Quote from: Insufficient Metal;416155Since a large part of cyberpunk was style-over-substance, this shouldn't be surprising.

In Storming the Reality Studio, the author posits that the very first work of "cyberpunk" fiction was Mary Shelly's Frankenstein.

Loved that book.

Also DD, I think you are correct that the corp-uber-alles, screw "the man" socio-political stuff was nothing new, and just a reflection of the us young and stupid anti-establishment types thinking (once again) we were making some kind of stand (just like the hippies, greasers, beatniks, etc..). The essence of CP is actually in the trappings, "the leather jackets, the forearm-replaced-with-a-gatling-railgun nonsense, the NeuroUltraNet Braincore jacks" as you put it. That stuff IS the cyberpunk. That's why it's being dated doesn't bother me. It's always been fantasy. Honestly, I still like KMFDM too

Quote from: CRKrueger;416147you can hook someone up to a PET scanner to see how their brain reacts to a commercial.  The level of manipulation that is possible is entire geometric orders of magnitude greater,

I read an article about a firm in LA that does audience-testing for films, but the audience is all wired up to brain scans and monitored scene by scene.    I am quite sure that they offer the service for commercials and music videos as well.

I wonder if the firm has been used for political commercials.   It's a whole new level of evaluation and testing.

I'd like to be totally against it...but if it makes horror movies scarier and action movies more exciting, I gotta go say Plug Me In!

DD, I'll agree with you that corporate controlling aspects of society and gov't is nothing new, and the difference is not one of kind, but of degree.  Where I disagree though is that the incredible change in the degree of control certainly does make a big difference to me.

I see a difference between a populace who would react if they knew the truth and one that has been carefully and systematically conditioned to just not give a fuck.

As someone said upthread, if Cyberpunk as a genre fails to deliver today socially, it's because we all sold out in the 80s and there is no resistance.

I always viewed Cyberpunk in a social, political and economic context, I never thought "Pink Mohawk" was a key to the genre.  Corporate dystopia and the willing sacrifice of freedoms by the populace were the keys for me, and we got that in spades.

Quote from: Sigmund;416157That stuff IS the cyberpunk. That's why it's being dated doesn't bother me. It's always been fantasy. Honestly, I still like KMFDM too

Me three.

And yeah, it's a bit like saying "well, if you take out the hard-bitten dialogue, moody lighting, double-crosses, twists and femme fatales, film noir's got nothing."

Quote from: CRKrueger;416162I see a difference between a populace who would react if they knew the truth and one that has been carefully and systematically conditioned to just not give a fuck.

Systematically conditioned to paying full attention to crap like Lady GaGa, Angelina Jolie, Taylor Swift, movies, reality TV shows, etc ...   :rolleyes:

I still think the Military Icebreaker - combat software with the same kind of mystique as a B2 stealth bomber, piloted in real time by a shit hot console jockey - is the coolest thing in the world.

And I presume somewhere in the world there exists some kind of army authored hacking tool. So did they get it right or wrong?

It seems to me that there are elements of truth to be found in cyberpunk fiction, and that is all one can really hope for.

And Military Icebreakers are so cool I'd have missed them if they didn't exist.

My GURPS Cyberpunk campaign ran from 1990 to 1992, and it is still one era in my gaming history I fondly remember (it actually was inspired by "Golem^100" by Alfred Bester, and had horror and paranormal elements.

It was set in 2090. Manhattan was abandoned, a refuge for the poor and the homeless. A Megacorporation had built a lab under the WTC Towers, and they experimented with drugs capable of awakening mental powers in human beings (the lab rats were the destitutes living in Manhattan). A subway train connected this lab to a monitoring center set under Liberty Island.

Some of the experimental drugs came from chemicals exctracted in SE Asia (exp. Laos) after a war down there where heavy concentrations of NBC weapons had been used on the jungles.

You can see the inspirations: "Blade Runner", "Escape from New York", some of the most hallucinogenic vistas of "Apocalypse Now", "Altered States" and even "Air America" and some Iron Maidens' cover threw in the mix. It also was the only time that a campaign didn't ended well with *the players* agreeing that it was a great ending.

Anyway, for my 2090 future I took an hint from "Aliens": take reconigzable technology and prop it with futuristic thinghies. The "marines" from "Aliens" are worse equipped than an elite soldier of today, and helmet-mounted cameras sending sending images on fuzzy B/W screens were "retro" even when the movie was out. But that was the point: you both grasped the context and had enough cool vistas/gadgets to call it "futuristic/awe inspiring". Same for the choices made in the original "Alien" or in movies like "Outland".

IMHO, *the* thing no one saw coming were cellphones. An iPhone 4 would cost a truck of credits in the "future" of GURPS Cyberpunk.

Quote from: ReckallIMHO, *the* thing no one saw coming were cellphones. An iPhone 4 would cost a truck of credits in the "future" of GURPS Cyberpunk.

And what's nuts is they we're already here (according the wikipedia the first commercial cell network was launched in Japan in 1979). I remember that people I knew started to get them in the early 90's.
I think, though, that nobody imagined they would be quite so ubiquitous.

Quote from: Reckall;416180IMHO, *the* thing no one saw coming were cellphones. An iPhone 4 would cost a truck of credits in the "future" of GURPS Cyberpunk.

My personal favorite: the "Cistron" from GURPS Black Ops.

A miniature computer with a full-color screen that you can write on, a fold-out keyboard, can access the Internet AND television AND radio. OMG! And it has a GPS!

Price: $62,000, if you can find one on the black market because it's super-magic ultra-technology.

Quote from: Aos;416181And what's nuts

SIMPLE JACK

Did fucking Erik Bwhotshismname post something not about...the GAME...or rather THE game?

I will mark this date in my calandar.

I don't think cyberpunk is unplayable or goofy.

Would a Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon type game be unplayable?  Maybe a little goofy, but certainly not unplayable.  Same with cyberpunk.  Just as the "rocket patrol" pulps are a 1930s vision of the future, so too is Neuromancer/Talsorian-esque cyberpunk a 1980s/early 90s vision of the [nearer?] future.

Doesn't invalidate a thing.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;416137I mean, how is the US getting involved in brushfire wars with troop deployments all over the place now any different than the US sending Marines to Haiti in the 20's, Guatemala in the 30's, Hearst basically inventing the Spanish/American war?  How are "megacorps running everything" now any different than US Steel or Standard Oil or innumerable horrid "company towns" that dotted the Appalachians from the mid 1800's onward?  Or carpetbaggers moving on the South during reconstruction?

It is the old adage, "My dear, I play in the middle ages but god as my witness. I never ever want to live in the real middle ages."

When you dig beyond a surface examination of events you will find the things that we changed because they proved intolerable or abhorrent to live with.  Doesn't mean our times are not beset with problems nor does it mean that we can cease to be vigilant.  

But it doesn't change the fact that more people live in freedom and prosperity today than any other time in human history. That trends continue to point to the expansion of both.

As to the original OP, yes there are elements of cyberpunk today. Extrapolation works well for many elements of technology. Jules Verne's book "Paris in the 20th century" is eerily prescient in many parts. But taken as a whole both Verne and Gibson are way off the mark. The main problem are being unable to predict "out of left-field" advances along with secondary and synergistic effects on society due to technological progress.

Today Cyberpunk is still enjoyable as an alternate present. Much like James Bond/Super Spy, Urban Fantasy, and several other genre.

Quote from: CRKrueger;416162I always viewed Cyberpunk in a social, political and economic context, I never thought "Pink Mohawk" was a key to the genre.  Corporate dystopia and the willing sacrifice of freedoms by the populace were the keys for me, and we got that in spades.

I agree with this. Like the Comedian said: "It came true. You're living in it." Isn't the sf that stands in the same relation to today's world as cyberpunk to the world of the 80s all that posthuman Singularity stuff -- like Charles Stross and Ken McLeod?

Quote from: danbuter;416019On the contrary, I think the current world is very cyberpunk, minus the common cybernetics. If you're outside in a city or many large towns, you're on camera. When Hurricane Katrina hit, it was Blackwater doing the street corner guards stuff. Big banks and big corporations tell politicians what to do. The internet is pervasive. iPhones and other wireless devices are better than the cyperpunk stuff in the Gibson books.

Things are very dystopian right now. England is hurtling back to the nineteenth century and America feels like a lost cause. Russia seems to be flexing its muscles from time to time while China is on the ascent. India is a fast growing nuclear power.

I used to enjoy Cyberpunk greatly but it has not aged well at all. I'm sure there are plenty of good modern iterations of the genre, but modern technology renders the ability to predict fun stuff a little less potent. Digital technology was new in the 80's and so 'jacking in' was a cool idea. In the end I started reading Jeff Noon whose work somehow got lumped in with cyberpunk when it's more organic and rooted in mythology not cybernetics.

Quote from: ggroy;416074Billy Idol's "Cyberpunk" cd?

No matter what anyone says, Adam In Chains is a good tune.