A Cyberpunk Manifesto – Revised

https://www.neondystopia.com/cyberpunk-fashion-lifestyle/a-cyberpunk-manifesto-revised/

by jwfxpr • 9 years ago

84 47 9 years ago

neondystopia.com

davidgerard• 9 years ago

HN-dotted already. Google cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:DmPqry...

dredmorbius• 9 years ago

TIA is a more socially useful feed.

https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.neondystopia.com/c...

Archive.is / Archive.fo another:

https://archive.fo/3GFSF

Asooka• 9 years ago

Wow I'm from Bulgaria and didn't know this existed. Disinformation accomplished.

SideburnsOfDoom6• 9 years ago

5. Even in the most developed and ‘democratic’ countries, the System imposes misinformation. Even in the countries that pretend to be the cradle of free speech, misinformation is the System’s primary weapon. A weapon they use very well.

I wonder how that would be revisited today. Now misinformation comes from all corners, many factions all vying to misinform their way into being "the system".

The idea that some cyberpunk underground stands in resistance to this "system" is frankly hopeless. Do you want 9-11 truthers and Obama birthers? That's how you get them. Do you want antivaxers and chemtrails believers? Then let them think that they have a secret truth. Do you want the "alt-right" ? This is where it grew.

throwanem• 9 years ago

It was ever thus. The rate's increased, for which we have the Internet to thank, but that's the only change, and one not of kind but of degree. Truth and lies compete, and sometimes lies win out. Would you rather there be only pravda?

SideburnsOfDoom6• 9 years ago

Would you rather there be only pravda?

No. You're right. But then I also wouldn't write a manifesto about taking down the Establishment Media. That comes across completely differently now.

kortex2• 9 years ago

Indeed. You can't know what's truly true (istina) without some crucible in which free ideas flow, to enable the discourse which moves toward that truth. Free speech is quintessential to escaping the pravda, truthiness-es and alt-facts fed to us. The side effect is that some alt-facts find a safe space to thrive and multiply. I don't think this can be avoided, I think it ultimately is a feature of nature.

To use a machine learning analogy, all the pravda out there - everyone's relative truths - is your training set. If you limit your training set, you lose some ability to generalize to the real world.

coldtea• 9 years ago

I wonder how that would be revisited today. Now misinformation comes from all corners, many factions all vying to misinform their way into being "the system".

The System was never a single entity (e.g. just the government) in the first place.

As for smaller independent fractions, those are not really relevant, because its a power law that defines what people believe. 20% of the media/outlets/social media accounts/etc set the tone for 80% of reality (and recursively, 20% of those set 80% of the tone).

narrator• 9 years ago

Why do you even care about what cyberpunk is if you think resisting "the system" is hopeless? If everything's just fine and any kind of change tp the way things are currently working is futile then it's just a bunch of nerds playing with a grandiose fantasy ultimately leading nowhere. Might as well be Trekkies learning to speak Klingon and arguing about whether Deep Space Nine was better than The Next Generation for all you care.

SideburnsOfDoom6• 9 years ago

Everything is far from fine, I did not indicate otherwise. I did not say that "resisting the system is hopeless", read again.

Trying to change things is not futile, but the idea that this cyberpunk media underground will help us has borne toxic fruit, any fix must first grapple with the reality that this strategy was hopeless.

delinka• 9 years ago

Revised to fix translation errors, rather than revised for the current political climate. I'd have preferred the latter.

falcolas• 9 years ago

What has really changed, though?

1. The Society surrounding us is clogged with conservancy, pulling everything and everybody to itself, while it sinks slowly into the quicksand of time.
3. The System must impose its truth upon us so that it can rule. The government needs us to follow it blindly. For this reason, we live in an informational eclipse. When people can only acquire information from the government, they cannot distinguish right from the wrong. So the lie becomes a truth – truth, fundamental to everything else. Thus, leaders control with lies and ordinary people have no notion of what is true and follow the government blindly, trusting it.
12. Those who control the Net, control the information.

These seem as relevant today as they were yesterday. And it's quite likely they will still be relevant tomorrow; human nature is slow to change.

SideburnsOfDoom6• 9 years ago

When people can only acquire information from the government, they cannot distinguish right from the wrong. So the lie becomes a truth

Is that really as relevant today as it was yesterday? It seems to me now far more complex and entangled than the monolithic "resist the government system" set out:

In the US, rather than the government controlling the truth, a certain clique of fringe peddlers of a distorted narrative - the likes of Breitbart and Infowars, have done so well as to attempt a hostile takeover of government, and so far are succeeding. Is the name "Infowars" not a self-conscious echo of the sentiment that you quote above? But the content is poisoned fruit.

In the UK, the Murdoch press drives government policy, not vice versa. And has for a long time.

ivan_gammel3• 9 years ago

It's a very strange feeling to see that cyberpunk has become irrelevant today, while still being right on some judgments. Corporations are bigger than ever, the Net has become vital resource for billions of people, climate is changing and air became unbreathable in many giant megalopolises but... it's not a dystopia, it's just the future that came and felt different from what we had expected, a sort of normality that is not worse than anything in the history before. Probably, the reason is that we've got 404 in our search of the ultimate evil to oppose to. There's no single ultimate evil to resist, there are many smaller ones and many come from the resistance itself, because there's no ultimate truth to defend. The future has come and there's no cyberpunk in it.

krapp5• 9 years ago

The future has come and there's no cyberpunk in it.

It's likely that the last Presidential election was decided, in no small part, by the efforts of a neo-anarchist site publishing classified information and a group of meme obsessed netizens attempting to disrupt and undermine the establishment. That seems pretty cyberpunk to me.

orblivion• 9 years ago

My favorite was when this neoanarchist site published a video of the military killing people, and the credit card companies refused to continue to serve them. And then an amorphous non-organization known as "Anonymous" brought down the credit card companies' websites. Meanwhile the neoanarchists switched to a newly emerging "crypto-currency" created by a shadowy entity known only as "Satoshi Nakamoto".

ivan_gammel3• 9 years ago

It looks like the D.C. after Washington means "Default Country" - so deep is the assumption that the only interesting things are happening in the USA. Since there's the Net, it's inevitable that there will be hacking scandals and there will be some cyberwarfare in action, but it's a tiny part of the bigger world and the local events like the recent presidental election in USA do not define the image of modern civilization. There's no cyberpunk in the hot air and sunlight among the ruins of Syria, in the alcoholic reality of Russian monotowns or in the frozen technoutopia of silently ageing Japan. Cyberpunk today looks the same as steampunk: the form without the content, something without the grounds to exist.

alphonsegaston• 9 years ago

With a data given to them from hackers tied to Russian intelligence services. Honestly seems like a prequel to the military incident in Neuromancer.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/guccifer-20-is-li...

maus42• 9 years ago

That seems pretty cyberpunk to me.

The problem is that it does not rain all the time and the ads are not in Japanese. The visual direction is simply off. Also the soundtrack leaves much to be desired. (Instead of Vangelis and Kenji Kawai, we have ... Gangnam Style?) It is not recognizable as cyberpunk.

Less in jest: much of the "cyberpunk" (at least for people like me) even when not talking about the genre of fiction but about the more general ethos or an idea ... was influenced by the presence of the certain set of fiction, especially visual medium (film, comics, the Japanese varieties anime, manga). And with fiction, you have aesthetics and narratives. Maybe an opportunity to entertain a kind of romanticism.

The real life lacks all that. Instead of neural implants, we have touchscreens that get dirty. The advent of artificial intelligence does not come with military grade AIs escaping into wild, followed by action involving tanks and deep philosophical discussions; the advent of AI means that we have very good image classifiers (and other machine learning systems that perform well in fairly restricted tasks such as speech recognition or Go), amazing opportunities for applying statistics to marketing, and bunch of geeks who have read too much Kurzweil writing decision theory papers in California. Instead of identifiable protagonists doing cool things while opposing identifiable antagonists of the story, we get n+1 people thinking they are the cool protagonists, in other words, Occupy and Wikileaks and Anonymous and alt-right.

[The same thing works in both directions of time, really. Cyberpunk science fiction liked the underground scene of punks" resisting the system. The historical fiction as a genre has always loved the idea of underground revolutionaries. (Think about Les Miserables.) And in reality it was much more boring and nasty and ambiguous, because no matter have much you try to be grim and realistic when writing fiction, in fiction even grim and gritty kinda still glitters.]

nilved• 9 years ago

Not sure which world you live in but today is as cyberpunk as ever.

digi_owl2• 9 years ago

Well Gibson was "bemused" that people considered the world he described a dystopia, as that was never his intent.

cyberpunk3• 9 years ago

The future has come and there's no cyberpunk in it.

I'm still here...... :P

mirimir2• 9 years ago

I'm shocked that you got that username less than a year ago!

But "cypherpunk" is >9 years old, and inactive.

cyberpunk3• 9 years ago

One of the key settings in cyberpunk lit is where corporations are more powerful than governments..

We are already there in some ways. Take the situation in the UK where, say, apple don't pay any tax to the national govt -- this is a perfect example where a massive corp is more powerful than a govt. There is absolutely no way that the uk govt could change the situation.

There are a few options they could try, but they would all fail and so they're not even attempted as trying and failing would be an embarrassment and admitting that they're powerless.

The options?

Take them to court? The govt would run out of money before they even got into a courtroom.

Sales ban? Unless the cost of stopping doing business in the UK is more than paying tax in every other country who would immediately take the same steps if it worked then they'd just leave the uk.

Guilt trip? Sure, people are annoyed but it's barely a news cycle at a time and everyone will still pay 1k for the new iphone (8 is rumored at around there... apparently).

That's even before you read about the revolving door between govt and big corp and the toothless ACOBA.

The lobby/'campaign donation' culture in US politics is an even stronger litmus, to me at least, that in contract to your view the future has come, and the cyberpunk is in it.

biofox• 9 years ago

I used to have a print-out of this on my bedroom wall as a teenager, next to the Hacker Manifesto.

Looking back at this as an adult, having not read it for many year, I'm shocked at how antisocial it is. Did I really believe this stuff?

I'm guessing it was a way for an intelligent, yet powerless, kid to gain some sense of control -- identifying strongly with my skills to feel superior to the society that denied me the freedoms I desired.

Now, as an adult member of society, I'm acutely aware how much I depend on the established systems for my security and well-being. Young people shouldn't feel the need to withdraw and create their own subcultures to gain a sense of belonging or security. We should be incorporating them into society, giving them a sense of purpose and belonging, and equipping them to make meaningful contributions.

Any thoughts how we can achieve that?

digi_owl2• 9 years ago

Not quite sure. But perhaps treating them as persons and not as pests may be a start.

I think the primary problem humanity has is that adults kinda forget that we learned our way as much by experiencing things first hand as being lectured on what was good and what was bad. Forbidden fruit and all that.

BTW, i seem to recall reading that giving kids responsibilities early results in them grouping up to behave responsible. The example used was a kid watching the family store while the parent was out running and errand or some such.

xg15• 9 years ago

Young people shouldn't feel the need to withdraw and create their own subcultures to gain a sense of belonging or security. We should be incorporating them into society, giving them a sense of purpose and belonging, and equipping them to make meaningful contributions.

I'm not sure if this at all possible or even desirable. I'm not a psychologist, but my impression is that a certain degree of exploring identities is an important part of growing up - and that often involves separation from established structures and a change of relationship to family, school, etc, at least for a while. In the past, those spaces were physical, today they are a mix of physical and virtual.

That said, not everyone is rebellious as a teenager and there are many people who easily find their identities as parts if well-established groups. However people are different and I don't think those groups would at any time be desirable for everyone. ( Or if they were, we'd have a scarily homogeneous society)

Of course some subcultures and alternative groups can lead people in bad directions and be in fact harmful to them. But then the task should be to protect against those bad groups - or even better, give people the strength to protect themselves. Even in those cases, it's important to keep in mind why exactly the groups are harmful.

Seeing the existence of sub-cultures per se as the problem seems too simple to me.

krapp5• 9 years ago

Looking back at this as an adult, having not read it for many year, I'm shocked at how antisocial it is. Did I really believe this stuff?

Congratulations, you've lived long enough to become the villain. /s

1310122• 9 years ago

Challenging the world that came before them is a normal process for the development of teenagers identity. It is a way to negotiate their entry into 'the system' and I honestly think it drives us forward.

But to answer directly your question, I would say abolish tuition fees, mass incarceration and UX paradigm.

noonespecial• 9 years ago

I'm shocked at how antisocial it is. Did I really believe this stuff?

I did. And I remember how much. Today I think being thrown wide and clear of "the mainstream" by my teenaged rebellion was valuable. It gave me a great view from the outside so that as I began my journey back i could better find my place in it.

What I saw that most changed my mind? I was expecting a world of nefarious villains, but what I found was nothing but a bunch of weak anit-patterns and emergent behaviours. The world didn't suck because illuminati super-villains were oppressing the sheeple, it sucked for the same reason parks get trashed. Garbage accumulates and nobody bothers to pick it up.

ethbro• 9 years ago

The world didn't suck because illuminati super-villains were oppressing the sheeple, it sucked for the same reason parks get trashed. Garbage accumulates and nobody bothers to pick it up.

Excellently phrased. And paradoxically, harder to fix.

Everyone is willing to play at being the hero, but no one wants to pick up garbage.

discombobulate• 9 years ago

Any thoughts how we can achieve that?

It says how in the manifesto. Schools & universities do the job of indoctrination:

'Society suppresses us. Yes, it suppresses freedom of thought. With its cruel education programs in schools and universities. They drill into children their view of things and any attempt to express a different opinion is denied and punished.'.

Now, as an adult member of society, I'm acutely aware how much I depend on the established systems for my security and well-being

The System in its current form is one configuration. If you benefit from the current system, you're likely inclined to the status quo. A pig in a cage on antibiotics.

solatic• 9 years ago

Young people shouldn't feel the need to withdraw and create their own subcultures to gain a sense of belonging or security. We should be incorporating them into society, giving them a sense of purpose and belonging, and equipping them to make meaningful contributions.

None of that matters when you're a teenager. A large part of puberty is establishing identity and a unique sense of self, in contrast to the sense of belonging to family and community that existed in a healthy childhood. And as for security - the trope that teenagers feel invincible exists for a reason, and not for a cultural one.

Anytime society attempts to define what it means to make a "healthy" contribution, remember that it is society making that determination, and not the individual. Part of growing up is figuring out for yourself what kinds of decisions are healthy for you as an individual, and the job of parents and educators is to give the benefit of their experience as mentors and help guide young people into understanding whether or not the decisions they are making are actually healthy for them.

Parents restricting their adolescent children to choices which are healthy for the parents/society (but not for the child) is ultimately one of the biggest ruptures of family relationships.

c3RlcGhlbnI_• 9 years ago

The original has a rhythm, it reads like a poem. Shouldn't the corrections have tried to maintain that?

This version is awkward to read and that draws attention to how silly some of its statements are. Like that you might just want to take a little walk sometimes is not a crucial component of the manifesto, it just helped that paragraph flow before.

unixhero• 9 years ago

[meta] Fantastic discussion

A Cyberpunk Manifesto – Revised

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