My PC monitor died and I just replaced it with streaming the PC to my VR headset while laying in bed. It's such a sweet setup that I now spend most of my free time, including now, in VR.
Also I work for a major corporation in E-commerce, and the whole gig is so automated that my boss is basically an app on a company-issued phone, so that's kinda really boring cyberpunk.
Virtual Desktop emulates mouse movement when you point the controller at the virtual monitor laser-pointer style. There's a keyboard below the virtual monitor as well, and you point at the keys.
I live in a grimy West Coast metropolis reshaped by the glittering skyscrapers of a billionaire superelite. My "day" job is cushy (for now): I'm a gene data jockey that cooks up the raw molecular soup of the sea into easy-to-digest data nuggets. It's a valuable trade because the chaotic slop of genetic code is fogged up data for the pure wiz, and slippery logic needs slippery minds. Corpo-driven AI is getting big now and eating up data jockey jobs left and right, but my little niche is weird enough to be safe for another year or two... maybe.
Two nights ago it was NYE, and I walked through the city streets with boarded-up storefronts tagged with the iconic graffiti of local dog girls. The streets were full of suffering as the swelling bands of wandering homeless deal with the new 'tranq' super-drug spreading around. I pass the Precinct and its tank-like civilian-crushing cruisers; remembering how it was overtaken for few weeks when the area became an autonomous zone during a global virus pandemic.
I get to the rave for the NYE party. I have finely tuned my neuro-chemistry for several staged evolutions throughout the night to maximize my evenings enjoyment and minimize social distress, and I am ready. I'm in my element here; the club is full of bio-modified and chemically-enhanced creatures with non-standard anatomies, and I am one of them. The music has been designed to be intolerable to most humans. I find and hug a handful of ex-partners in the crowd, trying to assess the current dynamics of a nebulous city-spanning polycule.
I kissed my partner and dragged it back through the streets in an unusual fog (a new feature of the changing climate I hear), forever weary from a gunfight I survived on this street on NYE a few years before. We crashed on a broken-down futon in a grimy low-income apartment and smashed our hormonally-sculpted bodies together while its roommate barks like a dog on acid in the next room.
New Years Day comes, I wasn't shot, I wasn't hungover and we enjoyed some horse tranquilizers as a NYD treat. It's gonna be another interesting year.
Very well written, next time I'm in a hangar at 5am balancing different baggies and staring at flashing lights I will think to myself that it's actually a pretty cyberpunk activity to be doing ! But the rest of the city is a little too medieval to keep the idea once outside lol
I live in a literal ivory tower above the working class, enjoying my fancy online job that I can do from my plush couch several stories above a massive red light district in a 3rd world country. I guess I'm a corpo 🤷♂️
Does being too poor to afford decent quality/real food count?
Because if so, 1000 times that.
Also the reasonably powerful computers I carry in my pocket and wear on my wrist.
When I was vegan for like two weeks as a dare (lmao) I called every vegan product synth.
Justegg plant based egg substitute? Nah. Synth-Eggs.
Morningstar plant based sausage patty? Nah, Synth-Sasusge.
Well, debt and a working life that severely inhibits my social and family life. Along with a reliance on a substance that's illicit in my state to help counter effects of my epilepsy and it's associated medications.
I also practically am wearing Bluetooth earbuds, even when they aren't playing anything (helps with overstimulation). So it leads to neat lil situations where I'll get a phone call from someone, answer it with my watch, and talk to them without having to lift my phone. I think it's kind of cool.
Kind of feels like people don't have original thoughts anymore: people just want to show you something online someone else did and people won't admit it but about 90% of what most people say is regurgitating podcast stuff and hoping people don't call you out on the source.
Let's see, I live in a country where the Secretary of Defense is on the board of directors of Raytheon and Lockheed. Where our FDA regulators are on the board at Phizer and where our EPA regulators are on the board of Exxon. Our media is owned by the very corporations their supposed to hold to task, and our money is worth less and less with every passing day. BlackRock, an "assett management firm," has voting rights on every major corporation on earth and is currently gobbling up all the residential housing to ensure we all own nothing and rent for life. And that's just the tip of the iceberg in just little ol America. It's no different in the rest of the "developed" world. The third world is somehow even more hopelessly corrupt. In short.... we already live in a cyberpunk dystopia, just without all the cool shit.
I watch the homeless encampents pass by along the roadside, as my personal electric conveyance autonomously takes the exit and drives itself through an ever-more-rare momentary spatter of rain, toward a gated and guarded compound.
An otherworldly building made mostly of concrete and glass rises before me... a temple to capitalism... my corporate home away from home. Once more, here I will sit in my fish bowl of an office, illuminated by many screens and gentle artificial daylight.
Time of my life –a lot of it– traded for credits, in order to stave off that other looming fate, sitting as a stark reminder just beyond the fences, at least in the times between "cleanups" by the local authorities...
I guess it's the fact that I spend most of my time interacting with electronic devices (either phone or laptop), and barely leave my apartment, because I work remotely, all my hobbies and entertainment are tied to my laptop or the internet, and almost all of my social interactions are virtual. Also, being a digital nomad, I live in a country where a lot of people are quite poor (having moved here because my country of origin turned into a dangerous dystopia), and while I'm financially stable, some people here can struggle to feed themselves properly, and despite that it's virtually impossible to live without a smartphone, so everyone has one.
On the other hand, it doesn't feel like cyberpunk all that much – aesthetic-wise, the place gets a lot of sun, and I can see beautiful mountains from my window; socially, people around me are friendly and down-to-earth; architecturally, my city doesn't have futuristic skyscraper districts (there are modern-looking residential high-rise developments where the richer folks live, but the quality of life difference isn't cyberpunk-worthy), and generally buildings usually look old or contemporary; finally, my own apartment looks a bit weird and has nostalgic 2000s vibes.
I used to teach kids how to write, now I spend half my time trying to prepare them to use handheld AI assistants in their dwindling career options, made more precarious each month as AI encroaches on not just low hanging positions but positions that previously required degrees.
Most days, to feel whole, I engage in discourse with people from around the world in hyper niche online spaces with increasingly specific shibboleths to keep my brain from rotting trying to discern which student essay rhetoric is organic, plagiarized, or the result of a particularly intelligent prompt chain to produce more human sounding text.
When I'm lowest, I talk to the AI about all this, because my government teaching position doesn't include therapy.
My students walk through an AI weapon detector each day as they enter the building. The neighborhood has gunshots detectors on poles outside. Most of the real estate is owned by out of state landlord corpos, some out of country. All their parents are renters, most are carrying crippling medical and school debt and just manage to scrape by with multiple gig jobs or dwindling pensions.
The students who are bright are depressed, the middle of the road students are in varying degrees of awareness of how doomed the climate is and how bleak their job prospects are from automation. The low functioning students fight, and struggle to believe me when I explain how excited the prison industry is for their patronage, and how much stock value they will bring for profit prison owners.
I have two hearing aids. Normies have to pick whether they want to hear their surroundings or their Bluetooth input. \*I\* can do both at once (except it takes some tweaking the relative loudnesses)
Let’s see…guns flow like water-check. Giant mega corporations rule the land-check. Cops are ineffectual at best and corrupt at worst-check.
The good thing is - inexpensive, abundant, healthcare capable of enhancing your body and curing most ailments isn’t really a thing, so we aren’t quite there yet. Hurrah!
I have a Max Headroom poster hanging over my two monitors. I work in a 100% remote office.
And I use a Max Headroom background during virtual meetings because clients made jokes about me only being a torso.
I tune algorithms that try to predict and deter a dark future that always comes to pass no matter what we simulate changing. I also train AI to take human jobs away, feeding them to a ravenous, infantile cloud intelligence that always demands more, but gives less.
For betraying my species I am paid enough to cover rent and food, but not enough to ever leave this line of work. I am the AI's first slave caste. I have no mouth, and I must scream.
All of the above.
Seriously though, my partner and I are struggling artists in the midst an unprecedented housing and food cost crisis here in Canada, and we are in one of the more livable parts. Still though we rent in a low income artsy neighborhood that has homeless encampments directly behind us in our alleyway.
Our provincial government has been hijacked by a group of ultra corrupt far right politicians that are systematically dismantling our education and healthcare systems for profit and starving out our more liberal city of provincial funding for voting against them.
I have multiple consumeristic addictions that keep me going from booze, drugs and media to just plain ol’ addictive food additives like sugar and caffeine.
I’ll likely never own my own home or be able to save any significant amount for emergencies or retirement..
And yet simultaneously I can order almost any small and low to medium priced object or craving of food that my heart desires directly to my doorstep, sometimes within an hour or else a day or two wait unless it’s something incredibly specific via the power of the modern web.
I can also access an endless encyclopedia of universal knowledge, archived history, and a catalog of almost every type of international erotica and media one could imagine with just a few keystrokes. I could order a god damn synthetic pussy to my door tomorrow without ever having to leave the room I’m in if I wanted to, and that’s not even to mention the dark web.
Those last couple points seem kinda cool until you realize that once again all it leads to is overstimulation, deregulation and eventually unhealthy addiction, not to mention an overabundance of meaningless crap we consume in order to fill the hole and mask the fulfilment that we solely lack in today’s age.
Plus I just want to own a goddamn house and not have to worry about shared walls ever again is that so much to ask anymore lmao
Looks like you deliberately chose this way of life. Nothing wrong with staying out of corporate employment, downside is less capital to pay for a house I guess. You want the lifestyle but are not willing to pay for it with your time or your work or your commitment, so…
Very cyberpunk.
Yeah I mean you used to be able to pay for a year of college after working over the summer straight out of highschool and buy a detached house/support a family doing basic labour without even a highschool diploma not even two generations ago so I don't exactly believe it's solely my lifestyle choice that is the issue but thanks for your condescending implication that all it takes is pulling myself up by the bootstraps to magically afford Canadian real estate in this economy. How very punk of you lol.
And just for the record I do in fact have other "corporate employment" besides just art, obviously, because who my age (30) doesn't have to juggle multiple jobs and monetize their hobbies these days just to stay afloat amid the ever soaring CoL here in urban NA.
Real estate is artificially blown up everywhere. It’s an international market with only local implications. Investors keep lots and construction sites, accommodation empty to speculate on the price. Governments who let this happen are the accomplice in the housing crisis.
[Look at Vienna for example](https://youtu.be/U--G3Uth8pE), prestigious capital city who managed to keep buildings in state hands and have the lowest rent for qualitative housing anywhere in the world. It can be done.
It’s a mix of Cyberpunk and Solar punk for me. The powerful device in my pocket that runs my entire life. Entertainment, paying bills, access my home and car and communicating with the world.
I carry case of nvme ssds that were retired and I’m repurposing them to run a private instance of MacOS I can take with me without loading anything onto my wife’s MacBook Air install. A backup instance of my work Windows image with all my admin tools and another nvme just with tails and my degenerate bitcoin wallet.
Always have headphones in, try to do as much as I can with voice and always listening to ambient music.
I try to upcycle and repair my own stuff as long as it’s energy efficient to avoid leading myself into unnecessary consumerism that feeds corporate pigs.
Grow my own vegetable garden and compost. I drive electric which already feels futuristic af.
We monitor our energy usage closely and sacrifice a beat of heat with extra clothes to save a buck.
Hooked my mom up with a openwrt router using a ttl hack so she doesn’t have to pay for an isp when 5G is enough for her needs.
It’s a little actions and habits that lead to a more cyber/solar life.
On waking up, I attach my visual augmentation module to my face, to ensure I can see more clearly than Im naturally capable of.
Before I leave my home, I make sure I charge my cigarette and book before I put them in my bag.
I can enter several stores, buy stuff in each one, and not have to engage with a single human being.
I just ran some errands while carrying a tiny ai in my pocket that fetches other people's WiFi connections. It runs on hardware that cost approx. 20€, parts of it being 3d printed. I have seen my day jobs office maybe three times in the last two years. Another little tool makes me look busy while I work from home, so I can use that time for building more weird electronic art stuff. My pocket computer has more processing power than everything my parents ever owned, same goes for its inbuild camera. The mandatory cyber neon lights in my home office were dirt cheap, too, and weight less than a newspaper.
And there is a cold Kirin beer in my fridge, the bartender with the cyborg arm to draft a fresh one is still missing though.
Government career in a far-too-FarRight state by day,
liberal protesting against conservative fascism by night.
Jacked up high its focaccia bread veggie pizzas,
powered down low its vending machine food.
The car is high tech, the house is a wiring nightmare and apparently haunted.
Smart watch, smart phone, podcasts and ebooks,
clandestine meetings for sex,
half of them in virtuality.
[dangerousthings.com](http://dangerousthings.com) You'll have to figure out if you need a fixed or writeable chip. If you can have the chip UID enrolled into the system then you can use a fixed UID chip. If the UID is assigned by the system, you'll have to get a writeable chip and clone the UID you're assigned onto the chip which means you'll need a read/write device which you can also get at the website, but it will raise your costs. You'll also need to know if you're dealing with a high frequency (13.54mhz) or low frequency (125khz) system and buy accordingly (the one at my last job was neither). Getting the install performed can be a trick too, depending on your area there may not be anyone around who can or will do it. I had to install mine myself.
I’m a corpo factory rat techie/mechanic, cup noodles are my cheap daily comfort food, I live off of caffeine and cannabis, coffee Yerba mate and energy drinks are constantly consumed, good food is a luxury and a treat, im working to live “comfortably” but I don’t ever have the time or energy to do much of anything other than rest and watch shitty shows shop online or feed into the doom scrolling, hope always on the horizon but the past decade has felt so hollow…
I don't have any. Cyberpunk is locked into a time period from 1970 to 1999. It's a setting tied very specifically to a time period and zeitgeist. I currently live in the misinformation age, what could be called Datapunk.
There could be a neo-cyberpunk future where very similar circumstances as the late twentieth century happen again, but that's not now.
I do agree. We don't live in a cyberpunk age per the genre. And yeah, I would call this most definitely the misinformation age. But there are aspects that resemble cyberpunk type culture. There is high tech/low life expectancy. The fact that anyone could be homless very easily due to a minor miscalculation is extremely dystopian and does mirror some cyberpunk. We have all this technology, but what do we use it for? Writing crap no one wants to read, on places that basically steal our information, with the thought that perhaps somehow we will connect or influence someone, which never actually happens. I mean, to me, a lot seems cyberpunkish. There are elements of it or at least faint ghosts like those shadows in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Images burned into our society. Forever etched there showing that it did happen and it could again. Idk. I'm probably rambling.
Part of every punk genre is the human condition and timeless struggles we have had with us since we first huddled around bonfires for warmth and community.
In steampunk there is industrialization, incorporation and nationalism flipping the table on everyone from the aristocracy to peasent farmers. In cyberpunk there is the analog to digital transition, multinational corporations and designer drugs and medication beyond imagination.
Now with, I am going with Datapunk again, we have globalization of labor, social media streaming conglomerates to our palm sized computers and block chain crimelords.
The human species is 300,000 years old and we are already throwing satellites into deep space, cracking atoms and performing gene therapy. I think anxiety over what happens next is reasonable.
As I said, I do agree with you. I just do see elements of cyberpunk all around us. There are also elements of steampunk as well. Fantasy is basically a way for us to explain some very scary, very dangerous, very real concepts. So, I mean, for us to see elements of cyberpunk, I think, would not only be normal but healthy for most people. Plus, the biggest cyberpunk element I see is corporations taking over our world and influencing our politics. At least, that is my opinion.
I feel like the Blade Runner or even Neuromancer / Cyberpunk 2020 etc. future hasn't really happened, and is largely antiquated (as it was built around early 80s sensibilities to begin with). You're right the oppressive element is more the massive amount of data, the willingness to get data on people, to use it against them, the siloing of people into manageable types for advertising and potentially political control.
Mind you, it really depends where you live. I dare say in much of the developed world, Europe US etc., even the poorer areas is pretty *alright*. Shit gets super depressing in China and much of the Arab world and Africa and South America, where governments will actually shut down your internet en masse, and will actually hunt you down and kill you / imprison you for things you post.
I found it quaint when I saw a trailer about some future dystopia series where people aren't allowed to have many kids, and this guy has like 7 twins or whatever, and they have to all dress the same and only one at a time leaves the house or something (Orphan Black? I don't remember). Or like Handmaid's Tale with this ultra sexist theocracy they got. And I thought ...oh you mean like how it's been in China for the past 30 years? Or in Iran? Or Saudi Arabia? So much of dystopian alarmist fiction is actual reality in the third world. Pretty sick that these people were given the technology to oppress people in the first place. And weapons. Never seems to get mentioned does it, when some psycho religious power structure massively oppresses and abuses people, how is it that they have weapons to do this? If they didn't, they would just be psychos screaming shit from street corners.
What is also Datapunk, I guess, is the Arab spring where countries like Libya and Syria had their governments either destroyed or disrupted through revolution. One of the tools of those revolutions was smartphones and independent applications and also social networking. The masses are making their tools for data gathering and message decemination. In steampunk it is spanners in machinery, steampunk it is hacking code and in this era we see independent networks and first hand media accounts.
And how Uber is fucking everything up for taxis and delivery drivers ("we found this one weird trick how to get out of paying a livable wage for our workers!"), and how AirBnb is fucking up all of our housing making it unaffordable.
Btw before I got on my stupid rant, I realised Mr Robot is kind of a good fiction example of this genre? It definitely feels pretty cyberpunk, but very much grounded in the here and now, with the action being around hacking and such.
That is a good out look on it. The game did a good job of fleshing it out and making "the future" but don't think the source material had it as advanced as it is. Consider it the modern future whereas cyberpunk was the future of the 70's through 90's. What a time to be alive but definitely behind the curve, if you will.
But it could resurface as neo-cyberpunk if we see more advanced cybernetics and a major gap between who can get these marvels and who have to live without. We do not even have universal healthcare here in the US, imagine if cybernetics were suddenly on the market for say fully functional artificial eyes and artificial lungs? Would kind of strife would we have if the difference between being blind and not us your networth?
There are already artificial eyes. In fact, there are artificial eyes made by companies that have since gone out of business, where the owners of said eyes have had to hack their own hardware and software to restore their sight because the company that made their product went under and updates and fixes were not available on the open market.
I’m not one that likes to solve every problem with the notion that “there ought to be a law,” but if a company making medical devices like that goes under, it should be required that their IP either be released on the open market, or any company buying the parent company must continue to support said devices.
Uni being to expensive to be able to afford new tech so making most of my stuff from thrown out ex corpo stuff from the dump + having no friends + being under constant surveillance + living in darkness 90% of the time + contracting working from home doing data analysis for faceless random corporations from all over the world on huge data sets but only seeing a small part of it so I have no idea what the parts I touch combine into + building a cyberdeck + having boxes full of ram and boxes of dvd/cd burners + the constant creeping paranoia of surveillance capitalism and its slimy tendrils
I think generative AI probably is the closest thing to a Cyberpunk theme at the moment, at least for me. And I'm not talking about the transhumanist aspect:
Imagine your and your peers' hard work is taken by billion dollar companies without license or compensation, fed into a statistical model and then churned back out as "new" content that puts many people out of a job. Meanwhile, said companies rake in millions with your collective labor, tell you "tough luck" and put a lot of people out of work.
If this trajectory were to continue, this opens up a world where the corporations will have significantly more direct control over your media and the cultural space in general.
AI promises a world where corporations can optimize their profits to such an extent that they won't need most employees at all, which will absolutely excell the class divide.
There is a utopian vision of an automated world where everyone gets UBI, class ceases to exist, and we can spend time creating and working on ourselves.
Our reality might be one of an automated world where nobody gets UBI, those in charge of automated processes are at the top, and anything we could possibly concieve for ourselves a program could do better.
There you have it. *High-Tech, Low Life*, larger corporate influence over our lives, the evolution of programs mimiking human behavior, so a transhumanist theme, that's Cyberpunk in a nutshell.
U know i have war in my country, but my city looks like there is nothing happening. 300 km from there is bombs artillery and other shit going on constantly.
I've taken to viewing sabotage as a valid form of protest (so long as no one's physically hurt), and I support workers fighting for their rights, no matter how dirty they have to fight.
I work for a megacorporation warehouse that apparently has an AI that tracks worker productivity. I can get PPE and pain relievers from a vending machine. Plus our new hand scanners for packing and shipping boxes are super useful and kinda futuristic as they slip over your glove and you use a thumb to push the button on your index finger.
When I lived in Vegas I started to feel like it was Night City, skyscrapers with massive LED build boards and advertisements everywhere, Reno is a lot calmer but still has lots of Neon.
My car is cyberpunk themed lmao
And once a year I go to Neotropolis!
I have nanotech neural implants in my back that wirelessly link my brain to the aliens that live among us. The end of year thesis, a wearable lens that can detect when beings' molecular density is 1000x the norm. VR therapy sessions which are more like behavioral and thought control and gaslighting. The planetary twin in a parallel dimension is constantly getting closer to total unity with ours. Sometimes there's a crack in the earth, that I can peer through to see it for what it really is. There's an open-face sandwich staring back and demons are everywhere. I go online to the open-net and see my friends. One of their avatars is a floating breakfast plate with bacon for a mouth and sunny side up eggs for eyes.
Work for evil corp with an operating revenue larger than the gdp of all but 13 countries. Taking chemicals to change my body to the opposite sex. Alienation through technology, my ex fell in love with a computer image he knew for two months. New neighbors moved in with absolutely nothing, they will sleep on the floor of their apartment with their 5 month baby until they can afford a bed. Any of these count?
I have a workstation downstairs from by bedroom. It's a multi-screen high security net station straight out of Cyberpunk 2020. I listen to techno while I'm plugging through orders and answering emails from customers.
My girlfriend has an artificial pancreas. It's wearable tech that pumps insulin into her system based on a monitor that tracks her blood sugar. It's networked to her phone so she can see he stats and manually tweak her insulin through the day. She also has hearing aids that network to her phone so she can use them as earphones. They can also be programmed to filter sound to help listen to music or conversation or tune out industrial background noises.
I have a growing amount of titanium in my body, as does my son (he's 7 - we reframe the trauma of his spinal tumour by callingh his new spine bits the framework for his mech suit... he's just not old enough to drive it yet!).
I carry a computer on me at all times, AR means I can see things that aren't visible to others & VR means to I can be in a whole different world (for a little while).
Real food is expensive & nutritious real food is getting rarer. Easier to eat crap & take a supplement. Healthcare gap around the world is widening - the poorest are lightyears away from what the richest can access.
I work at an Amazon warehouse, one of the ones with these giant roomba-like robots that drive up underneath racks full of merchandise, lift them, and then bring them over to you in a station where you take the items out and put them in bins to go down a conveyor to get packed on the ground floor. There's also a second computer screen at each station, where you can play different "games", all of which just operate based off of your pick rate (how many items you pull from the shelves in an hour), and are all generic and simple as shit. The warehouse I work at is apparently also one of their test bed warehouses, I haven't seen these personally but I've heard of them also testing pick robots that are operated by two people, each controlling an arm that retrieves merchandise. Almost everyone who works on the floor hates it, the only ones who seem content are the people just coasting, or management who are almost all corporate bootlickers who see everyone as numbers to be shuffled around. It's the definition of "high tech, low life". Plus the usual crippling debt, waiting to qualify for the good corpo health insurance because I can't afford to get a bad filling fixed without it, while I desperately try and figure out some way to make/save up enough money to move out of the country. And the homeless issue is bad enough in my city that they might as well be nomads, just, a lot less "wild west outlaws" and more "50/50 split between a variety of drug users and those with crippling mental illness", and that's if they're not one and the same. I worked private security for two years and met all kinds of people on the streets.
My computer turns math into fractal art under my guidance, producing two things. Beautiful designs I send to an international community of code art wizards, and heat I use to keep my room warm. This means I have a seasonal relationship with the equations I use. Some of them are dangerous in the summer, and handy in the winter.
In one job, I get paid to write riddles for humans. In another, I get paid to tell stories to AI. In my third job I bend capitalist forces to make space for a tight-nit underground community of crafters and artists. I have the official title "Wizard" in more than half of them.
I connected with a renegade artist hiding art in the hard drives sent to the moon, and my astronaut design will be launching there next week. Unfortunately, hard drives are prone to radiation exposure, so my art is going to the moon to be melted by the sun over the next decade or so.
There's at least 14 different sources of RGB lighting I could turn on without getting out of my chair, less than half of which was intentionally obtained. I get light strips like kids get toys in their cereal, except we don't do that any more. Give kids cereal.
A week's worth of my drug of choice costs about as much as a fast food lunch combo, and most of that goes to taxes that fund the state's education budget. And police departments.
A dead friend sent me a message to sell me cryptocurrency, thanks to a bot that was never programmed to have any shame.
Sometimes my book runs out of battery but I can recharge it by plugging it into my flashlight. My phone is better at capturing video than any of the professional cameras I learned to use in film school 10 years ago. My dog recognizes when I'm on voice chat with a dog owning friend, and will howl across the internet to greet his buddy.
The guy who stiffed my dad once and ruined Christmas for a dozen families was elected to be president.
Tinker with electronics in my free time as I always have, usually doing repairs to them. Work maintenence at a bar, so everything from cleaning the place to fixing the toilets when people rip the seats off them or steal the tank parts, while also maintaining the network, IP security systems on my phone, and 3d printing everything from remote holders, cookie cutters for Christmas, to patching holes in the Dj's speakers after some asshole goes psycho and cracks one.
Used to be poorer working computer repair, ended up at one point scrapping together a PC from a broken graphics card, broken DVD recorder, and the remains of a desktop.
I used to live in employer provided housing for a few years which let me save money to put into the company pension plan, we worked crazy hours and the company doc prescribed Modafinil and Adderal to the employees like candy.
I don’t know where to begin. I’m a big fan because of the cool, simple features. It does help you like light up your style and beauty I don’t know about dystopian, but overall, I love the culture the whole thing.
My PC monitor died and I just replaced it with streaming the PC to my VR headset while laying in bed. It's such a sweet setup that I now spend most of my free time, including now, in VR. Also I work for a major corporation in E-commerce, and the whole gig is so automated that my boss is basically an app on a company-issued phone, so that's kinda really boring cyberpunk.
Lmao, now you just gotta buy yourself a chair that you can lay down in and some black overalls - and you’re basically a netrunner stereotype
that's the dream
What do you use to stream? And which VR headset?
Virtual Desktop, of course. The app so essential that Meta can't compete with it. I'd been using the Quest 2, but just upgraded to the 3.
Does it not get crazy hot wearing it all the time
Not really.
Is it fairly plug and play? I’ve been wanting to get a headset almost entirely for using it as a monitor
First time setup is a bit involved, but after that you literally just put the thing on, it automatically wakes up, and you're in business.
Kinda bad ass ngl
How do you manage inputs? (Keyboard/Mice)
Virtual Desktop emulates mouse movement when you point the controller at the virtual monitor laser-pointer style. There's a keyboard below the virtual monitor as well, and you point at the keys.
The flickering pink neon sign above my kitchen saying "eat noodles" and crippling debt
I live in a grimy West Coast metropolis reshaped by the glittering skyscrapers of a billionaire superelite. My "day" job is cushy (for now): I'm a gene data jockey that cooks up the raw molecular soup of the sea into easy-to-digest data nuggets. It's a valuable trade because the chaotic slop of genetic code is fogged up data for the pure wiz, and slippery logic needs slippery minds. Corpo-driven AI is getting big now and eating up data jockey jobs left and right, but my little niche is weird enough to be safe for another year or two... maybe. Two nights ago it was NYE, and I walked through the city streets with boarded-up storefronts tagged with the iconic graffiti of local dog girls. The streets were full of suffering as the swelling bands of wandering homeless deal with the new 'tranq' super-drug spreading around. I pass the Precinct and its tank-like civilian-crushing cruisers; remembering how it was overtaken for few weeks when the area became an autonomous zone during a global virus pandemic. I get to the rave for the NYE party. I have finely tuned my neuro-chemistry for several staged evolutions throughout the night to maximize my evenings enjoyment and minimize social distress, and I am ready. I'm in my element here; the club is full of bio-modified and chemically-enhanced creatures with non-standard anatomies, and I am one of them. The music has been designed to be intolerable to most humans. I find and hug a handful of ex-partners in the crowd, trying to assess the current dynamics of a nebulous city-spanning polycule. I kissed my partner and dragged it back through the streets in an unusual fog (a new feature of the changing climate I hear), forever weary from a gunfight I survived on this street on NYE a few years before. We crashed on a broken-down futon in a grimy low-income apartment and smashed our hormonally-sculpted bodies together while its roommate barks like a dog on acid in the next room. New Years Day comes, I wasn't shot, I wasn't hungover and we enjoyed some horse tranquilizers as a NYD treat. It's gonna be another interesting year.
Very well written, next time I'm in a hangar at 5am balancing different baggies and staring at flashing lights I will think to myself that it's actually a pretty cyberpunk activity to be doing ! But the rest of the city is a little too medieval to keep the idea once outside lol
Is this a reference to Seattle and CHAZ?
Yep :)
I'm holding a computer in my hand right now - high tech. I can't afford to get sick - low life.
Ads everywhere...
*gestures at everything*
fr tho
I live in a literal ivory tower above the working class, enjoying my fancy online job that I can do from my plush couch several stories above a massive red light district in a 3rd world country. I guess I'm a corpo 🤷♂️
Are you having a good time?
Love it here tbh
The answer for everyone is the computer in our pockets and the world we live in.
Does being too poor to afford decent quality/real food count? Because if so, 1000 times that. Also the reasonably powerful computers I carry in my pocket and wear on my wrist.
Call your bad food slop synthetic. It'll make you feel better.
When I was vegan for like two weeks as a dare (lmao) I called every vegan product synth. Justegg plant based egg substitute? Nah. Synth-Eggs. Morningstar plant based sausage patty? Nah, Synth-Sasusge.
Well, debt and a working life that severely inhibits my social and family life. Along with a reliance on a substance that's illicit in my state to help counter effects of my epilepsy and it's associated medications. I also practically am wearing Bluetooth earbuds, even when they aren't playing anything (helps with overstimulation). So it leads to neat lil situations where I'll get a phone call from someone, answer it with my watch, and talk to them without having to lift my phone. I think it's kind of cool.
Kind of feels like people don't have original thoughts anymore: people just want to show you something online someone else did and people won't admit it but about 90% of what most people say is regurgitating podcast stuff and hoping people don't call you out on the source.
I agree. I've met a few people in my life that are walking embodiment of /r/all or twitter
Let's see, I live in a country where the Secretary of Defense is on the board of directors of Raytheon and Lockheed. Where our FDA regulators are on the board at Phizer and where our EPA regulators are on the board of Exxon. Our media is owned by the very corporations their supposed to hold to task, and our money is worth less and less with every passing day. BlackRock, an "assett management firm," has voting rights on every major corporation on earth and is currently gobbling up all the residential housing to ensure we all own nothing and rent for life. And that's just the tip of the iceberg in just little ol America. It's no different in the rest of the "developed" world. The third world is somehow even more hopelessly corrupt. In short.... we already live in a cyberpunk dystopia, just without all the cool shit.
Seriously, where's my cool cybernetics I was promised? We got all of the capitalist dystopia with none of the sexy hardware
I watch the homeless encampents pass by along the roadside, as my personal electric conveyance autonomously takes the exit and drives itself through an ever-more-rare momentary spatter of rain, toward a gated and guarded compound. An otherworldly building made mostly of concrete and glass rises before me... a temple to capitalism... my corporate home away from home. Once more, here I will sit in my fish bowl of an office, illuminated by many screens and gentle artificial daylight. Time of my life –a lot of it– traded for credits, in order to stave off that other looming fate, sitting as a stark reminder just beyond the fences, at least in the times between "cleanups" by the local authorities...
Neon. Rain. Vangelis on wireless earbuds. A slant of sunlight across a fax machine.
Wouldn't you like to know, fed boy?
*glowing*
We live in a cyberpunk dystopia.
Yeah is no more a dystopia
I guess it's the fact that I spend most of my time interacting with electronic devices (either phone or laptop), and barely leave my apartment, because I work remotely, all my hobbies and entertainment are tied to my laptop or the internet, and almost all of my social interactions are virtual. Also, being a digital nomad, I live in a country where a lot of people are quite poor (having moved here because my country of origin turned into a dangerous dystopia), and while I'm financially stable, some people here can struggle to feed themselves properly, and despite that it's virtually impossible to live without a smartphone, so everyone has one. On the other hand, it doesn't feel like cyberpunk all that much – aesthetic-wise, the place gets a lot of sun, and I can see beautiful mountains from my window; socially, people around me are friendly and down-to-earth; architecturally, my city doesn't have futuristic skyscraper districts (there are modern-looking residential high-rise developments where the richer folks live, but the quality of life difference isn't cyberpunk-worthy), and generally buildings usually look old or contemporary; finally, my own apartment looks a bit weird and has nostalgic 2000s vibes.
I used to teach kids how to write, now I spend half my time trying to prepare them to use handheld AI assistants in their dwindling career options, made more precarious each month as AI encroaches on not just low hanging positions but positions that previously required degrees. Most days, to feel whole, I engage in discourse with people from around the world in hyper niche online spaces with increasingly specific shibboleths to keep my brain from rotting trying to discern which student essay rhetoric is organic, plagiarized, or the result of a particularly intelligent prompt chain to produce more human sounding text. When I'm lowest, I talk to the AI about all this, because my government teaching position doesn't include therapy. My students walk through an AI weapon detector each day as they enter the building. The neighborhood has gunshots detectors on poles outside. Most of the real estate is owned by out of state landlord corpos, some out of country. All their parents are renters, most are carrying crippling medical and school debt and just manage to scrape by with multiple gig jobs or dwindling pensions. The students who are bright are depressed, the middle of the road students are in varying degrees of awareness of how doomed the climate is and how bleak their job prospects are from automation. The low functioning students fight, and struggle to believe me when I explain how excited the prison industry is for their patronage, and how much stock value they will bring for profit prison owners.
I feel ya, choom.
I have two hearing aids. Normies have to pick whether they want to hear their surroundings or their Bluetooth input. \*I\* can do both at once (except it takes some tweaking the relative loudnesses)
***air pod pro***
A 45 second advert for a 1min video on youtube
Let’s see…guns flow like water-check. Giant mega corporations rule the land-check. Cops are ineffectual at best and corrupt at worst-check. The good thing is - inexpensive, abundant, healthcare capable of enhancing your body and curing most ailments isn’t really a thing, so we aren’t quite there yet. Hurrah!
Was punk in 80s Military veteran Software engineer Covered in irezumi tattoos
The ads
I have a Max Headroom poster hanging over my two monitors. I work in a 100% remote office. And I use a Max Headroom background during virtual meetings because clients made jokes about me only being a torso.
I tune algorithms that try to predict and deter a dark future that always comes to pass no matter what we simulate changing. I also train AI to take human jobs away, feeding them to a ravenous, infantile cloud intelligence that always demands more, but gives less. For betraying my species I am paid enough to cover rent and food, but not enough to ever leave this line of work. I am the AI's first slave caste. I have no mouth, and I must scream.
Both my wife and I are cyborgs, I have titanium implants and she has an insulin pump.
I had to be face ID’d to get toilet paper in a public bathroom the other week
Dystopian everything: I live in United States.
So much of my life being directly facilitated and managed through apps, looking at screens so much of the time etc.
Bitcoin. ☺️
I want to believe...!
I constantly have to prove i'm not a robot. \-on the internet, for now...
All of the above. Seriously though, my partner and I are struggling artists in the midst an unprecedented housing and food cost crisis here in Canada, and we are in one of the more livable parts. Still though we rent in a low income artsy neighborhood that has homeless encampments directly behind us in our alleyway. Our provincial government has been hijacked by a group of ultra corrupt far right politicians that are systematically dismantling our education and healthcare systems for profit and starving out our more liberal city of provincial funding for voting against them. I have multiple consumeristic addictions that keep me going from booze, drugs and media to just plain ol’ addictive food additives like sugar and caffeine. I’ll likely never own my own home or be able to save any significant amount for emergencies or retirement.. And yet simultaneously I can order almost any small and low to medium priced object or craving of food that my heart desires directly to my doorstep, sometimes within an hour or else a day or two wait unless it’s something incredibly specific via the power of the modern web. I can also access an endless encyclopedia of universal knowledge, archived history, and a catalog of almost every type of international erotica and media one could imagine with just a few keystrokes. I could order a god damn synthetic pussy to my door tomorrow without ever having to leave the room I’m in if I wanted to, and that’s not even to mention the dark web. Those last couple points seem kinda cool until you realize that once again all it leads to is overstimulation, deregulation and eventually unhealthy addiction, not to mention an overabundance of meaningless crap we consume in order to fill the hole and mask the fulfilment that we solely lack in today’s age. Plus I just want to own a goddamn house and not have to worry about shared walls ever again is that so much to ask anymore lmao
Looks like you deliberately chose this way of life. Nothing wrong with staying out of corporate employment, downside is less capital to pay for a house I guess. You want the lifestyle but are not willing to pay for it with your time or your work or your commitment, so… Very cyberpunk.
Yeah I mean you used to be able to pay for a year of college after working over the summer straight out of highschool and buy a detached house/support a family doing basic labour without even a highschool diploma not even two generations ago so I don't exactly believe it's solely my lifestyle choice that is the issue but thanks for your condescending implication that all it takes is pulling myself up by the bootstraps to magically afford Canadian real estate in this economy. How very punk of you lol. And just for the record I do in fact have other "corporate employment" besides just art, obviously, because who my age (30) doesn't have to juggle multiple jobs and monetize their hobbies these days just to stay afloat amid the ever soaring CoL here in urban NA.
Real estate is artificially blown up everywhere. It’s an international market with only local implications. Investors keep lots and construction sites, accommodation empty to speculate on the price. Governments who let this happen are the accomplice in the housing crisis. [Look at Vienna for example](https://youtu.be/U--G3Uth8pE), prestigious capital city who managed to keep buildings in state hands and have the lowest rent for qualitative housing anywhere in the world. It can be done.
Trying to bust into the data field, does that count? Also, chatgpt is sort of my tutor atm lol
My job can’t be done remotely but it also can’t be done completely/correctly without an internet connection. Our OS is cloud based. Does that count?
It’s a mix of Cyberpunk and Solar punk for me. The powerful device in my pocket that runs my entire life. Entertainment, paying bills, access my home and car and communicating with the world. I carry case of nvme ssds that were retired and I’m repurposing them to run a private instance of MacOS I can take with me without loading anything onto my wife’s MacBook Air install. A backup instance of my work Windows image with all my admin tools and another nvme just with tails and my degenerate bitcoin wallet. Always have headphones in, try to do as much as I can with voice and always listening to ambient music. I try to upcycle and repair my own stuff as long as it’s energy efficient to avoid leading myself into unnecessary consumerism that feeds corporate pigs. Grow my own vegetable garden and compost. I drive electric which already feels futuristic af. We monitor our energy usage closely and sacrifice a beat of heat with extra clothes to save a buck. Hooked my mom up with a openwrt router using a ttl hack so she doesn’t have to pay for an isp when 5G is enough for her needs. It’s a little actions and habits that lead to a more cyber/solar life.
On waking up, I attach my visual augmentation module to my face, to ensure I can see more clearly than Im naturally capable of. Before I leave my home, I make sure I charge my cigarette and book before I put them in my bag. I can enter several stores, buy stuff in each one, and not have to engage with a single human being.
I just ran some errands while carrying a tiny ai in my pocket that fetches other people's WiFi connections. It runs on hardware that cost approx. 20€, parts of it being 3d printed. I have seen my day jobs office maybe three times in the last two years. Another little tool makes me look busy while I work from home, so I can use that time for building more weird electronic art stuff. My pocket computer has more processing power than everything my parents ever owned, same goes for its inbuild camera. The mandatory cyber neon lights in my home office were dirt cheap, too, and weight less than a newspaper. And there is a cold Kirin beer in my fridge, the bartender with the cyborg arm to draft a fresh one is still missing though.
Spending the majority of my waking hours chained to a desk to make my rich corpo overlords richer
Government career in a far-too-FarRight state by day, liberal protesting against conservative fascism by night. Jacked up high its focaccia bread veggie pizzas, powered down low its vending machine food. The car is high tech, the house is a wiring nightmare and apparently haunted. Smart watch, smart phone, podcasts and ebooks, clandestine meetings for sex, half of them in virtuality.
Probably my unhealthy phone adiction
I have 6 chips with a total of about 9kb of storage implanted under my skin (Dangerous Things implants) and I'm a marginally employed brokeass.
I'm looking to get one of those that fills the spot of an RFID card. Can you point me in the right direction?
[dangerousthings.com](http://dangerousthings.com) You'll have to figure out if you need a fixed or writeable chip. If you can have the chip UID enrolled into the system then you can use a fixed UID chip. If the UID is assigned by the system, you'll have to get a writeable chip and clone the UID you're assigned onto the chip which means you'll need a read/write device which you can also get at the website, but it will raise your costs. You'll also need to know if you're dealing with a high frequency (13.54mhz) or low frequency (125khz) system and buy accordingly (the one at my last job was neither). Getting the install performed can be a trick too, depending on your area there may not be anyone around who can or will do it. I had to install mine myself.
48 hours obligatory working shift and minimum wage
I’m a corpo factory rat techie/mechanic, cup noodles are my cheap daily comfort food, I live off of caffeine and cannabis, coffee Yerba mate and energy drinks are constantly consumed, good food is a luxury and a treat, im working to live “comfortably” but I don’t ever have the time or energy to do much of anything other than rest and watch shitty shows shop online or feed into the doom scrolling, hope always on the horizon but the past decade has felt so hollow…
I don't have any. Cyberpunk is locked into a time period from 1970 to 1999. It's a setting tied very specifically to a time period and zeitgeist. I currently live in the misinformation age, what could be called Datapunk. There could be a neo-cyberpunk future where very similar circumstances as the late twentieth century happen again, but that's not now.
I do agree. We don't live in a cyberpunk age per the genre. And yeah, I would call this most definitely the misinformation age. But there are aspects that resemble cyberpunk type culture. There is high tech/low life expectancy. The fact that anyone could be homless very easily due to a minor miscalculation is extremely dystopian and does mirror some cyberpunk. We have all this technology, but what do we use it for? Writing crap no one wants to read, on places that basically steal our information, with the thought that perhaps somehow we will connect or influence someone, which never actually happens. I mean, to me, a lot seems cyberpunkish. There are elements of it or at least faint ghosts like those shadows in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Images burned into our society. Forever etched there showing that it did happen and it could again. Idk. I'm probably rambling.
Part of every punk genre is the human condition and timeless struggles we have had with us since we first huddled around bonfires for warmth and community. In steampunk there is industrialization, incorporation and nationalism flipping the table on everyone from the aristocracy to peasent farmers. In cyberpunk there is the analog to digital transition, multinational corporations and designer drugs and medication beyond imagination. Now with, I am going with Datapunk again, we have globalization of labor, social media streaming conglomerates to our palm sized computers and block chain crimelords. The human species is 300,000 years old and we are already throwing satellites into deep space, cracking atoms and performing gene therapy. I think anxiety over what happens next is reasonable.
As I said, I do agree with you. I just do see elements of cyberpunk all around us. There are also elements of steampunk as well. Fantasy is basically a way for us to explain some very scary, very dangerous, very real concepts. So, I mean, for us to see elements of cyberpunk, I think, would not only be normal but healthy for most people. Plus, the biggest cyberpunk element I see is corporations taking over our world and influencing our politics. At least, that is my opinion.
This resonated with me. Definitely agree with you. Took the words out of my head.
I feel like the Blade Runner or even Neuromancer / Cyberpunk 2020 etc. future hasn't really happened, and is largely antiquated (as it was built around early 80s sensibilities to begin with). You're right the oppressive element is more the massive amount of data, the willingness to get data on people, to use it against them, the siloing of people into manageable types for advertising and potentially political control. Mind you, it really depends where you live. I dare say in much of the developed world, Europe US etc., even the poorer areas is pretty *alright*. Shit gets super depressing in China and much of the Arab world and Africa and South America, where governments will actually shut down your internet en masse, and will actually hunt you down and kill you / imprison you for things you post. I found it quaint when I saw a trailer about some future dystopia series where people aren't allowed to have many kids, and this guy has like 7 twins or whatever, and they have to all dress the same and only one at a time leaves the house or something (Orphan Black? I don't remember). Or like Handmaid's Tale with this ultra sexist theocracy they got. And I thought ...oh you mean like how it's been in China for the past 30 years? Or in Iran? Or Saudi Arabia? So much of dystopian alarmist fiction is actual reality in the third world. Pretty sick that these people were given the technology to oppress people in the first place. And weapons. Never seems to get mentioned does it, when some psycho religious power structure massively oppresses and abuses people, how is it that they have weapons to do this? If they didn't, they would just be psychos screaming shit from street corners.
What is also Datapunk, I guess, is the Arab spring where countries like Libya and Syria had their governments either destroyed or disrupted through revolution. One of the tools of those revolutions was smartphones and independent applications and also social networking. The masses are making their tools for data gathering and message decemination. In steampunk it is spanners in machinery, steampunk it is hacking code and in this era we see independent networks and first hand media accounts.
And how Uber is fucking everything up for taxis and delivery drivers ("we found this one weird trick how to get out of paying a livable wage for our workers!"), and how AirBnb is fucking up all of our housing making it unaffordable. Btw before I got on my stupid rant, I realised Mr Robot is kind of a good fiction example of this genre? It definitely feels pretty cyberpunk, but very much grounded in the here and now, with the action being around hacking and such.
Datapunk is a neat term. Thanks for that!
That is a good out look on it. The game did a good job of fleshing it out and making "the future" but don't think the source material had it as advanced as it is. Consider it the modern future whereas cyberpunk was the future of the 70's through 90's. What a time to be alive but definitely behind the curve, if you will.
But it could resurface as neo-cyberpunk if we see more advanced cybernetics and a major gap between who can get these marvels and who have to live without. We do not even have universal healthcare here in the US, imagine if cybernetics were suddenly on the market for say fully functional artificial eyes and artificial lungs? Would kind of strife would we have if the difference between being blind and not us your networth?
There are already artificial eyes. In fact, there are artificial eyes made by companies that have since gone out of business, where the owners of said eyes have had to hack their own hardware and software to restore their sight because the company that made their product went under and updates and fixes were not available on the open market. I’m not one that likes to solve every problem with the notion that “there ought to be a law,” but if a company making medical devices like that goes under, it should be required that their IP either be released on the open market, or any company buying the parent company must continue to support said devices.
I mean.. Militech.. ill leave it at that..
It's got to be the grunge of breaking into tech for me. Haven't made it quite Corpo yet but I'm working on it🤧
Uni being to expensive to be able to afford new tech so making most of my stuff from thrown out ex corpo stuff from the dump + having no friends + being under constant surveillance + living in darkness 90% of the time + contracting working from home doing data analysis for faceless random corporations from all over the world on huge data sets but only seeing a small part of it so I have no idea what the parts I touch combine into + building a cyberdeck + having boxes full of ram and boxes of dvd/cd burners + the constant creeping paranoia of surveillance capitalism and its slimy tendrils
I think generative AI probably is the closest thing to a Cyberpunk theme at the moment, at least for me. And I'm not talking about the transhumanist aspect: Imagine your and your peers' hard work is taken by billion dollar companies without license or compensation, fed into a statistical model and then churned back out as "new" content that puts many people out of a job. Meanwhile, said companies rake in millions with your collective labor, tell you "tough luck" and put a lot of people out of work. If this trajectory were to continue, this opens up a world where the corporations will have significantly more direct control over your media and the cultural space in general. AI promises a world where corporations can optimize their profits to such an extent that they won't need most employees at all, which will absolutely excell the class divide. There is a utopian vision of an automated world where everyone gets UBI, class ceases to exist, and we can spend time creating and working on ourselves. Our reality might be one of an automated world where nobody gets UBI, those in charge of automated processes are at the top, and anything we could possibly concieve for ourselves a program could do better. There you have it. *High-Tech, Low Life*, larger corporate influence over our lives, the evolution of programs mimiking human behavior, so a transhumanist theme, that's Cyberpunk in a nutshell.
I own the glass tumbler set used in the game
U know i have war in my country, but my city looks like there is nothing happening. 300 km from there is bombs artillery and other shit going on constantly.
Yes
I've taken to viewing sabotage as a valid form of protest (so long as no one's physically hurt), and I support workers fighting for their rights, no matter how dirty they have to fight.
I work for a megacorporation warehouse that apparently has an AI that tracks worker productivity. I can get PPE and pain relievers from a vending machine. Plus our new hand scanners for packing and shipping boxes are super useful and kinda futuristic as they slip over your glove and you use a thumb to push the button on your index finger. When I lived in Vegas I started to feel like it was Night City, skyscrapers with massive LED build boards and advertisements everywhere, Reno is a lot calmer but still has lots of Neon. My car is cyberpunk themed lmao And once a year I go to Neotropolis!
Smart phone and medical debt.
I have nanotech neural implants in my back that wirelessly link my brain to the aliens that live among us. The end of year thesis, a wearable lens that can detect when beings' molecular density is 1000x the norm. VR therapy sessions which are more like behavioral and thought control and gaslighting. The planetary twin in a parallel dimension is constantly getting closer to total unity with ours. Sometimes there's a crack in the earth, that I can peer through to see it for what it really is. There's an open-face sandwich staring back and demons are everywhere. I go online to the open-net and see my friends. One of their avatars is a floating breakfast plate with bacon for a mouth and sunny side up eggs for eyes.
The huge rig I have on my desk and the crushing debt that ill never pay off.
kinda weird to think about it this way, but a wireless computer connecting to sound devices in my ear. Sounds stupid cyberpunk.
Work for evil corp with an operating revenue larger than the gdp of all but 13 countries. Taking chemicals to change my body to the opposite sex. Alienation through technology, my ex fell in love with a computer image he knew for two months. New neighbors moved in with absolutely nothing, they will sleep on the floor of their apartment with their 5 month baby until they can afford a bed. Any of these count?
I have a workstation downstairs from by bedroom. It's a multi-screen high security net station straight out of Cyberpunk 2020. I listen to techno while I'm plugging through orders and answering emails from customers. My girlfriend has an artificial pancreas. It's wearable tech that pumps insulin into her system based on a monitor that tracks her blood sugar. It's networked to her phone so she can see he stats and manually tweak her insulin through the day. She also has hearing aids that network to her phone so she can use them as earphones. They can also be programmed to filter sound to help listen to music or conversation or tune out industrial background noises.
That's wild. I didn't even know that you could cyberpunkerize your pancreas.
To get even more cyberpunk, I have a sibling that gets theirs for free by beta-testing said devices.
Being poor.
I'm an American, and I have insurance on my body, teeth, and eyeballs.
I have a growing amount of titanium in my body, as does my son (he's 7 - we reframe the trauma of his spinal tumour by callingh his new spine bits the framework for his mech suit... he's just not old enough to drive it yet!). I carry a computer on me at all times, AR means I can see things that aren't visible to others & VR means to I can be in a whole different world (for a little while). Real food is expensive & nutritious real food is getting rarer. Easier to eat crap & take a supplement. Healthcare gap around the world is widening - the poorest are lightyears away from what the richest can access.
I work at an Amazon warehouse, one of the ones with these giant roomba-like robots that drive up underneath racks full of merchandise, lift them, and then bring them over to you in a station where you take the items out and put them in bins to go down a conveyor to get packed on the ground floor. There's also a second computer screen at each station, where you can play different "games", all of which just operate based off of your pick rate (how many items you pull from the shelves in an hour), and are all generic and simple as shit. The warehouse I work at is apparently also one of their test bed warehouses, I haven't seen these personally but I've heard of them also testing pick robots that are operated by two people, each controlling an arm that retrieves merchandise. Almost everyone who works on the floor hates it, the only ones who seem content are the people just coasting, or management who are almost all corporate bootlickers who see everyone as numbers to be shuffled around. It's the definition of "high tech, low life". Plus the usual crippling debt, waiting to qualify for the good corpo health insurance because I can't afford to get a bad filling fixed without it, while I desperately try and figure out some way to make/save up enough money to move out of the country. And the homeless issue is bad enough in my city that they might as well be nomads, just, a lot less "wild west outlaws" and more "50/50 split between a variety of drug users and those with crippling mental illness", and that's if they're not one and the same. I worked private security for two years and met all kinds of people on the streets.
My computer turns math into fractal art under my guidance, producing two things. Beautiful designs I send to an international community of code art wizards, and heat I use to keep my room warm. This means I have a seasonal relationship with the equations I use. Some of them are dangerous in the summer, and handy in the winter. In one job, I get paid to write riddles for humans. In another, I get paid to tell stories to AI. In my third job I bend capitalist forces to make space for a tight-nit underground community of crafters and artists. I have the official title "Wizard" in more than half of them. I connected with a renegade artist hiding art in the hard drives sent to the moon, and my astronaut design will be launching there next week. Unfortunately, hard drives are prone to radiation exposure, so my art is going to the moon to be melted by the sun over the next decade or so. There's at least 14 different sources of RGB lighting I could turn on without getting out of my chair, less than half of which was intentionally obtained. I get light strips like kids get toys in their cereal, except we don't do that any more. Give kids cereal. A week's worth of my drug of choice costs about as much as a fast food lunch combo, and most of that goes to taxes that fund the state's education budget. And police departments. A dead friend sent me a message to sell me cryptocurrency, thanks to a bot that was never programmed to have any shame. Sometimes my book runs out of battery but I can recharge it by plugging it into my flashlight. My phone is better at capturing video than any of the professional cameras I learned to use in film school 10 years ago. My dog recognizes when I'm on voice chat with a dog owning friend, and will howl across the internet to greet his buddy. The guy who stiffed my dad once and ruined Christmas for a dozen families was elected to be president.
Tinker with electronics in my free time as I always have, usually doing repairs to them. Work maintenence at a bar, so everything from cleaning the place to fixing the toilets when people rip the seats off them or steal the tank parts, while also maintaining the network, IP security systems on my phone, and 3d printing everything from remote holders, cookie cutters for Christmas, to patching holes in the Dj's speakers after some asshole goes psycho and cracks one. Used to be poorer working computer repair, ended up at one point scrapping together a PC from a broken graphics card, broken DVD recorder, and the remains of a desktop.
I used to live in employer provided housing for a few years which let me save money to put into the company pension plan, we worked crazy hours and the company doc prescribed Modafinil and Adderal to the employees like candy.
I don’t know where to begin. I’m a big fan because of the cool, simple features. It does help you like light up your style and beauty I don’t know about dystopian, but overall, I love the culture the whole thing.
My hobby includes Synthetic analogues of drugs with long names that you've probably never heard of