DB: Reverse the cyberpunk genre

Time to reverse everyone's favorite genre (and the prototypical American fantasy): cyberpunk. Big Business is Bad, Technology is Terrible, and that sort of thing.

But how to do it? Ideas?
 
Time to reverse everyone's favorite genre (and the prototypical American fantasy): cyberpunk. Big Business is Bad, Technology is Terrible, and that sort of thing.

But how to do it? Ideas?

First off, cyberpunk tends to be anti-big business as it is. Government by Evil Megacorporations and what not.

Second of all, just have Neo-Luddism more popular. You could go about that several ways. For example, increased urbanization and less pollution control makes every major city devastated by smog and pollution; as a result, there's a general tendency for people to want to move out to more pastoral regions. You can get some general sort of idyllic, Arcadian view of the countryside by poor city dwellers.
 
OOC: Did you completely miss the double-blind tag of this thread? I know that; the OP is positing from a TL where cyberpunk is the opposite of what it is today. ITTL, cyberpunk is idealized.
 
ooc: Ooops! Sorry, I did miss it. Cyberpunk would be kind of a bad word for your genre, though... "Punk" doesn't really fit an idyllic setting. My earlier post stands, though, outside of the beginning. Neo-Luddism = big business is bad and tech is bad.
 
Inject some realism into the stories, for one. I find the whole genre impossibly naive. Corps are not driven by brilliant, idealistic, athletic young 'punks' who quote Nash and weave equilibriums out of thin air. They are run by old men who got there by grabbing the biggest possible slice of profit for themselves, not 'themselves and the greater good'. They like the status quo because they win with this set of rules, and want to keep it. High-level corporate negotiations are not meetings among philosopher-priests with elegant arcane technology. They are rough, underhanded, and almost always unethical. If you an get anyone of the proper security level to talk honestly, they'll tell you the same.
 
I would say a good way to do it would be to stop or lessen the United States' economic woes in the 1980s. It always seems like popular speculative fiction literature reflects the opposite of the feelings of the time. When things are looking down, writers show the possibility of a brighter future. When things are looking up, writers warn us of the pratfalls of complacency.

The cyberpunk genre is similar to the fiction of the 1930s, envisioning a utopian society where everyone can live together in harmony and all resources are free. But the oil crisis of the early 80s also caused authors to turn away from technology, unlike Great Depression-era fiction which praised it as the solution to all the world's problems.

OOC: Thank you, sci-fi college writing class. :D
 
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