A Geek History of Time - Episode 215 - Cyberpunk Part I

Episode Date: June 10, 2023

So thank you all for coming to Cocktalk. He has trouble counting change, which is what the hands think. Wait, wait, stop. Yes, but I don't think that Dana Carvey's movie, um, coming out at that same time, was really that big a problem for our country. I still don't know why you're making such a big deal about September 11th, 2001. Fucking hate you. Well, you know, they don't necessarily need to be anathema, but they are definitely on different end-to-end spectrum.

Oh, boy. See, I have a genetic predisposition against redheads, so... Because? Yeah, because you are one... Right. Yeah, combustion, yeah. We've heard it before. The only time I change a setting is when I take the hair trimmer down to the nether

reaches. Like, that's the only time. Other than that, it's all just a two I'm joking I use feet after the four gospels. What's the next book of the Bible? Okay, and after that Yeah, okay, and if you look at the 15th chapter of Romans, okay, you will find that it actually mentioned the ability to arm yourself That's why it's AR-15. Thank you. Checkmate-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8 This is a geek history of time. Where we connect Nurtory to the real world. My name is Ed Blaylock.

I'm a world history and English teacher here in Northern California. And earlier this evening, we showed the Empire Strikes Back to my son for the first time. We saw episode four, I think, this last weekend. And I could not get out of my head the revelation that I had not known previously, but the revelation that you provided to me last week that the remaster of those films was made partly in order to screw George Lucas's ex-wife out of any more money, out of the franchise, or the of out of out of the franchise or the yeah out of the franchise and and so I was watching the movie and and like a part of me was you know a little kid again

and and watching the movie and and being completely absorbed in it but every so often when and when I could tell oh, this is George masturbating on the screen again with all of his CGI shit because he could do it now. I, I, number one, I was keenly aware of all of it and number two, every time it happened, I thought, yep, and there goes, there goes ex-wife's cut of the, cut of the profits. Like, there we go. Um, I'm not going to say it ruined it for me because it didn't, but it was certainly a new aspect to viewing the film. And the other thing that struck

me was it was just a reminder that George wrote a hell of a lot better material when he had people script doctrine for him and he was still in a position where people said no. Like, wow. And then, and then the very last thought in the Luke prelling around on on best bet. Moments. It was really eerie how I was looking at him going, oh my god, everybody on the internet is right. They ought to cast Sebastian Stan to play young Luke because holy crap.

So anyway, that was that was everything that was going through my head earlier this evening while watching that movie. How about you? What have you had going on? Well, I'm Damien Harmony. I'm a Latin teacher and a, uh, US history teacher up here at the high school level in Northern California. I got to ask you buried the lead. Did you all keep, um, the satyr proper in that you hid the, uh, the surprise ending of Empire five or Empire Strikes Back from your son this whole time? Did you hide the breath from the wine? Yes. So how did he react to the revelation that the fact I am your father?

He... The first... Now we actually had to rewind for him to totally catch the line because he's five and, uh, may or may not have, uh, you know, attention issues. We haven't quite figured that out yet for sure. Okay. But he was, he, he turned around as, as right as Luke's, Luke's hand gets cut off. And, and Vader and Vader is, you know, given the whole speech and he turned around and he was asking me, I don't even remember what the question was,

he was, oh, he was asking me, is he going to get his hand back? And in that moment, he missed, I am your father. Oh my God. And so we had to pause the movie and go back by like a minute and a half and I was like, these like, oh my God, dude. So we paused the movie and we went back and was like, okay, you need to catch this.

And then he caught it and his eyes got big. And he looked at me and this is so my kid. This is so my kid. He looked at me and he said, is his dad mad at him? And there was a small part of my heart that broke. But mostly I just explained, no. His dad is trying to get him to join him. Yeah, his, his dad turns out to be the bad guy. And that's why that's part of why he's so upset right now. The bad guy turns out to be his dad. Yeah, well, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So yeah, that it was, it was, it was a moment there. I wonder if, if that reveal is not unlike the challenger. Where everybody thinks that they saw it explode in class. But in fact statistically that's impossible. And the real deal is more like like one one hundredth of the people who claim it actually did get to watch it explode in class. Uh, but everybody remembers watching the news reports later on and they're like, everything later on.

But there are memories. So I wonder if one of a couple of things is happening here. One, it occupies a much bigger part in our heads. Yeah. Not because it was a huge deal to us, but because later on, it was told to us that it was a huge deal. So we constructed our memories to reflect that. Well, okay. Or what as you said, your son has attention issues. Yeah. Well, yeah. I was and because I you you were closer to your son's age when this came out. And that's not a dig on you. I literally fell asleep when Vader came on to the screen

and woke up at credits because I was, it was 1980. So I was two years old. Yeah, so you were just a, you were young and, yeah. I thought Vader was a good guy. Okay. He showed up and then, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Everything was over.

Okay. Well, there you are. So I wonder if, right? are. So I wonder if five year olds were able to hang with it and really understand it back then too. I don't know about five year olds. I will say six year olds. Okay. Okay. I'm pretty sure I was six. Sure. I know it was it was a big deal. It had emotional impact to me. I think it was, it was a big deal. I mean, it had emotional impact to me. I think it had been, if I had been nine or 10, it would have been a holy shit, you know, kind of moment.

It would have been, it would have been bigger because there would have been more. Unifusion, I'd have remembered other stuff. More clearly. Yeah. Um, but it I'd have remembered other stuff. Yeah. But it was, it was a moment. Now, I didn't see it. I didn't see it first run. I saw it second run at the base movie theater at Miramar. So give me a year for that.

So well, it would have been. Would that have been just summer of 81? 80, yeah, probably 81. Okay, because it came out in 80. Yeah, so it was 80, yeah, I think I saw it. I think I saw it in summer of 81. And yeah, and then return of the Jedi was a whole other thing because that was 83.

Yeah, I was that one I have conscious memory of yeah, I was I was eight years old. And my dad had gone to Hawaii ahead of us and I had not seen my father in several months. And on opening weekend my mother and I got into see it in a theater in powway. And that night on the news, we were watching on TV as they were talking about, oh, long lines at all the theaters. And you know, a bunch of people, you know, sold out shows and this, that and the other thing. And we were like, what? We didn't even, there was no line. We just walked in. Yeah. Because we went to a theater and fucking pow away, which in 1983 was in the middle of nowhere in San Diego County.

Right. Right. Right. But, um, and then this was the first time I ever saw a movie more than once in the theater because then a couple of literally like, it couldn't have been more than two weeks later. Uh, we were in Hawaii and my dad wanted to go see it. And so we went and saw it in the theater again as a family of three of us. And yeah. So. Because I remember seeing it. And I remember the scene where Luke is hiding underneath the the stanchions. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the throne room. Yeah. Yeah, where he's hiding and you've got the light playing and, and Vader is just taunting him and talking. Yeah.

And he's just, you know, in that whole, I remember that reveal, that one hit me. It's like, Oh, you know, and, and yeah, that was cool. That was cool. And, and that wasn't the reveal. I believe Luke revealed it to her on the, on the bridge. You know, now that I think about there's a lot of Similarly shaped walkways in that movie particularly Whether built my in a lot of or built by the Empire. Yeah, and a lot of ocean violations like everywhere. Yeah, yeah You walk famous for Yeah, for there. Yeah, but for a virus. Yeah, for there. Yeah. But, uh, actually, the industry of safety standard. Yeah. I mean,

you saw that spit that they were putting on solo on it. Did not have a double vent. Um, oh no. Oh, no. No, no. Don't give me start on like kitchen. I was crap. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Food handling safety. Oh my god. Oh lord. Yeah. No hair nets. F grade. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. But, uh, of course, what would hair net look like on a D-walk of fishnet body suit? Like, exactly. Yeah. But of course, what would her that like on a D walk of fishnet body suit like? He has Matt suit. Yeah, just their face.

But, but yeah, um, yeah, I remember he, he, he reveals it to her in the, while she's wearing a dress that the Ewoks just happened to have in her size. Flying around giant flag. but you know what happened to the last person to wear that. You see the burn marks on it. Let's not let's not talk about it. That's not. Yeah, why does it smell like smoke and a bond?

Yeah. So so so at the beginning of of empire this afternoon evening, my my my wife's comment was, okay, wait, this isn't the one with the Ewok's in it is it. I said, no, that's the next one. She goes, oh darn. I said, why? It says the Ewoks are cute.

I said, no, they're not. No, they're not. They're terrifying. They're murder bears. They're murder, they're murder teddy bears. She says, yeah, but they're teddy bears. I said, no, no. and I told her about the the Ewok versus stormtrooper mode. Yes And I'm forgetting the name of the game battle right to yeah battle front two

I was like no no no, it's it's a survival horror mode. Yes, you you she says well, yeah, but they're cute Yes, you do she says, well, yeah, but they're cute. He's like, okay, cool. Yeah. But so I remember him revealing it, but I remember Luke's just breaking and shouting and that that fight. I remember very viscerally, um, but I don't have conscious memory of the first time I saw um, Pire and and new hope. I was in utero Yeah, yeah, that was your fond of reminding us all the time. I mean, you weren't that old for either. No, no, it wasn't. No. I, I, I think was in college by that point. Yeah. Wow, on his behalf, fuck you, man. Wow, like he listens

Okay, well I can't comment on that either way, but um So yeah, we we we kept we we kept shoppers We we you know kept kept kept kept to the rules and and it was It was a moment, but it was not the Kind of moment that it might have been if you were older when you saw it. Okay. Interesting. Yeah.

All right. Well, what do you got tonight? Well, I've been, yeah. Okay. Well, good that you are. Because finally, at long last, after I've given everybody homework for months now. The NFT episode, here we go. Tell us which version of Board 8 you're selling.

I know, I don't understand NFT anymore than random dude off the street, like so no. And also, you know, fuck anybody who does just be, you know, real quick opinionated about it. There was a guy at a show that I did recently. Um, and he kept both of his feet on the stage, which is just rude, and he talked loudly. So he was either into his cups a bit or he's just this guy, and quite frankly, the combo could have been this. Yeah, I was going to say it could be both. But he spoke, you know, as though he belonged there. And I was off stage for a small part of the show. And I messaged a friend of mine. I'm like, is this guy your friend? And she's like, I mean, he came because I invited him, but I don't think I'll invite him again. I was like,

okay, cool. because he he sounds like the kind of guy who would try to talk you into an NFT during sex, which, you know, I have a way with words and sometimes it just hits, you know, so yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so you were you were going to do stuff. Tell us stuff. Yeah, so I've been I've been giving everybody here homework for like you know a month over a month forever Because I've been saying I'm gonna do cyberpunk I'm gonna talk about cyberpunk and low and behold finally. I'm going to be talking about the genre of cyberpunk So I'm gonna learn you a thing and

this this ties into what we did with, uh, friend of the show, uh, Bay Wolf, and I'm forgetting his last name right now. Rockland. Yeah. Uh, when he talked about noir, um, like, you, you, if I had piped up every time I was like, Oh, Hey, that's like name of cyberpunk thing. We'd been here forever because the even longer than we work, because the two genres are spiritually and thematically linked even though the forces that were at work and creating them were very different. So we've talked about Blade Runner, as its own thing.

And as I mentioned in those episodes, Philip K. Dick died in March of 1982 before Blade Runner was released. Right, right. It is truly a shame that he didn't live long enough to see what a cultural phenomenon the film became. Remember that he loved it, saying that it captured visually exactly what he had

pictured in his mind as he wrote electric sheep. Right. The floating neon lit billboards, polyglot culture, environmental collapse, amoral corporate titans, and questions regarding the definition of humanity versus machine, are all hallmarks of a genre of science fiction that Dick should be considered a founder of,

which is to say, Cyberpunk. But while Dick imagined the beginnings of the genre, its codifier has to be William Gibson. Okay. Now Gibson started writing in the late 1970s and I know at some point you're going to want to ask and so I'm going to cut this right off of the pass. He never served in the Navy. He never served in any form of the military. He had none of that kind of background. His name doesn't start with H, so I didn the military. He had none of that kind of background. His name doesn't start with H. So I didn't think.

Yeah. Okay. Well, there you go. It's adjacent though, Gibson. Yes. But his youth in young adulthood, I would call punk before punk was a recognized thing. He told his draft hearing panel that he and I quote intended to sample every narcotic substance in existence. Wow. What are those other things? Because I know buddy Ibsen was was very much of a different stripe there. Yeah, no Gibson. Oh, oh, Gibson. And, and yeah, um, his, his, he's not related to Hynergipson and buddy. No, no, no, no, uh, his, his older brother, um, Mel, and he did not see

I die at all. I would imagine that would have been. Mel was a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell of a hell didn't technically dodge the draft. He like preemptively dodged and nobody had the volume. Reemptively, well, he preemptively dodged, but he basically told the draft board, yeah, I'm a complete druggy. Right. And so he never got called off to service. Okay. He was very heavily involved in the counter culture before and after moving to Canada. In the early 1970s, he supported himself and his young family by scouring Salvation Army stores for things that he could upsell to specialist collectors. Like give me an example.

My soul is like one of those old, tiny turntable type things. That kind of stuff. Yeah. They didn't, the sources that I found didn't give specific examples, but he was, he was, he was doing upselling and upcycling. Okay. As a way of making a living before that was. So, so far, why is he is thumbing authority in the eye? Yeah. He is, by way of

mentioning drugs, which at the time was, uh, in terms of terms of social like I said, as a big no no yeah, um, he was He was he was looking at the he was he was engaging in in capitalism in a very Grassroots kind of way. Yeah, and he was doing it in such a way that valued old things. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Um yeah, he got a bachelor's degree because he realized that he could maintain high college grades pretty easily and student aid packages were a source of income. Oh, back when when that was true. Yeah, well, and this is Canada. Oh, okay.

Right. He's in, he's in, he's in Toronto. So keep that in my too. How do you pay for healthcare? I mean, that's a huge drain on most people. I don't, I don't fucking know. Oh, man, like it had to be a drag. After getting his bachelors, he considered getting a master's focusing on hard science, on quote, sorry, I need to include the quotes here.

He considered getting a master's focusing on and I quote hard science fiction as fascist literature. Close quotes. Wow. Yeah. So cyberpunk is inherently dystopian. You don't get punk of any kind in a perfect world. Yeah, as Jason B. Yes.

Yes, and that's become now one of our tag lines, because it's just too good not to be. Yeah. So it's cyberpunk, as a genre, is built on the idea that the utopian visions of early science fiction aren't ever going to happen. Okay. Like, like, that's just not the way people are now. So this is different than the dystopian of or the dystopian utopia of they're going to happen, but at great cost. Yes. Correct.

Oh, correct. So those it's just that shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's not more lock in Eloy. It's not those who walk away from Omelos. It's it is it's taking it's taking the kind of counter utopian idea of the new wave in science fiction and taking it one step further, which is, no, we're not going to get there. Okay. Because we suck. Okay. Basically, it has a pretty grim view of humanity as a guest all.

Technology is going to be abused, corporate structures, and social structures are going to magnify problems rather than eliminate them. Okay. Oh, he's predicting the future because I'm just thinking about how. Pretty much. Yeah. You know, we could have automation working really well. And instead of arguing as to whether or not a self-check outline will cost people jobs that don't get the benefits anyway.

It's really, it's really. It's really it's real star still. Yeah. And and and like there was a couple of friends of mine on on Facebook. This is several years ago now got into this like knockdown dragout argument over automation and the potential for automation technology to eliminate for automation technology to eliminate quote unquote bullshit jobs. Right. Like like being a checkout clerk, being, you know, the kind of stuff that's just soul sucking doesn't require any creativity, does not give anything back to the person doing the work, you know, the only reason that people do it is because we live in a worker star starve society. Yeah. Like, and there's nothing, that is not to take away from the dignity of a person working one of those jobs to feed themselves and their family.

Not at all. Not at all. But if we would just do right by everyone, we'd be working four hour days anyway. Yeah. Much, you know, we could have the Jetsons without the pollution, but y'all wanted to do that. Yeah. Yeah, pretty much.

Okay. And so Gibson specifically envisioned the sprawl as his setting. It's a massive landscape of concrete steel neon and desperate hustling poverty where sex workers, hackers, and con artists stare upward toward the gleaming airy high-rise homes of the incredibly wealthy. So Santa Monica. I do. Yeah, or several parts of the Bay area. I could look at you.

Oh, yeah. Oakland, I'm looking at you. Yeah. Like, literally, one side of of the street the opposite side of the street like holy shit. Anyway, and within Cyberpunk, social and environmental collapse are consistent background elements. Okay, we we are not going to wind up using this technology to fix the world. The people who have access to the technology are going to wind up using it to cut out the rungs of the ladder underneath them. I like that. They're crazy not the concept.

Yeah, yeah. They're going to find ways to take this technology and use it to squeeze every dime out of the common pleb. They're going to find new and amusing ways to create some new opiate of the masses out of it to keep people docile or keep them struggling, like I said, hustling poverty, just in order to make ends meet, and the richer are going to get way richer. The middle class is going to completely disintegrate and the poor are going to stay shitty poor. Right. You know, they become the threat that you unleash on the middle class should the middle class try to do something like in France.

Yeah. Yeah. Yes. You know, it's funny. You mentioned that like, because I immediately went to, okay, what would that opiate be? And of course, there's drugs. And, and I'm thinking there's so many drugs inside all the different ways we've had, right? But then I'm thinking it's entertainment.

And, and I don't want to get too critical of reality TV or anything like that, because quite honestly, that's not the problem. The problem is the policies that cut out the social safety net. But that being said, I was thinking about the zombie movies that I discussed a hundred years ago. And probably a hundred episodes ago. But in the zombie movies, if you remember, the one where it's like the last Romero movie where the zombies become conscious and active. Yeah.

And so it's very clearly Marxist-Polimic. One of the signs of this is a decaying society was the Stark division between the rich and the poor, right cuz he's a set in Pittsburgh um, and One of the first things that you see in the establishing shot is people in a cage fighting for the entertainment of others Yep, and part of me is like okay, well, that's like Now I look back at like my enjoyment of mixed martial arts. I'm like, ooh, not pro wrestling because that's a different art.

Um, but, yeah, that's, that's, that's committee del arte. Yeah, but, but with, with suplexing. Right. But MMA. I'm just like, oh, man, this, we were warned that this is a sign. And then I realized there was There's a new TV show on TBS Called slap slap fight or maximum slap or something like that And it's oh, yeah, the same guy who owns the UFC runs it and it's just people slapping the shit out of each other. Yeah Like oh, yeah, we've really giving each other, giving each other

traumatic brain injuries, doing it. Right. Well, which is, I mean, MMA and boxing do the same thing. Yeah. You're mortgaging your, your, your, your noggin. But like, this one is literally, you stand there and slap each other. Like, it's such a reduction. Oh, yeah. No, such a reduction. You know what it is. And, and after I make this comparison, there's another note I need to make. But it's out of my balls from idiotic. It's just watching some guy get kicked or fall on his nuts or that's like fail army stuff, though. Like this is that is slapstick. Honestly, that's just rude slapstick. Whereas this is, I mean, guys like, they muster themselves up and there's a science to slapping the shit out of each other now.

And of course there is, because it is a technique and stuff like that. But like, I'm sitting there like thinking about that and going, okay, well, this is like, this is the opiate. Yeah. And all we're doing is watching men's and women slap the shit out of each other

and you just see their faces like ballooning up. Oh, swelling up. Yeah. Yeah. It's like to watch, like when you think about what's actually physically going on. And they do the super slow mo So it's I mean they're hitting all the all the things

Yeah, and I kind of wish we would go back to drugs Really yeah I can't disagree with you So I'm not even I'm not even gonna try yeah,. And the other thing is that friend of the show, Bishop of the Honol, pointed this out to me, in a conversation. I don't remember how it is. I think I referenced idiocracy about something.

And his response was, yeah, that's funny. You know, I can't watch that movie anymore after I realized that it advocates for eugenics. I was going to say that I was like, oh, that movie with a eugenics lens. Yeah. Like I'm already writing.

Fuck. Yeah, I'm already doing the pre-research on it, to be honest. Oh, well, okay. There we go. So, so yeah, but yeah, it absolutely does advocate for eugenics. Yeah. And so the tone, the rather hopeless,

but we're gonna ha ha about it of videocracy is adjacent to Cyberpunk because it's like, no, the future is not going to get better. The future is only going to get worse from here. Right. All we have is to stand here and like those of us who have the will or the cussedness or whatever to stand. Right.

Yeah. Fuck. Yeah. You know, like, yeah, all we have is to try some level of Nietzsche and trying to give meaning to shit in the face of the fact the world is going to go to shit. Like, right. You know, so one of the basic, like, legs of the tripod of Cyberpunk is utopia is just not gonna happen. It's not even going to be a utopia for some people. It's going to be, no, this is gonna suck.

There are going to be people who are going to be on the top of the pile and they're going to live like kings and queens completely separated from the teaming masses. But it's still not even really going to be a utopia for them either because when we encounter those characters, usually, certainly in Gibson's work, their concerns are so removed from the day-to-day sweat and blood of being human that they're like high elves. Their experience is not even entirely human. So there's not a human experience anymore. Yeah, there is a loss of their humanity involved in that because of their isolation from the Hoypalloy. Let me ask you this and feel free to tell me

I'm stepping too far forward. OK. The people who are in that position, the ones who are the hiles, are they the only ones that aren't cybernatically enhanced? Oh, no, many of them are enhanced. Some of them. Some of them. Yeah, depending.

Okay, it was going to be interesting to me if they were the ones who weren't because they're the ones that are least human, despite the fact that their bodies would be the most. But, okay, so that's not a... That is a theme that you can see an individual works. Okay, okay, but it's not an old one. But as a part of the genre, that's not necessarily the thing, because there are some cases in which they stop being human entirely and they upload their consciousness as yes,

to a virtual realm. Sure. And in their other places where they have, they do a cybernetic augmentation for status. They have the gleaming platinum hand, or the one eye that's been turned into a gold mirror kind of thing, you know. Okay. Yeah. But it's it's so yeah. Um, but that's that could be a very potent metaphor. It would be interesting. Yeah. Yeah. But because you could then get into eugenics and racism and who is a person. And I want to say it's altered carbon. Okay.

It's altered carbon. Well, friend of the Joe Bishop, feel free to take up this plot that I've just described. There you go. This motif. And I only want 5%. So, yeah. Yeah, so there is, there is one suit.

I want to say it's altered carbon, but I may be remembering the title wrong. But there is one one. That's a movie. Yeah, it was actually Netflix, a Netflix series. And that's that's a cyberpunk series. It's oh, Jesus, so cyberpunk it fucking hurts. I will take a look. But in Altered Carbon, in the very first season of the show, in the first novel, in the very first season of the show and the first novel. The individual who hires the main character is so wealthy that he does not have any. He only has the one augmentation that everybody in that society has.

I'm not gonna go into too much detail about it. But he only has the one augmentation literally everybody has, but he's so wealthy that he has multiple clones of his own body. Oh, okay. So if something happens to him, he has. He has. Yeah. So anyway, and so he doesn't have any other, because he doesn't need them.

Okay. So what you're describing is the Gabriel Bell riots. You remember when we got the one for long? Yes, I mean, this is where DAX ended up with the upper group. Yes, with the Cloud Cucu lander above the fray. Well, we don't want to talk. That's politics. We don't like it. That's Tashi subject, you know, we can agree to disagree. I wish we'd had this lens when we watched that. That would have been another, another good thing to bring to it. Yeah, if I'd been, if I'd been consciously thinking about it, it would

have been. But so, so first leg, we're never going to get to Utopia. Okay. Second leg, Cyberpunk distrust authority. This is this is very noir. Okay. The protagonists are outlaws or else they work in quasi legal or morally questionable spaces. Okay. Okay. So there's you know, are back to the utopia. Are people trying to get there? Are people depends on the writer? Let go of the idea. depends on the writer. Okay, Gibson Gibson's case. For

everybody who's above the red line, to call it to give a name to the divide. Sure. For everybody who's above that line, they don't need to worry about creating a Topey because hey, I got mine. Fuck you. Sure. And everybody below that line consistently, his protagonists are motivated by getting their next score and

staying Like okay, so they're not like they're not they're not in a position to try to start a revolution because everybody's just hustling too hard to stay alive Okay, so there's there and they're not even aware that such a thing is possible like they just doesn't enter the consciousness No, it didn't come up. Oh, it doesn't come up. Oh, wow. It doesn't come up. Gibson is a cynic. Okay. Gibson is really hardcore cynic.

So they're not even looking to get you up, and they're never even going to try to let you down. No. Right. No, and many of them will run around and hurt you. Naturally, yeah. You know, yeah. Yeah. So as I was saying, the protagonists are, are you?

I'm so proud of you. Hey, you know, they're operating in these quasi-legal, or in some cases, not even quasi-legal, like no, no, no, no, we're breaking the law. Oh, Jesus priest, full on breaking the law, breaking the law. But it's not even like we're breaking a law and making a striking a blow for the common man It's we're trying to come here too. Yeah, no, we're we're gonna break into this building to steal this thing from this corporate entity to sell to this other corporate

Entity so we can make rent well, I see why I didn't ever like playing in this world. Yeah, there's no fucking heroes. Like, no, no, not really. Um, so the authorities in these settings work for the corporate elite and are not to be trusted. Oh my God. All right. And if I'm getting ahead of you, okay, are we going to get into the ravaged 2099 series by Marvel? I don't have it in my notes, but we can only talk about it. Okay, when you get to like the mid 90s, yeah, yeah, yeah, please tell me, totally can. Yeah. Oh my God, that's all this

wild. That's fucking wild. Okay. So now here's the thing, the Cyberpunk RPG, which I recommended to folks to find, find a PDF copy and read it. Right. And the only reason I recommend a PDF copy is because it's out of print. Sure. I want to support Artel Surin games and Mike Pondsmith and everything he and they do because they're awesome. But in the Cyberpunk role playing game, Cyberpunk 2013, Cyberpunk 2020.

There's an interesting wrinkle because COP, and that's literally the name of it, COP, is a player character class. In that particular setting, the public police, I work for the city government, not I'm a corporate, you know, private security cop, they are held up as a righteous set of public servants trying to resist a tide of corporate control. Okay. So, so naturally looking at this setting, the very first time I opened up the book, the very first PC I created was like, well, okay, I'm going to be a cop because this is the closest thing to a white hat I can see here. Now this was of course in like 1990 when I was a sheltered suburban kid who didn't really know

anything about the real world police. But anyway, the suburban kids, the police can be heroes. Yeah, so but but it's interesting that like that's the that's the that's the way that particular die gets cast and in in the setting is well, okay, your your government employee you're not working for a corporation and you're trying to resist the the corporations taking over your job and privatizing it. And so that makes you a white hat, you know, which I don't know. I genuinely don't know what William Gibson would think of that. Like I'd kind of be interested to be like, okay, Bill, can I call you Bill? Here's this game based on, you know, essentially the setting

in this genre that you codified. Here's cops. And tell me, what do you think of this? Is your countercultural guy and, you know, so anyway. And funny thing is in neuro-mancer, which is Gibson's first novel in this setting, the protagonists, the team, are operating so far outside the law

that the police aren't even an issue. They're operating on a level where like, no, no, we don't need to worry about the cops. Before the cops, like nobody's going to call the cops because they just have their own private goons who are going to make us disappear. And so if this goes pear-shaped, jail is the last thing we need to worry about. Like, we'll be happy to go to jail if this falls apart because that means, you that means we're still alive and haven't had our brains taken out of our bodies

and plugged into something, you know, as punishment by the people we're trying to steal from, you know. So that's kind of how that falls down or how that falls out. And this is something that again shows up consistently throughout the literature in a voice of the whirlwind that that main character is up against a conspiracy of a whole bunch of people and he's doing all kinds of shadowy sketchy, you know, knife in the dark kind of shit. And he never, he hardly worries about the police at all. It's just, it's just not really an issue. And so this operating outside the law is framed in a way that it's just the default setting

within these kinds of stories for a lot of this literature. I can't say this universally, but for a lot of this literature, it's just, no, you're working, you know, your day job or the call to adventure. Your day job involves probably some grinding bullshit job like I was talking about before. And then in order to really pay the bills, you also have a side hustle that is either semily or not at all illegal. Right. You know, and most many or most of your daily transactions happen, because, you know, trying to deal with the official economy, there's barriers or, you know, it's just too expensive. So next leg, and it turns out this is something about this. Nothing about this. Sounds like a video game that I would want to play.

Okay. I can understand that to each their own. Yeah. And here's why is that there's an economy behind the economy. I don't I don't really like games that have much of an economy anyway, but also there's no hero there. Like it is it is also great is to be walked out like there's yeah, I don't know. There's no moral stance to take. There's no. Yeah. Yeah. No, I get it. Until we get it. Yeah. Anyway, that's interesting that that's the point you bring up because the next item on the checklist is

cyberpunk is morally ambiguous. But it's not just an issue, it's not just an issue of distrusting authority and everybody's operating quasi. Literally, it's morality is ambiguous. Characters operate based on an internal code of morality that doesn't necessarily line up with what you would see as a moral code in a situation where you're not scrambling to survive. We have anti-heroes predominating motivations are rarely, I'm not going to say never, but they are rarely altruistic or noble. Bad things get done in order to stop worse things from happening. I hate that. And the last tag we've already talked about, this is one of the places where it's also very heavily influenced by noir.

Right. Okay. You know, um, I mean, really what we're doing is deconstructing why Damien doesn't like noir. Yeah, but we're doing it. Yeah, but we're doing it, but we're doing it with, you know, high tech in the, in, in the net, right, apostrophe, you know, virtual reality internet. Right. the net, right, apostrophe, you know, virtual reality, internet, right. And, okay. And then last leg of the four-legged stool, cyberpunk also asks epistemial logical questions about humanity.

When does one start or stop being human? So now you're bringing me back. Okay. Now you're bringing that. So spoiler alert for a book that's, you know, 50 years, almost 50 years old. Sure. Well, 40 something. Anyway, in Neuromancer, the plot centers around the protagonists working to try to unify the two forcefully divided halves of an artificial intelligence's personality. Okay. Neuromancer and winter mute. Yeah, I gave a spoiler warning. So anyway, what they wind up figuring out is they have been, the individual who actually hired them is neuro-mancer, the one half of this artificial intelligence that got free

and has been moving around the net manipulating events to try to upload itself into the right server essentially, in order to reunite with its other half, winter mute, which lives, quote unquote, lives, in an environment, essentially in a space station, in orbit, you know, around Earth Earth where the Tessier-Ashpool family run their corporate empire from. It's a whole thing. Anyway, high elves, like I said. Right, right. And so there's the question is, like, is this artificial intelligence? Does this count as equivalent to human? Does this artificial intelligence have a soul?

You know, neuro-mancer could be said to be the soul of the intelligence of winter mute. Oh wow. Because there's the one half of the intelligence that is cold and calculating and kept in this cage and then there is the half that has been running around with the Hoy-Poleuille in the net on Earth.

So, anyway. So, and then in other places in the literature, you have characters whether protagonist or antagonists who have themselves become partially machine. And where do we, where do we start considering them more machine than man, twisted and evil? Right, you get the, the ship of the easiest question. Yeah. How does our ability to change ourselves affect our humanity?

When I can unplug a whole part of my body and plug in a whole other part of my body, and I give myself the ability to, you know, stick a finger into a socket on a computer and throw my consciousness into a virtual environment. Am I still like, how does that affect me as a human? What does that do to my humanity? Were any of the original writers of this genre stoned? Oh yeah.

Oh sorry. I was gonna say disabled. Did any of you or any of your recipes, not any of the original ones, but there has been kind of sounds like it. Yeah. It really does.

Yeah. Because I would be very interested in seeing what a disabled person or a person with, with special needs or, you know, any number of, of, of things that are not physically typical or neurotypical, I would be interested in seeing their take on it because I'm just thinking about like people who depend on a motorized wheelchair to get around. Yeah. They would not say that they're not human, you know.

Well, indeed. And they wouldn't be debating their humanity based on their dependence on that technology. I don't know. I'm not saying you're advocating that, but I just know it. No, but it's very, it starts off as, you know what it sounds like? It sounds like really interesting 1800s philosophy. Oh, yeah.

You know, yeah. And, and this is a good place to note that this genre of fiction has gone on to inspire or very significantly affect the transhumanism movement, you know, in which there are scientists and engineers and, you know, medical types, I don't know, the right term, medical engineers. And various medical scientists working on augmentation, not just, well, let's find out ways to give abilities

to people who are disabled in some way, but let's look at ways to hack our bodies in order to, in order to upgrade ourselves to, uh, in order to, to upgrade ourselves, right, through through implantation of tech of whatever kind. Um, that's so like, that's so interesting to me just because I think, as soon as you said that, I immediately think of people getting laser surgery for their eyes. Yeah. And people getting breast surgery for their eyes, and people getting breast augmentation surgery. Yeah.

Like, both of those are using surgical tech to, in their eyes, and in their breasts themselves, to improve themselves to some level, or to bring themselves up to what they think is parity with somebody else. Yes. And there's a whole conversation, sort of, or a whole passage in the first cyberpunk role-playing game, rule book about, let's talk about cyborgs. Your grandma has an artificial hip. She could be a cyborg.

Right. Every time you put in contact lenses, you're kind of imagine yourself a cyborg. Like there's even hawking this whole conversation about it. Yeah. Brilliant mind was absolutely defined as a cyborg by most definitions. Yeah. Yep.

100%. How much humanity do you have? You know, you resolve it. But his, but his, but his, but his experience of his humanity, right? And his his definition of what made him him would be different from those of us who are able bodied, right? From those of us who who did not have the experience of being reliant on and united with in that kind of way with a piece of technology, which then brings me to the last bullet point under this heading, which is how much of our personality is ours.

Sure. And this goes back to talking about implanted memories from Blade Runner. Like if our personality is based on what we remember and we know that our memories can be manufactured. How much of that, where do we draw the line of what is intrinsically us? How do we define what it means to have something that is intrinsically us?

Take it the other way. If losing your memories is, if your memories are intrinsically you because they're yours, what happens when you get amnesia or aphasia or if you get dementia? Are you at the end of a point you stop being intrinsically you? Yeah. And voice of the whirlwind, one possibly one of my favorite novels in this genre and kind of in general. And again, spoiler alert, if you haven't done your homework

because I know I recommended this one. The main character wakes up and he is a clone who has a set of memories that have been implanted on his brain that are his memories from the person who's, you know, he has the same DNA as this person. This is his body, right? And so he looks in the mirror and he's like, oh yeah, no, I'm me, right? Except the No, I'm me, right? Except the last he he went on an interstellar expedition as a corporate soldier got involved in a corporate war on an alien planet. And he died. I'm some span of years, then I'll say was read the book, but several years passed between the last time he recorded his Personality onto the tapes and when he was actually killed and so one of the opening lines of the book is his therapist saying to him, okay, you have to accept the fact that

the man who died is not you Wow you have to accept the fact that the man who died is not you. Wow. And the whole motivation for the main character is him in the back of his head going, no, fuck you, I am him. And I need to figure out what the hell happened and somebody fucking murdered me. And I'm gonna figure out who did it

and I'm gonna make figure out who did it, and I'm going to make them fucking pay. Okay. And like he remembers being married, but his wife divorced him. Sure. And he has no memory of it at all. I mean, this is also almost everything. Paul Verhoeven directs in the transition from the 80s to the 90s, too. Kind of. Yeah. You know, which is interesting that he's playing with with memory and stuff like that. Because he does that all the way up through basic instinct. Um, yeah. But you know, there's just, I mean, you've got Robocop, you've got total recall, you've got basic instinct, all of which deal with, yeah, and and Robocop, uh like it is right there on the on the 10 it's side punk with with by the way a publicly employed cop as the hero. Fighting against a private corporation trying to take over the department. Yep, just saying. Yep.

uh, um, and then total recall. Mm hmm. Doesn't immediately, like if you're not a, a fanboy of the genre, like, I am, you look at total recall and you don't immediately think cyberpunk, but it totally is. It does. Absolutely. Yeah. Um, you know, and so, and so all of these kind of, you know, existence, personality, kind of questions are things that cyberpunk winds up playing with. And so those are our bases of the what what makes a work cyberpunk.

Okay. The aesthetic is really important, but it's not critical. I would argue that if you have these elements, it can be cyberpunk without having to necessarily look on the box like it is cyberpunk. Loading billboards show like that, right? People with implants, visible implants. Visible implants, yeah. I'm sorry, but I keep kind of flipping back to the cyber bunk is a kind of sci-fi, right? Yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah, because when you bring up like people like, you know, you can get enhanced, you know, this or that, right? Yeah, and in an all honesty like we're already there. We have laser surgery for eyes. We have, you know, a human growth hormone, you know, you there's different ways that you can buy a cypherpone. You can enhance your body. A sub a sub category a sub category of cypherpone is biopunk. Okay. So I paused this too. If you had a

world in which a certain skin color put you at the top of the cast system. No, fuck. Yeah. Could a character pay money to get themselves literally re-skinned and then pass amongst the higher cast system for a heist or whatever or what have you or just to live the good life. You see where I'm going like, you know, sci-fi. I have, yeah, I have, I have a really strong feeling that you're going to pull the rug out from going to be one of the joke. And if you are, I know there's not going to say there's no joke. Because she's you're bringing all that up, but I'm thinking of the movie soul man.

Oh, Jesus Christ. Yes, but like that's absolutely the wrongest way to go. There's no joke because she's your because you're bringing all that up and I'm thinking of the movie soul man. Oh Jesus Yes, but like that's absolutely the wrongest way to go. Yeah, no, you're fault Yeah, but no, there's a movie in the 70s come to think of it watermelon man Okay, yeah, I'm not there with it, but okay. 1972, Mario Van Peoples, no, no, his dad, fuck, I forget his first name. And they might not be related, but I just assume people named Van Peoples are gonna be fucking related.

Oh no, they totally are related. Okay, so Mario Van Peoples dad directed it. And I forget who was in it. Okay. But they had to get a black makeup artist to come in and do the makeup to put a black band in white face for the entirety of the movie and It's not quite it's not quite the sci-fi. It's what if you woke up one day and you were a different color, right?

and oh wow, okay, and it's He wakes up as a black man. So it's it's a black, they put him in white face until he wakes up and then he's actual natural skin color. And then he ends like that might be my recommendation, even though it's not cyberpunk, but essentially it is in 1972, a real attempt at looking at the caste system that we had going on in America luckily, we've learned and we've gotten better and we're in a first-rate of society. Yeah, no, we read out because we elected. So it doesn't matter to black man into the lighthouse.

So yeah, no, exactly. And then in orange light. Yeah, and then in orange light. Yeah. But you know, I can't even keep going on that with I know it's just like God damn it. Okay. But but I just I so there was a movie that did that, but it wasn't cyberpunky, but it was a fascinating. But it was you add cyberpunk to it. Like you said, uh, you get all kinds of, oh, yeah, I don't want to hell out of that. Yeah.

One could be skin because that is our largest of, oh yeah, I know I watched the hell out of that. One could be skin, because that is our largest organ, you know? And so I'm wondering at that, and then another part of me was like, isn't, couldn't you also say then that having your protagonist have gender-affirming care? Couldn't you tie, like, you see what I'm saying?

Like, because we're getting into questions of identity. Yeah. You're true of humanity, you're true self. And I mean, obviously we're seeing, the matrix could absolutely be this, but it's more allegory than it is actually stating it. You wake up, you go from green into blue, you know, stuff like that. But yeah, I'm just, I'm just thinking about the current milieu that we have. And there's

so many interesting places that cyberpunk could absolutely take us. Oh, yeah. And, and that's kind of kind of one of the things I'm, I'm gonna. Okay. I appreciate your indulgence. Oh yeah, no, of course. This shit is 75% of what we do here. Indulging me? But yeah, well, no, I mean, engines. But so,

so the one of the other things that you almost always see, certainly early on in Cyberpunk is the very first imaginings of something like the internet. Gibson first imagined the net with an apostrophe capital N18, A VR environment where hackers do literal battle with automated security programs. Sure. And even Gibson was not quite there to really see the extent to which the internet and web 2.0, particularly we're going to alter free thing. You know the extent to which like right now, right now, you and I are having a conversation face to face despite being literally on opposite sides of an urban area. Right? And we're doing that

because of a whole set of infrastructures. Like science fiction came up with the ideas of video phones forever ago. But the way in which, but the way in which you and I are recording this and the way in which our audience is experiencing it. Right. Is something that science fiction authors missed out on? Nobody, nobody got it. Nobody saw this coming in the way that it happened. Right.

Gibson and the genre of Cyberpunk came closest to it. Okay. But the ubiquity of connected society, the ubiquity of connected culture, the ability that we have to carry an object in our hand that does everything for us. We have one device that can give us directions to get where we want to go, we can buy tickets to go wherever to an event. Yeah. And show up and just show the device to get in. Yeah.

We carry, like depending on what kind of stuff you have on your phone, you could conceivably now, as we recording this, you could almost go without a wallet if you just have your phone. That's true. That's very true. Because because our entire society has become wired into the net and everything is interconnected in that way. And Gibson figured out, okay, well, you can have computers, start computers and computers are going to be really important, and computers are going to be really important, you know, to the people who are in power.

Right. But the, but the, I don't want to say democratization. I don't want to say democratization because that has overtones. Popularization. Popularization and the availability is better. Popularization and availability of access to that, he totally, he did not see coming. Like the people who deal with the net are hackers. They are net runners. They are

people who, this is their stick. Yeah. And so he envisioned this and in the first and into the second generation of the genre, that was kind of the image that everybody had of the net simply because it had not become ubiquitous for everybody in the world yet. And nobody and nobody I think saw the threshold of access dropping as low as it has. Sure. Like, I don't think anybody envisioned that it would become that relative to put things on the net, or that it would become that easy for people who know nothing about operating a computer.

Here we are. Create a web page. Yeah. You know, and and and history time. Come. Yeah. You know, hi.

I do one speaking of. I mean, I know a little bit about operating a computer, but not not enough. Anyway, um, and so, but, but the net as it shows up in early cyberpunk is Gibson's baby. That's not something that's not something that Dick had anything to do with. He didn't envision anything like that. You'll notice there's no kind of internet, anything net activity. None of that happens in Blade Runner. Because he just didn't, it wasn't on his radar.

Sure. Gibson's stories treat cybernetics and man-machine neural interfaces as background elements rather than the McGuffin. Like in an earlier generation of story, if it was like, oh, no, you can, you can put on this helmet and And talk to the computer with your brain, right? Mm-hmm. An earlier generation of story that would be like oh my god. We can't let the reptilons get a hold of this tech You know, this is this is the McGuffin for the whole story. This is a big deal. You know, this is the thing

right story, this is a big deal. You know, this, this is the thing. Right. Um, in, in Gibson's world, no, this is just, it's background noise. His first published short story is entitled Burning Chrome. Okay. Which like, oh my God, what a fucking title. But it's a textbook example of the way he does this. In his first novel, Neuromancer, which came out in 84, and I've already kind of ruined this, but again, the primary big idea is that it's an artificial intelligence manipulating the main characters in order to achieve its goals. But along the way, there's a former military officer

with an artificial implanted personality. Like his whole consciousness and personality has been engineered by the AI and downloaded literally into his brain. A thief who can project holograms using cybernetic implants. He can throw lasers out that intersect with each other to create illusions in the air. A freelance mercenary with metal eyes and razors implanted in her fingertips.

A family of corporate aristocrats who spends time in cryohyberation aboard an orbital resort habitat. Okay. And the protagonist and the main character who's a hacker who maneuvers through VR cyberspace using a direct connection between his brain and his computer. And the way he gets roped into doing all of this is that mercenary I mentioned with the artificial implanted personality, which you don't find that out until the climax of the

book. But anyway, that mercenary shows up on his door and goes, Hey, you know how you haven't been able to get on the net since somebody, you know, literally damaged your nervous system. So now you can't get on the net anymore and you're forced to do all this, you know, side hustle shit. Yeah, no, I can fix that for you. But you need to do this job before me. And if you burn me, I will redamage your nervous system worse. So like, what do you want to do?

Like, so exploiting the, the, the handicapped, the, yeah, pardon me, forgive me. Exploiting the disabled is still, still a theme. Okay. Well, it's, it's, it's dangling, it's dangling the carrot of, I can, I can, I can cure you. But not only I can cure you, I can make you worse.

But yeah, well, I will. But the thread, I will not leave you alone. The thread of, yeah. Well, no, the, the threat is, the, the threat comes up if you sign on and you burn me, I will fuck you even harder. But the main character did have the option to walk away at the beginning. Oh, okay, okay.

And he didn't, because he literally, there's moments where Gibson does really a job of describing the environment of the net as being like a drug trip. Things are brighter and more intense and light. It's not something you want to give up and he's been deprived of it. So, and where was I? The novel, Neuromancer is is the first installment of the Sprawl trilogy.

So it's Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive are the trilogy of the series. Okay. Now, Neuromancer is the only one of them to win the Neb- it is the- sorry, not the only one of them. Neuromancer is the only novel to win the Nebula Award from the Science Fiction Writers Association of America, the Hugo Awards from the World Science Fiction Society, and the Philip K. Dick Award for Best American Science Fiction Paperback of the Year, which is worth noting because when Gibson watched Blade Runner in the process of writing the book, he lamented to friends that his own sprawl was going to be viewed as him biting off of Philip K. Dick. He was like, I've been working on this. Yeah. I've been writing this. This is what I have going on in my own head, but I'm going to put this

out in the world and everybody's going to think that, oh, well, you know, clearly he just saw Blade Runner. head, but I'm going to put this out in the world and everybody's going to think that, oh, well, you know, clearly he just saw Blade Runner. Right. Uh, and, and he had to be talked into finishing the book because he was like, well, shit, I back to square one. I got to come up with something all new and they're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, don't know I had that moment. Well, okay, so we had recorded the G.I. Joe quadrilogy Yes, and then about Oh God, I don't remember how many weeks before it dropped Mm-hmm the podcast the very and everybody should go listen to this podcast after hours. Barry has about, yeah, uh, yeah, what I'd say after, oh yeah, office hours, office, I apologize. Um, office hours, uh, Barry had two episodes

in which he went in depth into GI joke cartoons. I'm like, God damn it. into GI Joe cartoons. I'm like, God damn it. It's not a bitch. The amount of people that I did, we haven't killed us like months long. Yeah. Right. You know, and so I was just like, oh man, like I, but I, I recorded it before I had heard it,

but we haven't released it yet and it was really fun. So, yeah. I understand this guy's reticence of like, oh yeah. Well, I'll just hold on to these for a year. But yeah, but yeah, maybe so, um, yeah, I had a had a similar experience, um, and I've, of course, never published anything, but back when I was in college, I wrote all kinds of fantasy and science fiction stuff just in my spare time.

And there was one series of stories that I was really, really like, amped about writing. And I was working on them and working on them. And then I'm trying to remember what year it was because like I said, I never finished anything. I never got anything published. But I wound up, I always kind of had it in the back of my head. I was like, well, you know, someday

when I have the time, I'm gonna to go back and I'm going to do that. And then one of my co-workers recommended that I pick up the Harry Dresden series by Jim Butcher. And I got like five pages into the first book and I was like, I thought of a bitch. Well, there's no point in me ever finishing that because God damn it. And but your did it way better than I did. Naturally, but anyway, yeah. So, I mean, yeah, if you're if you're a creative, if you are at all in any way,

a creative type, you've probably had that moment. But thankfully William Gibson's editor talked him out of just burning him. And you script like no, no, no, no, finish it. Please. editor talked him out of just burning him and he scripted like no no no finish it please. And so when the book came out it was not a runaway hit commercially, but everybody in the science fiction writing community and like the court everybody was talking about it. And it catalyzed the explosion of the cyberpunk genre. So in the years immediately after that, we have Walter John Williams. First novel

was hardwired in 1986. Second novel, which I've recommended and is one of my favorites, Voice of the World Wind in 1987, and then a third book in the same universe, Saulip System, 1989. Okay. Another kind of considered, considered one of the canon of the literature works is by George Alec Eiffinger, when Gravity Fails published in 1986, which takes place

in a Middle Eastern kind of Morocco in what's the movie I'm thinking of Bogey. Oh, Casablanca. Casablanca takes place in a Casablanca kind of kind of setting. Has is is one of the first times that we really see a different cultural lens being brought in lens being brought in and applied to the genre of Cyberpunk. In 1988, we have Bruce Sterling writing islands in the net. Sterling was actually one of the first people who encouraged Gibson to write fiction professionally. He and Gibson are very close friends. They then collaborated on the difference engine in 1990, which is a seminal work in the steam punk genre, which takes many of the ideas out of cyberpunk and moves it into an imagined Victorian setting rather than a futuristic one. Right, and it's like fantastic technology,

but with steam powered everything, practically. Yes, yes. There's still crystals and maybe focusing lenses and shit like that, but by and large, it's much sootier, if you will. Yes, yes you will. Yes, yeah. Yes, definitely. And over the course of many years, Rudy Rucker published the Where Tetrology.

He started before Neuromancer, but Gibson's short story is predate Rucker's first novel. And so I still give credit to Gibson. Software is the first one of them. Wetware is the next one and the novels from Wetware on undoubtedly got more attention than they might have otherwise if Neuromancer had not been published. Okay. And like if they're really record fans in the audience, prove me wrong. I invite you, you know, if I have if I have deeply offended you, you know, say something about it, let me know. And so what we have going on, like at the time all of this is happening, just to give, you know, to now shift a little

bit, we've talked about the late 70s, early 80s, I mean, over and over and over again. Of course. So we're, you know, kind of beating a dead horse with this, but, you know, could you, we just, could you imagine the boomer version of this show of like, it's just nothing but like the Gulf of Tonkin, uh, the assassination of RFK, like it's just those two pillars. Just just those two things over and over and over again. Yeah. Yeah. things over and over and over again. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Yeah, I can so clearly see it. Except the boomer version of the show can't exist because they can't figure out how to operate zoom. There. Like, you know,

we're like that completely completely. I completely, the inner. I trade a thought. Yeah, don't worry about it. No. So, but specifically the things that we can look at here are like obviously, again, Gibson was coming at this from a very cynical, honk disillusion kind of frame of mind. Right. Again, very 70s and 80s of him. Very, very 70s and very early 80s.

And so, you know, the draft, you know, which he is very humble about. No, I didn't actually have the stones dodged the draft. I went to Canada, but they never actually tried to draft me. So I can't, I can't claim the moral high ground of being a draft dodger is kind of his the way he characterizes it. So there's, there's an authenticity to him. And again, question questions of authenticity and hybrid authenticity kind of fit with what you're talking about here.

Like, it's not that he necessarily didn't have the stones to do it. He didn't have to. So he's like, Hey, I can't climb the high ground on that one because I didn't have to do it. But I did tell them I'm doing all the drugs I can. And I did go to Canada. Like I was ready, but I didn't have to. I was, yeah, I was set to do it, but it never came up. Yeah, it's so interesting that he's not doing stolen valor to hot to about dodging the draft.

Whereas there's so many people who did stolen valor about being in service. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, I think, yeah. Yeah, I had, I had a thought about that, but it flittered away as quickly as I had it. So maybe I'll come back to it. But yeah, no, no, here's some unknown drugs. Yes, it's like to lost like tears in rain.

And so we see in the in the 70s, we see the beginnings of mass consciousness of environmental issues. Right. In the 70s, we see, we see punk being born out of this disaffection, this, you know, the system is rigged, fuck the system. Well, Anna distanced with, with bourgeois indulgent stuff too. Like, oh, oh, you, you claim to be a leftist, but you're just going to go and work for your parents anyway. We're actually poor. Yeah. Like, you're a tourist here. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm. Yeah. Like you're a tourist. Yeah. So yeah, I'm actually struggling. Oh, hey, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and the, you also see a splintering in a fracturing though amongst a lot of activism in the 70s that you didn't see in the 60s. You saw

a lot of unity in the 60s. A lot of groups working together in the 70s. you didn't see in the 60s. You saw a lot of unity in the 60s. A lot of groups working together in the 70s. Yeah. I clearly can't rely on you for our leaders have been killed or or or and you see a splintering and a disaffection. Yeah. Yeah.

And yeah, and that, we can't count on you. We can't count on anybody. Right. You know, that splintering and the, I don't wanna say the failure of those movements, but from any number of points of view, you could certainly look at, you know, what like, okay, well, we got the, we got the civil rights bill

passed and we got this done and we got this done, but everything's still fucking sucks. Right. You know, and so from, from a certain point of view, it would be, it would be really easy to look at that and be like, well, okay, like fuck this. We can't rely on anybody. None of this is, none of this, you know, yes, things have gotten better, but they're not fixed. Mm-hmm.

And at the same time that things have gotten better, we've seen Richard Nixon get into power and immediately use every tool at his disposal to criminalize drugs and try to find a way to criminalize being against the Vietnam War. Right. Um, and we've seen corporate America completely back to that play. And we've seen the Vietnam War being supported by corporate America because war is good for business. Du Pont war is a racket. Thank you, Smetley Butler. Famously Du Pont. Yeah, and add on TV of a black veteran playing basketball on prosthetic legs that they had

created because Du Pont, right? But I'm pretty sure they're also the ones that like made a lot of defolience. Oh, not just defolience. Nape home. Right. So it is a do pot product. It's like, yeah, so it was okay. It was nape. Yeah. So yeah, there was there was I don't remember where the line came from, but it was like, you know, thank you, DuPont as, as, you know, Nape home is being dropped. Yeah. So, you know, yeah, you've got this. Corporations are absolutely benefiting heavily from these things. Oh, and painting themselves as heroes. Oh, yeah. And making themselves out to be the good guy and and bourgeois society the middle comfortable middle class and everybody above them is either buying it hook line and

sinker or is the ones peddling that line right like you know above above again the red line right they're the ones actively putting that story out. And between, call it the red line and the green line, there's everybody buying the story and below the green line, you don't believe a word of it, but there's nothing you can fucking do about it. Sure. Even if,

and from the point of view of somebody who's making a living by finding stuff in Salvation Army stores and reselling it, it's all a crock of shit. You know, and we're never going to get to Utopia. One of one of Gibson's short stories is not only a refutation of the idea that we're going to get to Utopia, but a scathing indictment of the vision of Utopia that was offered by authors in the 40s and 50s. And I highly recommend anybody who hasn't read it or even if you have read it, go back and reread it, see if you can find it anywhere online. The Gernsback Continuum, named for Hugo Gernsback,

who is the person for whom the Hugo Award is named. He was a seminal figure in the beginnings of popular science fiction, was an editor, was a very, very big deal responsible a seminal figure in the beginnings of popular science fiction, was an editor, was a very, very big deal responsible for a lot of early authors getting their start big figure. Well, in Gibson's story, and it's a little bit surrealist, so it's kind of hard to boil down,

but a photographer is traveling around the country, around North America, because I think it goes in the United States and Canada. But he's traveling around North America, and he's collecting, he's photographing these places that are examples of art, deco, and Bauhaus, you know, kind of semi-futurist architecture. And as he's doing it, he starts having these hallucinatory episodes, these visions, like he's looking into a parallel universe

in which this future occurs. And everybody he sees in that universe is tall and blonde and pretty and perfect. And he's horrified. And he can't escape it. And the punch line of the story is he's having a conversation. He's decided I'm running away from this project as fast as I can because I don't want to get sucked into this parallel universe. Oh my God. And I'm oversimplifying and it's been a while since I read the story. But he's having a conversation with a flight attendant who says, oh, yeah, we show some of his photographs.

And she goes, oh, yeah, no, you know, isn't it ashamed that the world never turned out the way they, they, you know, isn't it a shame that, you know, the world never turned out the way they they, you know, envisioned that it would back then. And the main character's response is thank God it didn't. And can I have another drink? You know, and so it's this no, no, no, there is there is lurking fascism here. There is ableism there is like. There is ableism there is like yeah, this was a bad idea not only are we never gonna get there but but we we don't want to right thank God that's that's the bad place like holy shit right and so that level of, I mean, cynicism, I've said cynicism, but it's not just that. It's disillusionment with, like, not only is the idea of utopia unreal, but the idea of utopia is toxic. Like we shouldn't be trying to build a utopia because like the new wave came up with the idea of,

well, okay, how are we gonna build a utopia? And is it worth the price if people have to suffer to create it? What's the dark side of utopia going to be? This is taking that idea and going another step further in the late 70s, early 80s and like looking at everything Reagan had to say and saying, yeah, bullshit, shining city on a hill fuck you. Who's who's going to be living in that city? Who are you

going to be excluding from that city because they don't fit your picture of the shining city? Right. Right. And what you think Pastor, you're gonna draw on too. Yeah, and where are you going to, yeah, what are you going back to here, right? Right. And so it's reactive to all of that going on kind of all at once. And so as we move on through the 80s,

I need to mention a couple of Japanese sources. Okay. First, Dominion, well, I'm gonna mention the author first. Massimo de Shirou is a really big within the cyberpunk genre within manga. In 1985, 1986, he wrote a series entitled Dominion, which is about police officers. Again, idealizing the virtuous defenders of the independence of

democratically elected governments, democratically and force are democratically decided upon social mores. The tank police and dominion, which is a fun series, well worth reading. In Apple seed, which ran from 1985 to 1989, there is a utopia he does have an attempt at utopia. The city state that the main characters are again,

part of the paramilitary police force for, is designed to be a utopia right down to all of the functionaries who work for the city state or artificial humans. They are bioreights. They are, they are replicant. Basically, they areants. Okay. And one of the things that the government does is because the rest of the world is recovering from a nuclear exchange that led to you know that there was there's been societal collapse there's been all kinds of conflict whatever and the agents of this particular society, whoever it was who founded the society, has decided, okay, we're going to go and we're going to find people from all over the world, we're going to bring them here and we're going to reintegrate them into a civilized society,

we're going to have a social safety net, we're going to do all these things. Okay. And it's going to be a moral polyglot culture. It's gonna, you know, all the stuff and the aesthetic is totally gonna be solar punk. It's bright, it's sunny, it's shining all the time. Sure. But our police force and we don't have,

we don't have an army. Listen to the tone of my books when I say that. We don't have a military. But our police force is going to be made up of former special forces soldiers from all of these other countries who have now been left stateless in the wake of World War III, and we are going to use them as necessary to defend our interests, which usually means we're going to be using them to do sketchy shit in the shadows to direct world politics in ways we want it to go. It sounds very Eric Prince.

Kinda. Yeah, like we're gonna grab people and basically, you know, hire them for cheap and then not let them leave the plane and then deploy them where we want to and now they pretty much depend on us. It's a little bit less, it's more than looking for, it's a little bit less kidnathy than that. Yeah, yeah. It sounds more generous, but function, it's very somewhat. Yeah. Yeah. And Shiro is very much writing it as, yeah, no, this is not, this looks like a utopia, but it's very someone. Yeah. Yeah. And Shiro is very much writing it as, uh, yeah, I know this, this is not, this looks like a utopia, but it's, it's really not like we're not, we're not actually going to have a utopia. There's, there's still going to be sketchy shit going on. Well, and this is something for whom, like either he or his parents in living memory would have had

the American occupation where, yeah. You know, we had to American occupation where yeah, you know, we had to bomb the shit out of you first and now you have this utopia. And while there is commercial success and the rebuild has been successful at one cost and you've got, you know, yeah, you've got all this shit going on. So yeah, you know, yeah, it's not upselling from a thrift store, but clearly, it puts in the air. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And and in Apple seed, one of the two main main characters, one of the two protagonists is a full conversion cyborg. He is a brain and a semi semi organic support system for that brain in a robot body. And he has the ability to link up because of his full conversion cyborg body, he has the ability

to link up to multiple machines at once and control them, which is why his model of his model of cyborg bodies referred to as hecatonkarees taken from the name for the Greek titans, the many handed ones. Oh, okay. The hundred handed ones. And yeah, the hundred handed ones. There we go. Yes, the hundred handed ones. And that's bryorious. the 100 handed ones. And that's Briarious. And then, and I just completely flaked on the name of the other main character, which sucks because she was awesome. And damn it, I'm gonna have to look it up later. But the other main character is a is a entirely human. She doesn't have any cybernetic qualities, but she is a like Brian Rios is. She's a former

special forces operative who has, she's, she's really actually the one of the two of them who frequently she's less, she's the hot headed one, she's the one that flies off the handle, has trouble following orders. Yeah, sure. And she does most of her work in what's called a land mate, which is basically think like a battle mech only, it's 10 feet tall rather than 30 feet tall.

Okay. Yeah. So it's like it's like a power suit plus plus. And so they get into all kinds of, you know, counter terrorism. They are usually put in usually the two main characters are almost always put in the position of stopping somebody else from doing something horrible, but they have to do it in the shadows, and their very involvement is like violation of international law most of the time. And then there are other characters who are due

to raggedists or, or, you know, supporting characters who are regularly doing stuff that, no, no, no, you're actually being sent off to assassinate somebody like, right. You're breaking into an embassy in a foreign country and stealing shit. Like, this is bad. Right. And so that's that's Apple seed and for a whole host of reasons I highly recommend reading it because it's amazing. And then what Mossimone Shirou is most known for here in the United States is ghost at the shell. Okay.

Yeah. ghost in the shell. Okay, yeah, which is in the case of the manga is early 90s, started in 1991. And in that, the main character, Major Kusanagi, is a again, a full conversion cyborg. She is a brain in a robot body. The fingers I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's where they can type it, you know, 300 words a minute because their fingers break up, you know, and they can do that. And that's kind of the background that, go ahead. I was gonna say that government functionary thing being all cyborg in his, he's brought, you brought this up twice now in his works, right?

Yeah. Right. Now it just gets at the dehumanization, um, that we do, or the bureaucracy, because of the humanization it does toward us. The DMV is a punchline to us. The people who work there are merely props to that building. And, you know, they act in a certain way and it's really interesting that like. Again, you know we're talking about we're talking about the automation aspect of work. And people do it. You know, we don't mean to do humanize them.

We're just saying that like if we can automate it, shouldn't we release people to do bad poetry and get high and stand couch and still feed them? Yeah. And still, yeah, not forced them into homelessness. Yeah. Right. And so it's interesting that the civil service is what this author keeps dehumanizing on purpose,

which is an American creation on some levels because we redid their government. Oh yeah, well, we did redid their government. I'm going to say that it's not just us redoing their government though. that it's not just us redoing their government though. There's a case to be made that this is also a Confucianist thing. Okay, yeah. That the strict hierarchy and the very much order above all kind of framework

that surrounds that in a nation context is also a thing, is also part of that. I'm not gonna say it's not at all us having gone in and gone. Okay, now your whole government, we're gonna go through your entire government, anybody who we don't think is good, we're going to fire and we're going to put other people in here. And by the way, you need to now adopt this set of ideals regarding parliamentary democracy

and all of this. Like yes, that's definitely a thing there, but there's also the underlying, like the continuity of culture within those structures was there beforehand, if you get what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And from your mention of the DMV, I find it interesting that the most humanizing depiction I've seen in my adult life of the DMV is in Zootopia.

I was going to say, I bet you. When, you know, we actually have a little bit of sort of character background development between two of the employees. Right. And, and like, and joy, literally not literally not yeah they're literally not human right and yet that's the most humanized trail I've seen of a DMV function area on screen I think ever in my life Yeah, like that disagree. You know, um, so, um, ghost in the shell again, uh, now, uh, Apple seed with, with Briarious, a cyborg being one of the, one of the main protagonists, uh, Apple seed gets into some questions of, you know, who's human, who's not?

How do we define that? Multiple sporting characters are, like I said, essentially replicants, their bioroids. And, and, you know, they have character arcs, they have development, they, they are treated in day to day life as human, sure, except in a couple of places where it becomes important to the plot that everybody's aware that, well, you don't really have a mother,

you were grown in a tube and then raised in a crash of other bio-roids. And there comes up an issue where the DNA code of one of them is part of a e that has to unlock something. Anyway, but like until it becomes a plot point, they're treated as just as humans, everybody else, but everybody also knows they're not true born human to borrow a phrase from the dark L-dare and work him a 40k, which makes me feel icky, but like, you know, they're their bioreights. And so those issues are there, those issues are

brought up, that's part of the storyline, but in Ghost in the Shell, she really goes hard into questions of our memories and our personality and our identity being a thing, literally the ghost in the shell. One of the main plot points within the series is that if you put your brain into a cybernetic body, you get all of these physical advantages. There's all this wonderful, amazing shit you can do, but it also means that anybody who's a good enough hacker can literally hack your brain.

Right. And then you get into issues of autonomy, yes, not just humanity, but autonomy now, and the violation thereof. And then you get into issues of autonomy. Yes. Not just humanity, but autonomy now and the violation thereof. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, and there's in the film, in the animated film, for Ghost of the Shell, part of the climax of the film, there's this moment where

Major Kursunagi is in the middle of a conflict that is, she's in a physical fight, but there's also like a digital consciousness fight, kind of going on at the same time. She has to get to a place to deal with that. The setting in which that takes place is this gigantic circular room and on one of the walls, two or three stories high, artistic depiction of the tree of evolution. Okay. And it's really heavy-handed,

but it's also really brilliant. Sure. Where she's essentially trying to, and I'm trying to remember what the ultimate endgame is, but she's locked in this struggle that has to do with a hacker obliterating the autonomy of millions of people. And it's this question of evolution, and the hacker has this very high-falut science fictiony madman kind of post-human evolution

kind of justification for what they're doing. And so it's this brilliantly done moment that just really puts a pin in you know the these concepts of humanity post humanity evolution identity Definition of you know all this epistemological kind of issues mm-hmm and so crucially important partly because Of you know dealing with these questions in this genre,

there's this format, I guess, not genre, because we're talking about the sub-genre, but in the format of manga and animation. And also important, because since this was in the format of manga and animation, there was a whole new direction of influence that that then had, because people who might not have been reading literary cyberpunk

saw this work because they're anime fans, right, and then that spun off in those directions. And another another artist in artist in this category, Toshimichi Suzuki is responsible for bubble gum crisis. And AD police. Well, I think I've heard of bubble gum crisis. What was the other one? AD police, which is a spinoff of bubble gum crisis. And bubble gum crisis is built around the idea of a gigantic corporation. There's environmental collapse, you know, all the stuff that happens at the outset of these to create the dystopia we're living in, or catalyze the dystopia we're living in. And then the GENOM corporation,

which the name GENOM according to Suzuki is inspired partially by the word GENOM. So the GENOM corporation develops boomers, which are robots. And they're essentially they're like replicants, only many of them look more robot-like. They come up with these artificial semi-sort of life forms that in order to achieve a human level of intelligence, their circuitry, their hardware is semi-biological and is chemical as well as physical. And that's an important plot point because when you stress a boomer by forcing it to do something outside of its programming, by working it too hard, by doing all of these things.

Now wait, this isn't a generational discussion. This is something from the book. This is, this is, yeah, this is entire boomer. Yeah, totally different kind of boomer. And he, he, again, Suzuki used the word boomer, not in any kind of connection to the idea of baby boomers because on that side of the Pacific that wasn't a phrase. And on this side of the Pacific,

it had not picked up the connotations it has as you and I are talking about it. Sure. But he was using it as one like on on multiple works on multiple levels. Boomers are, they make a lot of noise. They are part of a boom of population growth. They and they came out of nothing and became this huge workforce. And that's kind of where boomer in this context, why he used that term. And so what winds up happening is these semi-human, semi-quasi-human robots, wind up becoming the low-level workforce. In the case of bubblegum crisis in that universe, there's a massive earthquake that levels a huge portion of the Kanto region of Japan. And Genom Corporation shows up and says, all right, well, we have the workers to rebuild.

We will sell everybody a boomer and they'll go out and they'll do this work. Well when you overwork a boomer or you force it to do something, it's not programmed to do. So there are models of boomer. It should be mentioned at this point that are human looking. And one of the things that you can get a boomer to do is be your secretary. Okay. And there are other models of boomer, much like Chris in Blade Runner, who are specifically

built in Orkidbeer Robot Sex Workers. Right. Well, if you take a secretary, boomer, and you try to push it into the job of being a sex worker, that's not what it was, what she was built to do. Mm-hmm. And so eventually that can lead to boomer psychosis. At which point, the boomer goes berserkerk and now you have someone or something that is depending on how you want to define it Who is much stronger than a normal human faster than a normal human and is completely batched crazy and violent and so

the protagonists of bubble gum crisis are a team of women, a trio of women who use essentially like an Ironman suit to defend people against the the rampages of boomers who've gone out of control. And while they're doing that, they are also busy trying to investigate and work their way up to finding out all of the chicaneery that the Guinau Corporation has done, because the Guinau Corporation has known all along that this is a problem, but they've told everybody,

oh, you know, no, this is perfectly safe, don't need to worry about this. And so there's multiple levels of what they're doing. The action sequences are generated by, you know, boomer goes psycho and they have to go off and fight it. But there's also this, they are constantly being dogged by agents of Gennum. And individual stories have to do with, you know, there's one in which a pair of boomers escape from the colony on Luna, on the moon. And, you know, the boomers in that story are very explicitly humanized.

We, as the audience, empathize very strongly with them. And then the main characters are put in a position of having to protect people against them or protect people from them in the end. And the main characters have the conflict, have faced the internal conflict of, you know, they've been literally broken by these experiences.

But now we have to defend people from what has happened because of this. And the villain isn't the boomers in this case, the villain is Guinam corporation. If that makes sense. It does, it does. And then the AD police series is a spinoff from bubblegum crisis, which focuses on the essentially the SWAT team of the Tokyo Kanto police department who have to get called in and have to act as the police dealing with these incidents. And like one of the episodes of AD police involves one of their number being hideously horribly injured and being turned into a full conversion cyborg

and going mad himself. Right, it would, you know. It's fallen to that level. Yeah, and level. Yeah. Yeah. So, so again, this is important again, because this is these, these ideas and these questions.

There's a little bit of cross pollination in bubblegum crisis with superhero genre. And, and then there's the fact that again, this is anime and Ba and people who normally wouldn't have been exposed to the genre get exposed to the genre of cyberpunk through this source. Okay. So now we're getting into the 1990s.

And I know that you wanted to come back around. Oh, yeah, next time I'm going to get talking about Neil Stevenson in in 93 and 95 so okay. Well. This seems like an actual good breaking off point. I yeah, so I think so. I think so. Why don't you why don't we go go through that. Do you need Stevenson in the next episode,

and then bring back the comic series that I was going to talk about. OK, yeah, that worked. OK, cool. OK, cool, cool. Cool. Well, what are you recommending for people to read or watch or consume?

I'm going to very, very strongly recommend the Netflix series of altered carbon. Oh, yeah, yeah. Because it does a lot of things in the genre. It's firmly rooted in Cyberpunk, but it plays around, it plays, it very explicitly plays around with race and ethnicity as a thing, because the main character, his consciousness is in his identity, he is Asian, but the body he is a white man and it's a thing. And on top of that, it's just a really good work. So very highly recommended. All right. How about you? This episode, I'm going to actually recommend a movie called Advent Ages. I believe it's streaming still on Netflix and Amazon. I know that it's also probably on Roku and Paramount,

but it's called Advent Ages and it's essentially, it's a near future and you've got economic hardship, lots of opulent wealth, and it's a mother daughter story, and it comes down to essentially, do you get essentially implant surgery to give your family an advantage as things are destabilizing.

And it's actually directed by a friend of mine, Jen Pong. your family and advantage as things are destabilizing. And it's actually directed by a friend of mine, Jen Pong, who has directed a number of like sci-fi TV shows. Okay. And such like that, she's directed, she's an episode of the boys, some stuff of Stargirl, foundation, Agents of Shield. Oh, wow. Yeah, Cloak and Dagger, Quantico, the explainer.

Okay. You may have heard. Riverdale. She's directed episodes of a lot of things. And so, anyway, it, it, it, advantageous, wanted jury prize at Sundance in 2015. Oh wow. And yeah, it was so cool. Yeah, it's it's a good film. I highly recommend it. It's only an hour and a half long. It's pretty short and it was it's remarkable. Like when you watch it, remember that it was done on a very tight budget. Okay. And it does not seem like you're like, this was done on a very tight like it's, it's, it's really good. Alright. Yeah. Awesome. That's what I recommend. Very cool. Cool. Do you want to be found or no? I do not want to be found. I'm, I'm going to find a

corner of the net and tuck myself away there. Bear boy. Don't come, don't come looking for me because the ice is thick. Sure, sure. The sand. Well, let's see. You can find me probably by the time this airs aim for the August fourth capital punishment show, if not that, then the September eighth capital punishment show. So you can find me there. Where can we, we be found collectively? Collectively. Well, you've already found us somewhere.

So you already know at least one of the places we can be found, but we are available on the Apple Podcast app and on Stitcher. Our website is web, web, web, web, gik History Time.com. We can be found on Twitter collectively again as Geek History time. And that's it. You've already said where you can be found. Yeah. Oh, both of those shows will be at Luna's in Sacramento at 8 p.m. All right. There we go. There you go. Cool. Well, for a Geek history of time, I am the third clone of Damien Harmony. And I'm at Blaleock and until next time, keep rolling to one place. And I'm Ed Blaylock and until next time, keep rolling to one place.