battlefield, cold and alone as death overtakes you.

If there's absolutely nothing the rich could want from the poor. i.e. their automated machines provide for their every need, they live in a post-scarcity society and they would probably just han out free stuff to the plebs, since it doesn't cost them anything.

But an actually post-scarcity system is impossible, since there's always something that has some worth to someone. The rich may develop a taste for degrading service from poor people (very cyberpunk-y) or become human-centric entertainment obsessed and create an attention-based economy for the poor to compete int (very post-cuberpunk)

>my poor oppressed minorities receiving free SNAP/EBT

Campaign idea: a Slack group of right-wing hackers decides to crash the national welfare system.

Would make for a decent villain campaign.

Oh, like setting up messed up reality tv shows like Blade Runner, or that new computer game S.O.S.

Too much exposition needed to explain how the welfare is really keeping people poor with mismanaged cultural incentives in order to keep a voting demographic.
It's all well an good discussing deep themes in your fiction but you also need to be able to bring it digestable and snappy.

>Elon Musk is actually a competent businessman.
Nah, he's the recipient of the most government money since the East India Company. His businesses would all be broke if it wasn't for the generous subsidies he gets various governments.