For me it was Ghost in the Shell and Shadowrun, which was the first pen & paper RPG I played when I was in college. I always played a rigger because that was the first time that I ever thought about “hacking” something other than a computer or network as a lifestyle. Combining the cultures of “petrol heads” and “tech nerds” clicked with me.

But the first “cyberpunk” movie that made the idea of technology as a sub-culture real to me was, ironically, (and I hate to admit this) seeing “Hackers” for the first time. Certainly not as a real vision of what “cyberpunk” was, but rather an extremely over-the-top and glamorized commentary both on how non-technical people view technophiles as well as how people who ate, slept, lived, and breathed a tech-centered ethos might live. Like, my parents legit believed that’s how I acted with my friends when I wasn’t around them.

I grew up in the era of The Legion of Doom and the Cult of the Dead Cow, and realized that this hyperbolic version of the archetypical “console cowboys” was how a lot of people saw the younger generation of computer kids. They had graduated from the long-haired, bearded, ex-hippies toiling away in a basement somewhere into stylish (albeit very weird) tech-savvy young hacktivists that were trying to buck the system solely because someone told them they couldn’t.

Then, reading Neuromancer and Snow Crash introduced the idea of a virtual world parallel (beneath? alongside?) to the physical world and that was the gravity that brought it all together.

There’s an instakill bug in Pyramid Song? I’ve played through it 3 times and have never experienced that bug. How does it manifest?

One of the dangers I can see is that their instances become supernodes that carry a lot more sway over the underlying AP protocol. They could use Microsoft’s old “embrace and extend” philosophy and start making special extensions that only their nodes have. Then their critical mass either forces changes to the underlying protocol or bifurcates the fediverse into “Meta-based” and “not Meta-based”.

Another issue will be what data they can mine from their users as well as other instances, and what tools they will build to circumvent any protections to mine all the fedi data.

And let’s not even talk about the moderation issues (or sure lack thereof) that will make the fediverse much less safe for everyone. We’ve already seen time and time again that Zuck & co. don’t care about moderation and user safety, and actually would rather manipulate data to their own nefarious ends.

There are so many more reasons why this is a bad thing.

A lot of my foundational impressions were based on movie soundtracks of the likes of “Johnny Mnemonic”, “Strange Days”, “The Matrix”, and “The Crow”. In my college days, I was really into the industrial genre and the likes of NiN (the Broken/Fixed era), Front 242, Sister Machine Gun, God Lives Underwater, and Machines of Loving Grace. Then I got into EDM for a while, as a lot of the software devs I lived and worked with were into that genre.

These days, I’ve been getting into darkwave and synthwave. I’m a big fan of our very own @revengeday@dataterm.digital, Dance With The Dead, Extra Terra, Neon Nox, Lazerpunk, and DreamReaper to name a few.