Thank you for your kind response, I’m sorry if I came off really hostile. I’ve had bad experiences with people that have similar ideas to you in the past, and I’ve spent most of the last three years in severe chronic pain. You seem nicer and more humble in your comments and I really appreciate that.

Re: public self-model — I try to create as little difference between myself online and in meat space, because I think it’s healthier, more honest, and leads to better self actualization, because if I want to be something in the freedom of cyberspace, then I want to try to be it in real life too if I can. And, here is as real as anywhere.

You’re trying to bootstrap objective meaning and morality and something like truth out of nothing using a mishmash of tired ideas from various rationalist or adjacent schools of thought like Kant, Aristotle, Rawls, Plato, etc, while dismissing the schools of thought you disagree with (e.g. postmodernism) using tired cliches.

I’m happy for you if this framework you’ve constructed works for you, in fending off the derealization and depersonalization you speak about. I’ve had many of the same struggles, and for a few years actually spent time doing precisely what you’ve been doing — trying to bootstrap an entire rigid philosophical framework out of nothing using phenomenology and ontology and concepts from across philosophy, building a huge ediface with its own healthy helpings of people like Kant and Rawls. But for myself, as I became more familiar with Stirner, Nietzsche, Novatore, Daoism, post structuralism, and Wittgenstein, I found a better way for myself, where I wouldn’t have to forever keep fighting an ultimately self-deluding battle defending a framework built on the rickety foundations of rationalism and, ultimately, nothing at all.

I’ve realized that my inclination to do so was born out of a few fundamentally false assumptions left over from the death of religion in our society, which I had unknowingly bought into, and which were desperately reaching out to trying to reestablish a religion around themselves because it’s in their naturetod do so, in the process using me, becoming my masters. But I also realized that, iltimately, it was I who was choosing to listen to these ideas and give them power, so I could just stop.

I think there’s a better (and more intellectually clearsighted) answer instead of “reconatructing” the very same ediface that’s been crumbling for the last century or so.

How about instead realizing that there’s nothing inherently absurd or unlivable about living without objective meaning, morality, or truth, because there never were such things in the first place, just ideas that you gave power. Learning how to immerse yourself in the fluidity of self and existence and finding joy within it? Instead of “taking yourself captive,” learning to listen to yourself and your deeply-felt needs and desires, as they emerge from the creative nothing at the center of your being, and enacting them, so that action feels as inevitable and necessary as no action at all? Learning how to see that meaning is just a stance towards a thing or idea, and therefore that you can grant things meaning as pleases you, because ultimately you give meaning to things anyway, so why not own that? Become a conscious egoist, it’s fun! We have cookies and hugs at least

I started with open curiosity, but the more I read the worse it got. I’ve spent too much time on the internet reading overconfident pseudophilosophical religious rationalists’ arguments and dealing with their grandiose statements and unfounded assumptions to want to deal with any more of that, and the distinct lack of coherent argument and connective tissue anywhere on the about page and principles page (that proof of objective meaning!) convinced me this was more of that. It really reads like the time cube thing, or that one guy on reddit who thought he “disproved math.” I understand what you’re saying, and it’s not worth engaging with seriously. Naive and effortful engagement is not owed you. I am very tired, and don’t have a brain effort and space to waste.

This is… something lmao, I can’t tell if it’s serious

deleted by creator

How is itexpressing your feelings if you didn’t write the prose with your own feelings and imagery informing it? This feels cyberpunk, but not in a good way, in a bad, dystopian way lol

Fair enough, I see your point. But like I said, that’s background worldbuilding, instead of being dealt with directly by the narrative.

Right, like I said, it exists as a backdrop

Exactly!

I like Blade Runner (and 2049) a lot, but I always felt like they put much more emphasis on the ‘cyber’ part then the ‘punk’ part.

Not much commentary on socioeconomic issues, or engagement with themes of anti-athoritarianism and anti-capitalism, or the dystopian nature of the world, all of that is just background dressing to a much more standard science fiction exploration of “what it means to be human”, which is something I could find better explored in classic golden age science fiction like Isaac Asimov’s Robot and Foundation series, like Caves of Steel.

That’s why, out of all visual media, it’s really Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and Robocop that made the genre click for me, believe it nor. It’s the former that made me finally go out and get all the cyberpunk literature I could and start reading it. That’s probably informed by my queer, anarchist, and punk leanings outside of cyberpunk, you know?

You should watch this video about how much invasive user data MacOS collects and sends (in plaintext) to Apple’s servers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMc5zgALLiY

And this one, about App Store tracking and them ignoring privacy settings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=016QGxOsjQY

And read this NYT article: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/19/opinion/apple-iphone-privacy.html

E2E encryption and key data being stored only on device

That’s for iMessage. And you can get identical functionality from Signal on any Android phone with a secure element (like a Pixel). They don’t encrypt iCloud backups, and regularly turn that info in to the government. And, ironically, those iCloud backups include messages, which aren’t stored on their servers encrypted! According to the NYT: “Apple also has access to text messages that it says are otherwise encrypted when they are backed up in iCloud, a workaround that’s apparently necessary to aid law enforcement.”

it’s the best privacy story around

Not remotely. That would be GrapheneOS on a Pixel or CalyxOS on another Android phone. Apple is good in comparison to other stock vendors, sure. But it isn’t the best option. Also, maybe read their privacy policy sometime: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww. It’s enlightening stuff. They collect a lot, and use it for whatever they want as long as it doesn’t leave Apple (or the businesses its partnered with).

They don’t make money by selling you or your data - they make money selling hardware to you.

Maybe not: “Apple is also building out its own online advertising business, portions of which a French privacy watchdog said may run afoul of European laws. The agency said that Apple doesn’t appear to require users’ consent for tracking, as it now does from other app makers, meaning it could benefit from the targeted advertising that its do-not-track feature is meant to hinder.” (From the NYT article)

After all, why would a megacorporation turn down the opportunity to milk more profit out of their very captive (have you ever tried to get an Apple person to leave their walled garden?) income source? Remember, this is /c/cyberpunk lol

Apple’s made privacy a fairly large part of their value offering recently.

The problem is that that’s mostly marketing smoke and mirrors. They define privacy as not giving your data to third parties (who aren’t subcontracted with them), not actually refusing to collect in-depth data or link it to your personal identity. There have been a number of pieces of evidence released recently that show that they actually collect as much if not more data about you then Google does, and tend to ignore your privacy settings.

The amount of effort required to root a phone hard enough to where apps couldn’t stalk me wasn’t helping.

Depending on your phone, you could use GrapheneOS (which is super easy to set up compared to rooting and basically the best security and privacy you can get in any smartphone) or CalyxOS. Both easier (and more effective) than rooting, and certainly better than Apple.

I haven’t read it yet, but from what I’ve just read on the Wikipedia page — and other things I’ve heard about it previously — I’m very interested in reading it! As a cyberpunk, a queer, a trans woman, and a feminist, with an interest in poststructuralism, I think there’d be a lot of interesting things I can glean from it.

(I’ve always felt that challenging essentialized notions of gender, and engaging in radical body-modification and self-expression, is a pretty cyberpunk, and feminist, thing to do)

Non-PDF version for those like me who can’t stand PDFs: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/donna-haraway-a-cyborg-manifesto

This is an interesting idea!

Personally, from my study of it, I conceptualize the relationship between modernism and postmodernism a little differently — namely, modernism itself was concerned with questioning assumptions and critically analyzing dogmatic beliefs, trying to find justifications for them and discarding the ones that could not be justified. It was actually a response to the dogmatism and unquestioned assumptions and lack of proper justifications that was common in religiously-influenced philosophy and theology. It was also a revolution in epistemology, in trying to figure out how we could understand the world and justify our beliefs and know what is true in the first place. Postmodernism is thus, in my opinion, not a reversal of a key concept of modernism at all, but an acceleration of modernism — modernism taken to its natural conclusion, by applying modernism’s own desire to critically analyze assumptions and remove unjustified ones to modernism’s own assumptions about empiricism and objectivity and the existence of universal truths itself. And in many ways this was prefigured by Hume; in fact, Stirner, who is considered a proto-postmodernist by most scholars, explicitly cites Hume as a philosopher he respects — a rare thing indeed!

To the degree that postmodernism ends up inverting modernism, and having a completely different methodology than modernism, this is a result of the bringing of one of modernism’s core ideas to its logical fruition. And this naturally results in something far more radical and interesting and capable of bearing new intellectual fruit then modernism itself, because postmodernism’s benefit doesn’t merely come from blindly reversing an aspect of a previous philosophy, but from what it chooses to continue and strengthen and what it reverses as a result.

I think this differs strongly from the relationship between cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk because while post-cyberpunk does invert one of the aspects of cyberpunk, it does not do this as a result of a deeper undercurrent of philosophy or logic or ideas from the cyberpunk ethos that motivates this reversal, and so this reversal doesn’t really bear new fruit at all — it just undoes what cyberpunk did and returns to the science fiction world before cyberpunk came about. It doesn’t take the cyberpunk project and move forward to even more radical and thus fruitful new worlds further on beyond what cyberpunk could discover, which is what postmodernism does to modernism, because there’s no aspect or undercurrent of cyberpunk that it actually takes further. The reversal is actually just a reset.

This is why I have a lot less interest in postcyberpunk than cyberpunk — it feels like a genre created by those who have reached middle age and bought into the system, and so now, being comfortable and benefitting from the system, they willfully blind themselves to the need for radical critique and deconstruction and rage at it, and thus wish to return to a more reformist genre. Postmodernism would be more like postcyberpunk if it had looked at modernism and reversed the assumption that things need critique and critical analysis and decided to just return back to Catholic philosophy!

Interesting! Anachronistic/retrofuturistic tech is far from essential in cyberpunk (even the aesthetic) for me, but I can certainly see why it might be for others.

Instead, I think postcyerpunk should be updating the cyberpunk genre to reflect current modern societal fears. Cyberpunk was very much a product of the 1980s. The societal fears in the US revolved around rising crime rates, unchecked capitalism, Japan’s rise in influence, etc. Blade Runner perfectly encapsulates all of that. But today, 40 years later, the societal fears have changed. Personally, I think the movie Elysium is the best example of postcyberpunk. It’s still about high-tech low-lifes except the societal fears have been changed to climate change, the wealth gap, and free access to healthcare.

This definitely makes more sense, and sounds more interesting to me. I totally agree with you on what postcyberpunk is/should be.

Although, I don’t think either climate change nor other current concerns like the rise of right wing populism and fascism are new to the cyberpunk genre — see for instance John Shirley’s cyberpunk trilogy A Song Called Youth or the settings of Hardwired and Cyberpunk 2020. And the other new concerns you list are just epiphenomena of capitalism’s dominance of our society.

Relatedly, I do think, though, that our picture of what unchecked capitalism does and will look like in the future has changed since the 80s. Instead of corporations absent a government, or acting as broken up, haphazard governments, what we are actually seeing is a corporate-state merger, corporations taking over the state and turning it to their own ends — primarily the enforcement of property and destruction of worker power — because it’s much more profitable to use an apparatus that’s funded (via taxes) by the very people you want to defend yourself from and extract profit from, and already has a vineer of legitimacy, instead of having to do it all yourself. The ultimate form of outsourcing.

I see that as a misunderstanding of the genre. One of cyberpunk’s major influences was the hard-boiled detective/film-noir stories where the main character gets heavily involved in a case but their life isn’t personally improved after resolving it

That’s true. One of the things that I wish cyberpunk would explore more actually is the idea of actually fighting back against the system, or trying to build and defend what small positive things you can in the interstices between the megacorporations, and the process of doing those things in spite of knowing that, ultimately, you are doomed to fail — the system is far bigger than you, and nothing you or even a small group of people can do will ever really make a difference in the long run. Finding reasons to go on and keep fighting despite having no illusions that there is any hope. This is essential to why I liked Hardwired and Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and yet it is surprisingly rare among cyberpunk works. Perhaps a move in this direction would indeed by post cyberpunk?

It’d be nice if the text included references to the works they’re talking about.

It does, apologies. I just quoted parts that didn’t bc I was more interested in specific things it said. Here’s the list of the works the original article is talking about:

Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age is perhaps the most popular postcyberpunk novel, though also worthy of consideration are Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net and Holy Fire, Ian McDonald’s Necroville (aka Terminal Cafe), Ken MacLeod’s The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal, Greg Bear’s Queen of Angels, Slant, and (parts of) Moving Mars, Raphael Carter’s The Fortunate Fall, some of Greg Egan’s work (Egan novels like Permutation City and Diaspora are so wildly extrapolative that it’s hard to fit them into any category), and the first hundred pages or so of Walter Jon Williams’ Aristoi (among others).

is such an incredible list!

Incidentally, I’m currently working (very slowly due to my issues) on a sprawling gothic hyper-transhumanist cyberpunk interactive fiction game focused on creating a rich, novel-quality story, a fractally-detailed and heavily atmospheric world inspired both by regular cyberpunk and works like The Crow and Dark City, and naturalistic story-focused gameplay.

The gameplay will be focused around your dialogue choices with other characters and solving various obsticles designed to enhance your immersion in the world instead of pulling you out, realistic problems like figuring out who and how to talk to the right people at a night market to get illegal weapons, or how to get into your apartment to get your stuff back after you’ve been evicted. The problem solving gameplay (with usually more than one solution to every obsticle) is inspired by immersive sims like Deus Ex.

It’ll deal with themes of positive transhumanism (so, modifying yourself, being an expression of your own identity ans values, makes you more yourself, even if it makes you less “human” — the opposite of the message cyberpsychosis is meant to carry) and questions of anarchist insurrectionism and nihilism.

http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/mutated_child_of_punk.html