this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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chapotraphouse
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What I know from playing Cyberpunk 2077 is that being a fixer is half figuring out Google results and half putting together slick 3D powerpoints and putting them on a datashard in a fancy little box that you present ceremoniously to someone
The other part of your job is knowing a guy. Tbh, full time job.
How do I get the job of just being the guy who others have to know? Sounds like a sweet gig
Know a lot of guys who would stick their necks out for you. No joke, this is how a lot of underground networks work.
Get s job managing technical people. It's not s necessary job or even moral but you basically just have to know which knowledgable person can usually do something best and you get paid well in this dumb system. I know all my managers have had this exact gig.
A Cyberpunk fixer is just a venture capitalist for violence.
in the cyberpunk franchise's universe there's actually the blackwall on the net, which is a firewall meant to keep AIs away from the net. it's interesting because the people responsible for the blackwall is netwatch, which works closely with corporations and is kinda a corp itself i think. in real life, corporations and capitalists are accelerating the AI takeover of our internet. kinda shows how even cyberpunk (the genre) writers cant even make fiction close enough to how fucked up the reality of capitalism really is.
It's not really a plot point but Phantom Liberty makes a point that Netwatch happily looks the other way for the NUSA and large corps fuck around beyond the Blackwall, and the main quest of the base game makes it clear they are also lying both about the nature of the Blackwall and its efficacy.
Also, the Peralez quest line implies that AIs are manipulating human behavior very directly. There is layers to the lore if you look deeper, but the game puts so much emphasis on style over substance it's easy to miss it.
Those AIs are more like intentional cyberweapons turned into eldritch horrors (leftover from one of the apocalypses that have happened in the timeline) than just nonsense factories trying to get ad money. Elsewhere, however, there's a reference (I think on the radio) to an "AI author" that's supposed to be award winning and extremely prolific, including a blurb and summary to convey to the player that it's clearly just generating nonsense, so your point about how even their attempts to satirize what was clearly coming fail to be as shitty and absurd as the reality is dead on and something I've thought about myself too.
Another place they fall short is advertising: there's less of it and it's less intrusive than real advertising. Although that's honestly not surprising: the artists and writers they had could only devote so much time to making awful memetic spores, and had concerns like "style" and "humor" to think about, whereas real advertising has large dedicated teams working round the clock to churn out the most heinous and infectious memetic spores imaginable.