We Have to Build the Cool Parts of Cyberpunk

The worst possible outcome is that we get cyberpunk, but only the shitty parts. That's where we're heading right now.

We're getting the corpos and their increasingly thicc alliance with the government. Yesterday, the USG announced that Anthropic, Google, OpenAi and xAI would all be pre-releasing their models to the government and that the government would be getting an increased say in who would get access to what models. Anthropic's war with the Department of War, when Anthropic was labeled a supply chain risk, and the banning of the release of Mythos-Fable by the government are only a few examples. Anthropic and OAI being willing to put their models into the government to assist in military operations in South America and Iran are another recent example.

We're getting concentrated control over the internet already. Age verification, really just identity verification applied in the name of "saving the kids", is rolling out across Europe and soon, we will see the exact same thing get passed in the US. Censorship and surveillance is already blossoming across Europe and the US and has been prevalent in China and the Middle East for quite some time.

Palantir, Flock and other surveillance capitalist countries are becoming ubiquitous at an alarming rate. They're becoming far more socially accepted as well, even as the governments wielding them become increasingly corrupt and authoritarian.

War is spreading, namely drone and "smart bomb" warfare, with Iran, Palestine and Ukraine serving as the proving ground of what is to come. The robots are here... they're just being used to blow people up instead of doing our dishes.

All of that should piss you off... but what should really piss you off is that we're getting all of the bad parts of cyberpunk... without the good stuff.

GLP-1's are an exception but for the most part, we're not seeing the lifespan-elongating superdrugs, the cool chrome prosthetics, the neural implants. We got Meta Raybans that surveil everyone you see, though. We're getting the corpos but the anarchists responding are hysterically undereducated and extremely incapable. We've got builders galore, but they're all building B2B SaaS slop. We have alternative, hard-to-trace currency, but it's being used to build surveilled casinos instead of surveillance-proof black markets. We have malware, but it's being pointed at senior citizens to enrich Russian zoomers with Ferraris instead of against anyone in any kind of power.

What should enrage you into action is that we are going down the worst possible avenue, the one where we get all of the surveillance and oppression of cyberpunk but not even the aesthetic benefits of it. No Neon Tokyo, just a spreading West Virginiafication. Power concentrates in one direction, and we seem to have a populace more willing to slurp slop all day instead of do something about it.