The 90's are 30 years ago(??). I've often wondered if the people taking piracetam or whatever it was back then have had any long term effects, good or bad. It felt like dialing up your IQ and awareness was possible. You just had to figure out the right combination of substances to take.
I just spent 20 minutes looking over google results for nootropics and seems like little has changed.
Edit: Thought archive.org might have this magazine and, of course, they do!
It's a lot harder to read than I remember and the ads are better than I remember. There's also more nudity than I recall... so maybe don't open this at work.
We might not have the great hacker collectives and hackerspaces of the past, but the culture is still out there. L0pht might be gone from Boston, sure. But these kids give me a ton of inspiration. [0]
Don't mean to 'go off', but life has no meaning beyond that which you give it. If you 'fictionalize' your existence in the context of cyberpunk, and great science fiction books, and compelling video games, you become a character in those stories. Life is richer for it.
https://www.wired.com/story/mtba-charliecard-hack-defcon-202... [0]
There was generally a ton of tech promise and a vibe of excitement, libertarian nonjudgmental sexuality that didn't demand both labeling AND acceptance as it seems to now (as can be seen throughout that magazine)... all of this at the cusp of the explosion of the Internet...
You can’t watch “Are We the Baddies?” as a war story. It introduced such elements simply to establish who’s getting made fun of. They remain in character but that’s it, the war story plot doesn’t progress the skit just keeps hammering the parody. Some parody has a more complete story but “Scary Movie” progresses the underlying plot to make fun of different elements of the movies it’s making fun of.
Harry Potter on the other hand calls out many of the tropes it’s using. House of the lions vs house of the snakes, guess who’s supposed to be the hero and who the villain. Except the characters once introduced are telling an actual story.
Snow Crash is between those extremes but focuses too much on the underlying story and its characters to be an actual parody. Over the top elements exist in the world, but they are played straight more Gulliver's Travels than Spaceballs.
I feel like snow crash it's kinda along those lines.
It has all the vibe of cyberpunk except for the magick, but if you mentally replace magick with "quantum futuristic alien tech masked as godly one" it still fits with the lore.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sttm8Q9rOdQ
There are currently 3 parts to the series, and it is an interesting overview of the genre.
[0]you had to buy a descrambler to watch it [1]she would never explicitly say it was cracked, because of course everything was cracked [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjDHhdx_tGY
Resident Evil, the Umbrella Corporation.
Or, further back, Bubblegum Crisis, Genom Corporation.
Most of those cyborg stories (Edgerunners, the newer Deus Ex's games, Ghost In The Shell) are more like... Hmm, perhaps Phantom of the Opera.
Alien/s, now that's SciFi about motherhood.
I guess if I was going to approach "cyberpunk Frankenstein" I'd end up somewhere adjacent to Michael Marshall Smith's Spares ("human clones, the ultimate health insurance").
The whole concept of a counterculture is gone. The closest thing we have to a counterculture in the US today is the MAGA/militia/Q-Anon movement.
You're probably just getting old
There are structural and cultural reasons that make it difficult to have one now (the internet's total immediacy and transparency of everything, post-modernism which means nothing is ever really new now, just recombinations).
There's not really a mainstream culture now. Even the biggest consent-manufactories like the 'mainstream media' are actually a minority in an overall fragmented and dissenting pseudoculture that's becoming more like an ecosystem than an expanding monoculture. What would have been 'the dominant culture' in the civil rights era, the domain of the Cronkites of that era, is now just another minority, perhaps the largest single minority but still distrusted or ignored by the majority.
What the counterculture movement of the 70s and 80s presented, at least externally through hair, clothes, tattoos, piercing, etc is now post mainstream.
It’s like this huge portion of society “rebelling” against a Nixon that no longer exists, or is a much smaller portion of the population than it was when it was an oppressive majority.
I remember in middle school I was paddled by the headmaster because my hair was too long. It touched my shirt collar in the back.
[0] premiered in 2012, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Comes_Honey_Boo_Boo
Take absurdism, or the deconstruction of gender for example. Or people using mastodon just to show the 12-ish friends that they repaired a their dirt cheap bike. I think also you could also argue that Meta-Irony is some form of counterculture.
Just think things that are not commodified yet.
Aside from identity, is there no counterculture, or is everything so interconnected and observable via Internet and social media that nothing is in a "dark corner" anymore? I can see that argument.
Maybe twenty years ago, it’s hit a significant low single digits and had a chunk of prime shelf space to display mass produced merchandise at Target.
I think the change is that things are marketed as if they are cool and novel and rate, because that sells more. But it’s obviously not rare and counterculture if Walmart is ordering a million “Yas queen” t-shirts and selling them in 25k population cities.
Controversial doesn’t mean counter-culture. There’s just different preferences in the mainstream.
Some people liked Michael Jackson, some liked Garth Brooks. Neither were counter-culture. They were both very mainstream.
MAGA is way too mainstream to be a counter culture. QAnon is more like a belief in certain conspiracies than an ethos you live by, no?
wfh
automating away exploitative labor
intentionally not having kids/imploding nuclear family as the norm
<50% in US are convinced god exists
local AI/ML threatening copyright rent seekers
steam/proton
online retail impact on brick and mortar
Spearheaded because of huge pandemic "extreme condition" measures, with more to come.
>automating away exploitative labor
And relegating of pesky ex-workers to slums Soylent Green / Ellysium style.
>intentionally not having kids/imploding nuclear family as the norm
Massive demographic collapse, with societies full of older selfish adults, Children of Men style.
><50% in US are convinced god exists
But 99% still worships money and the rat race as god.
>local AI/ML threatening copyright rent seekers
And non-local AI killing the livehoods of artists and creatives, for the benefit of AI corporate overlords.
>online retail impact on brick and mortar
Consolidation of consumer market on a handful or corporate behemoths, Robocop style.
You say all those things as if they're good...
(And the fact that "steam/proton" even makes the list as something of similar importance is cherry on top)
Counterculture existes in libre gaming, distros, hackers, underground games such as Nethack, IF games from IF archive, niche electronica/rock/metal/blues from Jamendo (Revolution Void, Proleter, Helfervescent, Nanowar (ok, now is half-mainstream, but still...) and now saved back in archive.org thanks to James Scott...
The defining characteristic of 80s-90s cyberpunk is that it's about near-future crime. So it shares an awful lot -- if not absolutely everything -- with noir. The "punk" aspect is that cyberpunk stories are often told from the perspective of the criminal rather than the detective.
The r*dditors who go on and on about "i-it's all about urban dystopia and corporate conspiracies!" are dead wrong, because both elements don't always (-- indeed very rarely --) feature in the foundational literary works of the genre. Take Burning Chrome, for instance: All of the stories are about crime, but the features of the settings are rarely clear.
So much for literary cyberpunk. Cyberpunk in art -- e.g. www.cyberpunk.tech -- is its own thing, and just as old.
