are you telling me that cyberpunk pop culture might have been warning me of an impending dystopia?!
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this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2024
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TBF, for the last 30 years even Cyberpunk authors completely missed the point that capitalism will subvert these amazing technologies to make everything worse if we don't do something. Neal Stephenson is a crypto shill.
Manna got rampant capitalism + AI pretty close, and has predicted McDonalds payment kiosks, Amazon worker abuse, and probably some of the tech layoffs too.
Wow... I've worked in the fast food industry for 2 years, and that really hits close to home. With the kitchen display systems and headsets, with modern technology it would be easy to implement that... very easy. We'd still need one manager on the line for de-escalating angry customers but that would end up essentially the same as the book synopsis described. And the subsequent dystopia... I could literally see this occurring tomorrow. Kinda scary.
Damn, that surprises and saddens me. I've only ever read one of his books, Diamond Age/A young lady's illustrated primer, but I thoroughly enjoyed it and also thought there were some great critiques of the upper class
gets worse. they tried to warn you again and this time someone's taken action before it could reach you: relevant news article
Scientists are saying we should hit Blade Runner territory by May.
...and WALL-E by June.
The corporations in Wall-E were short sighted and misguided but ultimately well intentioned. We're way off track for Wall-E
Bell Riots are in September.
Eugenics wars and ww3 next π« I dont like this timeline
Technically the Blade Runner universe is the Aliens universe too, so, don't worry, it will get worse.
Ooh, how are they linked?
If I remember right they both have the same company Weyland yutani
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner
Screen capture of DVD bonus feature from Prometheus (2012), a dictated letter by Peter Weyland about Eldon Tyrell, chief executive officer of the Tyrell Corporation
So, Prometheus establishes Tyrell Corporation and Weyland-Yutani as competitors! Neat.
And there's this:
There's also some commentary from Ridley Scott, one of the displayed replicant body designs in 2049 is clearly an Engineer, and I believe a billboard for Weyland in one of the Blade Runners, but I can't find that screenshot so maybe I'm misremembering that one.
Most of it is Easter Egg level stuff but there's enough that it's canon if you want it to be. Or not.
Really, the biggest takeaway I learned from this connection hunt back in the day was that the Blade Runner humanity had multiple colonies on other planets, which was just not something I remembered being a thing from the movies.
The colony thing is in the text into for blade runner, from memory.
Replicants were made to work on the colonies.
Eugenics wars should have started in 2022 by the revised timeline, and were 1992-1996 in the original timeline
When do I get a Replicant?
you? never. sky will be orange though.
Sky was orange during wildfires a few years ago
and in San Francisco, even!
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Could someone enlighten me what Deus Ex is about without spoiling more than two hours of gameplay?
You're a new type of cyborg cop, that works for a new anti-terrorism unit to hunt down terrorists, formed after they bombed the twin towers. A global pandemic keeps the streets eerily quiet.
The game came out in 2000 btw.
The game came out in 2000 btw.
And the last official patch was...
Mon Mar 19 12:06:14 2001 v1.112fm
...176 days before 9/11. Crazy foresight.
Al-Qaeda tried to destroy those buildings every 5 years or so.
I got the game bundled with a SoundBlaster Live! Platinum 5.1 kit and played it before, during, and after 9/11, and was blown away by the coincidences that appeared eerily prescient during this time.
Technically it's the statue of liberty. It's what gives the purpose of UNATCO. to basically make the world police judge , jury and executioner
UNATCO already exists before the statue of liberty
spoiler
(which was an inside job)
Ssshh OP didn't want spoilers can you hide that?
Also everything was orchestrated by the Illuminati before they got hijacked by a splinter faction of even bigger dickbags than the normal Illuminati.
Yeah, I left out the spoilers and stuff that didn't actually happen.
There's a lot of what were open secrets in the 90s, like that the gov't was scanning internet traffic and phone calls, the existence of the NSA, the CIA blackmailing US politicians, that gets combined with wacky conspiracies in there, which leaves a bad taste.
Yeah. Mk Ultra. Cloud seeding. Remote hacking of vehicles. Black site torture.
A global pandemic keeps the streets eerily quiet.
well that's not accurate at all for how it was in 2020
It was for like...two weeks
Youβre a cyborg agent for a new branch of the federal government formed in response to a terrorist attack on us soil tasked with performing extrajudicial acts in order to keep access to the treatment for a pandemic under government control.
In the opening cutscene the governments response to the pandemic is revealed to be βlet it ripβ for profit.
Itβs a phenomenal game and very fun.
Basically: Anti-Terrorist agent gets instructed not to talk to terrorist, talks to terrorist and becomes a terrorist.
Cybernetics (or technology in general) are both the hope of humanity and its likely doom through abuse by powerful interests.
Deus Ex is the 1984 of videogames.
Someone on here posted the dialogue from a conversation with an NSF βterroristβ from the game and I initially thought it was a pretty reasonable assessment of modern society and its problems. It was only when I read the comments that someone pointed out that the post was quoted verbatim from the game. Need to see if I can find that postβ¦
Corporations are so big, you don't even know who you're working for. That's terror. Terror built into the system.
There's so much more, but I remember that one
Here is another:
Human beings may not be perfect, but a computer program with language synthesis is hardly the answer to the world's problems.
-JC Denton
Is it talking about LLMs? Pretty correct according to me
Ross (Accursed Farms) did a really good review/analysis of the game: https://youtu.be/rxOKEsBx4NU?si=a7UHgYa-TqCfnqvB
I've never played the game and it doesn't seem like it's for me... But this video... I think about it a lot...
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/rxOKEsBx4NU?si=a7UHgYa-TqCfnqvB
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
They also predicted 9/11.
Meanwhile I'm playing Deus Ex like:
Damn
It's just human nature to see something coming for 40+ years and then be surprised by it.
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