Game: Cyberpunk 2070 reflects the direction of society in America
In Cyberpunk 2070 society is fully integrated into the web with neural links, bionics, and brain dances (living out and feeling other peoples experiences). The premise of the game is during a heist you put a shard (memory stick) into your skull to preserve it so you can be paid but your fixer (guy who setup the job) kills you because the heat is too much. As it turns out the shard has engram on it captured by a corporation. An engram is manifest by using software called soul killer which strips out the memory content of a person where it is housed in a server owned exclusively by a corporation, except in this instance it's in your head.
Society is despotic. Porn of any and every kind is everywhere, homosexuality is open. and some people choose to be Dolls - chipped so their bodies can be used to fulfill fantasies for patron outside their control. Almost everyone, including your character is a cyborg to one degree or another, and some more machine than human. A market is made of brain dances where people are taken, abused and killed so the experience can be sold. Others use brain dances to create stardom and fortune by doing things other would want to discreetly experience.
War has fractured the US and Japan or China had a beachhead in California where the story takes place. Food is synthetic and insects are a staple component in just about everything. Drug use is widespread and rampant. Medical care is assigned to your neural chip and the wealthiest get instant medical attention via airship as soon as their vitals fluctuate thanks to the constant connection to the web. Since the police are overwhelmed there is no restriction on the 2nd amendment and bounties are placed on thugs/criminals, this is how you make your money.
The engram stuck in your skull was created to put one persons consciousness into another body and completely overwrite the host, in this case my character. The engram is call Johnny Silverhand - a punk rocker/terrorist that used a nuke to blow up a corporation before they captured and harvested his being to torture it for eternity. The visual/voice of Johnny Silverhand is Keanu Reeves.
Not my creation, but if you'd like to take a peek this overview visually may help https://youtu.be/z1rUP17fayA?si=2sOaF...
If this is the deprived future this world is being steered toward, and it sure looks like it is, I'm glad I'm getting off sooner than later.
Society is despotic. Porn of any and every kind is everywhere, homosexuality is open. and some people choose to be Dolls - chipped so their bodies can be used to fulfill fantasies for patron outside their control. Almost everyone, including your character is a cyborg to one degree or another, and some more machine than human. A market is made of brain dances where people are taken, abused and killed so the experience can be sold. Others use brain dances to create stardom and fortune by doing things other would want to discreetly experience.
War has fractured the US and Japan or China had a beachhead in California where the story takes place. Food is synthetic and insects are a staple component in just about everything. Drug use is widespread and rampant. Medical care is assigned to your neural chip and the wealthiest get instant medical attention via airship as soon as their vitals fluctuate thanks to the constant connection to the web. Since the police are overwhelmed there is no restriction on the 2nd amendment and bounties are placed on thugs/criminals, this is how you make your money.
The engram stuck in your skull was created to put one persons consciousness into another body and completely overwrite the host, in this case my character. The engram is call Johnny Silverhand - a punk rocker/terrorist that used a nuke to blow up a corporation before they captured and harvested his being to torture it for eternity. The visual/voice of Johnny Silverhand is Keanu Reeves.
Not my creation, but if you'd like to take a peek this overview visually may help https://youtu.be/z1rUP17fayA?si=2sOaF...
If this is the deprived future this world is being steered toward, and it sure looks like it is, I'm glad I'm getting off sooner than later.
Cyberpunk as a genre, including this game are always about a dystopian future at base. The hook that makes it bite is always the same. Instant or near instant gratification with little to no effort.
Do people want their fantasies to be realized virtually without effort? In many if not most cases, yes they do. Let's face it, humanity as a whole is lazy. Some few strive to create value beyond the norm. However most people prefer to get by. Meaning they do enough to support their preferred lifestyle if they are able to and little to nothing beyond that.
This is a recent change culturally.
It came to a head in the mid 60s. The rebellion against "the man" which really meant parents. It was the beginning of the instant gratification movement. It has been getting worse and more widespread ever since.
Unfortunately, people in this path always forget that dystopian scenarios always end in pain and death. There are no good outcomes.
Right now we are on the path to fulfill that type of future. Can it be averted? Sure. The real question is will enough stand up for individualism to step outside that and survive?
Honestly that isn't looking good.
Altruism is death by 1000 cuts. Funding wars all over the world, and meanwhile allowing your own society to collapse will bring on a dystopian future.
Will it be Cyberpunk or Atlas Shrugged?
My money would be on Atlas Shrugged.
We don't see enough innovation any more to actually create the underlying infrastructure for a Cyberpunk future. We would get a little further on the path but then the collapse will bring it all down.
How do you run a cyber world when nobody knows how to make the power plants work?
Who is John Galt indeed.
DOCTOR PARADOX BROADCAST EXCERPT
Here we are – constructing artificial cities in orbit, downloading our minds into integrated circuits, coding all-powerful AIs – and we can't make one damn flu vaccine?! You wanna know why? Corps WANT to destroy nature, 'cause it doesn't give them IPs or copyright ownership! So we eat testtube chicken, plants that grow in labs – hell, even photosynthesis has been trademarked! Enough is enough. It's time we say STOP, before the sixth extinction wipes us ALL out! You think they'll stop at food? What about our bodies? There's no chunk of 'em that can't be cut, improved and modified so that every breath we take, every heartbeat generates profit. And what about your children? From the corp's perspective, it's untapped potential, a goddamn wasted commodity! Soon our techno-fascist overlords will convince you that having children isn't your natural right but a privilege you pay for out of your pocket! The water you're drinking, the food you're eating – they're putting in chemicals that will reduce your fertility so that soon they'll be incubating babies in water tanks, with serial numbers on their foreheads, hooked up to cables instead of umbilical cords! Open your eyes! Snap out of it! Before it's too late!
I've also been watching Babylon 5 again and it would be good training material for people who need to understand the value of freedom and the urgent need to defend it. As Jefferson indicated in the Declaration of independence, sometimes 'insurrection' is the only rational and heroic action.