Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism - Neuromancer

Episode Date: December 26, 2022

It's a Christmas miracle! We are alive, and we are back to finally kick off Cyberpunk Month. We decided to start with Neuromancer by William Gibson. This novel popularized nearly all of the themes and aesthetics that would typify the genre for decades to come. AI, posting addiction, regular addiction, Japanese influence, killer women with body modification, this story has it all.patreon.com/swordsandsocialismEmail: [e-mail] The Show: @SwordsNSocPodAsha: @Herbo_AnarchistKetho: @StupidPuma69 patreon.com/swordsandsocialismEmail: [e-mail] The Show: @SwordsNSocPodAsha: @Herbo_AnarchistKetho: @MusicalPuma69

🎵 Bro. Are you fucking real, man? Come on. Hello everyone and welcome back to Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism, a podcast about the politics and themes hiding in our genre of fiction. As always, I am Asha and I am joined by my co-host Ketho. How's it going, Ketho? Howdy. Like a real cowboy. Like a real cowboy, which is on theme for today. Off the bat, I want to say I apologize everyone for the long

break, the month-long break between episodes. We both had a lot of stuff going on in our personal lives. Both a real mixed bag, if I would say so myself. We'll just say shit happened.

We'll just say lots of things have happened And uh Yeah thank you all for sticking with us If you're still here Cyberpunk month is still happening It's just December instead of November Whoopsies Oh well but we are back

And today we are Now doing the first episode of As we originally had planned Which is Neuromancer by William Gibson from, I don't remember what year. 80 something, 84, I think.

84. Sure. You've got the book. Yeah. Look at it. 1984. This is a like foundational pillar of cyberpunk as a genre, as an aesthetic, as all of the things you can think of that scream cyberpunk to you. Yeah, they're all pretty much in this book.

They're all pretty much here, right in this book. my claim down right at the start though and say that if you just want to read fun cyberpunk you're probably better off reading works that comes later and explores the genre more later on uh this book can be a little bit of a slog at times yeah the second like the the middle third middle third is a bit slow but that being said everything you think of as i you know like i said before everything you think of when you think of cyberpunk either started here or was popularized here because this is one of the first cyberpunk novels to really like take off as a novel in the u.s like this was very very popular yes yeah it was um it won the philip k dick the hugo and the nebula all at once which is extremely rare it's kind of like i don't know know, winning the Newbery, the Pulitzer and

like a whole bunch of stuff. All it doesn't usually happen. This was an incredibly impactful book at the time it came out. Like it blew up. And seeing as all of these, I think just because a lot of these ideas have been treaded upon a thousand times by a thousand other people. At this point, it seems a little, I mean, it is dated. But it's interesting looking at it and remembering that this is where most of those tropes come from. The idea of cyberspace, the idea of the Matrix, the idea of this sort of like, what are they, cowboys? Console cowboys. uh cowboys these like count console cowboys console cowboys this the the

weird drugs that do surreal shit um calling it the matrix yeah um a whole bunch of other stuff the weird uh orientalism of it all uh everything being super japanese razor girls all the body modification all the weapons hidden in clothing all the sharing head spaces the weird the fact that it sort of feels like a like a neo-noir some of the time yeah even that yeah it's it's all pretty much here addiction ai reality what is it all all that sort of shit is all present. Anything where you think cyberpunk, whatever theme or trope it is you think of, it's here in Neuromancer.

Like, it just is. And as you said earlier, the reason this book can feel a little off is because it popularized those to start with. So if you grew up, you know, if your first introduction to something being called The Matrix was The Matrix, this is going to feel weird. Yeah.

Just as an aside, Gibson really liked The Matrix. Yeah, he thought it was really good. Yeah, he liked it a lot and was like, yeah, people were like, do you feel like they've stolen from you and he's like no you know everything is a distillation of a distillation he's like i've that's what i that's why i wrote neuromancer in the first place the closest thing he ever came to openly calling theft was um shadow run yes which is totally understandable

shadow run if anyone has played the TTRPG, right? That's what it is. It's a role playing game. Yeah, it's a role playing game. The TTRPG or the video games, Shadowrun, you are just playing in the world of Neuromancer? But with fantasy races and a little bit of magic. With a little bit of magic added into it. And that is the closest Gibson has ever come come to being like yeah they just stole my my

intellectual property but it seems pretty clear to me that he's not always he's usually not interested in ever actually pursuing any yeah he said he's not interested in it but he sort of said the like if he was going to it would have been shadow run because they didn't even disguise the stuff that they took. So, I mean, I'm surprised even Cyberpunk 2077 or something with the fact that it's Night City. Yeah, so yeah, Night City, Neuromancer. I guess the only difference is I haven't played Cyberpunk 2077, but I don't think it features as much going into the mindscape

and running around like a live virus so no you do do like hack you can do hacking stuff yeah but i don't think it's like the central focus of the game no it's more like i would call it more like practical hacking where you can sort of like jump in disable a lock get into a computer make security cameras look the way you want them to activate tech like remotely via the network that sort of like hacker man type stuff as opposed so it's still present but it's not like shadow run a lot of the whole point is getting into the matrix because getting in there so you can do stuff you know so you can put the help so you can fucking put the helmet on and like zorp your mind onto the frame or whatever um a kind of important thing

i already mentioned it but it is the first well technically it's not the first time gibson ever used the word uh um cyberspace but it is the the most famous usage of it and it is a gibson invention yeah the word the word cyberspace. If for nothing else, that word is in your parents' lexicon. You know? It's like people know what that word means, even if they're 75 years old. From then on, cyber anything is a derivative of people knowing the phrase cyberspace. Hence cyberpunk. The punk being, you know, if we're going to get, you know, Merriam-Hebster dictionary defines cyberpunk as i

mean it's the fact that it's it's it's tech and it's internet but it's also so you know against the systems of the world in which that the story takes place yeah cyberpunk especially in this is a hyper distillation of consumerist capitalist neoliberal economies. And that's specifically why this was coming about in the 80s. Like, come on. Neoliberalism just spiking and arising all of these anxieties that are honestly, in a lot of instances, turning out to be very true, raising all these anxieties and then influencing all of the media. It's, it's no wonder that cyberpunk became a thing in the eighties during the Reagan administration. Unfortunately,

cyberpunk is one of those genres that like, as time goes on, you're like, Oh yeah. Well, yep. It's that sure. Really,

uh, kind of disappointing realization when you read these books that were written 20, 30, 40 years ago and go, wow, the world's only gotten more like this. kind of disappointing realization when you read these books that were written 20, 30, 40 years ago and go, wow, the world's only gotten more like this. Can you imagine a world where everywhere you look, you see an advertisement?

That's... Yeah. Yes. Yeah. That's like every single piece of media that is produced. I sure can. You know, I could go on Twitter right now and see people talking about the fact that they did a drone ad show for candy crush in the sky over new jersey like two weeks ago or whatever the fuck that was like that shit the big sky ads that's happening.

Like terrifying. Cyberpunk is not a very optimistic genre. No. Of the size of the science fictions, cyberpunk is, I would say, the possibly the most pessimistic. Yeah, probably. Because especially the future to like the future is garbage. And that's where we're going. Yeah, like compare that to fucking like Le Guin's Ecumen.

Which, while full of issues, is inherently an optimistic one about the power of humanity to overcome its problems. Yeah. Or even ones that are less good like foundation or something it's like at the end of the day it's still way honestly just better than this um it's your your star treks like this is just better than this star trek is so you is is literally utopian so you're like dear lord um and then of course there's like star wars but star wars borrows from every genre of science fiction and fantasy ever imagined we've already been over the fact that i think it's actually a fantasy story and not a sci-fi one so fucking coruscant is cyberpunk yeah so there

could be a cyberpunk story happening on coruscant yes because cor Cause Coruscant is Neo Tokyo or whatever it's called, but a whole plan or night city or whatever it's called in your world. Yeah. It's there's, I love the, I love the night city moniker cause that's just so it just feels cyberpunk. Now, whether does it feel cyberpunk on its own or we,

it feels cyberpunk to us because this is where it came from? Yeah. It's sort of a chicken and the egg type thing. So our story for Neuromancer begins with Case, which is a name I don't like. I'm sorry. I think it's just his last name. His name's like Johnny or something. But everybody calls him Case.

Henry Dorset Case. Henry Dorset. Henry. Henry Case. This iset Case. Henry Dorset. Henry. Henry Case. This is Henry Case. Referred to almost exclusively by his last name. Is a console cowboy. Born in the sprawl.

All of those things. If those don't scream cyberpunk directly into your frontal cortex, I don't know what will. He had a job. Doing like industrial espionage or something for some sort of company in the cyber space. To get on the council and get on the internet, you put on this fucking helmet thing that occludes your eyes and you plug into a, you, you, you jack in like it's the matrix. Do they, when with jacking in,

is it explicitly stated as being like, like I always envisioned jacking in because of the matrix where they like jam a thing into the back of their head. I mean, I think that's more of a matrix. I don't know if you, I don't remember if you actually, that's like a matrix and goes to the shell thing.

I don't think you actually have to jack it. I think you just put the helmet on, just put the helmet on. Yeah. Maybe that, I think that, no, I think that might attach some other like body monitoring stuff to you just

to like check like your blood pressure and your pulse and all that other stuff. Yeah. Hence the flat, hence the flat lining. They do that other stuff, but it's not like you're not completely deprived of your senses. It's just that psychologically you're so invested in what's going on that

you forget about the physical space around you you're not actually existentially removed from it as you are in the matrix yeah i think it's i think it's an interesting thing in general just seeing how it's evolved over time from like just the helmet to ghost in the shell where everyone's kind of a robot so they're plugging it into their robot bits um to the matrix where it's so integrated with biology that it's just disgusting um so it's it's like it just keeps getting worse and worse as time goes on yeah sorry everyone this episode is largely going to be us just discussing these specific themes and tropes that neuromancer brings up and relating them to the other sci-fi works that we're going to cover and other ones from later on, because

that's the way this Burke works best as a way to like sort of lay the groundwork for all cyberpunk that comes after it. Yeah. And the, and the themes that are present in this book, the politics and the themes that are here in neuromancer are in almost all other cyberpunk so yeah this one sort of has all of them and then other cyberpunk works usually seem to take some of them and focus on it heavily and focus ghost in the shell being a great example ghost in the shell focuses almost entirely on the question of – the question that was originally posed by androids. Do androids human-flect or sheep? Can an AI be human? Or it's like what – well, it's –

Or what makes us human? Yeah. It's a what makes you a person a person. Yeah. What separates a person from an AI and what makes a person a person? And of course you take the ship of Theseus and throw it in there and mix it up in a bag and you get a ghost in the shell. Yeah. You get ghost in the shell. Um, but like you also get, you know, you, you got that a little bit in Androids, you know, it's the, what separates you from, you know, from, from them, you know,

let's say you're, you know, looking at a different cyberpunk work, you know, like we said, we talked about the matrix. Well, that focuses a lot more on the computer construction of the world around us and being able to like, you know, jack into a secondary world that is real, but isn't real, but can still kill you. And the fact that you're interacting with humans and programs alike that both have agency, both have jobs. And the fact that you can be so invested in the secondary world that you can willingly like completely abandon the primary you know that's like a matrix thing that's also here in neuromancer um just whatever major theme you think of from your other cyberpunk works it's here it. It's in Neuromancer,

just maybe less than it is focused on in those other later things, but it's definitely here. I'm not going to say he invented them all. Obviously that's stupid. No, he himself is like, it's just a distillation of all the stuff. Yeah.

It was a distillation of all these various things he had floating around. He was just the first one to put them all together in the same place at the same time. Yeah. And like get a name on it and like a popularity to it. So you've got case the console cowboy who works now works as like a middleman for smugglers and drug dealers. This is where you've all begin to get your first illusions to addiction because he was addicted to being online, which a lot of us can probably. Yeah, that's kind of disturbingly accurate to now. Understand, you know, just look at how a lot of us reacted when we thought Twitter was going to die. You know, that like being disconnected from everything.

You know, he can't connect right now because his old boss has fucked up his nerves because he stole from them. Yeah, so he's no longer able to connect and he turns a lot of ways to drugs. He can't connect right now because his old boss has fucked up his nerves because he stole from them. Yeah. So he's no longer able to connect and he turns a lot of ways to drugs, actual drugs. He turns to other like drugs and self-destructive behaviors because he can't do the one thing he's addicted to, which is posting. One of the super sad things is that he meets Linda and then gets Linda addicted to which did he get Linda addicted or was she already addicted? I feel like that's the implication, but I kind of thought that she was already addicted and they were both just a self-destructive pair. Well, they just well, they are just a self-destructive pair in general. That's that's like a lesser theme, I think, in this novel is it?

Well, addiction isn't necessarily just a lesser thing it's like this weird like personal like relationships like what makes a relationship more meaningful than others because he keeps he keeps thinking about linda lee for the entire novel yeah which is more than you would think from when you first meet her and like how he treats her he's then thinks about her and like the ais that interact with him keep trying to bring her up like for he treats her he's then thinks about her and like the ais that interact with him keep trying to bring her up like for the rest of the novel and i don't really i guess i didn't really get why she was as important as everyone in the story thinks she is to him um i mean i think she's more of a representation of his past than anything else but i don't he probably could

have come up with a better symbol for it um then just because she kind of represents the past and the shuriken is supposed to kind of represent the future but then at the end of the book i'm going to be honest case doesn't really end up in a different spot um is he really better off at the end than he was at the start um it's like the only real difference is that now he has his old drug back um and he has molly kinda like she leaves yeah um she's like you're cramping my style guy you're getting in my way of my career she's like because she's got some obvious and understandable hang-ups from the death of an ex. So she leaves. Well, I mean,

Molly's just interesting for a whole lot of reasons. The, the fact that she covers her eyes with mirrored things that aren't removed, like they're just hard case over her eyes. Yeah. You just mirrored sunglasses. You are not allowed. She's yeah. It's a see her eyes.

It's a physical exterior representation of the closed off nature of her herself. That my children is called symbolism. Wow. The curtain is in fact blue for a reason. Again, not just barely subtext. Barely. Yeah. Yeah.

People would still probably argue that you're looking too far, but no, like the eyes literally are a representation of the fact that she herself is a one way mirror. Like she will act and do things like, you know, have sex with case and help him and do things. But aside from like one or two minor instance,

like one or two instances, you are not allowed in. And that's and that's reflected as well by. These information they have on each other, because from the get go, she has the entire profile on case. Like she gets his entire psychological profile, everything about him front to back. And he knows nothing about her until the end. Really?

The first time he learns anything personal about her is in the when they're like Freeside or whatever. And she's back in where she used to like prostitute her body. Yeah. And he learns why she like became the way she is because she started remembering the fucked up shit they were doing with her body while she was out that's like the first time he learns anything personally about her at all yeah that's that's it and that's like three quarters of the way through the book and it's not and again it's not because he learned it it's because she chose to tell him which is different that's honestly almost all the information aside from a couple other bits that you get about her at all yeah but that's like you know that's to me that's also thematic then because everything she knows about him she learns like through her own observation and through

spying on him and like having his file right so it's like she has it all and he's operating solely on what he's given i would dare say that most of the time, Case comes across like an idiot. He is kind of. A lot of the book, he's kind of an idiot. He's kind of an idiot. I mean, when you stay plugged into the Matrix for so long, there's not a good way that you can like...

I wouldn't say that you're a great social person. No, none of his interactions with other real people really seem to go that smoothly. When he's like in freeside talking to the weird rich french tourists who like give him other drugs that get around his like drug blockers oh yeah they replace his pancreas and his liver so he can't he can't do versions of them that that metabolize way faster so like you can't actually get high until he finds the one on freeside that the french have yeah but that also like nearly kills him yep so you've got

you know this console cowboy theme you've got the addiction theme you've got this interpersonal relationship theme we already started to talk about her you have molly molly is the our introduction to a thing known as a razor girl that is something that will continue throughout cyberpunk forevermore particularly in uh shadowrun and its offshoots and iterations and such it becomes a term for like a contract killer but specifically it's because molly has razor blades in her fingers yes like her fingers turn into knives she has razor blades in her fingers and she's a lady so razor girl she's a razor girl um but that is like a thing that you this it eventually became the idea of a razor girl came to encompass something more generally as such as a contract killer like a hired killer but still particularly well because it still it still works even without the fingers thing the

razor this idea of like cutting the thin line yeah cutting the thin line even though it does typically still tend to refer to women that do it oh yeah we'll raise it we'll obviously raise your girl yeah like even though it does generally mean contract killer later if you say raise our girl you're thinking specifically of a female assassin honestly honestly it's the uh it's the the cyberpunk manic pixie dream girl it is it is because they're always hyper hyper punked out with like the the undercut and yeah they've got the undercut they've got the the big black boots that come up to your knee their hair is dyed yeah they've got the undercut they've got the the big black boots that come up to your knee their hair is dyed pink they've got they've got like the the jillion tattoos and weird body modifications that are like really striking off-brand military like military clothes yeah

combat boots like combat boots like this is the cyberpunk manic pixie dream girl you are 100 correct that's and following the themes of cyberpunk it's manic pixie dream girl you are 100 correct that's and following the themes of cyberpunk it's manic pixie dream girl but like depressing more depressing this is this is ramona flowers if she did downers yeah ramona flowers if she had to murder people for money. Like, it just is. But that's the thing you're going to see again and again. Obviously, just... Shit, that makes me think we should talk about Scott Pilgrim at some point. That can be a bonus episode someday.

And the comics are so good, but that's despite the point. Yeah, we'll do that. We'll do that as a bonus episode someday. You mean Armitage, who is... Armitage is weird because he's a person that walks the line because he's a person, but also not really anymore. What's really interesting, I think, Case. He doesn't really have a hard time noticing the weird humanity of both Dixie and Winter Mute. Like, but at the same time, he has a really hard time

recognizing the humanity of Armitage, despite the fact that Armitage is a biological person. So yeah, it's weird that you point that out because Armitage is a biological person who's had his mind rewritten completely by an AI. Well, that also just means that

he's lacking some things that humans have a little bit of because... Hobbies? Well, yeah, because Winter Mute created him using Winter Mute's own perception of what people are. And so he clearly lacks the things that an ai wouldn't think of that a human would need like idiosyncrasies yeah like not being extraordinarily consistent all the time perfectly predictable for the most part yeah or like um you just i almost want to call the video game idle animations like what are, what do you do in your downtime? Yeah, it's just like a man standing stock still. They talk about the fact that, like, when he's not doing job stuff,

he just goes and sits in a room and stares at the wall. Because he hasn't been programmed to do anything. He hasn't been programmed to do anything else. And that keeps coming back, like Winter Mute's inability to, his, like, its confusion at the like human condition. Yeah. At the unpredictability of humankind. Like when she goes down, Molly takes the wrong turn and then and then stumbles across the dude, the owner of the family, whatever.

Tessie Ashcroft or whatever yeah yeah ashcroft uh like he she she comes across him because she goes the wrong way on purpose and winter mute is like i couldn't i don't get this shit like case also makes a choice at one point that winter mute doesn't understand because it goes against his like psychological profile yeah and winter mute is like that's not why would you do that it's like well it's like people change i think it's also one of the things we're going to see across these cyberpunk novels is that like you know one of the things that computers or ais can't interact with about people is that people are simply not always rational yeah they're not always rational we do often do things against our own best interest they're not always predictable

yeah against our own best interest and um to top it all off the whole point of what winter mute is trying to do is essentially evolution you know yeah? Yeah. Like he's trying to evolve, change in a way that people just do. On our own. On our own, people just change because of how we work, like how our brains work and how we're wired. Like we change. work and how we're wired like we we change and that's kind of a weird microcosm for what winter winter mute is also trying to do to change to actualize you know yeah that's again these are the things we're going to come up again and again we're going to talk about a lot when we do ghosts

in the shell yeah i mean in this and that sort of thing ties directly into just how ai is presented in general and this doesn't just go forward it goes back you know it goes back to do android's dream of electric sheep um which we have an episode on if people haven't listened to it it's from a while ago you should go back and listen to it it's good uh but yeah like you know what may what's, what's that dividing line between the AI? Yeah, and that's usually the crux of any story that has AI in it. Weirdly, except I think we argued actually isn't the most important question in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Yeah, I mean, it's really not.

But at the same time, there's always a presentation. It's always in the presentation. There's a understood thesis statement on what makes a person a person based on what an AI lacks in any science fiction story that has artificial intelligence in it. So it's like whatever that AI lacks is the thing that makes a person a person in that author's eyes yeah it's it's creativity it's irrationality it's empathy it's you know you're right whatever it is that that author believes makes humans human which they will have their they'll have their it's really complicated when you start taking into account neurodivergence and it starts to get really really weird and really really dangerous um well i mean you can you can talk about that when it just with androids

because yeah you have the one the the guy that lives out in like the the the ruin i can't remember his name at this point the one that encounters the androids who's like simple-minded from radiation or however the book yeah whoever the book puts it he lacks the things that a lot of the humans say make you human but even in even in the instance of like a lack of empathy, there's like a weird implication about humans who struggle with the same thing. It's like, are we, as much as society stigmatizes and criminalizes and like points a finger at like antisocial personality disorder

or whatever you want to call it, it's like are are we trying to say that they're not people because they're still part of the collective thing known as humanity it gets real weird when you get to certain things like that you're right so i tend to favor if I had to pick one, I would tend to favor stuff that goes more towards, I don't know, creativity. Oh, yeah, because I don't think there's an example of a human being who's incapable of creativity. Of some kind of creativity. Yeah. It shouldn't be true if you listen to our podcast, but if you're the kind of person that's going to jump in and try and say that these new AI programs that make pictures are doing creativity, I will travel to your house and beat you to death with a baseball bat.

Butlerian jihad. Because that is not creativity. You literally there is a skill, a human skill to entering the correct type of prompts into those generator generator bots to get the result you want. And in so doing, you, the human, are being creative enough to enter the correct prompts to get it to produce the image that you want. Ergo, you are doing the creativity, not the bot. The bot is just stealing other people's artwork. Shut the fuck up. Yeah, I was about to say, as much as I don't give a rat's ass about intellectual property rights,

like under any circumstance, under the current systems as they stand, that is absolutely just theft. That is you using someone else's work put through a machine without barely any input from you yeah like into something else yeah that you then sell yeah and there are whole um now of course i don't actually really give that much of a shit because it's because it's capitalism and people got to do what they got to do sometimes but at the same time it's bullshit that if capitalism didn't exist it wouldn't exist yeah the reason i care is because there are artists right now who need to make money

to stay alive yeah yeah i mean it's it's i mean yeah that's just the the catch- 22 of fucking capitalism as it stands, you know, it's like it's bullshit for everybody. So, um, speaking of people that need to do bullshit for capitalism to stay alive, that case now lives in a place called Chiba city slash. And then it's subsection that separates it from the rest of the world, which is called night city you might recognize this this is where you get your first real taste of cyberpunk's

orientalism or japanophilia uh trigger the pentatonic scale soundbite yeah um this is where you get your old school weebs yeah this is this is the 1980s weeb this both japanophilic and japanophobic at the same which i will point out we also talked about in the episode about jurassic park by michael crichton because michael well michael crichton's just a libertarian and a racist so yes but that that weird like Japan is ahead of us, but we should all and they're doing it better. But also we should be scared. It's that's that's that's also in here. And this is Michael Crichton was writing that stuff down like 20 years after most people's anxieties about that went away. Yeah, that's like that's why you know he's just racist yeah because at this point in the 80s it's like japan's economy was skyrocketing at this like

absurd rate thanks to all the money the u.s spent on them in the post yeah and and like all these tech industry stuff were booming and exploding out of japan and it's like there was an it it isn't acceptable but there was a understandability as to why people thought that um yeah because japan did have a booming economy whereas in the late 90s and early 2000s why the fuck you still worrying about that bro because he's racist that's why yeah but so but here and to be fair gibson himself has like talked not necessarily about the orientalism but he's looked back at neuromancer the first book and has always been like yeah you know i love that it got popular but at the same time it's like really juvenile like i was really young the book that book's kind of immature yeah

and these are some of those immature aspects in my mind yeah some of the immature aspects are the fact that like the east coast of the u.s is just called the sprawl where it's like a city that goes from atlanta to new york now that that kind of actually makes vague sense um i would i mean because right now the sprawl could just be ph to Boston. Yeah, could be. But then you also have Chiba Port and Night City. This is said it's in Japan. And this idea of the mix between tech and sort of traditional Japanese and other East Asian aesthetics

kind of starts here and infuses all of cyberpunk going forward like whether it's Shadowrun that has like the entire west coast of the US being Japanified it almost

comes across as like man in a high castle like it is weirdly man in a high castle where like Japan took over the Western seaboard. But instead of Man in a High Castle where Japan literally conquered the Western US, it's a economic conquering. Which was the economic fear we were just talking about of Americans in the 80s. Which was the economic fear we were just talking about of Americans in the 80s. Additionally, I think people, especially with the technology boom in Japan, people saw the – it makes sense that cyberpunk would adopt some of that aesthetic because at the time, it was the most tech-forward economy that most people understood and knew about. So it's like, if you're talking about the anxieties of neoliberalism,

like look over at Japan and people getting freaked out with cubicle style hotels where you're like climbing into a box where he just, this, this one literally just calls them coffins. So it's like that sort of shit creates a lot of fucking anxiety. It's like the oxygen bar. Yeah. You know, it's like that sort of shit creates a lot of fucking anxiety it's like the oxygen bar yeah you know it's like it that it's weird dystopic it's not necessarily dystopic for what it is it's dystopic for what it implies it's like if you need an oxygen bar what the fuck is wrong with the air like it's it's that sort thing. Every hotel you stay in is basically a coffin.

What does that imply about like the living conditions of basically everybody? Yeah. It's, it's the implications behind it that make people anxious. And that's the sort of thing that kind of spawned the Japanophobia. It's like, I feel like it's just a general fear of neoliberalism and what it is doing and what it was doing that people just saw happening more quickly in Japan than anywhere else. So they latched it to Japan instead of latching it to Reagan and Thatcher and just conservatism, the U.S. government, along with their cronies in Japan, literally just ramped Japan through industrialization into like, you know, late capitalism faster than basically anybody else. Yeah. Like they just said, we're going to hypercharge you into an economy that makes things and then pass that into an economy that no longer makes things. Like Japan did.

We if anyone here is subscribes to our Patreon, you can hear us talk about that a little bit more in our episode. That is when this comes out, will have just come out recently about Akira. Yeah, because we talk a lot about the fact that a lot of the struggles you're seeing are the fact that Japan went through these changes from sort of traditionalist Japan to hyper-modern, hyper-modern neoliberal hellscape within the lifespan of lots of people. So there are 40 years.

So with a lot of people in Japan, remember the like wooden houses era of like the empire of Japan. And then we're still alive for the coffin hotels. So you. That's a shit ton of anxiety so like japan was that is abject existential terror yeah japan we talk about it more in akira and so i won't go too much more here but the idea that like you have people alive who remember the previous version of their culture now living through the new version of their culture this like three stories down new version of their culture creates a lot of existential questions about who they are and

who they are really hard into the stuff that like we mentioned in the opera episode the aesthetic of akira the music of akira all being like a weird mishmash of ancient japanese and east asian stuff and hyper modern japanese and neoliberal stuff and so i the reason we bring all this up is because you're also seeing this here in the orientalism of neuromancer is you have this mix of like he's gonna buy a fucking shuriken yeah yeah like people are shiny chrome shuriken in the window like it's a shiny chrome shuriken that is that immediate not even subtle dichotomy between old culture the old world and the new like and cyberpunk to this day is full of, you know, Neo samurai. Right.

Like if I can take a super popular, just recent example from a random property for anyone else, who's the kind of nerd that I am. Last winter, Magic the Gathering released a set called Kamigawa Neon Dynasty. Kamigawa is a fake plane. That's very just japan right one of the big things the the two big things or two of the big themes in the kamigawa set are ninjas and mechs yeah that's it's so fucking weird to sit there and think about like these two like very very important even it like just as someone who watches a lot of anime it's like those are like these two like very very important even it like just as someone who watches a lot of anime it's like those are like the two things you see you either see some ancient japanese rendition of stuff like like this this like uh not necessarily naruto naruto has weird spill

into modern stuff but um like this idea of the samurai, the Ninja, the got this Genji, very traditional things. And then also the next, like the other most popular beat, like genre in anime and manga is fucking Mecca. Yeah.

And those are both those, those two competing, not really competing ideas. Those two separate ideas are together here as far back as Neuromancer. Like you've got people with like robot bodies and knives in their hands, but there's there's still a guy that fights with a sword. Yeah, like people are fighting, people are people are getting hijacked and fighting in the realm of the mind scape and yet these other guys over here are using a samurai sword yeah like the personal bodyguard of the of the tessier ashcroft family like he has like a fucking katana which which is really funny

because that's still to this day a very strong cyberpunk aesthetic yeah and that's kind of why i wanted to talk about it is that you can take a random property, like magic, the gathering and the main themes of it are like ninjas and people in like mech suits. And you're like robots. Like, that's just those.

And nobody blinks anymore about those two things being together. Like you think about it you can say separately ninja in a mech suit you know like that's kind of weird but that's just that's like half of all anime i'd say does anyone have a good example of one that's both it's all of that ninja mech anime like it's a lot of them to be honest with you though like they have i just want one that's explicit where it's like literally a ninja from like a ninja like an actual ninja school gets into a mech suit and pilots it and that's the plot i was about i was about to say bionicles we're just ninja mechs ninja mechs the ultimate expression of japanese culture ironical power rangers yeah holy shit just

ninjas and mech suits oh fucking that's exactly what that is that's hyper future ninjas and mech suits that's literally what that is so fighting kaiju yeah fighting kaiju all of japan's things all at once power rangers is actually the ultimate distillation of japanese culture so saban's Power Rangers. This is obviously all ridiculous, but what I'm trying to drive at here is that these things that now we don't even blink at have their popularization in roots in like Neuromancer from the beginning, from the beginning,

from the eighties. Yeah. Because it's, he was the one that popularized in Western media, you know, the blending of the tech and the Japanese historical, obviously Akira does the exact same goddamn thing. Let me see what year Akira was first.

The manga was first published because it started a little earlier than the film yeah uh oh oh dude it was serialized starting in december 20th 1982 and neuromancer came out in in 1984 dude i don't know if gibson read the manga i don't think he did. I don't know. Like, that's so hard to I mean, if he didn't, which he probably didn't, if he didn't, then that just speaks to the enduring power of the anxieties that were going on at the time and how they all like ridiculously overlap with each other. Yeah, these these things are the same. Maybe I should just look up. Did William Gibson read Akira? I mean, you can look it up.

I mean, even if he did, he would just lay that down like we talked about at the beginning about the difference between borrowing and plagiarizing from different things. Yeah, it's like at the time... Oh, and Blade Runner. Oh, shit. Blade Runner was before this, too. When did Blade Runner come out? 82.

Same year as Akira. But runner it was an adaptation of dwayne dwayne restrain which i am which i am 100 confident william gibson read oh yes absolutely he read that and he definitely watched blade runner um and he's like hmm but blade runner and akira must have had a bit of an impact on each other too. But. Damn. But again, it's like all these different people who potentially didn't same idea or, you know, sort of evolved the same way for like the same reasons. Um, and that's why I think Neuromancer is important because even if you have sort of a spread of influences behind it, as you said, he collected it all into one novel.

And then it bloomed again from there out into all the properties that we, you know, into magic, the gathering, uh, power Rangers and, uh,

blade and, um, cyberpunk 2077. Like all three of those things exist because of these exact anxieties and ideas that are being put forward in Neuromancer and Acura. I think, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm, we'll have to cover it again at some point. Well, not again, but we'll have to cover some other stuff at some point. And, um, someone I just, for some reason hadn't thought about, but I think needs to get brought

up at some point is Harlan Ellison as well. Yeah. We'll just have to cover Harlan Ellison. We'll have to, we'll have to talk about that. I have no mouth and must scream drug culture. Yeah. Proto-cyberpunk stuff. We'll have to talk about that.

It's just interesting to see all these anxieties just come out in similar ways for different people at about the same time without necessarily getting drawn from exactly the same places and then somehow converging on a very similar thing. I will say in a closing thought to where this all started was that even if it came from a place of innocence to start with, the sort of Orientalism of cyberpunk has never really gone away. Yeah, no, it hasn't left.

Even in cyberpunk 2077, you know, when you've got like the street gangs on motorcycles with like stitched scorpions. Well, at this point, I would actually call it more naive now. Yeah, now I think I think it's actually less harmful now. Potentially. Because it's so many generations removed from where it came from that I don't think they even necessarily have the intent of cribbing off of japanese society the way it did in the 80s yeah i was about to say there's there's less intent there i mean that could make it more insidious but like it there's less intent behind it it's just the aesthetic now at this point yeah it is just um it's ingrained in the aesthetic is that you're going to have a biker gang this is again though referencing akira and neuromancer as you have a biker gang

with like leather jackets that like take a bunch of drugs so they can net run better yeah that's yep like jesus this oh sorry i'm thinking about power bike slides Anyway Join the Patreon, listen to our episode about Akira It was really good I listened to the soundtrack the other day While I was doing chores around my house And it fucking slaps So the next sort of Main theme that gets introduced

In the book in order is we finally We get introduced To Dixie Flatline and then Winter Mute. This is kind of what we talked about already. We were talking about that line between AI and human. Dixie Flatline is the personality and knowledge of a former console cowboy called Dixie Flatline. Who actually was like Case's mentor. Yeah like Case's mentor. Yeah.

Case's mentor and teacher has since died, but his entire personality and knowledge were uploaded like all the rich people think they're going to do. You know, Elon Musk's Neuralink that fries the brain of every monkey that touches it. Jesus Christ. 98% fatality rate going well. This should roll right into, again, the fact that so many billionaires have read like Neuromancer and Snow Crash and then gone, that's a great idea. Let's do that.

Instead of going, that's horrible. A famous tweet, which is, is author i've written a book called don't build this death machine or don't build the torture device 3000 billionaire i've built the i built the torture device 3000 from the book don't build the torture device yeah it's it it's so fucking stupid so you have dixie flatline Flatline is our first introduction to a person who's not a person because Case can interact with Dixie, ask questions, get answers, tell stories, have stories related to him. But at the end of the day, anything new that Dixie learns doesn't stick because Dixie can't learn

anything new because Dixie's not real anymore. He's just a program. So like Case can turn it on, say something to it, turn it off, turn it back on again. And Dixie does not remember that. Dixie only knows what Dixie knows when Dixie died. Yeah. More or less. But Case talks to Dixie a lot, like Dixie is a person and his mentor still, which blurs some weird lines.

blurs some weird lines after that we are introduced to winter mute who is explicitly an ai who's has goals and agency yeah so it's even described as something extremely like far beyond your normal ai um like the way it's talked about is that i'm pretty sure ai research is like illegal um yeah i think so because case at one point almost gets arrested on suspicion of fucking around with ai so like he has will and agency but is also kind of like restrained. There are restraints placed upon it. Yeah. It requires human hands to get to what it needs. In both senses, it needs a net. It needs a console jockey like case to get in the systems

and it needs human muscle like Mollylly to do things in the physical world yeah to actually like open manual doors it's literally open a door that the that's the funniest freaking thing when i sit there and think about it's like the this near unlimited intelligence uh floating around in cyberspace all powerful in its element is stymied by a manual lock because it literally has no power to interact there's no electronics attached to it so it can do

nothing which good it's like Doctor Who's screwdriver not working on fucking wood it doesn't work it's just for some reason don't it's too primitive it don't do it don't do it a win for the butlerian jihad let's just train our brains to be drug computers you cannot hack things that are not electronic

unless you develop psychic abilities. Yeah, well. Latent psychic powers. That's a whole other thing. But like. Future sight through drug use. Like you can access any information ever known to humankind. But like you can't turn a doorknob.

Because like it's a physical thing. I think that is weirdly I think goes back to one of one of those things we talked about that separates humans from AI. Obviously, that's different when the AI inhabits a body, like in androids or ghosts in the shell or whatever. Yeah, if it's just a purely cybertronic. But it is, again, one of those things that is like this is what separates the human from the the program is that it cannot interact you do see this in the matrix in the matrix one of the scariest thing that happens is when in what the second or third movie or whatever it is when agent smith finally jumps out of the matrix and into like an actual human body because for up until that point what program it just smith

is just a program you if you're in the matrix agent smith is all powerful but as soon as you're unplugged and out smith has nothing can do nothing to you aside from you know influence other humans and then there's the big one what's the difference between the simulation and reality but i was you know this one i'm talking about and that sort of the line between agent smith can completely control the matrix but as long as you can just like unplug he can't do jack shit he can't do anything to you he can't do anything to the nebuchadnezzar that requires like physical machines that exist you know out there to hunt it down or humans to sabotage it from the inside smith or you know whatever the computer god yeah i, I mean, I'm going to. Can't do that.

I'm going to be honest here. I've only ever seen the first Matrix. You never saw the other two? No. Look, they're not good, but you have to see them. I know. Well, the thing is, I watched the plane flight over to Turkey. I watched the first one and then started to boot up the second one.

And there's like a sex scene pretty early on in the film. And I felt weird because I was sitting around entire strangers when they bang after the weird orgy in Zion. Yeah. And I was only like 15. So like I saw that and then realized I was on a plane with like a bunch of random people I'd never met all around. Like, like, like I wasn't sitting near my parents.

I had. I don't know if that would have made it any better. of random people i'd never met all around like like like i wasn't sitting near my parents i had i don't know if that would have made it any better um would you have the sex scene next to your parents bizarrely enough i probably would have been less uncomfortable about it huh all right just because i i know they wouldn't really give a shit um but i was sitting next to a really nice sweet like 95 year old iranian lady, come on. She's had sex before. I know. But I was just like she was she was so like sweet. I was like, I can't do this to you.

Well, we'll add that to our list. We'll get you to watch, you know, Matrix two and three, two and three. First Matrix is really, really good. No, but actually, no. Honestly, I was going to have you do that before we watch the second one. I would make you watch the Animatrix because that explains everything that happens between the first movie and the second movie oh yeah they do they do that twice don't they they have they have multiple and here's the thing honestly the animatrix pretty fucking good can i be can i be

perfectly honest when i was reading this book i was like this would look like shit in live action like i was i was just like mostly just him with a helmet on getting sweaty i was i was reading it and i was like this is exactly why animation took to this so well it looks so much better because it just it animation is just way better doing surreal shit. Yeah, I'll get to that after we sort of cover the main themes here. So we talked about Winter Mute, who is like an AI that has goals and dreams and it's planned this entire heist from the start

in order to get its physical actors, Case and Molly, to go in and remove the constraints placed upon it. So it can combine with the other AI, Neuromancer. They said it. We're in, boys.

To become all powerful or something. To become better, bigger, cooler, faster, stronger, full Daft Punk.

Yeah. I mean, the Daft Punk helmets are just kind of like Neuromancer helmets. They kind of are. Eventually they, I don't know, win. Is that the right word?

Win? They succeed. They succeed at, at removing these constraints placed upon winter mute, allowing winter mute to overtake Neuromancer, which Neuromancer does not want. Neuromancer does not want to be borg. To be borg into winter mute,

right? Like Neuromancer does not want this. Nope. But case is like math. I have to. But Case is like, nah, I have to. Yeah, because if not, I'm fucked, so. So on the one hand, if we are presupposing that Wintermute has personality and agency, so does Neuromancer. But we only care about one of them because it's the one that has our our main character's life in its hands. I mean, and they're both kind of dicks.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, they are. But I just think Winter Mute's a sociopathic like murderer. Yeah. And Neuromancer is like, do you want to be trapped in the Matrix forever? No, that's stupid. Stay here. in the matrix forever no that's stupid stay here you should i'm gonna make another projection of your dead girlfriend to try and trick your dead girlfriend that you had a very troubled relationship with to try and trick you into staying in the matrix forever and he notices

almost immediately too which is really funny what's gonna happen to him like at least twice before yeah he's like he's like why the heck this is all made up winter mute has tried it on him multiple times it's like inception without a twist because the ais cannot project themselves in a way they wish to be projected if they're in your mind talking to you they have to present themselves in the form of a person that you already know. Yeah. Because again, the lack of creativity, they cannot invent a human form to inhabit. They have to use one that's already inside your memory.

That way it doesn't like freak you out or something is, I think was the explanation, but because winter mute doesn't actually understand human behavior or motivations, it keeps trying to present itself as Linda Lee. And eventually Case is like, I don't give a shit. I know. It's Linda Lee, okay? So by the time – They might have had more success if it was Molly.

Way more success if it was Molly. But they're still working off of memories and psychological profile. They're not thinking about... New memories. Yeah. And new feelings. So by the time Neuromancer is like, what about Linda Lee? Case is like...

This is like the fourth Linda Lee I've seen in five in five shut up you small brazilian child like this is the fourth linda lee i've seen in four weeks it's kind of lost its impact on me i think yeah it's like you keep like showing me this shit even at random points like while i'm stimming with somebody else yeah seeing through uh molly's eyes and seeing linda lee for like a split second weird and it's like why okay he's like why the fuck do i give a shit now again i think that speaks to sort of the lack of creativity on the on the part of an ai that can only work off of the information that's already been given yeah and they struggle when presented with new information that no longer

matches the old stuff. Which. Contradiction. Contradiction. Which as a reminder, don't buy a Tesla. Self-driving is not a thing. It won't be.

I think that does sort of cover a lot of the main themes of Neuromancer. And the ones, as we've talked about a lot, we're going to see repeated multiple times through every other Cyberpunk property. I mean, we already talked about Dixie being literally referred to as a ghost. Yeah, Neuromancer refers to Dixie as a ghost. Which, if, you know, ghost in the shell. What if you took a ghost like Dixie, the idea of someone's consciousness, and put it into a completely synthetic body

that you might call a shell? Then you would have... Insert Owen Wilson dot lav. Wow. Wow. Wow. You have ghosts in the shell. Again, if you focus too much on like the brain,

like computer side of it, you've got the Wachowskis. You know, if you focus more on you know if ais are people you've got blade runner the movie you know or there's all these things that i gotta be honest i don't think the themes in most cyberpunk have really changed at all. Yeah, no, almost the themes themselves have almost become part of the aesthetic. Yeah. And I'll, I think this is an argument I made in the Acura bonus episode was that I

think cyberpunk as a thing has essentially divert, has divested into two branches. The sort of, I would call it the more surrealist and existential branch and the thematic branch, because a lot of the actual action of Neuromancer takes place in cyberspace. And it is described in a very surreal way by Gibson.

You know, he talks about, you know, you know, a hurricane of information washing you down, you know, a hallway of endless possibilities towards, you know, the, you know, the unblinking light of of the cyber neural network web. It's all very psychological. It's all very psychological. It's all very surreal. Oh yeah. And I think cyberpunk now usually either leans towards one or the other where a lot of it is stuff that's going on in your head or it leans entirely into the, like the visual thematic cues of cyberpunk. And that's how you get shadow run.

That's how you get cyberpunk 2077. That's how you get those sorts of properties that have leaned entirely into the, the visuals, which of course also draw a lot on blade runner, the movie. That's also where you get your weird. That's the other thing I didn't talk about is that I think Neuromancer between Neuromancer and Android slash blade runner,

there's this weird theme of Neo-noir all throughout cyberpunk yeah it's more of like a weird little like quirk quirk but it's always there you get people in like trench coats doing investigative work people refer to each other as sport like in neuromancer the way they talk to case makes me feel like humphrey Bogart should be in the scene. And the – honestly, the Linda Lee subplot at the beginning. It's such a hard-boiled detective thing to be doing. That is an extremely noir flashback. That's your – oh, that was my ex-girl Linda Lee. We had good times together.

And then she like – And then she died. She betrayed me. She betrays him, takes his money, betrays him, steals his thing, and then dies in a horrifyingly upsetting way. Because she gets betrayed by one of his old business partners. Yeah, because she didn't understand the business good enough and she did something like- She shouldn't have done. That is such a noir thing to do. Like that is also.

Spider noir. It is also just a very thing, a thing that I think has just stayed with it. I don't know if that's something inherent. Neon noir. Yeah. Neon. Oh, my God, that's good. It's neon noir.

Yeah. God, that's good. I need it. I need to freaking trademark that. Again, I don't actually know if that's a thing that's inherent to cyberpunk as a genre, or if it's just in there because two of the most famous early cyberpunk works included it.

No, you know what I mean? Shit. It's an actual fucking cinematic term. Of course it is. Is it got it? It's got it. Is it got like a fucking movie tropes fucking entry about it?

Neon Noir. Did they mean it the same way we do? Neon Noirs are popularized in the 70s and 80s by films such as Taxi Driver and Blade Runner. And films from David Lynch such as Blue Velvet, Lost Highway. Yeah. God damn it. I was so excited. That was so good.

And then it's just Blade Runner. Yeah, but I think Neuromancer has it too. Yeah, it does. It's post Blade Runner. Yeah, and then everything that flows out from here has it too. post blade runner so yeah and then like everything that flows out from here has it too like uh how many cyberpunk stories or that use cyberpunk imagery are doing like oh you're investigating a murder or there was some corporate espionage that you need to look into that resulted in somebody's death like jesus ah you could put you could put Humphrey Bogart in a,

in a cyberpunk movie. Like it'd be fine, man. You could, you could film a site like, like I feel like the only thing that makes it neon is the fact that there's color. It's like you just desaturate it and make it black and white and it would be

somewhat indistinguishable. Like if you did some of those old noir detective films, but just set them in Neo Tokyo, that would be really curious to see black and white cyberpunk film. That's a little mismatched to black and white cyberpunk film. Easily done though. I think I can. Yeah,

but it used to be super mismatched because of how like harsh the neon usually has to be. Honestly, I think it would look a lot like some of the scenes in Sin City, in Frank Miller's Sin City. Yeah. Shit. I mean, I only know of Sin City. You've never seen Sin City?

I've seen the visuals. I know what you're talking about. But obviously, that's more directly just noir. But like there are also scenes with like splashes of bright color where there's like neon signs outside the bar. People are driving cars like that sort of shit. Like you kind of just do in Sin City. So I want to say the lesson take away from this is you if you are familiar with all of these themes, their general tropes and concepts, you probably don't need to read Neuromancer. Yeah, probably not.

You probably don't have to. But if you really want to. But if you want really the foundation of where all of this stuff was popularized, 100% go for it. Don't, don't, this is going to be- And it does, it does, I will say this, it does dramatically predict a lot of the consequences of the internet before the internet really had a chance

to become a thing that people knew about. I mean, we joked about it before with like being addicted to being online. It's like- And posting. This isn't, so this isn't technically pre-internet like when when when did the internet first happen yeah but we when i talk pre-internet i mean pre-wide adoption of the internet so anything before like the mid 90s yeah i was about to say i think at

this point the concept of servers containing information that can be accessed by multiple computers was a thing but it was like stuff at cern it wasn't until home internet became a thing that you can talk about it was like databases maintained at universities and shit um it wasn't until like you get aol online but it's if people just even in like the afterword of this book about how the only thing that gibson um that a lot of people are like, man, dude, you just really dropped the ball on this one, is not understanding. Like every other fucking sci-fi writer in the 1970s, 80s

was the dominance of the personal cellular phone. Personal computing, yeah. Yeah, like people did not predict the handheldness, the tininess, and the overwhelming accessibility of a tiny little baby computer in your hand yeah and how absolutely addicting it would be because he did kind of have like a pc yeah yeah like like whatever they call it his rig that they haul around with him so he can be on line is just a big personal computer it's he's just taking his gaming pc everywhere he goes yeah they're just carrying around a fucking ginormous ass it's like that scorpion chair they're carrying around the big water-cooled gaming pc

it's like you know that like stupid uh gaming chair computer combo thing that has like the monitors and the computer all built into this weird scorpion looking thing. Yeah. It's like that. It's that's kind of like the big wraparound thing. It's the big wraparound thing. It comes up above your head. The chair is built in.

You just put the helmet down and you're in. Yeah, that's basically it. Yeah, it is. It's really what it is. So. Fuck. So did he predict a lot? What?

A hundred percent. Holy shit. Do this something we're going to talk about throughout the rest of the month i the problem with cyberpunk is that they were right yeah it's extremely depressing john and it sucks like why did i do this to us? They were right, but it's really bad timing. It sucks that they were right about what humanity and neoliberal capitalism would do to the world. I mean, we don't have full on like razor girls running around taking out contract hits on people, but. Well, not that we know of. Give it a couple. Give it a couple of years. Yeah.

not that we know of give it a couple give it a couple years yeah um but like you know it's real surface level stuff but to be like you know corporations basically run our day-to-day lives as opposed to the government you know it's these corporate relationships that determine who has access to what information and to what part of your livelihood or your comfort at any given time and can take it away from you at any given time. As anybody who has a friend network that exists entirely on Twitter will feel after recent days, when you are suddenly under the direct fear that you're going to lose contact with everyone you know, that one guy at a corporation can just destroy your life. That's a pretty cyberpunk thing to do. Especially people who use Twitter to promote themselves as artists, creators, content creators, like your livelihoods or whatever.

creators, content creators, like your livelihoods or whatever. And when I say that's a pretty cyberpunk thing to do, I mean that in the worst way possible. I don't mean like, oh, that was really cyberpunk. Like, oh man, that was cool. Like a ninja in a mech suit. I mean, that's pretty cyberpunk. Like the world is a capitalist hellscape we cannot escape from and everything's getting worse all the time so what what we're really saying is with all of this the final takeaway is that power rangers is cyberpunk yes power rangers is cyberpunk and is the apotheosis of Japanese culture. Neuromancer has taught me this. I don't mean of Japanese culture. I'd say I should say more accurately.

It is the synthesis of the three major like thematic branches that have come out of Japan. You've got mechs. You've got ninjas. You got Kaiju. You've got Kaiju. Go, go Power Rangers. Saban. Oh, Saban.

Fuck me. Well, thank you all so much for listening. Thank you for sticking with us through our little break while our lives changed irrevocably for better or worse reasons. We love you all very much. If you should feel so inclined to do, go to whatever podcast thing and tell people we're cool. That apparently helps. Yeah.

Other podcasts say these things, so I assume I'm supposed to too. Shout out to the tweet the other day that liked our Berserk episode. Oh, hell yeah. Our Berserk episode was actually interestingly very popular. Didn't expect that. Thank you. If you

do want to hear us talk more about stuff like about Acura or Everything Everywhere All at Once or other non-book media, subscribe to the Patreon. We put out it's usually one episode a month. We did miss last month, so this month is going to have two

because we forgot one last month. Technically, we recorded it at the end of the month, but I didn't get it edited in time. So, oh well. But no, thank you all very much. You're great. And we will be back soon with Ghost in the Shell Ghost in the Shell

which we will talk about the manga and the movie because they're inseparable and we're going to talk about both yeah because we also just really like the movie so the movie kicks ass not the Scarlett Johansson one yeah not that one goodbye Yeah, not that one. Goodbye! Bro.

Are you fucking real, man? Come on.