It’s not the world we are heading to, its the world we were heading to in 1985. We’re already there. It’s just way more pernicious and theres less fetishization of japan.
Wasn't the Japan stuff in 80s scifi primarily fear that their economy would overtake the US and Europe? It was the postwar economic miracle period for Japan.
I'd argue that the fear and orientalism are still here, just pointed at China instead of Japan.
Yeah there was a time in the 1970s if you had a Japanese car in a major urban area you could expect it to get vandalized. There was also that Micheal Crichton novel Rising Sun, and a bunch of Tom Clancy novels are about how a conspiracy of evil Japanese businessmen are gonna take over the world.
It was a weird moment where Japan was the designated enemy for a while. It really goes to show how easily propagandized the average American is, deciding who their enemies are based on whichever economic desire our capitalists have. Japan eventually lost this fight though, the Plaza accords and the Liberal Party trying to cut taxes ended up in the 1990s recession, which they never quite recovered from. Now Japan has a much less hostile and dominant role in their trade with the west
That was also when "J-slur Crap" started being used by car people, wasn't it? My boomer parents always assumed stuff that was made in Japan was of poor quality - they are the same about China now, obviously.
Now people buy the absolute cheapest stuff the can find on wish and call it chineseium when their $0.40 wrench lasts exactly as long as you'd think a $0.40 wrench would
My $0.40 wrench broke! They're trying to destroy the west
Well, afaik the US just bullied them with debt and currency. There was an article posted here ages ago about it
People here are probably too young to remember, but by the late 1980s Nikkei 225 index had risen by more than 900% over 15 years, outperforming Nasdaq and S&P and every other market by miles.
Japan’s invasion of Hollywood, with Sony acquiring Columbia Pictures. Mitsubishi bought the Rockefeller Center. Japanese investors were buying up US properties left and right. For your ordinary Americans, it had looked like Japan would own America by the end of the century.
Japan already overtook US in worldwide semiconductor sales in the mid-1980s, with rumors of Fairchild, IBM and even Intel itself being acquired by Japanese firms. An internal Intel memo predicting that “Silicon Valley might become a wasteland” as it laid off 30% of its workers.
Then… it all came crashing down by Christmas day of 1989. The extraordinary growth of Japanese economy had been fueled by cheap credit, leading to asset price bubble that eventually bursted. Japan never recovered from that.
The US would also go on the experience a similar fate: with the financial deregulation of the Clinton era (started during Reagan) pumping out cheap credit that fueled the 1990s growth, everyone thought they would get richer simply by endlessly borrowing from the banks and going all in into real estate. This ultimately precipitated in the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008, and the global financial crisis of 2009. In many ways the US still hasn’t recovered from that crash.
Cheap credit was certainly a factor but I don't think you can ignore the effect of the Plaza Accords, the forced appreciation of the Yen, and the forced transfer of semi-conductor technology from Toshiba to Intel and other US compamies.
Japan is not a fully independent state and was/is under effective US military occupation. That's why they had to knuckle under and give the Americans what they wanted but when America tried the same against China, China told them to go eat shit.
Fun side story: at the height of the bubble, one property valuer estimated the land that the Imperial Palace in Tokyo sat on was worth more than all the real estate in California.
Definitely, my point is that it could never have lasted in any case. Junk mortgages are junk mortgages, just like the US subprime housing bubble - you cannot fuel the bubble indefinitely, it has to come crashing down at some point.
As I understand it part of the whole basis for Japan's astronomical growth in the post war period was the deliberate setting of the value if the yen below its actual value.
Nah, that's what the Yankoids what you to think because nobody could possibly beat America unless they were cheating. The Americans have been accusing China of the same thing as well.
In reality, nobody is going to buy a Japanese product if its not a good product. Japan had a strong centralized industrial policy where the state directed and financed the creation of key industrial sectors like automobiles and electronics. This goes against American free market ideology, which is why America is so committed to the myth of Japanese currency manipulation.
Well that, and a big does of "those yellows can only be beating us if they're cheating" racism.
No as i understand it the setting of the yen at a favorable interest rate was part of the process if recapitalizing the Japanese economy after the war. It was a deliberate move to undercut the Japanese communist party.
Rent for offices in Ginza hit 200k USD per square meter at points lol
less fetishization of japan.
idk have you seen how many weebs there are now?
i thought the weeb infestation was under control is there something going on with the zoomers
This could be debated but... sci fi dystopia is meant to highlight the horror we are in right now, not necessarily some prediction of the future. The use of an exaggerated fictional future is meant to shake off the intense normalization of existing in modernity.
I don't think this holds entirely true for cyberpunk as a genre. Like take cyberpunk-esque augmentations, that's just straight up a non-issue, even today. Right on the money as how that will go, if nothing else changes, but I don't think that's a horror applicable now. The underlying problem of how the system works, sure, but that's more a cautionary tale as to how things play out, not how they currently are
Plastic surgery? It's just having silicone implanted rather than silicon.
The thing is that Cyberpunk 2077 exaggerates the evils of capitalism so far into absurdity that it stops being a critique of capitalism. Instead of the true mundane horrors of capitalism we have today, where companies basically knowingly stuff everything with microplastics and get away with it by greenwashing, and where single billionaires can inspired coups in foreign nations, Cyberpunk 2077 is a world where corporations feed you literal slop made of 100% artificial substances using the most crude and disgusting advertisements.
What CDPR does is basically make the most over the top faux capitalism where people do obviously evil shit and then gesture at it to go "haha wow glad we don't live like that, huh gamers?" There's absolutely zero meat to their critique, it's a capitalist strawman.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a world where corporations feed you literal slop made of 100% artificial substances using the most crude and disgusting advertisements.
I agree with your overall point, but if news broke tomorrow that the Impossible Burger was 80% plastic by mass I would not be surprised at all. Given how evil irl corporations already are you really have to exaggerate to predict how evil they'll get in 50 years. Otherwise you end up with shit like Quantum of Solace, where James Bond fought to prevent an evil corporation from privatizing all of Bolivia's water... And raising prices less than an actual company did irl.
Impossible Burger was 80% plastic by mass
as long as the macros are good i'll keep eating that garbage
Even if it was 80% plastic, the advertising would still be positive advertising, trying to spin it as still a good thing.
Compared to Cyberpunk 2077 where their artificial slop is basically advertised as being the most disgusting slop ever, but people still accept that anyway
2077 is just the aesthetics of cyberpunk and little meat, but absurdist late stage capitalism is not uncommon in the genre.
It's also basically a post-apocalyptic setting. The rest of the world except for Canada, Sweden, and Japan is Fallout. Like despite all the evil capitalism, the main reason the world is a disaster is because there was a nuclear war, which for me really distracts from any sort of capitalist critique because I'd imagine any system dealing with those material conditions is gonna end up having horrors.
I didn't remember anything about widespread nuclear war. The Arasaka-Militech Corporate war ended with both sides getting nationalized, not widespread nuclear devastation. The USSR still exists (though subsumed by Sov Oi), as does China (as evidenced by Kang Tao and you do a quest for someone implied to be a Chinese spy). Theres also lots of references to Europe being a haven for advanced Biotech (especially in the expansion) and there's advertising for holiday packages in Somalia.
The Arasaka-Militech Corporate war ended with both sides getting nationalized
I thought it was supposed to be a dystopia
It is still a dystopia because Militech and Arasaka then ate the US and Japanese governments from the inside out. The president of the New USA is a former Militech exec.
it also totally misses the mark in some aspects. in actual gameplay, you have the ability to work for the police and literally help them fight people around the city. there's literally a whole copaganda mission glorifying some sexy detective. corps are evil, and capitalism has gone too far, but the police are your friends and you should help them shoot people on the street!
I wanted to like that section so bad too, because i'm a sucker for noir and bladerunner shit, but the glorification of the cops in this game was so gross, and immediately breaks immersion when the protag is continually shit talking them when they aren't on screen.
the game even has some in-game cartoons that mock the police force in the game, animations put out by the NCPD that depict the police officers as buff cool dogs and civilians as stupid little dogs and do show the NCPD to be authoritarian and overly violent. so they put effort into making the NCPD seem that way, but in actual gameplay they are nothing but heroes just trying to protect the city from cyberpsychos and gangs, with the police fixer telling V to simply incapacitate cyberpsychos as if ACTUAL police wouldn't be eager to slaughter someone (like capitalist police truly are like). this incongruence totally destroyed the message and immersion for me and made the actual game seem more pro-police.
oh my god those are infuriating too, because for a long time i thought maybe there was a way to actually incapacitate them but i'm pretty fucking sure there isn't. half the time, their health drops to 0 and wil roll on the floor, clearly alive but in pain, but the in game text that gets sent is still "sorry, had to waste 'em, lmao"
i think you have to use a nonlethal takedown or something but yeah its pretty stupid
Depending on when you played, it was probably a DoT effect on them. In early patches (and I'm not sure when this was changed, so that could be pre 1.6 or even pre 2.0) DoT effects would keep ticking and kill incapacitated enemies, but now all DoTs are non-lethal and stop when they go down.
Weird, I don't know what's happening then. I've been hitting them with all the quickhack DoTs and laying into them with a monowhip, and then just back off when they're down to a few percent at which point the bleed, burn, or poison incaps them. If you're using a blunt weapon be careful you're not hitting them after their health hits 0, because at that point any further damage will kill them, even nonlethal.
the police fixer
She's a former journalist turned fixer, not a cop. There's even a mission where she sends you to help another journalist she knows/used to work with, who tears into her as an amoral sellout who gave up investigative journalism to go be a mercenary agent.
my mistake, i seemed to have interpreted her to be a cop for some reason. my point still stands with the random NCPD activities around the map.
Probably the vest. She has a very generic detective sort of look, and that seems to be a common assumption.
the random NCPD activities around the map.
The funniest part of that is that it was clearly someone's "clever" idea for a diegetic way of pointing the player at all these little world mini-events so you don't miss them, then they forgot the system was some formal private contractor thing and included a bunch of things that the cops wouldn't be paying people to go deal with, like there's multiple NCPD Scanner events involving corporate soldiers having murdered some journalist or massacred protesters or striking workers and you get a payout for killing the soldiers and grabbing a copy of their orders or w/e.
I really can't agree with your overall read of how the game handles cops either: every "good" cop either gets killed, driven out, or fired for it, and every time a cop finds their conscience it's because of a direct personal connection to an issue (like the toxic shitbag cops who are worried about their former coworker, the cops you find in the process of murdering some corpo suit who'd put one of their family members into a coma, or the cop in the DLC who dies carrying out a heist of medical supplies to deal with a local health crisis that affected him personally). Like the mission with River ends with the discovery that the NCPD was involved in the assassination and coverup and River gets fired for investigating it at all, then his big rogue investigation thing after that was him looking for a missing family member, leaving him to hit both points of being systemically punished for doing the right thing, and only sticking his neck out to help someone when that someone was a family member of his.
My entire life I’ve wanted to make art or music or something, but I’ve always been scared because what if people get the wrong message from it? Posts like this confirm to me that’s gonna happen no matter how blatant and loudly you spell it out for people so you might as well do it.
Let's be honest here CDPR's Cyberpunk is very mild in its criticism of capitalism. It uses it more for the aesthetics than for any kind of critic of society.
There's only one mission I remember where you engage with any sort of revolutionary rhetoric. It's the one where you're tracking down hidden messages calling for an overthrow of capitalism. Johnny's there commenting, and despite how he's supposed to be this militant revolutionary himself, he completely mocks the hidden messages. He goads you to find the rest and where they're coming from, I think he says they're probably written by some dumb angsty kid. I thought it seemed really out of tone, but now I realize the game's writers completely missed the point of the setting.
Then again I'm losing faith in cyberpunk as a genre to begin with. William Gibson turned out to be the biggest liberal on Earth. Mike Pondsmith doesn't seem much better.
The punchline of that quest was what made it even worse if you ask me. Someone hooked up a fortune telling machine to the net and made it spit out random sentences with a revolutionary flavor as a joke and as a result you have this entire group that is buying into it.
Johnny also does this during Judy's quest line to start a revolution at Clouds, a brothel.
Despite being portrayed as a revolutionary and a rebel, Johnny spends the entire time shitting on Judy and the other sex workers specifically because they're sex workers - the plan isn't good, but Johnny's problems aren't with the plan at any point.
All cyber, no punk.
well, to be fair johnny was never really portrayed as a feminist icon, that was part of his character. he was pretty shitty with alt. being militantly anti-capitalist doesn't mean he's immune to having misogynistic and anti-sex worker views.
The game does go out of its way to attenuate or neuter a revolutionary message every chance it gets. Hell, V recognizes the problems with unfettered capitalism (conversation with Takemura outside Arasaka warehouses), but defends the status quo every chance they get (convo between johnny and V in Pacifica after Placide). The game always defaults to implying the system is fine for most people.
Not like he is literally dying because of the system. I wish I could play V as a fledgling socialist, honestly.
V isn't really portrayed as dying because of systemic problems, though, he's dying because of his weird individual problem of installing a prototype brain chip. He could just as easily have not installed it and been no worse off: the run's already fucked and he gets killed by Dex anyway.
If there wasn't such a strong incentive in the system to become wealthy, V possibly wouldn't ever try to get into problematic situations like the Konpeki heist.
Night City is known as the city of dreams because it offers the rich and powerful all the comforts money can buy, and a quick way there is merc work. If you don't have money, you're less than nothing.
I’ve never played it because I’m not sure if my computer could handle it, but also even though I’m not super knowledgeable about cyberpunk I think an entire world of it that you’re thrust into would be a little much. Outside of that though I’m still surprised how much content of any kind people consume but don’t really think about. I know art for arts sake is still valid, but I’ve always tried to look for meaning in any piece of art I’m experiencing and it’s just wild to me that other people not only don’t do that, but are almost proud that they don’t? Idk it’s just very foreign to me anytime I see it.
A lot of people really fail to pick up media literacy skills, even if they've been to university. I think a lot of focus on STEM being the most important thing leads people to look down on and not engage with lit and media studies classes in a
way.I know it took me an embarrassing amount of time into my young adult life to start engaging with the media I consume lol.
My teachers tried, but I really think my media literacy was developed by brute force by polishing off a novel every week or so for several years.
I took a film studies class in college and didn't quite get it until years later
. Honestly, I was really struggling to find a social circle and figure out what I wanted to complete a degree in at that time, but STILL!
I pirated it to check out my rig and its doing really solid. RTX 3060, ryzen 7 7700x, 16gb ram, 1440p, everything high/ultra, plus ray traced reflections. with dlss on balanced i maintain 60fps
i once had a coworker tell me that Metal Gear Solid "isn't political." and I'm still trying to wrap my head around how few brain cells that kind of thought requires.
Wait Metal Gear Solid, the games that feature themes such as: the cold war, war economy, the military industrial complex, espionage, coups, PMCs etc. Are political? I thought it was just about cool stealth man getting hot babes and killing guys.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Its crazy that a grown ass adult (presumably) can throw a statement like that 😂
Ironically cyberpunk is itself emblematic of a gross capitalist system.
Punishing crunch development period, released in a broken state, only high end machines can play the game, for some reason it gets an anime adaptation, G@mers "forgive" the company.
All just to be a GTA clone with RPG mechanics.
gets an anime adaptation
Looping back to
Punishing crunch development period
But for the anime
Cyberpunk being commodotized into an aesthetic made by underpaid developers is quintessential cyberpunk.
i would argue that we are already there. if you think about it, everything but the augmentations is already here.
also this made me realize how cool it would be to have a cyberpunk genre game where you organize and lead a proletariat revolution as the main story, seriously i hate how stupid the politics are in games.
I actually had an idea for a cyberpunk game where you start off fighting off workers who were angry they were being replaced, especially as they'd sacrificed most of their limbs to remain competitive in a market where current gen robots couldn't match them, but newer robots were being rolled that absolutely would. Your character would then find himself being replaced as job contracts are burning up as robots are replacing you too, and you'd be forced to give up portions of your character's body to remain competitive in an ultimately losing battle. The option to fight the robots is always available but sours the companies that employed them against you.
And that's it; there's no way to beat the system in this uphill battle, and companies whose employed robots you destroy will never be happy that you're harming their bottom line. Corporations are not your friends and you can't win by ignoring them outsourcing your work to robots, and they won't be happy when you try to protect your future by harming their bottom line.
Ending is either you accept a payout and retire, or you get hired to fight off others who had your job and are fighting off robots, or the corporations alter legislation to make your job illegal 'because it's a danger to you and in this age, there's no reason to risk human life doing what robots can do'.
I mean, Red Faction Guerilla isn't far off, it's sci-fi and literally a worker's revolution (though against a very cliche villainous enemy). And given your almighty physical and mental powers, you could easily say you have cyber implants.
Cyberpunk 2077 is fine, especially after 2.0 patch, combat is great, different builds can give you a lot of fun. But when it comes to storytelling it misses the point entirely. V has a pretty good life, the horrors of dystopia doesn't really apply to him. Of cours Jackie, the Relic etc, are a huge problem for him, but in this world you're a cybernetic demi-god, have all the money, cars, apartments, there are no downsides.
i think the side quests and contracts better shows how much of a capitalist hellhole Night City is.
Yeah there's some real gnarly shit in the side content. Sometimes I feel like criticism of the game is coming mainly from people who just did the main quest and not much side content.q
My issue with it, and the same goes for a lot of RPGs that do this type of storytelling, is if you immerse yourself into it makes zero sense to do any side stuff, due to the impending doom coming.
The games fun, but I'm just griping about that form of storytelling. It detracts for me, especially if there's a lot of good side content because I'll constantly be pulled out of the game remembering the doom that the character has conveniently decided to ignore. It's the type of plot line for narrowly focused games, not something as sprawling as this.
Yeah CDPR has real issues with that kind of dissonance. Witcher 3 had a similar problem with Geralt ostensibly chasing Ciri but also fucking around and doing side content.
I need to save my daughter, but, you know, I could fuck around and play Magic: the Gathering instead.
V has a pretty good life
V almost immediately gets a cyberghost implanted into their brain which starts to kill them/overwrite their identity while also verbally abusing them. The only way it can be seen as a "good life" is if you illogically fuck around for hours and hours on end with all the sidequests which no person who's essentially dying of brainghost supercancer with a small hope of being able to cure it if they focus on the main tasks at hand would do.
i havent been able to do a deep dive into the expansion yet but its thrown me off that the initial plot of phantom liberty is...assisting the president of the NUSA. like oh...ok i guess thats what punks do now? anarcho-biden ass politics
without spoiling too much, the whole plot of the expansion is kinda liberal bullshit with garbage about maintaining "loyalty to the ideals of the country" and "duty to protect it". the missions themselves are cool, the story sucks.
Cyberpunk enjoyers really think they are some shadow runner PMCs, Yet i don't see them working as a uber driver.
Curious
my 40¢ wrench broked it must have been xi jinping
