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comment by user-inactivated
user-inactivated  ·  2307 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Cyberpunk isn’t just sci-fi — it’s Silicon Valley’s design theory

    . And while the heroes of cyberpunk generally break the law in order to take down large corporations, they do it for equality and equalization. The fundamental problem is there's no money in it so every Silicon Valley visionary you've ever seen turned to advertising.

I'd argue the free software movement, the subset of the crypto community that did things like PGP and Tor, and the more political pirates are counterexamples. With the exception of piracy they either don't involve breaking the law or the law changed to accommodate them, probably because everything subversive they do only ends up benefiting other techies and there's much more money to be made screwing everyone else.





kleinbl00  ·  2307 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I'd humor that argument. I'd point out, though, that Tor was born at the Naval Research Laboratory and incubated via DARPA so regardless of whether or not it was sheep-dipped into looking civilian or merely unleashed unto the world, it ain't very hax0ry. The counterargument would be that whole RSA/PGP kerfuffle.

I think we can agree that there's an ethos in cyberpunk that likely influenced a few folx. I think we can also agree that capping it off this essay with some bizarre bit from Blade Runner (which is noir as fuck, not cyberpunk) does not enforce its point.