
A Cyberpunk Manifesto – Revised - jwfxpr
https://www.neondystopia.com/cyberpunk-fashion-lifestyle/a-cyberpunk-manifesto-revised/
======
biofox
I used to have a print-out of this on my bedroom wall as a teenager, next to
the Hacker Manifesto.

Looking back at this as an adult, having not read it for many year, I'm
shocked at how antisocial it is. Did I really believe this stuff?

I'm guessing it was a way for an intelligent, yet powerless, kid to gain some
sense of control -- identifying strongly with my skills to feel superior to
the society that denied me the freedoms I desired.

Now, as an adult member of society, I'm acutely aware how much I depend on the
established systems for my security and well-being. Young people shouldn't
feel the need to withdraw and create their own subcultures to gain a sense of
belonging or security. We should be incorporating them into society, giving
them a sense of purpose and belonging, and equipping them to make meaningful
contributions.

Any thoughts how we can achieve that?

~~~
noonespecial
>I'm shocked at how antisocial it is. Did I really believe this stuff?

I did. And I remember how much. Today I think being thrown wide and clear of
"the mainstream" by my teenaged rebellion was valuable. It gave me a great
view from the outside so that as I began my journey back i could better find
my place in it.

What I saw that most changed my mind? I was expecting a world of nefarious
villains, but what I found was nothing but a bunch of weak anit-patterns and
emergent behaviours. The world didn't suck because illuminati super-villains
were oppressing the sheeple, it sucked for the same reason parks get trashed.
Garbage accumulates and nobody bothers to pick it up.

~~~
ethbro
_> The world didn't suck because illuminati super-villains were oppressing the
sheeple, it sucked for the same reason parks get trashed. Garbage accumulates
and nobody bothers to pick it up._

Excellently phrased. And paradoxically, harder to fix.

Everyone is willing to play at being the hero, but no one wants to pick up
garbage.

------
ivan_gammel
It's a very strange feeling to see that cyberpunk has become irrelevant today,
while still being right on some judgments. Corporations are bigger than ever,
the Net has become vital resource for billions of people, climate is changing
and air became unbreathable in many giant megalopolises but... it's not a
dystopia, it's just the future that came and felt different from what we had
expected, a sort of normality that is not worse than anything in the history
before. Probably, the reason is that we've got 404 in our search of the
ultimate evil to oppose to. There's no single ultimate evil to resist, there
are many smaller ones and many come from the resistance itself, because
there's no ultimate truth to defend. The future has come and there's no
cyberpunk in it.

~~~
krapp
>The future has come and there's no cyberpunk in it.

It's likely that the last Presidential election was decided, in no small part,
by the efforts of a neo-anarchist site publishing classified information and a
group of meme obsessed netizens attempting to disrupt and undermine the
establishment. That seems pretty cyberpunk to me.

~~~
orblivion
My favorite was when this neoanarchist site published a video of the military
killing people, and the credit card companies refused to continue to serve
them. And then an amorphous non-organization known as "Anonymous" brought down
the credit card companies' websites. Meanwhile the neoanarchists switched to a
newly emerging "crypto-currency" created by a shadowy entity known only as
"Satoshi Nakamoto".

~~~
beaconstudios
and said amorphous non-organisation also arose from a neo-anarchist online
collective. And the digital crypto-currency was used to buy drugs and other
contraband from digital bazaars hidden in the "deep web".

It's quite funny when you think about it, cyberpunk fiction predicted many of
the most recent technology intrigue stories/events.

~~~
krapp
>It's quite funny when you think about it, cyberpunk fiction predicted many of
the most recent technology intrigue stories/events.

That's not entirely coincidental, considering how influential cyberpunk was
during the nascent days of the internet. We have it to thank for the term
"cyberspace" after all, and like the technology in Star Trek, a lot of people
who grew up with it have been trying to "make it real" with limited success.

Still can't store a human consciousness on a tape drive, though.

------
SideburnsOfDoom
> 5\. Even in the most developed and ‘democratic’ countries, the System
> imposes misinformation. Even in the countries that pretend to be the cradle
> of free speech, misinformation is the System’s primary weapon. A weapon they
> use very well.

I wonder how that would be revisited today. Now misinformation comes from all
corners, many factions all vying to misinform their way into being "the
system".

The idea that some cyberpunk underground stands in resistance to this "system"
is frankly hopeless. Do you want 9-11 truthers and Obama birthers? That's how
you get them. Do you want antivaxers and chemtrails believers? Then let them
think that they have a secret truth. Do you want the "alt-right" ? This is
where it grew.

~~~
throwanem
It was ever thus. The rate's increased, for which we have the Internet to
thank, but that's the only change, and one not of kind but of degree. Truth
and lies compete, and sometimes lies win out. Would you rather there be only
pravda?

~~~
kortex
Indeed. You can't know what's truly true ( _istina_ ) without some crucible in
which free ideas flow, to enable the discourse which moves toward that truth.
Free speech is quintessential to escaping the _pravda_ , truthiness-es and
alt-facts fed to us. The side effect is that some alt-facts find a safe space
to thrive and multiply. I don't think this can be avoided, I think it
ultimately is a feature of nature.

To use a machine learning analogy, all the _pravda_ out there - everyone's
relative truths - is your training set. If you limit your training set, you
lose some ability to generalize to the real world.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
> discourse which moves toward that truth

Can you demonstrate that the discourse does move towards truth?

> all the pravda out there - everyone's relative truths -

"relative truth", eh? Is vaccine denial is relative truth? How about "Sandy
hook was staged?" how about "Obama is a foreign muslim, and he founded ISIS" ?

I know that these beliefs come from a place of ignorance, anger and fear, but
weaponising ignorance and fear is not a "discourse which moves toward that
truth" and these memes are not a "relative truth", they are a near totality of
the opposite. And yet they affect the fate of nations.

I certainly don't have answers, but I know that you first have to ask the
right questions, and that this manifesto no longer does.

------
Asooka
Wow I'm from Bulgaria and didn't know this existed. Disinformation
accomplished.

------
c3RlcGhlbnI_
The original has a rhythm, it reads like a poem. Shouldn't the corrections
have tried to maintain that?

This version is awkward to read and that draws attention to how silly some of
its statements are. Like that you might just want to take a little walk
sometimes is not a crucial component of the manifesto, it just helped that
paragraph flow before.

------
delinka
Revised to fix translation errors, rather than revised for the current
political climate. I'd have preferred the latter.

~~~
falcolas
What has really changed, though?

> 1\. The Society surrounding us is clogged with conservancy, pulling
> everything and everybody to itself, while it sinks slowly into the quicksand
> of time.

> 3\. The System must impose its truth upon us so that it can rule. The
> government needs us to follow it blindly. For this reason, we live in an
> informational eclipse. When people can only acquire information from the
> government, they cannot distinguish right from the wrong. So the lie becomes
> a truth – truth, fundamental to everything else. Thus, leaders control with
> lies and ordinary people have no notion of what is true and follow the
> government blindly, trusting it.

> 12\. Those who control the Net, control the information.

These seem as relevant today as they were yesterday. And it's quite likely
they will still be relevant tomorrow; human nature is slow to change.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
> When people can only acquire information from the government, they cannot
> distinguish right from the wrong. So the lie becomes a truth

Is that really as relevant today as it was yesterday? It seems to me now far
more complex and entangled than the monolithic "resist the government system"
set out:

In the US, rather than the government controlling the truth, a certain clique
of fringe peddlers of a distorted narrative - the likes of Breitbart and
Infowars, have done so well as to attempt a hostile takeover of government,
_and so far are succeeding_. Is the name "Infowars" not a self-conscious echo
of the sentiment that you quote above? But the content is poisoned fruit.

In the UK, the Murdoch press drives government policy, not vice versa. And has
for a long time.

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davidgerard
HN-dotted already. Google cache:
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~~~
dredmorbius
TIA is a more socially useful feed.

[https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.neondystopia.com/c...](https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.neondystopia.com/cyberpunk-
fashion-lifestyle/a-cyberpunk-manifesto-revised/)

Archive.is / Archive.fo another:

[https://archive.fo/3GFSF](https://archive.fo/3GFSF)

------
unixhero
[meta] Fantastic discussion

