Challenge: for want of an honest to god Cyberpunk reality

So I just started watching Blade Runner for the 5000th time, and I noticed that we still aren't any closer to flying cars, cyborgs and neon billboards on huge skyscrapers.

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, would be to have a world with a POD no earlier than 1992 which resembles a cyberpunk reality, no later than 2019.

Bonus points if it has mass produced hover-boards and computer technology from the late 80's/early 90's.

Here are examples of Cyberpunk worlds:

-Blade Runner, The Matrix, Brazil,Hackers, Ghost In The Shell
-Nar Shaddaa from Star Wars
-A gloomy film noir worlds coupled with heavy doses of computer hacking and mega corporations
-The cover of Somewhere In Time by Iron Maiden
-Shibuya,Tokyo at night :D

Best of luck ;)
 
  • Business is deregulated further, leading the the rise of mega corporations and corporatocracies, as well as corruption in government officials and police bribed by the companies to stay out of their way.
  • The Soviet Union's collapse leads to a preemptive strike by Communist party members against the west. The war is devastating, and leaves the environment in shambles.
  • The Chinese are harmed heavily by this war, leading to a mass influx of Chinese to Japan and the United States.
  • The war, as well as the new age of unregulated corporate empires, leaps ahead technology.
  • Millions flee to the cities for newly created jobs, and to escape the now devastated outside environment.
  • The internet takes off.
  • The corporations advertise their technological marvels heavily, and make it them a needed social component both for businesses and home use.
That's all I got.
 
I'm sort of doubtful that even a limited nuclear war is going to _stimulate_ technology, aside from stuff like cancer research... :D

I'll also note that some cyberpunk settings are not compatible: IIRC, Brazil was set in a Kafkaesque police state, while in others it's corporations, not governments which are the real powers.

1992 is probably too late a POD to get impressive cyborgs in 2019: between Major Kusanagi and that runner with springy artificial legs the tech gap is just too great. We certainly could get a more corporate-run world with weaker governments with a 1992 POD (have Osama Bin Ladin fall down a manhole and remove the more extreme nonsense economics parts of the Republican program: fast tech progress nowadays requires government input and an economy not run into the ditch), but the tech side of it is more of a problem.

It's also probably too late in 1992 to salvage Japan from extended economic problems: the problems were pretty systemic.

Now, if we go back to the 30s and prevent WWII as we know it, and throw in, say, a technocratic Japan and a transhumanist USSR.... https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=36203&highlight=transhumanist+ussr :)

Bruce
 

gridlocked

Banned
Cyberpunk is the combination of two different genres: Film Noir/Hard boiled Detective and Science Fiction. They can work great together like in the Film Blade Runner, but it is easy to ruin the formula too by making the technology too gee whiz and perky while having the protagonist being an action hero wearing a trench-coat. Not what I consider cyberpunk, but it does have a cartoon following.

I think the technology is less important than having the right atmosphere. We already have some technology more advanced than those mentioned in the classic cyberpunk works of the late 80s-early 90s. I guess experimental but powerful AI and that implants are easy to get, but not always socially accepted and other relatively low tech advancements mentioned in the novels would be easy to add. Having a world with millions of hot androids may be cool but it is not what I consider cyberpunk.

Society has to resemble the brutality of the 1930s United States somehow. The setting has to be at least slightly dystopian as well.

Add modern day Mexico to the technology of 2019, and I think you have a cyberpunk setting right there. For the United States or other advanced nations to become settings for cyberpunk you have to weaken the state and shrink the middle class. You would need a world wide depression, a nuclear war, an environmental catastrophe etc. However there still has to be a lot of wealth in private or at least corporate hands.

There are 80s tropes that are common in cyberpunk too. Japan is number 1, governments are not just weak and corrupt, but practically playthings of corporations and 80s urban fashion sense. The first and the third are easy too add. The second requires governments losing their monopoly of effective force to corporations whose security can stare down any government agency except the most powerful.

In short I think it would be very easy to get a cyberpunk world, just add a big disaster to our world while allowing modern technology to advance to 2019. This would create a lot of Mexicos.
 
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