edgerunneralexis

I've heard very good things about Ken MacLeod's work from figures I respect and whose opinions I relatively trust (including Ian M. Banks on the writing side and Kevin Carson on the anarchist side of things ;D)

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?

I think one of the key things that will prevent the capture of the Fediverse by corporations is never ever allowing whitelists for instance defederation and blocking to happen.

If that ever does happen, it becomes trivially easy to break the decentralized network up into a few centralized silos that are all disconnected from the rest of the network completely, whereas, the way it stands now, you have to explicitly block anyone you don't want to be connected to, so it's a great way to deal with bad actors and nasty instances, but makes it extremely hard to wall off your instance completely, because if you block another instance it's trivially easy for the people that are unhappy with that to find or create a small new instance that flies under the radar and allows them to see the content on both the instance they left and the incense it blocked. It also makes it incredibly hard to capture people on your instance because they can always create a small instance and use that instance to see the content on the instance they left.

I think also limiting block list size for instances (but not users!) Could be a really good way of doing this too because then any instance I want to block a ton of other instances is going to have to fork lemmy to lift that band and then everyone will know they did that and know to get off it.

Absolutely agreed

Also, to be fair, there's much less of a system to game in the first place, because you don't have an overall karma score, so there's not really any incentive to karma farm.

I think kind of depends on how deeply you explored the instance list to find and instance that really vibes with you and makes you feel like excited to join. If you join one of the major ones like lemmy.ml or lemmy.world or shit just works or another one of the big instances, it'll just feel like the early days of Reddit — young and active and exciting because it's a new platform but not particularly unique feel or culture or anything because they're just general purpose instances that let anyone in and so kind of end up with a common denominator internet culture. If you really go far down the instance list, though, and find an instance with less than a hundred users that has a really particular theme, target audience, and user culture, like I did, then it feels radically different than any other social media platform. I think that being on the big instances kind of hides the fact that Lemmy is super decentralized, just like the early internet, and so can give rise to really niche, unique, diverse, and interesting communities.

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).

I've just found someone irl to start putting implants under my skin

That is really exciting, what're you gonna implant?

In theory, I wouldn't hesitate one second to replace a substantial amount of my body with chrome — legs, arms, internal organs, eyes, etc — but I think actually going through with removing a healthy bodypart that I didn't hate and has served me well enough would be difficult. Nevertheless I don't think I'd really regret having gotten it done, so it'd just be like any other big scary surgery.

I don't think I'd want to do whole-body biotech upgrades like increasing muscle density or nervous system efficiency or whatever, because that effects a lot of things, so it's both more invasive and could have a lot more accidental unintended consequences. I'd probably start with replacing my left arm with a cybernetic one, since that's my off hand so I won't miss it as much if something goes wrong. Then use that as a platform to tinker and experiment and decide if I want to go further.

As for what kind of chrome I'd want to chip — I want the simplest, sturdiest, most robust thing that can possibly work, something I can understand as completely as possible, something that I can at least somewhat repair and upgrade myself, something that's well-known for reliability. Nothing super flashy with a lot of moving parts so its flimsy and unreliable, I want the PineTime or ThinkPad T420 of cyberware. And of course I'd flash it with open source firmware and remove all the corpo software and tracking I could!

I'd be a lot more careful about modifying my brain, for two reasons.

First of all, my theory of personal identity / consciousness is that the sense of coherent, singular identity doesn't come from a single, constant set of essential characteristics — whether physical or psychological — but from there being a sufficient resemblance between yourself prior to any given change and yourself after any given change, and a coherent self-narrative pathway from one to the other so that you can reconcile the two. Yourself at 20 and yourself at 35 can have completely different interests, beliefs, neural pathways, memories (our memories falsify over time, after all), and whatever else, but it's still you — how? Because you got there by a step by step process where you remained you between each change, and so by the transitive property, you're still you at the end, even if you're completely different now. If A ≈ B, and B ≈ C, and C ≈ D, then A ≈ D, even if A and D are completely different, because they've got this web of other things connecting them. Thus, if I'm going to maintain my sense of being myself, instead of accidentally killing myself off, I'm going to have to do any modifications of my brain slowly, step by step, and adjust to each one before getting the next one.

Which works out, because of my second point: if an implant in your brain goes wrong, its WAY, WAY, WAAAAAY worse than if something goes wrong with your body. Like, brain damage is no joke kids, I'm dealing with the fallout of it right now and it is not fun. And of course, as we all know, tech fails. A lot. It's buggy as shit. It's often pushed out the door before it's ready. It has vulnerabilities. So I'd want to keep the brain mods minimal if I did any at all — tried and true, tested, resiliant, as simple as possible, and not connected to the 'net.

On that note, I still haven't found equivalents of many of my old reddit subs... Is there a good transhumanism community anyone can share?

This community is about the ethos of cyberpunk as a subculture as much as it is about the literal genre, and transhumanism is very much a part of that, so for now you could post about that here. You could also create a transhumanism community yourself!

Pixel 6 w GrapheneOS is what I use, its lovely

It's very, very high on my list, especially since I adore story heavt isometric cRPGs. I've just spent collectively two out of the last three years dealing with PPCS, so I haven't gotten around to it lol