A Geek History of Time - Episode 216 - Cyberpunk Part II

Episode Date: June 17, 2023

I'm not here to poke holes and suspended this belief. Anyway, they see some weird shit. They decide to make a baby. Now, I'm not gonna merge it. Who gives a fuck? Oh my god, which is a trick on you, baby. You know what I'm saying? Well, you know, I really like it here. It's kind of nice and it's part of the oldest Bach home of the Sonders.

So yeah, sure, I think we're gonna settle. If I'm a peasant boy who's wrapped sword out of a stone. Yeah. I'm able to open people up. You will, yeah. Anytime I hit them with it, right? Yeah. So my cleave landing will make me a cavalier.

Good day, Sfer. If Sysclothon it was empty headed, plubian trash, it's really good and gruey. Because cannibalism and murder, we'll back just a little bit, build walls to keep out the rat heads. We can't use to live in the ground. A thorough intent doesn't exist. Some people stand up to white gibots.

Some people stay seeing white gibots. Let me just... This is a geek history of time. Where we connect nerdery to the real world. My name is Ed Blalock, I'm a world history and anglic teacher here in Northern California. And recently I have seen a lot of my fellow teachers, most of them in a higher level that I'm operating at, than I'm operating at. Talking on social media about how annoyed they are at seeing chat GPT showing up in papers and stuff that they're having a grade. And I totally

thoroughly empathize with that. And I get how that's like immensely frustrating. But on the level at which I'm teaching, the issue that that I have is simultaneously, I think, easier to deal with, and on a certain level, I don't want to say more frustrating, but it's frustrating on a different level. This past week, I was walking my students, again, this is material we're recovering, walking my students, again, this is material we're recovering, walking them through how to use text evidence in their writing and focusing on okay, so you need to give credit to your source. The author of Name of Article tells us that quotation marks put in your quote, close your quotation marks,

use commas where appropriate, close your quotation marks, put in your quote, close your quotation marks, use commas where appropriate, close your quotation marks, give the page number that you took this from in parentheses and then put a period, right? And then after you've done that, that's not enough, you need to write another sentence to explain this supports my argument because fill in the blank, right?

And there's six graders. So this is new for them, you know, at this level, it's not brand new because I went over it with them earlier in the year, but we're going over it again because many of them need the help. And so we're going over this again. And in the process of going through the writing that they turned into me, I found that a few of them had written responses that A didn't actually answer the question I was asking, B did not pull any text out of the article that I had literally written for them to use. As an aside, I think it's some of my best journalistic writing ever. We've been reading a translation excerpts from a translation of the Odyssey, and I wrote a news article entitled, Local Ruler Returns Killed Intruding Suitors, you know, for them right about.

And they didn't actually sign anything from it. And after I'd seen the same phrasing used more than once, you know, my spidey sense has started tingling so I typed the phrases that they used into Google and and they had not only gone to literally the first source that they could that comes up when you when you search for a particular term on Google but they just they just copied it, word for word, plugged it into what they were writing,

and then kept walking. In an assignment that was literally about quoting from a source, and I don't know if the commission of plagiarism is the worst part, or if the worst part is the sheer laziness of the plagiarism that they committed. Like plagiarism, plagiarism is going to happen. You know, students are going to steal shit and not give credit for it. Like that happens and it sucks and it makes me mad.

But like, you couldn't even try a little bit harder. Like you couldn't find a quote that actually answers my question. Like, anyway. So, that's part of the reason that Friday night, I had a very large margarita with dinner because it was that kind of week all over. How about you? Well, I'm Damien Harmony. Am I Latin and US history teacher up here in

Northern California at the high school level? I have run into the same kind of thing with chat GPT. I have tried to do all I could to get ahead of the curve on that. And I've been fairly successful. I had to modify my policy on essay writing so that if your essay appears as though it has come from any kind of essay generation. That is Chatchy BT, that is AI, that is paper saver or course hero or any other number of things, then you will be required to make an appointment with me to defend said paper up to and including answering questions about content, word choice, etc, etc. Okay. That's wow. Yeah. I like it. And I actually had a kid come in and I said, okay, here's the deal. I'm going to read you your paper and then I'm going to read you what I generated today

before you came in. I read the two of them. I said, do you see how those sound remarkably familiar? He says, yeah. I said, do I need to ask any further questions or are you going to admit to this? He's like, yeah, I did. I said, okay, cool. Now, getting zero for that, but we already have chat GPT open.

Why not use it the way it's intended? And I showed him how to generate an outline, a shopping list of what he needs to do for the next essay so that he could actually use it the way it's intended. It is a good tool. It's a lot like how I always say Cliff Notes is actually fantastic as a pre-reading tool. Yeah. It is not supposed to replace the book you're supposed to read.

Yeah. ChatGPT is a great place to organize yourself, organize your thoughts in a way that you're like, okay, now I know my first couple steps until you're able to do it yourself. But yeah, it enabled me to show him, like kind of give this restorative thing where I show him. Here's the bad way to use it,

and that's what cost you all the points this time, but here's a good way to use it, and notice how this is helping you get going. I'll get out there and win one for the giver. So go. I've said no more. Yes. So I've had, you know, those kinds of interactions with it.

OK. Today, I, I historically get lost everywhere I go. Okay. To the point where I used to build it into my calendar, my schedule of things. So I had to get a tire replaced, which meant that when my kids normally would get dropped off with me,

I had to let their mother know, hey, you can either drop them off a couple hours later with me or you could drop them off with me at this higher place. She said, okay, let me think about it. She got back to me. She's like, actually, we're gonna go look at mattresses for our daughter. So why don't you meet us at that mattress store afterwards?

Okay, cool. And then I say, okay, I'm finishing up here. Are you at the mattress place? Yes, we are. I said, great, you know where that is. And she says, I think you could see it from where you are. Oh, okay, cool. So then I just typed in the name of the mattress place

into the navigation software, because it didn't occur to me to just look around. And so I got in the car, drove right past it, where, because it didn't occur to me to just look around. And so I got in the car, drove right past it, got lost down by a furniture store, all over Hell's Half Acre, worked my way back, and then I'm like, I can't find the stamp thing, and then I looked up and I'm like, oh, oh shit, that's it right there. And so I pulled around, I parked, and looked, oh, oh shit. That's as it right there.

And so I pulled around I parked and looked at my room mirror. And then I looked behind me. And I'm like, I could see the parking spot that I pulled out of from where I am. Oh, damn it. I could have just walked over. And so I walked in. And I told my kids and my daughter says, yeah, I saw you going by and we were all wondering.

And then everybody just kind of realized it's you. So, I can't argue. But yeah. Yeah. So yeah. So just just at just at a curiosity, what did this this happened to be anywhere near the IKEA there in in yeah. Okay. I know. I know exactly the mattress place. And now I do two. Yeah. And I think I know the tire place. Yeah. Yes, you do. Yeah. And yeah, there we go. I now know both are in that close-approximity to each other. And yeah, we got it now. No both are in that close proximity to each other. Yeah. So anyway, so when last week, you were getting into the 90s, which is something that we could drop me saying that into

30% just about anywhere. Yes, yeah. Yeah, because when last week's book implies that it's a part two. Yeah, okay. So yeah, but you were just getting into the 90s about cyberpunk. Yeah, yes, I was. And so in the 90s, we now wind up, we see, I'm gonna say kind of a new generation of works, maybe not a new generation of authors. In some cases, new generation of authors, but definitely a new generation of works in the cyberpunk genre. And Neil Stevenson is another name that's huge in cyberpunk. And the work he is best known for in the genre is Snow Crash from 1993.

And there's a whole lot of stuff to talk about. And this is a book full of really big ideas. But I think most notably for looking at the development of the genre, he and visions, number one, his setting is similar to Gibson's sprawl, but it looks a lot more on the page. It looks less like everything has been built up vertically and you can hardly see the sun because of all the concrete and neon. It looks a lot more like everything in the world or everything in his world that we're experiencing has turned into the Los Angeles basin.

Everything is much wider. It's much more spread out, but it is, but it is, uh, vulcanized in, in this, in this very unique way within the genre. He envisions that, uh, corporate interests gain enough power enough influence that they become entities of authority in their own right. They become semi-states or quasi-states. And so who you work for and where you live essentially gives you citizenship with a particular corporation. And like one of the, like the kind of example that you have dropped on you right at the very beginning

of the book is the mafia in his setting, has taken over, has monopolized the pizza delivery business. And the main character is a professional pizza delivery driver who drives a souped up muscle car. And he talks about how he has to navigate moving from one corporate controlled zone into another one. And one of the things, he winds up very nearly getting himself, you know, he does wind up getting fired, but he winds up nearly causing a catastrophe for the pizza business because he's running up on the time limit to get this pizza delivered. And he winds up taking a shortcut because he knows he's in a community that is owned by and is, you know, a corporate zone of this particular corporation. And because he's the best at what he does,

of this particular corporation. And because he's the best at what he does, he has the road layout for any housing development built by this corporation. They all follow it because it's corporate interest. They all follow the same layout. Right. You can find your way. If you can find your way in one,

you can find your way in all of them because they're all identical. Sure, sure. And so he takes a shortcut. If you can find your way in one, you can find your way in all of them because they're all identical. Sure. Sure. And so he takes a shortcut. Only the house he tries to take a shortcut through has been modified and they've put in a swimming pool. So we have this idea of corporate citizenship.

We have this idea of the homogenization of, if you work for this corporation or you live in this corporation's development, little houses is made of tiki-taki and everyone the same as a thing. And that's like the first 10 pages of the book. Okay. And then he takes those ideas

and like again, to talk about how this is rooted in the genre of the main character whose name is Hiro, H-I-R-O, protagonist, hero protagonist is the main character's name. Really? Oh yeah, no, 100% no cap, totally. Yeah, so there are elements of what he's writing that are it's very self-aware and and he knows I'm writing in like

wink wink we all know we're in a cyberpunk novel. I'm just gonna make that clear You know, but but here's how I'm going to Play with these conventions and here is here. Here is a trope You don't know what I'm gonna do with this trope, but I'm gonna hold this trope in front of you Right and and part of the part of the tension for you as the reader is gonna be like Okay, is he gonna play this one straighters are gonna fuck with me. What is he gonna do? It's an amazing. It's it's an awesome book nice the the Central It's an amazing, it's an awesome book. Nice. Um, the, the, uh, central kind of idea of the book winds up being about language.

And there is a corporate interest, multi-millionaire, mega-millionaire, who has gotten a hold of a set of tablets that have to do with the proto, the root language of all languages. And there is this, essentially, the protagonist and his Ragtag band of friends and co-conspirators have to find a way to stop that tablet from wreaking havoc on the world net because what winds up happening is exposure essentially causes mimetic breakdown. And you generate snow, static in the net. And so snow crash means it's going to cause, it's going to cause a global catastrophe. Very different than what I originally thought that the book was about.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're not alone. But he winds up taking this really big idea about language and about how do we assign meaning to anything. And in and and and wrapped around that really deep epistemological core, he also talks about race and ethnicity because the main character is biracial. And the perception people have of the main character, he gets into talking about state authority and, you know, how does, what makes an authority legitimate. He winds up looking into, like he creates, the setting in which like everybody has multiple hustles just in order to keep a roof over their head. The main character is living in a storage container because that's the only housing he can afford. And it's illegal, but everybody else is doing it too.

All of his neighbors, like it's a storage place that's full of people. So it's predicting 2009, 2010. Yeah. I mean, it reminds me of like, it reminds me of when I was telling students about this job that I had and how you need to know your worth and I worked for an insurance company and my job was to weigh papers. Literally, they produced, I think, like insurance documents. And to see if they were wasting ink

or to see if a batch of papers was not formatted correctly, they had me wave the papers because ink, of course, adds a little bit of weight to it. So if you get enough papers, it weighs it. And so I'm in a dingy moldy office listening to, you know, the podcast or something, as I'm doing this all day, and it is mind numbing as you could well imagine. Yeah, I'm sure. And I was about to go into my credential program, but I was

tempting because I needed the money back then you could tempt me up. And I talked to the kids about like, look, you need to know your worth. Like I was making $13 an hour there to weigh papers and it was probably the easiest and hardest job that I had all at once, but the moment that I knew That they didn't understand That I was a human was when they came to me with a huge batch and they said, you know what? You might need to call your credential program and tell me you need to start later because we just got this big old batch And I quit the next day and I told my my students, like, you know, this is, this is these are things you run into. One of my students came back to me the next day and

says, uh, where was that? I said, Oh, it's such an such insurance place down on such and such street. Do you know of their hiring? Because my mom heard about that. Would like that job. And so what you just described to me is like people's hustle in 2010, 2011. And you know, you get the, no, man, look, all you got to do is close it up before they go home and you can stay there. And it's only like 50 bucks a month. I mean, that's way better than rent. stay there and it's only like 50 bucks a month. I mean, that's way better than rent. Yeah. Like, yep. So, yeah, once again, not wrong, not wrong. Yeah. So, um, and then in 1995, the movie Strange Days comes out. And that is near future like much cyberpunk, but not all. Sure. And the conceit of strange days is that technology has been developed

where that allows you to record your sensory experience. So like, think like wearing a GoPro, only it's not just watching stuff happen in video, it is healing the wind on your face. And being in the body of whoever is doing it, right? Sure. And so the main character of the movie, played by Liam Neeson, is a, at least I think is Liam Neeson.

No, it's Ralph Feins, isn't it? Yeah, you're right, it's Ralph Feins. Yeah, Ralph Feins plays a former police officer who is now working as a, you know, a petty grifter selling black market recordings from this device. Okay. And so like the opening scene is you see a, a dude, well, first, you see firsthand a woman's body in the shower looking down and that cuts then to a dude in a suit wearing a headset and running his hands over his own body. And Ralph finds, reaches over and clicks off the console that this guy's headset is plugged into.

And the guy takes it off and he says, see, there you go, you're a 19 year old girl taking a shower. How much is that tape worth for you? And so that kind of gives you everything you need to know about this conceit and how the main character interacts with it like, you know, from the beginning. Right. Well, he winds up getting a hold of a recording that implicates somebody very powerful,

or doesn't just implicate. It shows somebody very powerful committing a murder. Of course. From the point of view of the victim. And it's a it's a a chased semi-heist semi-chase thriller movie from there. And so again we're now dealing with memories, what's real, what's not, who are you, how does you know, all of those questions coming up, we're again dealing with a character who is in a semi-quasi-legal kind of workspace, you know.

And we're dealing with the same level of moral ambiguity, and nobody's really a good guy until the main character like finally kind finally finds his spine and says, no, I gotta get pushed and then decides to do the right thing. And it's all what's funny to me is it got described as science fiction noir, but nobody made the connection to know this is cyberpunk Like which is like it's kind of like if I was like I want to play a sorcerer rogue ranger

And they're like you mean a bard Kind of yeah, oh you mean cyberpunk. Oh you mean cyberpunk. Yeah, yeah and Yeah, you mean cyberpunk. Oh, you mean cyberpunk, yeah. Yeah. And because again, the technology involved is very much the kind of thing. It is a very cyberpunk McGuffin. Now it's set, you know, 10 minutes into the future. Right. So we don't see, you know, virtual reality,

we don't see, you know, visit the outer colonies. None of that kind of stuff is going on, but it's ethos and it's central conceit is very much in line with what Cyberpunk tells us. Oh wow. Okay. And then in 2011, we have the novel, and I don't remember when the movie was released, but we have Ready Player One by Ernest Klein. Now, just real quick, producer George introduced me to Ernest Klein's work when he was known as Ernie Klein. I assume they're the same person because he wrote or he was a comedian who kind of had long form rants

about like air wolf and all kinds of all kinds of what he called nostalgia type stuff. Okay. And and he I remember he introduced him to me long before that, but I remember when I saw a radio player at one and I saw Ernest Klein, I was like, oh wow, he's an author now too. But yeah, the movie came out, I want to say 2019, maybe 2018, everything a little bit pre-pandemic is a blur to me. Okay. Yeah. So yeah, from 1997 to 2001, Klein performed his original work at Austin Poetry Slam venues. So yeah, probably same dude. Yeah. His most popular spoken word pieces include Dance Munkies Dance. Yep. Dance by. Nerd porn, oh, tour, and when I was a kid. He also did. You want to date the the smart girl. Okay, because she's just

as kinky as you and then she'll help you with your calculus homework. Nice. And yeah, he does a whole thing about air wolf. Okay. The most important piece of technological innovation that our whole society has forever been geared toward. And of course, it was flown by a man named String fellow Hawk because he plays cello in the mountains. So of course, it's gonna be him. And it's just this whole thing. Yeah, that's awesome. I'm gonna, now I'm gonna have to find that.

Yeah, that's fine. Okay. So yeah, and. And. Yeah, ready player one. Yeah. So yeah. And, and, so yeah, ready player one. Yeah. Ready player one is, is, is very much a cyber punk work. I don't know how controversial that statement is, but I know that, I think, at least I get the sense that the the hey, look at all the nostalgic shit he's pointing back to winds of overshadowing the rest of like all the stuff that's background noise in that

story. Again, just like Gibson, just like Gibson. There's all this stuff that's like background assumptions taking place in the story that are that could potentially be MacGuffins for anybody else's work. The main character is living in a trailer park that has been built out vertically. Right. And because he went Ohio, I want to say. Yeah, yeah. And they're called the stacks like. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, they're called the stacks like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, everybody's critique of it was how Mastalgia porn it was and how easy that was and it's like There's so much there's so much other shit going on there like don't get me wrong I totally grooved on oh my god You know the dnd references and like Gundam and like every year, like, literally it was so much fun. Holy crap. Uh, you know, I mean, all of that was amazing. Don't get me wrong. But like, he's explicitly talking about the halves versus the have nots. And he's explicitly talking about a corporate giant taking this thing, like he drops an anvil on this was invented

by this one eccentric weirdo genius to be the thing that was going to democratize everything. It was supposed to, yeah, and it gets corporatized. And it's been corporatized and fucked over. And hey, look, we're never going to get utopia because people are going to abuse this. And as soon as somebody starts to challenge that, they literally bomb out the trailer bar. Yeah, they try to kill him. Yeah.

You know, and it's all about making money and the whole motivation for the antagonist in the movie is we have to be the ones to find, you know, the golden key. Right. Because if we get that, we solidify our control forever. Right. You know, there's not going to be any way for anybody else to free up this universe, right? In which literally everybody does everything. Like kids are going to school in this environment.

Yeah, it becomes a stand-in for, it's everything that I keep saying at school board meetings of like, don't budget around this thing because then this thing will be all that's left. Yeah, precisely. And yeah, it becomes a stand-in for that. And it becomes a stand-in for life. And technology starts to develop in order to accommodate that. Yes. And so what we see here, with Snowcrash and with Ready Player One, and I just completely skipped over the Matrix, but I'll get back to it in a minute. And I also skipped over the novel of altered carbon, but I'll get back to it.

What we see happening in all of these works is number one, by this time, while Snowcrash was a little bit before it, but certainly by the time of Red Player 1, and by the time of Altered Carbon and the Matrix, we had now seen the beginnings, at least the beginnings of what the internet was going to become. And so the assumptions, the technological assumptions that are going on in the background of these works now take that into account. And these works are now responding to, and Ready Player One very obviously is responding to, the explosion of the World Wide Web. And like we saw in real life, this thing that was invented as,

okay, now academics are all going to be able to talk to each other and we'll be able to have computers, you know, scientists across the world will be able to collaborate, we'll be able to do all this stuff. And yes, that has all happened, but it's also become a massive ocean of scam artists and porn and advertising and marketing and finding new ways for individuals to use anonymity to beat each other up and be shitty to each other. And like, so... Well, there we go. I'm gonna quibble a little bit because you grouped all those things together

and those are very different things. Scam artists, yes, you're absolutely right. People being shitty to each other, yes. But the number one driver of creating commerce online was horn. Yeah. It led to a number of innovations. And in the last 15 years, it has enabled a lot of sex workers to do it more safely and on their own terms.

Now, one could argue that it's led to greater exploitation. That's certainly an exploration that needs to be done. But in a lot of ways, there are a lot more people doing safe sex work thanks to the internet that previously had not been able to do. And that's not on the same level of scam artists. No, you're okay. Yes. 110 percent, you're right. That was, yeah.

I, I, and I will take, I will take that. More of that stuff is free than has ever been before. That's true. To the point where I think it's, it's this weird and, and this is merely intuitive on my part. Maybe I'm just aping my own experience to the point where because it's so free, it's less special and attitudes towards sex and sexuality are, I mean, we've seen generational things of like Gen Z is a lot less sexually active

than Gen, whatever came before, the millennial generation and Gen X. They're a lot less sexually active at their age and there have been theories that, yeah, that's because they have pocket porn. They have, they have a homerotica. And it's like, well, I can take care of myself now instead of the pressure to go out and, you know, engage in risky behaviors. Yeah. So, um, go ahead and proceed that doesn't take them down some really weird ass fucking places. It abs. Yeah. But I wonder if the ubiquity of it has made it less of an

objectification. I know it's a weird thing, but you could almost see it kind of doing this recurve. Yeah. I think I know none of it's special. Whereas it used to be that one issue that you have at the bottom of your sock drawer. And now it's, yeah, you know, what pixel do I want to click on? And there's a hole who cares, you know, it gets into that. So I don't know. Yeah, there's, there's a whole bag of dicks that could be, I mean, can't ask that could be, um, could, could be gotten into with that. Because also consent culture is a much bigger deal now. And that's, that's a good is true.

In parallel with the ubiquity of, I mean, like, okay, I gave a lecture back in 2019 on the romantic period. And there was a picture of a woman whose bare breast was, was, was bear in a drawing from the 17 or 1800s. And I had a student like, you know, I'm giving a lecture, I'm explaining, you know, here's what's being venerated and here's a picture. And he, and you know, she's on a swing.

So obviously it's a metaphor for sex and one dress. And he's like, titties. And I just looked at him. He's a sophomore. He's titties. And of him. He's a sophomore. He's titties. Of course, it's a sophomore. Yes. Cause that remark is by definition, sophomore. I go, but I looked at him and everybody looked at him. I said, okay, I'm gonna stop for just a second. Like, you know that it was wrong to shout that out.

But I would also like to ask anybody in this room, does anybody not have access to pictures of actual breasts on their phone at any time that they want? And despite that, you are still excited by a painting from the 1700s that is not in any way realistic. Where sheltered are you, boy? I know, and I was like,

where you have like a pornomatic 3,000 pocket that you could look up with much better pixelation than the painting that I'm showing you. And you're still out here shouting out titties. And like way to do it, man. Yeah. I like it. That's a perfect way. But my point was, you know, there was not a single student in there that was in any way embarrassed by my pointing all that out. Yeah, well, yeah.

They all knew. Yeah, they, you know, everything he's saying is very true. Yeah, and the result, I don't say, I don't want to say the result, but at the same time, consent matters a hell of a lot more to these kids and it's a lot clearer to these kids That it was when we were going up And I wonder how two things don't correlate so I yeah, I think I yeah I think there's something to be said for that and at the same time they have really stupid fucked up

Instagram pages where they can all Collectively go be really shitty to each other and about each other and make burn pages on teachers and shit like that. That's all there too. Yeah. You know, the fire that cooks your food burns your hand. Yeah. Yeah, it's yeah, I like that metaphor. There was a teacher who became a comedian and she says, you know, it's really weird. They don't respect you as a person, but they'll respect your pronouns. Yeah. Yeah. I can wow. Yeah. Yeah. That's really good. That's a really good summation. Yeah. But the internet at that time was just breaking open. Like you said. And the assumptions that are,

yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, like, it's really hard to argue that Ready Player One wasn't a response to what we had already started seeing happen in real time with the internet, with the commodification, with the corporatization and everything everywhere it has built in promotional marketing. And just being constantly bombarded by somebody trying to sell you something, 24, 7, 365 as long as you're online. You can get away from it. And what's interesting is

is there is a kind of earnest hopefulness in in Ready Player One, which is like because of the author's name. The hopeful client. The story. Yeah, the story is very cyberpunk, but it also has this like the main character in that book is Peter Parker. You know, he is a teenage, every man who has this big dream and isn't going to be stopped. And I don't want to say he's a cock-eyed optimist, but you know, he kind of keeps going because he doesn't have much choice, but he's also motivated by, I'm not going to let these guys ruin this thing for everybody. It's not, he's not motivated by, you know, I'm doing this because they're paying me. Right. It's not your personal thing, but at the same time, it's not revolutionary until he meets Artemis. Yeah.

Yeah. He has to be radicalized out of it. So I'm wondering if it's not pulling like it, it's not, it doesn't feel cyberpunk because of the optimism that is allowed to grow with him. Yeah. But I'm wondering if it's, if you couldn't say that it's it is set within a cyberpunk aesthetic. Well, it's set within a cyberpunk aesthetic. The main character is it's it's it's intensely anti-authority. Because you know, the bad guys in the corporation out to take them to the

world. It asks epistemiological questions, but they're not so much about humanity, but they are about identity because what we find out about like all of his interactions with his best friend have looked and sounded one way and then he meets the best friend, IRL, and that's not who this person actually turns out to be. Now, are you talking in the movie? Are you talking in the in the book? Cause in the book, well, the movie kind of combines his best friend and the love interest. Yes, I'm talking mostly, I'm talking mostly about the book. Okay. Because in the book, if I recall correctly, Artemis is the way that she is described is

actually much closer to the way H is depicted on screen. She's larger. I believe she is a dark skinned woman, she's a larger person and she is not anything like her avatar. Whereas in the movie, it's largely her avatar is her, but she has, they gave her glasses in a ponytail. Yeah, yeah. We got it. We got it. We got it is depicted. Yes, in the movie. Yeah.

So like there is, there is this question of what is, what is the real identity? Are you your real version of yourself online or are you more, is you the person you are when you take the headset off? Like, you know, I, and she scolds him for a while for buying into this artificialized

vera. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Um, so let's see, uh, this is the identity is the epistemia logical question. Uh, the moral ambiguity for the main character is not as much there. Uh, the main character is not as much there. The main character is not an anti-hero. But again, distrust of authority and again, the people he just hope in,

like the world has not gotten better in the future. The world is still pretty sad, sack, crappy. is still pretty sad, sad, crappy. And so, I mean, I'd argue we've got, you know, three out of four, and the moral ambiguity not being there makes it feel less noir, which inherently makes it maybe feel less cyberpunk, but I'm still going to argue it belongs in the genre. Okay. Okay. So you can come at me, come at me online. Yeah. The only thing I would have is that the significance of hope and the willingness to

change from what you were originally going after to what you, what you end up going after. Yeah. Um, because the message of, oh God, it's like the Zephym Cochrane of that of that story. I forget his name now. But the the willingness, that guy's optimism as well. And that guy's like, I believed in you this whole time kind of aspect. Yeah. That's that seems to have stripped away the cyberpunkness, the three stool, the three stool legs that you talked about last time. Yeah. Yeah. It, it, it really takes away from those.

And, and I don't mind taking a genre and bending it and going in a different direction, but I, I do, and I'm not a purist. But I do think that it takes significant steps away from it. In the same way that I would not say that Star Wars is sci-fi, I would not say that Ready Player One is cyberpunk, despite having kind of overlaps. Okay. I see that argument.

I, my own kind of counteraps. Okay. I see that argument. My own kind of counter argument is I think what we see with Ready Player One in particular is a response or an inversion of some of the tropes in it. And I think it's a generational evolution. I think line is, yes, client is going with, okay, yeah, we're not ever going, we're not going to get to utopia. We're not going to, you know, all of that stuff that we were promised. I totally agree with you Bill, we're not going to get that. But what do we do with that? And I think his argument is we keep reaching for it. We keep striving. We don't give up.

I think it's a defiant statement in the face of catastrophe. It's it's it's hope as as an act of rebellion revolution. It's it's what way when we talked about Jim Henson, it's hope punk. Yes. Yeah. Yes. I don't disagree there. Yeah. Yeah. So, and I, I convened like in getting to ready player one, I skipped over the matrix, which was dumb of me. Matrix came out in 1999 and immediately became the favorite movie of every self-important philosophy major, like on the planet. Has it barely touches on Cartesian models of the universe?

Well, yeah. Yeah. You know, and again, we have, we're not going to get to Utopia. We have, we're not even, we're not capable of handling Utopia. The machines literally tell Nino, like, no, the first generation we built you, we built you Utopia and you committed mass suicide because you couldn't fucking handle it. Right. You know, like the level of, oh my God, humanity sucks that's involved in the commentary in the

major. I believe y'all are really stupid. Yeah, it's bleak. And it, I mean, the central conceit is not only that the technology exists in that world for our brains to be hooked into computers, but that no, no, we are already all hooked into one. Right. And we don't know it. And it takes some kind of action outside of daily, our perceived daily existence to make us notice it. And then we have to make the choice of whether we're going to continue

as we are or if we're going to move on and move into the higher level of reality. Seek authenticity. Seek authenticity. And the most important people, the only ones who are capable of doing this, again, you go back to the importance of hackers. Yes. Yes. And the, it's, again, inherently anti-authoritarian, or anti-authority, period. It is the day-to-day existence of Neo and all and and everybody else that that are you know on the side of the protagonist, their very existence is criminal. Right. They don't

they don't even have a choice about like you know whether they're whether their hustle is quasi-legal. The very fact that they know what they know. It's illegal and punishable by death if they get caught by the agents. It asks really potent questions. I don't know if I want to go so far to say deep ones, but they're definitely potent ones about the soul and identity and reality reality and you know, because the yeah, yeah, life is a huge it's like yeah, it's it's 90% of the core idea of the movie. I mean, he said, you know, I used to eat there really, really good noodles and you know, but that none of that's real and she asks him, what does that tell you that nothing that the matrix cannot tell me what's real

Like that's that's the the core of it, you know Yeah, yeah um and Again Morally morally ambiguity ambiguity Morally moral ambiguity ambiguity Like Neo at at the start Neo is not really

He's he's clearly doing underground hacker shit And his day job and his day job is colorless and soulless right and and sucks and all of the excitement in his life Yeah, and all of the excitement in his life is Yeah. And all of the excitement in his life is what happens outside of that. So, you know, and again, it is an evolution of the concepts out of the earlier days of the genre. It's not just that, okay, we're going to have the net. It is, no, no, we're all existing in the net, and we just don't know it. And what does that mean? How do we deal with that? What do we do? And of course, now that we know, and the watch outskis, know what we all collectively know about the watch outsk Yeah. You know, the issues of identity and, you know, reality of person and avatar versus physical body

and like all of that stuff takes on, takes on a holy level of meaning. Right. And, you know, this is a place where queer coded questions of identity become a meaningful thing within the context of the genre of cyberpunk. It is an evolution of taking the ideas and bringing a new lens to bear on looking at them. And so then altered carbon, the novel, comes out in 2002, and I didn't get into the details

of what the conceits are there, but in altered carbon, it's a farther future setting. Humanity is spread out to multiple different planets. And the main and everybody in the world at a certain age after birth, very, very young, has an implant called a stack placed at the base of your spinal column. of your spinal column and through some sci-fi magical voodoo, your stack, if something happens to you and you are killed, your consciousness. Now, this is important, not just your memories, but your consciousness gets transferred into the stack. Okay.

And the stack can be taken out of your corpse and put into another body. So, the author very clearly, Morgan very clearly states, consciousness as a way of getting around the whole ship of Thesea's question, like, is this really you, if it's just your memory is going into a new body? No, no, it is your consciousness

It is it is you right but you get put into a new body and There is the question of how long does it take for them to find another body to put you in? What happens to the person whose body you've been put in? What happens to the person whose body you've been put in? One of the punishments essentially the effectively the equivalent of the death penalty in this universe is you you get Your your stat gets removed from your body and your body gets handed to somebody else

The main character is a former soldier, revolutionary terrorist, kind of blurs lines in a lot of ways, who wakes up in a new body. He has been placed in a new body by an incredibly wealthy benefactor, who wants him to solve that wealthy benefactor's murder. Okay. And the main character goes, well, okay, you're talking to me. So obviously they didn't destroy your stack. So you weren't really murdered. So why don't you just get them? And he says, well, when when I was there's there's a thing about, you know, when he was killed, a weapon was used that scrambled his recollection. So he does not remember, I want to say it's like the 24 hours before he was killed.

Yeah, I do. And it's also kind of mentioned in passing that he's the benefactors wealthy enough that he keeps cloned bodies of himself on ice you know Figuratively, you know in hibernation so that if anything happens to him He has his own body he gets to go back to and that's like cloning is incredibly expensive and that's a sign of just how Tesier Ashpool, you know, upper, upper, upper, upper, cross this guy is.

And the, you know, one of the, one of the things that kind of happens in the background and it's gut wrenching to watch in the Netflix series is as the main character is being taken out of the facility where he's been revived. A couple of parents, you see this couple greeting this 50-something year old woman who comes shuffling out being escorted by a couple of orderlies and these two people in their 30s, you know, rush up to this woman in their 50s and they say a name and this woman who is older than these two people looks at them and goes, Daddy, what happened? And it's like, oh, well, oh boy, fuck. Yeah, I mean, so, so the main character is intensely more like ambiguous. The setting is intensely dystopian. The overarching interplanetary government is very harsh and corporatist

at best. And the main character, and it's way noir. The main character is trend and navigate all kinds of intrigue within the upper crust of society as he's working as this, you know, you know, quasi legal private investigator kind of kind of guy and you get flashbacks to his experiences before he was killed and you know, it turns out he's been his stack has been sitting in storage for years before he got resurrected. And then one of the supporting characters who kind of becomes his sidekick is an artificial intelligence who is programmed to sound and act like Edgar Allen Poe and is the manager slash desk clerk of a themed hotel and is Edgar. Like for all intents and purposes, like he's Edgar. And so again, dealing with an AI is the AI. Does the AI account as equivalent to human,

the main character who looks in the mirror and sees a white guy looking back at him when he is Asian or, you know, his own identity is that like, you know, what is, what does that do to his identity? What does that mean for him navigating the world? And so, again, it's an evolution of these ideas into a more modern set of lenses and more modern kind of outlook on these same issues. And then Blade Runner 2049 came out in 2017.

And I'm about to talk about that in some detail as part of the, part of talking about the evolution of the genre. But I also wanna mention in 1988, Mike Ponsmith publishes the Cyberpunk role playing in the first edition cyberpunk role playing game a few years after that cyberpunk 2.0 2.0 is based in that same universe. Okay. So now you want to talk about, and I am, I am either do it in the 90s, Marvel had their future setting, the 29, the Spider-Man 29, right, setting. Spider-Man 29, Punisher 29, 29, Doom 29 2099. There was a lot of 2099 stuff going on. I think they even had an X-Men and an Iron Man and an Avengers. Like there were a lot of 29

of them. It became a whole thing. And it was basically Stanley. It was like, what if you could do it 100 years from now? Yeah. And kind of let people run with it. But the one that that stuck out to me was called ravaged 2099. And what's wild about it is that I have the unlimited app, the Marvel unlimited app. You don't get all the comics that have ever existed because they haven't digitized all of them. They've done a really good job of grabbing most of them,

but this one, ravaged $2,99,000, not one of the ones that's on there. Okay. But there's a second run that's on there. So, okay. So when 29.99 first came out, I was like, okay, I'll check out the Spider-Man 20.99 and and Doom 20.99 was being advertised. I was like, yeah, I'll check out the Spider-Man 2989. And Doom 2989 was being advertised. And I was like, yeah, he's a bad guy. I don't know. At Punisher 2989, I was already kind of done

with Punisher by the time that came out. But in, oh, Lordy, I want to say it was 1991, 1992. Ravage 2999 issue number one came out. to. Ravage 2099 issue number one came out. And I grabbed that one and it was, I believe Tom DeFalco was an artist on it. It was Paul Ryan helped create it, not the ship bird bird who was in the house of reps. Yeah. Um, but uh, he basically, he goes to Stanley and he's like, you know, let's, let's, um, let's do another series, uh, ravaged 29 and, and Stan was like, yeah, sure, give it a shot. And it's essentially, you're following this character,

named Paul Philip Ravage, and he's the chief executive officer. He's like a security guy of eco-central, which is run by Alchemax, a megacorp. And eco-central is supposed to fight pollution. Early in, I think, the first issue, he himself is made into a fugitive because I think he was helping somebody file a claim that eco-central was was actually polluting.

And pollution is a big fucking deal there. It's like, I think, I want to say, it's a capital crime. And because him helping this, and he's, somebody comes up to him and he's like top level. So go away kid, you bother me kind of thing. He's not a good person and He and he's really good at fighting and some kid kind of comes up to him who works for them He's like hey, I found these irregularities and I think that there's somebody who Who's up higher who's who's actually polluting.

And he's like, okay, fine, we'll go through the paperwork, we'll do it, and I'll make sure I do a good job on it, but he's kind of putting the kid off. I don't remember the kid's name. And the person that he files it with is like, oh shit, I could be troubled with this. So he frames Paul Philip ravage or the crime of pollution and he is immediately burned,

like burn noticed. And so he is a fugitive. Now, he has a cybernetic enhancement that allows his arm to turn into a blaster, if I recall correctly. And he goes on the run. And one of the things I love about him going on the run is that his escape vehicle is an old tiny trash compacting truck, big old fucking big rig type truck. And all the other cars are made of plastic, recycled plastic and they're just very, very weak. And, excuse me one second. Hard me. He ends up on the run, and I want to say he's got his arm and he converts a cog into a throwing star and he's wearing

like the ultimate Kevlar vest and he's got his ability to fight. And so now all the people he's trained are hunting him down. And he ends up, if I recall correctly, he ends up on an island, like a garbage island of mutated people. And he ends up, um, he ends up mutating while he's on there. And that's what gives him most of his powers. But that takes like four issues. And I was in it because he was a red headed guy with long hair at a time where I was a red headed guy

with long hair. And I liked the idea of like, oh, you worked, you worked for this corporation, you were a bad guy and now you're brought low and your real heroism comes out. And I think he's like trying to save a woman named Tiana or something and he absolutely

trusted his superior who ends up framing him and he ends up on this island that mutates him and so he goes from just having energy blasts out of his hands that I think he mentioned that he was like surgically enhanced. And then he ends up with like essentially like a Wolverine suite of abilities, including like claws.

And so an average I'm like, and I'm like, that was kind of bound to happen. Yes. Yeah. Right. And I remember there's something in there about like the corporations are running Congress in 2099.

And I lost interest pretty quickly in the 2099 series. I think because other books had taken a highatus, they'd come back and my allowance hadn't grown. But also it was just like too much of an urban hellscape for me. So like after about the fourth episode or the fourth issue, I lost interest in it. But everything that you talked about in the last issue or in the last episode, and in this one, kind of all points to that happening in 92 and 91. Yeah.

Mm-hmm. So, yeah, yeah, for sure. And, you know, you mentioned Alchemax, I'm pretty sure that was the corporation that the alter ego of Spider-Man 2099 worked for. Yes. The Alchemax winds up being like, you know, the kingpin kind of big bad. Yeah, absolutely.

And in the 2999 universe, which is, which is very, you know, the idea of a corporation being the big bad is, you know, straight out of the corporation being the big bad is, you know, straight out of the, I mean, it's, it's, yeah, cornerstone genre. I want to say that in, I remember going back and reading about it. And I think doom poured molten adamantium on the whole island, which included ravage and then launched it into space. Yeah, um, that series did get pretty over the top pretty fast like the setting. The 29,9 whole mil you got like crazy,

but it was the 90s and that's part of part of that is also the ethos of the time being, you know, extreme, every time. Exactly. Exactly. And I think that's part of the recent I lost interest in it was just like, why do we have to be making everything edgy for the sake of being edgy? Like can we. And, and just the, the movement toward, like really, really doubling down on the idea of, of cynicism and, and moral ambiguity and anti-heroes and comics was it's like, not something I was into. Like, you look at pick up it. Oh, I was going to say if you look at Punisher 29,

like there is no pretence of him being a hero. He is a fascist dictator. Like, completely by violence. Like his, the skull is made up two giant guns. Yeah. Like, yeah. No, it's crazy. And if you're gonna pick up, if I'm gonna pick up a three color comic book, that's not, that's not what I want to do. Like, if I, if I'm going to pick up a three color comic book, that's not what I want to do. Like, if I want the citizen and the, and the, you know, we're never going to get utopia of cyberpunk, I'm going, there's other media in which I'm going to go look for that.

Right. And no shade to people who want to enjoy that in their comics. Yeah, yeah, no, certainly. But like for me, that was just not, that was not my thing. And so yeah, the the 29 and 9 series, I think I read like the first two issues of Spider-Man 29 and it just got too, too grim for me. Yeah, I, that was the same reaction I had. Yeah. Yeah. So, so you know in in the last few episodes that I wrote We looked at why a particular kind of fantasy film exploded onto the scene in the early 80s and then faded away And then came back in a very different kind of way in the 2010s, right? Right

Here we have a different situation Cyberpunk and never went away. Okay. It's been here. It hasn't always been front and center in the popular consciousness, but it has never completely dropped out of sight either. And so, 2017, we have Blade Runner 2049, right? For example, that's an example of the genre. It's dystopian. The environment is still fucked. Uh, thoroughly this time. There's no reference to the Sunlit Drive at the end of the first movie. Right.

Um, there's, uh, reference to a nuclear incident in Las Vegas. The scenes in Vegas are apocalyptic. It's, it's visually amazing and has this really heavy, hyper-real surreal kind of feeling to it. It's stunning. Anti-authority, the Wallace Corporation, the heir of the Tyrell Corporation for the first movie, is not merely a moral like Tyrell was, Wallace is crazy fucking evil. Nyander Wallace has multiple moments in the film where he inflicts violence or has violence inflicted on his behalf specifically to reinforce or signal his own power. Like one of the most chilling parts of it and like this is this is why Jared Leno

is probably the best person to play this role cause he's bug nuts. Yes. He has this moment where a replicant is decanted in front of him. Like slides out of this kind of film, koon kind of thing out of the ceiling and falls to the floor and is lying there,

shivering in the moments right after she, it's a female replicant, very important, is born and he walks forward and he coax her up and he's talking to her and he expounds as he's doing this. He talks about how slavery is a necessary evil for human advancement. Every great moment in the advancement of humanity has involved slavery, the building of the pyramids, and he talks about a couple of other examples. And he laments that, you know, we should own the stars, but I can't create enough.

I can't create enough workers, and I need them to reproduce on their own, and then there's this moment where he places his hand over the female replicants, lower abdomen. And then guts are like a fish. Stabs are in the abdomen. And she falls to the floor trembling. And there's like he brings up his hands in front of the camera.

He's blind. So he's not looking at him. But his hands come up in front of the camera. He's covered in blood. And he is utterly unaffected by the murder he just committed. Like it's a whole not a real person. It's a decapable. Yeah.

And because in his own head, he's God. So so like you know and and with everything we know about Jared let Oh, all the things that you know that anyway, yeah, that's like perfect casting for the care but anyway So Nyander was is not just a moral. He is evil. Mm-hmm. Oh, I the quote, every leap of civilization was built off the back of a disposable workforce. We lost our stomach for slaves unless engineered, but I can only make so many. Talk about like headbutting the point. Yeah, and driving it away. Yeah. Yeah. You almost had it. But you almost had it, but almost had it. Almost for honestly, let's let's be real. You write this character. Yeah, he's supposed to be the bad guy. Like we all see that he's a bad guy. Yeah, it's Gordon Gecko. You know, 110% yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, the note I have next, Tyrell played God, Wallace believes

he is a God. Like nice. And there's a replicant resistance underground to whom Decker has handed his daughter just after her birth for her own protection. And and the main character Kay runs into them and there's there's a whole subplot where like am I working with, I don't know if I'm working with them or against them or what exactly is going on. Moral ambiguity, the protagonist, K, is a replicant whose job is to hunt other replicants. At the start of the movie, he has absolutely no compunctions about his job. The first retirement air quotes that we see on screen is brutal, violent, and difficult to watch. It is a knockdown dragout slug fest between him and Dave Batista.

Uh-huh. He K winds up walking away, but you know, it's brutal. And K walks away from it more bothered by the evidence he found at the scene then by the killing he committed. The movie is made in a way that we as the audience are not unaffected by it. Okay.

So we're immediately looking at the main character like, man, I don't know right As the film goes on Kay loses this level of detachment The initial mission he gets given is to kill Deckerton Rachel's child Because to his superiors she represents a threat to peace between humans and replicants like if if Like, if this individual is found, this completely changes the paradigm of the interrelationship between humanity and replicants.

This is proof of replicants, you know, being able to reproduce like humans do. And this is potentially explosive in a whole bunch of different ways, like it's better that nobody ever finds out this ever happened. You got to eliminate, right? You got to eliminate this individual. The resistance call on K to kill Deckerd because he's a, he's a threat to the safety of his daughter, who to them represents the future of replicant kind. At the end of the film, A makes the decision not to kill the daughter or record. Instead, staging records death to protect him from the resistance and reuniting him with his daughter. Who, everybody thinks, is fully human.

I don't understand she's, you know, part-replicant, and she works as a memory fabricator for replicants. She is an artist who generates the memories that replicants have of their childhoods, which then brings us to the epistemological questions. For about half the movie, K thinks it's possible that he's actually Deckard's son and thus half human. This is because Deckard's daughter plugged some of her own memories into replicants, which is a carryover from Rachel's experience in the first film. Remember that she had memories that belonged to Terrell's niece.

Right. And it's a reversal of Rachel's own revelation. Rachel thought she was human and found out she was not K. At the beginning of the film knows he's a replicant and then finds out, hey, wait, maybe I'm not. Which then winds up getting reversed. He finds out, no, you're not. Not actually the chosen one, you're not that special.

But anyway, then K, a replicant, has an apartment, has his own living space, and he has an artificial intelligence girlfriend named Joy, who he purchased as a program, as like a chatbot, basically. But over time, Joy has grown into a far more complex, organic-seeming personality than she started as. And she appears to genuinely love K. When he heads off on on his, you know, running off into the wilderness to try to figure out what's going on, she urges him to download her into a storage device so she can go with

him. And this is when he's going to Vegas to find Deckard. And it's Joy, who first points out that K's memories seem like ones a human would have rather than a replicant. But then in Vegas, not to her all, Wallace's enforcer, who is a a replicant named Love, L-U-V. Love intercepts K after he's after he's found Deckerd and she destroys the storage device that Joy is on. She stomps on it in front of him with gratuitous cruelty. Right. Effectively murdering her. Right. And after she has done that, K and counters again, a you know, multi-story tall shimmering electronic billboard holographic billboard ad for the joy brand AI companion, which spots him because it's been programmed to, you know, see individuals who were who were looking at the target it advertised me. Yeah, bends down, it looks at him and vacantly with like nothing going on behind the eyes, calls

him by the same nickname that his joy had called him by, which then leaves us with the question of whether or not she was ever real. So Wallace alludes to the question of Deckard's humanity from the first film. Remember there was this you know question, is he a replicant? Is he not? Wallace offers him a clone of Rachel in exchange for information about the daughter's location. And so the clone, the clone of Rachel shows up and he has it brought out in front of him. And Iander Wallace says, is it the same now? then the moment you met her all these years drunk on the memory of its perfection? How shiny her lips? How instant your connection?

Did it never occur to you that this is why you were summoned in the first place? Designed to do nothing short of fall for her then and there all to make that single perfect specimen That is if you were designed, love or mathematical precision. Yes, no. And Decker responds, I know what's real. And after Decker refuses to tell him anything, Wallace has the Rachel clone murdered in front of him. She's not the real Rachel, but she is a living being. There's a couple of lines of dialogue that the Rachel Clone has and the suddenness of her death is a gut punch. Okay. So 2049 has everything. This is 110% Cyberpunk film. The reason Cyberpunk, the reason the movie like

2049 does as well as it did in 2017, is that we have been descending into a Cyberpunk dystopia from the moment Gibson codified the genre. We are living in it, okay? The all of the elements have been falling into place around us and what was already there at the beginning has been getting more pronounced. Supplyside economics, Reagan's favorite economic policy has become gospel to the American right.

And it's been normalized despite the overwhelming majority of economists knowing and saying repeatedly over and over that it's absolute bullshit. Wages have stagnated since Reagan will cost have gone up. Corporate profits have skyrocketed along with CEO pay As as you pointed out when we did the last episode when we talked about bullshit jobs our productivity has gone up massively But workers aren't getting paid anymore for it right all working less or working any less right right according to the Pew Research Center in 1970 middle

income households held 62% of the US's aggregate income upper income households held 29% by 2018 middle income households only held 43% while the share held by upper income households had risen to 48%. Jesus. The rich have gotten substantially richer and the middle class is shrinking rapidly. According to Statista in the fourth quarter of 2022, 68% of the nation's wealth was held by the richest 10%. But that's not the kicker. That's not the kicker. The kicker is 31% almost one third effectively one third of the population alone.

The Tessie Ashpool family of Neuromancer was a premonition of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. What is Elon Musk spending all of his money on? How did Jeff Bezos try to prove to us all that his dick still worked after he got divorced? Right. Space, space, shit. Right? Yeah.

And where did the test EA ash pools choose to live out there? They're waking hours when they're not in cryohybernation on a fucking space station. Right. Like, so of course, this is still relevant. Like. yeah. So, there's an aspect of it of, like, in addition to utopias impossible, because people are going to squeeze everything out of it for themselves, they're then going to use those squeezing to fuel their rockets to get off this planet

Mm-hmm and go colonize somewhere else and leave us all to die Yeah, and and advocate that well, you know the best way to to make this available to you know the common plebs Is just let us build you know factory towns right on Mars Right and entry and reintroduce indentured servitude like Mm-hmm, like you don't even have a mustache. How are you twirling it like right. And reintroduce indentured servitude like, do like, you don't even have a mustache. How are you twirling it? Like the fuck, man? Yeah. I don't know how do you do that? How, you know, and, and the, you know, what I said in the last episode about, you know, the depiction and cyberpunk

of the of the upper upper classes in this in this future, being so removed from day to day existence of the, you know, sweating hoiploi, that they're that, you know, the question is, how human are they now, right? Right. The extent to which the things that you hear Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos say are so out of touch. Yes. And so lacking in self-awareness. Like, you don't even understand that what you're advocating is indentured servitude when you're talking about, you know, having people sign a contract with the company in order to go to your colony on Mars.

Like, we tried that, that didn't end well. Right. That created a lot of problems, like for everybody, not just the poor saps that, you know, had to take that option to try to build a better life, but it didn't even work out well for the upper crust in that case, like, right.

You. So we have that going on. And corporate power has mushroomed. In 2010, citizens united, ruling by the Supreme Court, allowed corporations to openly support political candidates and equated money with speech So

You know spending money to support a candidate. Yeah, well and and Legally speaking the idea of corporations being fictive persons under the law, that's been since the hundreds, since forever, partly because it was difficult for jurists at the time to figure out how to treat a corporate entity. But now it's like no, corporations are people, corporations are people, my friend, to, to quote, um, what's his name, uh, presidential candidate, Mitt Romney. Yeah. To quote Mitt Romney, corporations are people, my friend.

Just again, do you hear what's coming out of your mouth? Like, well, it's made him a lot of money. So, yeah, yes. Um, successive presidential administrations since Reagan have worked to undo environment Well, it's made him a lot of money. So, I was very happy. Yeah, yes. Successive presidential administrations since Reagan have worked to undo environmental regulations, most notably the Trump administration, which pushed for more drilling and more coal production and consumption. Because corporations need to make that sweet, sweet money.

And by the way, did I mention that environmental collapse was part of the background noise of cyberpunk? How are you doing there? Yeah. Fox news and Alex Jones and Russia Limbaugh before them have made money hand over fist pushing anti-regulation, anti-government, pro industry ideas. Um, you know, we shouldn't get in the way of corporate interests doing what they need to do because that's how the economy runs. And if the economy keeps running, we're all, we're all going to be doing better. If you get in the way of corporations doing what they want to do, if you make it hard for them to do business, you know, business, you're going to lose your job.

In the early days of the genre, the white supremacy of, well, I'm going to use race baiting as a way to keep you as a white blue collar worker on my side wasn't part of the formula in genre, but that, you know, those that racial awareness is in more recent works. Right. And, you know, it's part of the same, it's a different part of the same beast, right? Mm-hmm. And when I wrote this next note, developments had not yet come out in the Fox News trial,

but Rupert Murdock has admitted under oath that his broadcast personalities endorsed election lies in 2020 and after. Yeah. Because endorsing those election lies, kept eyeballs on the screen held onto their their viewer base, which made them money. Right. You know, it isn't that he believes any of that shit. None of them believed any of that shit. But they kept parroting it because that's what the audience wanted to hear. And that's how they kept making making the dough. And so we now have real time, the epistemia logical question of who gets to decide what the truth is, you know, going back to our talk with Brent Tannihale, talking about, you know, different categories of truth.

Right. Like, you know, it's really, it's, it's happening. And I didn't mention this, this work in my list, but Max Headroom, the sadly short-lived television series from the 1980s is so cyberpunk it. Fucking hurts. And the main character, the protagonist there was a, was a reporter. And, and his whole, like all of his adventures had to do with

trying to get the truth to the people when they were being fed horse shit by corporations that were trying to keep eyeballs on screens and trying to sell a narrative for one reason or another. Right. And trying to sell a narrative for one reason or another. Privately held corporations have been ruled able to ignore employment rights and anti-discrimination legislation if it impinges on. And I quote, sincerely held beliefs. So yeah, no, there are laws about that. But like, you know, if you make enough noise about, well, you know, I'm a Christian. So I believe that whatever horse shit you want to say, if you can say it convincingly enough to convince a judge, well, you don't, you don't have to follow that legislation. Right.

You can, you can fire people or treat people like shit or what have you. You know, well, because you sincerely believe that. Well, all right, what you sincerely believe is you, you want to you want to maintain your bottom line, you know, and you don't like those people. So like whatever. You can, you know, you can get away with it. And now, I want to say the scary one, but they're all pretty scary, but private military contractors were projected by the senior defense analyst of aerospace and defense news billion dollars annually. That's a quarter of a trillion. Yes. Yeah. 223.8 billion to exercise my inner Carl Sagan for a moment. Billions and billions, right? And why is that cyberpunk you ask? That's because these are privately held companies doing the work of state militaries. They are armed security. paramilitary forces. So, privately paid military contractors are being paid to train state

militaries. And as we speak, the Wagner group is sending privately hired soldiers to fight in Ukraine for the Russians. And to make it even more dystopian, many of the soldiers that are being soldiers in air quotes that are being sent off by the Wagner group to do that are being recruited out of prisons where the option is you can stay here in a Russian prison, right? Or we're going to tell you we're going to pay you and you know we'll send you off to Ukraine with basically no training and you know put a rifle in your hands and send you off. And this is, and this is a corporate entity that in the case of the Wagner group is is very tightly linked hand in glove with, you know, the Putin regime. But, you know,

that's, that's a more extreme case of black water. And I don't remember what their name is anymore, who was doing any number of different contract jobs for the US government in Iraq. You talking KBR? Maybe. I know black water was doing stuff there, but so was KBR in Haliburton. And KBR is the same area of Haliburton. Yeah, and Haliburton. And KBR and so did the area of Haliburton.

Yeah, and Haliburton is a whole other case. Right. Because Haliburton isn't just military contractors. Haliburton is like all kinds of support infrastructure, working hand in love with the Department of Defense. And Haliburton was implicated in people going missing in New Orleans after the hurricane. Like Halliburton contractors showed up and people disappeared.

And there's open questions about whether there was human trafficking going on and you know, nothing concrete has been proven, but how much investigation has there been. And so we have all of these things happening around us. We have the future shock of the rapid development of the internet over the course of several decades, we've gone from I get on my computer and oh hey, I can go on my computer to shop for books to I pull out my phone and I'm immediately connected to I can buy anything I want to from just about

anyone in the world. Right. Incended to anyone else. Incended anywhere else. We've moved to a place where the workers who are involved in making that happen are having to deal with active anti-union efforts being taken against them. And again, corporate interests manipulating the system and stacking the deck in a way to hold onto their control.

Well, I'll go a couple of steps further on that too. Yeah. Very often those businesses get massive tax breaks that then the community has to put the bill for on the properties that they have to do these things. And then because of that, the roads get destroyed. Oh yeah, shredded. Just I know, because I live on one,

where like regularly regularly people in in like these surrounding I don't know three three mile radius regularly complain about how their suspension is fucked up about how they're out of alignment and on and on and on and on. and you have an increase of delivery truck traffic. You have people who are monitored so much that they'd better pee really hard when they go to the bathroom. Also that I can get something in two hours instead of having to wait a day. Like it's goddamn ridiculous.

Like I try really hard not to, you know, I go out and I get my own shit, you know, I don't, I don't do that, but there's plenty of people that, and again, since COVID, again, we had a chance, we had a chance at doing this really well. I'm excited to go the exact opposite, most cyberpunk kind of way possible. Now everybody's gotten used to home deliveries of things. Yeah. And now it's being offered it two hours instead of, you know, two days. And there is a segment of the population for whom the services of, you know, Uber, the services of Uber Eats and Postmates and DoorDash and Amazon and delivery by grocery stores.

There's a population for whom that's a wonderful thing. People who are limited in their mobility, who have immunity issues and going out in public is not feasible or safe for them. Absolutely. You know, folks who are neurodivergent who have anxiety issues, whatever, there is an aspect of all of that that is really awesome for those people. But it's been turned into this thing that is fucking dystopian. It's what Gibson had to say, like all encapsulated right there. We're not going to build a wonderful future. We're going to wind up taking this and finding a way to fuck people over with it.

Well, we already have. I mean, yeah. And again, I come back to drones could be a thing. We've seen, we've seen it work. We've seen self-driving this that and the other. We've seen drones. There are ways to automate all this stuff. Yeah. And still pay people to make sixth rate podcasts or go to school or sit on their couch and get high or hike or write bad poetry or play good music or whatever. Yeah. Everybody could still be eating and have that shit delivered with all the capabilities that we have of delivering stuff.

Or people could just work two, three hours a day. But we're doing neither of those things. Two hour detriment as a society. Two hour detriment as consumers. Two their detriment as workers. Two hour detriment as neighborhoods. to our detriment as neighborhoods, to our detriment as people who need to drive places. Yep.

And also that they don't get benefits and so on. Like it's, yeah, it's dumb. Yeah, and so that's basically, that's it. Cyberpunk, we, we, we, So we've kind of the cyberpunk that's basically, that's it. Cyberpunk, we, we, we, so we've caught up to Cyberpunk. That's, that's our moral here. Yeah, we're there. And now what we, what we do from here is up to us, because we can prove Gibson right. And, and we can say, well, you know, whatever, I got to get, I got to get mine.

I got to, you know, I got to, I got to, I got to find that score that's going to get me out of the sprawl and up onto the space station. Mm hmm. Or we can listen to the better angels of our nature and try to find a way to fix shit, right? And and and hold on to and go and go from cyberpunk to hope punk. We can try to go from cyberpunk to solar punk. You know, and and you know find find the solutions. But where we are right now is pretty clearly we're living in a hideous melanch of Gibson and Stevenson right now. And we kind of need to figure out what we want to do about it. Yeah.

So there we go. That is that is the development of the genre and kind of why why it hasn't gone anywhere or why it hasn't gone away. Why we haven't moved on away from it. And the answer is because we've been moving toward it the entire time. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, uh, you know, satire is getting shorter and shorter in, in its lifespan. Yes. Every, every passing day. Yeah. So well, that's bleak. Thank you. Yeah, well, you know, hey, I this is my turn to do that. Cool. Well, what would you like people to? Well, I guess the what have you gleaned?

I think we've kind of covered like, yeah, we kind of have. I mean, that's that's kind of what we've We've been saying for the last couple minutes now. Yeah, we have a chance We've had a chance and we have a chance to do things in a different and better way and we keep choosing otherwise We even had like huge crisis points that really could have galvanized us Yeah, and we went the other way. Yeah, like you know, we wanted to go back to normal and like You know, I one of the things I didn't talk about in the beginning of the episode was one of lessons my students did recently Which was on the bubonic plague in San Francisco and

essentially it's I mean, you know, I don't mean to and yet I totally meant to They're studying now by studying history I don't mean to and yet I totally meant to. They're studying now by studying history. Well, yeah. Everything that happened in the bubonic plague just replaced the name with COVID and it's roughly the same thing. Like right down to the dumbass arguments that people would use to make an illusion for themselves.

So one of the things that white people in 1900 said was, well, the bubonic plague is clearly a, this is their words, oriental disease. It would never hurt Europeans. And I'm like, and so I asked the question, what happened in the mid 1300s that would prove that wrong? And, I mean, you know, the theory is that the buvatic plague did start in the steps of Mongolia. But it didn't, there's so much people wholesome.

Yeah, yeah, no, it did in Europe. Yeah, it killed the shit out of the population. Right. And so I point that out to him. And then the next thing is I found a quote and somebody said, there's no way that white people could get the bubonic plague because Europeans eat meat. And the next question to the students was, go to a Chinese restaurant and look at its menu. How is it organized? the next question to the students was, go to a Chinese restaurant and look at its menu. How is it organized? Like, I love that.

That's awesome. Like, my first response is just, how fucking dumb it. Like, where, what is the, what? That's self delusion though. And that's what I explained to students. I said, imagine thinking that. Imagine telling yourself that to the point where you believe it. And, you know, I said, or imagine saying, like, well,

because my blood type is be negative, I can't get COVID. Like imagine being that stupid about it. And then, yeah, not wearing a mask or coughing on people. And what I really drilled down on was when people started, like, rallying or I want my haircut, I want my chicken wings and all that. I said, notice they weren't saying let's set up a system where people can come to my house and cut my hair. It was I want other people to take risks so that I can be comfortable. Yep. And it's not even so I can be comfortable.

It's so that so that I can have my perks, my, my, you know, yeah. And this was after they realized that white people, San Francisco didn't realize that there's a plague going on or a quarantine going on until they woke up that morning and didn't have breakfast ready for them because their servants hadn't shown up and cooked their breakfast for them. Oh shit, really? Dead fucking serious.

Dead fucking serious. It's just down the road from us. Wow. Yeah. And so, they're super engaged on this. So, what I've gleaned is like looking at the history that I'm teaching and it's like, wow. And the kids are making the connections.

Yeah, well, that's just good to see. Yeah, you know, and that's been really fun. To the point where one of the students is like, you know, I noticed something the other day, I'm like, oh, do share. It says, out of all the students on campus, the one group that more consistently wears more masks is Asian students. I said, good, now let's unpack that. Let's look at why. And, you know, as we start kind of getting into it, I said, now get back to setting the bubonic plague in San Francisco and take a look at what group

is most affected and is most shit upon and and gets blamed for it despite everybody wanting to deny that it exists because business. And here's what governor Henry Gage said, here's what the railroads said. Here's and they're just like, you know, they're like, whoa, that's just like, hmm, who have been paying attention? Good job. So, yeah. So anyway, that's, that's what I've gleaned. All right. Yeah. That works. So what are you going to recommend to people to consume or to read? I'm going to strongly recommend checking out Blade Runner 2049. And I'm going to recommend that when you do it, go into the film thinking about what we've talked about. There.

With with with all of this upper in an upper mind. View view the movie and and it is there is so much going on there. Yeah, so that's that's my that's my recommendation. What about you? I'm going to recommend a couple of things., on Amazon Prime, if you've got it, ironically enough. The giant beast or is it this giant beast? It's this giant beast that is the global economy. And specifically, look at episodes two and three episode two are rich people dicks or do dicks get rich And episode three the rubber episode So I'm gonna say look at those and then go and watch the running man

Okay, and I think those are pretty good. And if you really, really want, then watch the documentary called The Corporation. But I think those tie in largely to what we've been talking about with historical flair. So that's what I'm talking about. Yeah. Yeah. Who? You don't want to be found. So where can Yeah. Who? You don't want to be found. So where can we be found?

I do not want to be found. I'm hiding in a corner of the net behind all kinds of black eyes. We can be found. But you've already found us if you're listening. But if you want to find another avenue for locating us, obviously we are on the Apple podcast app and on Stitcher. You can find our website at woobahwoobahwoobahgeekhistorytime.com. We are available to tell, like you can tell me I'm wrong about Ready Player 1 or about

anything else on Twitter at Geek History Time. And what about you? Mostly you can find me live and in person in Sacramento, July 7th, August 4th and September 8th, all at Luna's in Sacramento at 8 p.m. doing capital punishment, sling and puns. The show is in its seventh year. And I know. So that's that's as almost as long as the seven year war. So there you go. Two more years to go. But yeah, that's that's where you can find us or you can find me rather. So for a geek history of time, I'm Damien Harmony. And I'm Ed Blaylock and until next time, keep rolling

20s.