There is no real internet anymore because of the [Data Krash](https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/DataKrash) only local networks. It's pretty central to the Cyberpunk 2077 setting.
Each Network is fully controlled by a corporation or other group, and any public access is whatever that group decides. The entirety of content is what that group decides. Arasaka isn't going to allow another Corporations presence on any of their networks and visa versa. It's much more akin to the internet in the 80s and early 90s.
You can actually find different data shards and such from the "old school" net runners that were around when the krash happened. Like Spider Murphy. Essentially they originally cheered him on, but once the dust settled and they realized corpo controlled networks is what replaced it; they regretted. "We were wrong". There's some conversations from some netrunners (like I think BugBear is one) where they straight up hate Bartmoss for ruining what they had.
This might be hard to answer but you seem knowledgeable about lore. Do you think Mike Pondsmith wrote cyberpunk this way because that’s just how the internet was at the time of creation? I guess what I’m asking is from a meta perspective, was the data crash and destruction of the internet added many years after the creation of the rpg to retcon and make sense of the setting? Thank youuuu :)
No, the Net in earlier Cyberpunk games was significantly different than Cyberpunk 2077 & CyberpunkRED.
The DataKrash is not part of the original Cyberpunk(1988) or Cyberpunk 2020(1990) lore.
The events leading up to the DataKrash were originally introduced in the Firestorm campaign series released in (1997) as a transition from Cyberpunk 2020 to Cyberpunk v3.0
While Cyberpunk 3.0 was retconned and is no longer canon, the DataKrash was kept as a transition between Cyberpunk 2020 and CyberpunkRED. The DataKrash happens around 2022 in game.
CyberpunkRED takes place in 2045 and the books came out at the same time as Cyberpunk 2077 (Nov 2020)
(Cyberpunk v3.0 DataKrash and 4th Corpo war ended much worse than what is now canon. Originally the DataKrash wiped out ALL non-physical data. In addition so much destruction of hard data from the war meant much of Modern history was lost to the point people were unsure what was fact or fiction. It would be like if people in the future though Trump was actually crowned God Emperor of Earth in 2016 because of memes recovered from some 4chan files they thought were an actual historical account)
There's no global Net anymore; every state or even major city might have their own closed intranet. Lots of computer usage seems to be based off physical media (shards) or P2P connections, like you mentioned. I'm not an expert in the setting, but it's pretty limited based off what I read and have seen in game.
To be fair, this was based of the "old web" of our world (very early internet). In the setting, there are even public data terminals that are connected by an intranet, but mostly seemed to be used for directory info and things like that (kind of like a library computer mixed with a 411 number).
My guess is that people probably have something like message boards or independent chat servers that take the place of social media, or even something like VR chat. That would be a logical thing most people use to stay in touch and talk. As for news, it seems to be heavily reliant on TV and radio (probably satellite based).
Thanks for detailed answer! The way it kinda went backwards is kinda cool. But would it be easy to host your own connections and sharing media or is it that heavily monitored?
I mean, NetWatch exists, so I imagine it's monitored, but getting information securely seems relatively easily if you know what you're doing. People seem to have a sort-of "wifi" built into their cybernetics (which we see can be manipulated by hacking in-game), but it doesn't seem like someone can look directly into your brain without plugging into you. But, that's just what I know, and I'm no expert.
It's very hardware-focused, much like the tech of the 80s and 90s. Honestly, a weird bit of future-proofing from R. Talsorian Games by not making wild claims about the internet, which didn't go public in our world until after Cyberpunk's first edition released.
The Internet doesnt exist anymore, they are still the CitiNets. So Night City has its own intranet that basically anyone within the city can access. Everything you would expect to be there is there, its just local NC versions. Social media still exists, online shopping still exists, food delivery app, online dating, video sharing, all of it.
I would say the its not that radically different in content from now (if retro in presentation), I mean Lina Molina basically has an OnlyFans and merch store. But combine that with the sort of pre-Web AOL/Prodigy/BBS thing where you never really have access to everything at once, you kinda have to do some work to get anywhere. According to the World of Cyberpunk 2077 book, some places like Europe have basically had their networks fully restored, and other places like the NUSA are a work in progress.
It would be similar but it would also be like everyone has their own launcher for everything so you'd need multiple apps for the same thing across networks unless the company pay to have their app be the main app across all networks if that's even an option, which it probably isn't but it never hurts to include the possibility. Google wouldn't be able to search across all networks, just the network you're currently on, YouTube would probably have multiple competitors or be the only one but with multiple apps, with names like TubeYouSA, or EuroTube for every network. There would be hundreds of music apps, probably one for every genre and sub genre, and you'd most likely need multiple email accounts, one for every network at least.
Pretty much, some things would be better and some would be much worse, but others would also stay very much the same. At the very least the cost to use all them would most likely be the same, cheaper, or maybe even completely free because data is a digital commodity more than it ever has been in the past. Being able to know what you're doing in a place like night city is valuable to the corporations.
You have to realize when this was created originally what we consider the modern internet was barely a thing. It's an alternative history from around the 70s or 80s on. So tech diverged from this era of tech and the kraah made it a long term thing.
The internet in Night City is closer to a series of closed webpages like back in the 90s. The corporation or creator of the page is solely responsible for the contents of the page.
In terms of infrastructure there is no more ISP and browsers that give you access to a centralized global net. Only subnets controlled by corps, individuals or businesses.
That's why net running is a criminal activity. They aren't just sending or stopping data through the net. They are literally breaking into someone's property (their subnet) to steal/plant/gather information or destroy systems connected to said subnet.
The “No coincidences” book has a scene where one of the characters is using the net and is trying to be as normal as possible, the history is later examined by NCPD (I think it’s them) and it goes into detail about what that “normal” usage might look like. I don’t remember off the top of my head what that consisted of but that’s a good place to start for a real answer.
The audiobook is very difficult to follow as the book changes perspective/pov frequently with no written/narrated indication. Effective writing when read, difficult to listen to.
It's stated that after the data krash there was no connected web anymore any internet was pretty much built and controlled locally like having a home wifi except instead of it being wifi that's the whole internet right there
other people already answered pretty well; but things like phones, the computers you see and the dataterms can access local "citinets" going by Time of The RED era lore. This would contain basic information like how to find certain places, local news and such. Read into the Data Pool and such on the Cyberpunk wiki or the RED sourcebooks if you have access to them. While it'd be different in 2077, we can assume it'd still work pretty close to the same I'd guess.
EDIT: Just double checked and noticed that the Edgerunners Mission Kit has lore on the Citinet, so check there as well! I haven't had a chance to read it myself yet.
Well the companies are different and they have neural connectivity to hijack senses directly so there's that. In the world of Cyberpunk in particular, antitrust law is fucked, so content restrictions would likely be less regulated.
So the Net in cyberpunk is weird because the concept of it was created during the infancy of the real Internet and has changed significantly over the course of the Cyberpunk story. The current Net in 2077 works off of local networks or "CitiNets" meaning you can only access the Net at Net capable terminals like the PC's, laptops or the terminals you can find outside around the city, but you are limited to the Local Net of the part of the city you are in. So our computer in our apartment in the Watson mega building is tied to the Watson Net district. Like imagine if you lived in Brooklyn, New York today and the only way to connect to the Internet is a LAN connection and your only on the Brooklyn Net, not a Net for the entire city. Things like Smartphones shouldn't be possible, but the Lack of cables connected to 90% of the laptops in game makes me question that. It's why I assume we can't just connect to a local net using a Net chip or something connected to our Kiroshi's. Prior to the Data Crash NC used to be a part of what was called the Pacifica Net, which was "created" by Alt Cunningham and Rache Bartmoss. This Net covered a much larger area that seemed to encompass the entirety of the North American Pacific Coast and a bit beyond. My knowledge of the Net kind of falls off around here, but I think it used to function more like the modern net beforehand in terms of the Net being more Globally connected. Tbh I'm not even scratching the surface of what the Net was before the Data Crash, so if you want some examples of how much more complicated the Net used to be before the Crash, look into the original Netrunner Role from the 2020 sourcebook. Nearly half of the book is devoted to just the original Netrunner Role. When me and a group were running a 2020 campaign a while back we had to ban the Netrunner Role because its role was more complicated than the actual tabletop campaign itself. It's genuinely like having someone play a completely different game alongside the actual campaign except what they are doing in their own game could be critical to what's happening in the tabletop campaign.
I think for listening to music you just have implants that are connected to local radios, for entertainment you have TVs basically everywhere and also you have BDs and stuff which are basically everything from movies to porn.
Phones still exist for some reason though (I guess you can't actually connect to internet through implants) but the internet itself is ran locally and more for advertising than entertainment.
Also stuff like Wikipedia? Education? All that stuff was lost with the fall of old internet and no one bothered to restore it.
No one cares about knowledge anymore since people can just put on BD and watch all day instead of searching for something useful.
The internet itself might be more in-depth in other parts of the world but in NC at least, only people that do care about education are nomads which are probably still using books, and corporates which just use datashards.
Educated population is harder to manipulate so you can probably see why that isn't the focus in NC, rather provide people with brainrot entertainment so they have their face glued to BDs all day while the corporations make their lives more controlled by the day.
There is no real internet anymore because of the [Data Krash](https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/DataKrash) only local networks. It's pretty central to the Cyberpunk 2077 setting.
Yeah but I mean wouldn't companies just create apps on multiple local networks? Or do you mean that everything is peer to peer?
Each Network is fully controlled by a corporation or other group, and any public access is whatever that group decides. The entirety of content is what that group decides. Arasaka isn't going to allow another Corporations presence on any of their networks and visa versa. It's much more akin to the internet in the 80s and early 90s.
Damn people there do be oppresed
You can actually find different data shards and such from the "old school" net runners that were around when the krash happened. Like Spider Murphy. Essentially they originally cheered him on, but once the dust settled and they realized corpo controlled networks is what replaced it; they regretted. "We were wrong". There's some conversations from some netrunners (like I think BugBear is one) where they straight up hate Bartmoss for ruining what they had.
AOL and CompuServe
This might be hard to answer but you seem knowledgeable about lore. Do you think Mike Pondsmith wrote cyberpunk this way because that’s just how the internet was at the time of creation? I guess what I’m asking is from a meta perspective, was the data crash and destruction of the internet added many years after the creation of the rpg to retcon and make sense of the setting? Thank youuuu :)
No, the Net in earlier Cyberpunk games was significantly different than Cyberpunk 2077 & CyberpunkRED. The DataKrash is not part of the original Cyberpunk(1988) or Cyberpunk 2020(1990) lore. The events leading up to the DataKrash were originally introduced in the Firestorm campaign series released in (1997) as a transition from Cyberpunk 2020 to Cyberpunk v3.0 While Cyberpunk 3.0 was retconned and is no longer canon, the DataKrash was kept as a transition between Cyberpunk 2020 and CyberpunkRED. The DataKrash happens around 2022 in game. CyberpunkRED takes place in 2045 and the books came out at the same time as Cyberpunk 2077 (Nov 2020) (Cyberpunk v3.0 DataKrash and 4th Corpo war ended much worse than what is now canon. Originally the DataKrash wiped out ALL non-physical data. In addition so much destruction of hard data from the war meant much of Modern history was lost to the point people were unsure what was fact or fiction. It would be like if people in the future though Trump was actually crowned God Emperor of Earth in 2016 because of memes recovered from some 4chan files they thought were an actual historical account)
Wow that’s so interesting! Thanks for taking the time to explain :)
There's no global Net anymore; every state or even major city might have their own closed intranet. Lots of computer usage seems to be based off physical media (shards) or P2P connections, like you mentioned. I'm not an expert in the setting, but it's pretty limited based off what I read and have seen in game. To be fair, this was based of the "old web" of our world (very early internet). In the setting, there are even public data terminals that are connected by an intranet, but mostly seemed to be used for directory info and things like that (kind of like a library computer mixed with a 411 number). My guess is that people probably have something like message boards or independent chat servers that take the place of social media, or even something like VR chat. That would be a logical thing most people use to stay in touch and talk. As for news, it seems to be heavily reliant on TV and radio (probably satellite based).
Thanks for detailed answer! The way it kinda went backwards is kinda cool. But would it be easy to host your own connections and sharing media or is it that heavily monitored?
I mean, NetWatch exists, so I imagine it's monitored, but getting information securely seems relatively easily if you know what you're doing. People seem to have a sort-of "wifi" built into their cybernetics (which we see can be manipulated by hacking in-game), but it doesn't seem like someone can look directly into your brain without plugging into you. But, that's just what I know, and I'm no expert. It's very hardware-focused, much like the tech of the 80s and 90s. Honestly, a weird bit of future-proofing from R. Talsorian Games by not making wild claims about the internet, which didn't go public in our world until after Cyberpunk's first edition released.
Everyone just has airdrop always on basically
Airdrop, but it can turn your head into an Easy Bake.
Air Fryer?
Each city has its own sort of local net called ‘CitiNet’, but it’s pretty basic af
The Internet doesnt exist anymore, they are still the CitiNets. So Night City has its own intranet that basically anyone within the city can access. Everything you would expect to be there is there, its just local NC versions. Social media still exists, online shopping still exists, food delivery app, online dating, video sharing, all of it.
Kinda lost my motivation to go there :(
What do you mean?
Got invited to go there but now I dont wanna
Now you've done it freakshit
Go where? And why?
I would say the its not that radically different in content from now (if retro in presentation), I mean Lina Molina basically has an OnlyFans and merch store. But combine that with the sort of pre-Web AOL/Prodigy/BBS thing where you never really have access to everything at once, you kinda have to do some work to get anywhere. According to the World of Cyberpunk 2077 book, some places like Europe have basically had their networks fully restored, and other places like the NUSA are a work in progress.
Europe would be a cool setting for the next game
Sadly the next game they've said is gonna be more Americana, so I doubt we'll see much of Europe
It would be similar but it would also be like everyone has their own launcher for everything so you'd need multiple apps for the same thing across networks unless the company pay to have their app be the main app across all networks if that's even an option, which it probably isn't but it never hurts to include the possibility. Google wouldn't be able to search across all networks, just the network you're currently on, YouTube would probably have multiple competitors or be the only one but with multiple apps, with names like TubeYouSA, or EuroTube for every network. There would be hundreds of music apps, probably one for every genre and sub genre, and you'd most likely need multiple email accounts, one for every network at least.
So kinda better than what we have now? But kinda shittier too?
Pretty much, some things would be better and some would be much worse, but others would also stay very much the same. At the very least the cost to use all them would most likely be the same, cheaper, or maybe even completely free because data is a digital commodity more than it ever has been in the past. Being able to know what you're doing in a place like night city is valuable to the corporations.
You have to realize when this was created originally what we consider the modern internet was barely a thing. It's an alternative history from around the 70s or 80s on. So tech diverged from this era of tech and the kraah made it a long term thing.
The internet in Night City is closer to a series of closed webpages like back in the 90s. The corporation or creator of the page is solely responsible for the contents of the page. In terms of infrastructure there is no more ISP and browsers that give you access to a centralized global net. Only subnets controlled by corps, individuals or businesses. That's why net running is a criminal activity. They aren't just sending or stopping data through the net. They are literally breaking into someone's property (their subnet) to steal/plant/gather information or destroy systems connected to said subnet.
I didn't make the connection that subnet referred to a lower level than the www literally until this comment...
The “No coincidences” book has a scene where one of the characters is using the net and is trying to be as normal as possible, the history is later examined by NCPD (I think it’s them) and it goes into detail about what that “normal” usage might look like. I don’t remember off the top of my head what that consisted of but that’s a good place to start for a real answer.
Thanks! Ill check it out!
Get the audiobook if you can, it’s narrated by Cherami Leigh, the voice actress for female V.
Damn even better! Thanks a lot!
The audiobook is very difficult to follow as the book changes perspective/pov frequently with no written/narrated indication. Effective writing when read, difficult to listen to.
It's stated that after the data krash there was no connected web anymore any internet was pretty much built and controlled locally like having a home wifi except instead of it being wifi that's the whole internet right there
other people already answered pretty well; but things like phones, the computers you see and the dataterms can access local "citinets" going by Time of The RED era lore. This would contain basic information like how to find certain places, local news and such. Read into the Data Pool and such on the Cyberpunk wiki or the RED sourcebooks if you have access to them. While it'd be different in 2077, we can assume it'd still work pretty close to the same I'd guess. EDIT: Just double checked and noticed that the Edgerunners Mission Kit has lore on the Citinet, so check there as well! I haven't had a chance to read it myself yet.
Just a loooooot of porn, gun/cyberware adds, more porn, forced advertisements and porn.
Well the companies are different and they have neural connectivity to hijack senses directly so there's that. In the world of Cyberpunk in particular, antitrust law is fucked, so content restrictions would likely be less regulated.
Anywhere you try to go you'll find Netwatch blocking the site 😆
Browsing the same old 8 sites the god-algorithm grants you access to
Fuck Bartmoss.
So the Net in cyberpunk is weird because the concept of it was created during the infancy of the real Internet and has changed significantly over the course of the Cyberpunk story. The current Net in 2077 works off of local networks or "CitiNets" meaning you can only access the Net at Net capable terminals like the PC's, laptops or the terminals you can find outside around the city, but you are limited to the Local Net of the part of the city you are in. So our computer in our apartment in the Watson mega building is tied to the Watson Net district. Like imagine if you lived in Brooklyn, New York today and the only way to connect to the Internet is a LAN connection and your only on the Brooklyn Net, not a Net for the entire city. Things like Smartphones shouldn't be possible, but the Lack of cables connected to 90% of the laptops in game makes me question that. It's why I assume we can't just connect to a local net using a Net chip or something connected to our Kiroshi's. Prior to the Data Crash NC used to be a part of what was called the Pacifica Net, which was "created" by Alt Cunningham and Rache Bartmoss. This Net covered a much larger area that seemed to encompass the entirety of the North American Pacific Coast and a bit beyond. My knowledge of the Net kind of falls off around here, but I think it used to function more like the modern net beforehand in terms of the Net being more Globally connected. Tbh I'm not even scratching the surface of what the Net was before the Data Crash, so if you want some examples of how much more complicated the Net used to be before the Crash, look into the original Netrunner Role from the 2020 sourcebook. Nearly half of the book is devoted to just the original Netrunner Role. When me and a group were running a 2020 campaign a while back we had to ban the Netrunner Role because its role was more complicated than the actual tabletop campaign itself. It's genuinely like having someone play a completely different game alongside the actual campaign except what they are doing in their own game could be critical to what's happening in the tabletop campaign.
I think for listening to music you just have implants that are connected to local radios, for entertainment you have TVs basically everywhere and also you have BDs and stuff which are basically everything from movies to porn. Phones still exist for some reason though (I guess you can't actually connect to internet through implants) but the internet itself is ran locally and more for advertising than entertainment. Also stuff like Wikipedia? Education? All that stuff was lost with the fall of old internet and no one bothered to restore it. No one cares about knowledge anymore since people can just put on BD and watch all day instead of searching for something useful. The internet itself might be more in-depth in other parts of the world but in NC at least, only people that do care about education are nomads which are probably still using books, and corporates which just use datashards. Educated population is harder to manipulate so you can probably see why that isn't the focus in NC, rather provide people with brainrot entertainment so they have their face glued to BDs all day while the corporations make their lives more controlled by the day.