Grey Havoc

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Given the distinct trend that real world events have taken lately, I thought it was long since time for a dedicated cyberpunk thread. For both real world examples as well as the fictional (e.g. universes such as The Sprawl [Neuromancer], Shadowrun, Cyberpunk 2020, etc.). I'll start off things with this little jokey blast from the past:

18yptzqv5fdd8jpg.jpg

https://io9.gizmodo.com/are-you-a-cyberpunk-this-early-1990s-poster-explains-i-1231691511
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1TQhIJGt7g

A bit of Cyberpunk 2020 universe lore (the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 game is part of that universe).
 
I really think there are plenty much more appropriate places on web for discussing cyberpank than SPF.
 
flateric said:
I really think there are plenty much more appropriate places on web for discussing cyberpank than SPF.

I used to think that too, but after pitching various setting ideas for a friend's video game regarding a setting where man and machine and corporatism and AI and whatever he said it sounded cyberpunk.

I personally interpreted it as "21st century dieselpunk" (As in what would happen if you took the 20th century's warhawk mentality and gave them 21st century gear). I imagine that would be more fitting for this board, just look at what's posted in the F/A-XX, B-21, FVL, etc. threads.
 
http://www.bitcultures.com/cyberpunk-and-architecture-lets-call-it-archipunkcybertecture/
 
https://youtu.be/xf0WjeE6eyM
https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-amazing-ways-akira-uses-light-to-tell-its-story-1789488147​
 
I have a lot of Shadowrun, Cyberpunk material from around 1990 together with Space 1899 and Traveller 2400 which GDW developed out of a roleplaying game called Twilight 2000 in which the world fought a protracted war at the end of the century looking eerily like Ukraine today.
Someone asked why these are relevant to Secret Projects?
Because much of the gear illustrated in the books covered designs for everything from combat jets to wired up visual aids.
I was in Berlin at the time and in the absence of real board wargames. (titles like Wurzburg and Eastern Front were for obvious reasons not welcome in German games shops). I enjoyed these game manuals with their alternate visions of a future in which the Cold War remained a factor in life.
Soon reality took over. Fall of the Berlin Wall. German unification, Desert Storm..9/11 The War on Terror.
But as we enter the third decade of the 21st Century I have been reaching for these well loved old books. Much in them resonates with the world around me. But be careful not to fry your brain!
 
There are also anime like Gasaraki, Genocyber (eps. 2 and 3), and Bubblegum Crisis that have some very far futuristic stuff (for the time, as well as some rather dated things, like printing a newspaper from your home computer to read) in them. Then there's manga like Nippon Kessen 2025, where Japan has triple hull mega carriers of the 1st Air Fleet (Second) carrying YF-23s and Space Shuttle launched power armor dudes. Very cyberpunk obv, but still from the 1990's, so sort of at the tail end of that genre.

Speaking of board games, there was a failed attempt to bring one to market back in 2008 called Next Wars Orange Crush: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/35005/orange-crush-civil-war-ukraine-future-conflict-ser The description is a bit OTT in hindsight, but still rather prescient given it was even before Maidan if obviously based on the Orange Revolution, although it isn't particularly cyberpunk.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_X_E_Kg9roE


When VR was still cool. Virtuality EMF cylinders and haptic feedback gloves were so spicy they kept weaseling their way into DOD concept arts for at least 10 years. These pictures (IIRC) are from somewhere on this forum but idr the thread so yeah:

cyber-war-one.png

infosphere.png

Imagine being in the back of a M1068 trying to avoid getting beaned in the back of the dome because the battalion LTC is trying to scroll through his 37 open tabs/real time datanet feeds from the SHF Starlink connection to 1/A/1's lead track to get a view from their CITV. Kevlars are mandatory at the AFATDS workstation in the future field force. Never skip neck day lads.

The reality turned into "just" Star Trek style touchscreens on ruggedized tablets, IVAS, and electric-digital gunsights integrated with GPS to replace MILES.
 
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I have a lot of Shadowrun, Cyberpunk material from around 1990 together with Space 1899 and Traveller 2400 which GDW developed out of a roleplaying game called Twilight 2000 in which the world fought a protracted war at the end of the century looking eerily like Ukraine today.
I think you jumped timelines somewhere along the way.
 
I have a lot of Shadowrun, Cyberpunk material from around 1990 together with Space 1899 and Traveller 2400 which GDW developed out of a roleplaying game called Twilight 2000 in which the world fought a protracted war at the end of the century looking eerily like Ukraine today.
I think you jumped timelines somewhere along the way.
Nah, it's right. I remember seeing ads for "Traveller 2400" during reruns of "Space: 1989."
 
I have a lot of Shadowrun, Cyberpunk material from around 1990 together with Space 1899 and Traveller 2400 which GDW developed out of a roleplaying game called Twilight 2000 in which the world fought a protracted war at the end of the century looking eerily like Ukraine today.
I think you jumped timelines somewhere along the way.

TBF the first edition of 2300 AD was called Traveller: 2300. It's owned by Mongoose now but I don't know if they've released anything new along with their new Traveller books. GDW wasn't terribly creative in their naming schemes so they just smushed together their two big IPs (Traveller and Twilight) into a single new name IP I guess.

FWIW I have like four of the Mongoose repubs both 1st edition and the most recent full color but 2300 AD was always the best of the big three IMO. Or rather, big two and small third.
 
One Cyberpunk Trope which featured prominently was that global megacorporations were more powerful than nation states and even fought one another.
Although Musk et al are major players they are not the EU or USA in military terms but there is sadly:

 
One Cyberpunk Trope which featured prominently was that global megacorporations were more powerful than nation states and even fought one another.
Although Musk et al are major players they are not the EU or USA in military terms but there is sadly:

They're trying to present themselves less as Hell's Angels and more slick and corporate in their imagery now.

Interestingly, their logo is based on the Roman 'W', but Like 'Z', it doesn't exist in the Cyrillic alphabet. The word in the middle of the bottom half is what actually stands for 'Wagner.' Tellingly perhaps, it looks like a drunken swastika.
 

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One Cyberpunk Trope which featured prominently was that global megacorporations were more powerful than nation states and even fought one another.
Although Musk et al are major players they are not the EU or USA in military terms but there is sadly:


Yeah, but no. Wagner Group might have maintained their reputation as a fearsome corporate force if there weren't buckets of videos of their guys getting turned into hamburger by drones bought off of Wish.com and operated by Ukrainian weebs. The moment they went public with hiring prisoners, they turned into a joke.
 
One Cyberpunk Trope which featured prominently was that global megacorporations were more powerful than nation states and even fought one another.
Although Musk et al are major players they are not the EU or USA in military terms but there is sadly:


Yeah, but no. Wagner Group might have maintained their reputation as a fearsome corporate force if there weren't buckets of videos of their guys getting turned into hamburger by drones bought off of Wish.com and operated by Ukrainian weebs. The moment they went public with hiring prisoners, they turned into a joke.

The U.S. hired prisoners in 2008 to fight in Iraq. Given the painfully obvious similarities between the current Eastern European war and Iraq, this is a bit ironic, to say the least.

Wagner is far more powerful than any Western PMC, obviously. It's about as powerful as US SOCOM or the CIA in real terms I guess. Perhaps you are right that this makes them a laughingstock, as the CIA and SOCOM have consistently have their butts handed to them by Pahstun goat herders, Iranian farm kids, Iraqi alley beggars, and various West African, South Asian, and East African Muslims for the past 20 years. That partially explains how Wagner got so popular in the first place in Africa and the Middle East, after all, but on their home turf they enjoy quite a solid reputation for being "badass".

Perhaps it's as undeserved as the Green Berets'/Delta Force's or CIA's reputation, who only seem capable of taking down small time criminals like Pablo Escobar and al-Baghdadi, or ambushing old men in their bedrooms only decades after they lost relevance in their own organization like Bin Laden, but they seem to be quite mettled to be able to withstand things that Americans actually shied away from at first blush. Maybe it's a Russian cultural virtue of being able to simply accept grim circumstance, not unlike the Japanese do, and the Americans don't. Which is weird, as America in WW2 was quite mettled, what with crashing B-25 bombers into Japanese destroyers and battling the IJN despite punishing air raids, and very rapidly went from being quite tough and tenacious to rather prissy and effete from the 1950's onwards. Maybe the Great Depression broke more than people's wallets?

Anyway it helps to understand that Wagner is essentially a combination of things that haven't existed in the "West" since the last time it was ascending as a collective civilization, the 1500s. It's part fraternity, part private/public business corporation, part biker gang, and part government agency, and there's no real direct analogy in Western spheres of government since the end of the High Middle Ages. Maybe Lloyd's in its original 1680's form. Something something they were also using the 234th Air Aslt Rgt radio callsigns in Syria, so it's clear Wagner is simultaneously more and less than meets the eye, but speaking in analogies is hard for something that has no analogy and speaking in truth is hard for something that is shadowy and nebulous.

If Blackwater were Wagner it would be US SOCOM (broad geopolitical coverage), the CIA SAD (sekrit), the 75th Ranger Regiment (big and muscular field unit), a military fraternity/regimental association, a potential career pathway for retired Special Forces footmen and generals, a public-traded corporation, a criminal enterprise, and a privately owned human resources concern, all at once. It's not contradictory though, but in the West it would be, because the West had started putting artificial and unnatural bureaucratic barriers against this sort of stuff in the 1800's and 1900's. Depending on where you live in Europe or America, these barriers came into place either after the US Civil War or after WW1, and then the regulators told everyone the barriers were always there once they started to bite down in the 1960's.

It's what America's DOD contractors who normally just cook food at a DFAC or refuse to deliver cargo would look like if the USG didn't give a hoot about petty corruption and insider trading, and instead encouraged such thinking in its government organs and bureaucrats. Something like if America brought back Jackson's Spoils System and obliterated the professional civil service, and proceeded to hand off all its government agencies' big shot seats to the Forbes Top 100, or something like that, and they all abide by a Omerta-esque code that ensures that if anyone squeaks they get shuffled out of sight and sent to jail for a very long time, which would encourage them to do well and not squeak. As I understand this is considered the ideal form of government by most Silicon Valley techno-fetishist libertarians, for some reason or another, but I cannot fathom what they see in it.

These barriers between government and business never materialized anywhere in Eastern Europe, except maybe Estonia and East Germany, which is why you get these weird medieval-esque neo-feudal economies in places with Hungary, Poland, Ukraine, and Russia as the most notable examples. Naturally these places, even when they have proper rule of law, are still weird as hell (for instance, it is very common [or rather, it isn't uncommon] in Eastern Europe, from the Urals to the Oder-Niesse, to believe that the native population suffered worse under communism than the Jews did under the Holocaust; I suppose only the Germans, Hungarians, and Romanians have retained the Ostalgie) too, which makes mapping connections onto Western cultural frameworks all the more difficult. Call it cultural baggage from the Tsars if you want, but Wagner is about as "corporate" as the 82nd Airborne is for occupying Iraqi golf courses so Halliburton can win construction contracts or KBR can win oil field operations contracts; or more prosaically as "corporate" as the CIA is for couping Guatemala's democratically elected president and installing a State Department patsy so the Dulles' brothers investments in United Fruit Company can get higher stocks for better dividends. Wagner has done both of these things, for the same reasons, at the behest of similarly connected and government-inclined client-operators.

Anyway Musk has found a way to be far more powerful generally involves simply not having private armies. Starlink essentially makes the entire Ukrainian Army one of Musk's armies without a cent touching anything as unproductive or low margin as a fighter jet or artillery rocket. I guess if he thinks the possibility of nuclear war is high he could just turn it off, or literally geofence the Starlink terminals along internal borders of February 23rd, and break their entire armed forces if they step beyond this. This is a far better form of control than having GI Joe wearing a Lockheed-Martin patch on his uniform because the Ukrainians won't be able to do anything and SpaceX can threaten the USAF's launches to pressure the Congress if push comes to shove.

It's doubtful that would actually happen given the recently stated war-ending goal of the United States is a return to the status quo ante, though. A defeat for Russia, but hardly a decisive one, and that is precisely the point as far as America is concerned. Hegemons enjoy stability, stability means limiting change, and destroying Russia versus making Ukraine malded, the US has already picked the malded option, but it isn't going to say the quiet part out loud unlike what the rather accomplished and generally tactful Mark Milley did. I suppose that's just exasperation at the State Department though.

In that sense, cyberpunk actually lowballed the strength of certain megacorps. They're almost as powerful as ethnic lobbyist groups and Congressional caucuses. Mere armies cannot replicate this strength, but other lobbyist groups and caucuses can band together to challenge it, and in that respect I don't think Musk or SpaceX are any more powerful than any other U.S. political organ. They're certainly a muscular player though and the amount of muscle garnered in the time spent is arguably the fastest growth of political power ever seen.

This power will wane over the coming decades as stuff like Starlink and vertical integration become more common and SpaceX's unique features become industry best practices.

Conversely, Wagner's political power (or something akin to it) will probably continue to grow as private contractors replace national armies due to a combination of lack of interest in states in pursuing the ever spiraling costs of foreign wars for limited gains and the aging of European and European-derivative populations' means fewer soldiers for said armies. These will mostly be composed of military veterans who still want to fight, the Ernst Junger/Storm of Steel types who are adventurous and enjoy fighting for fighting's sake, and generally will do things that special forces or commandos do in places like Somalia, Nigeria, or Philippines i.e. low level combat against insurrectionists or internal security threats.

National armies won't disappear of course, but wars between major world powers, or even major powers against third world powers, are increasingly less likely as the economic and political potentials of the global superpowers continues to decrease relative to the third world. They won't not happen, but we're not going to see strings of like half a dozen major ground wars every other year, as we saw in Desert Storm, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq that culminate in decades-long occupations. We might see one Iraq or one Desert Storm and then a hiatus for at least half a decade before a Kosovo or Bosnia happens, so instead of the UN Siege of Saddamism taking place over 10 years, it takes place over 20 years, or it never culminates because in that meantime the Saddamists attain nuclear weapons and become untouchable. The pace will also slow simply because the economic engines that allow these countries to wage war are gradually breaking down and crumbling, due to running into stiff headwinds of "sub-replacement fertility" and "increasing median age" for 60 years, and the effect that has on macroeconomic forecasts. It's not looking very good for anyone, except Nigeria and perhaps Israel, I guess.

Private armies of veteran soldiers in fraternal organizations makes a lot more sense in this context so Russia is just a window into the Western world's future in that regard. USA will resemble it a lot more in 2050 than it does now both politically and demographically (i.e. dominated by a single party, economically stagnant in tangible/real economic terms but perhaps still maintaining fiscal hegemony [for all a dollar will buy you at that point], and old), while Russia will probably resemble North Korea a lot more than it does now at that time economically but demographically it will still be shaped like itself (i.e. poor, single party system, but old), and China might resemble Germany or Japan/South Korea if the CPC plays their cards right or Italy, Turkey and Spain if they don't (i.e. world supplier of notable industrial components, or the foremost benders of basic metals on their continent yet nowhere else, and also old).

Cyberpunk's ultimate problem as a genre is it simply wasn't grim enough, really. It assumed everyone would still have the Internet, at least in so many decades in the future, when the reality is shaping up that electricity simply might not exist in a century. If it does, it will resemble a super-corporate Internet of Things retirement home more than the gritty live-fast-die-young mentality of cyberpunk. Alternatively it's an Amish Village, where electricity is far too precious to be wasted on something as trivial as entertainment, and thus only used for water pumps or refrigerators, if that. The live-fast mindset being simply too deeply rooted in the culturaly mentality of the early XX century, a time when people still had kids and median ages of the most economically powerful nations were still within childbearing years, to be believable as a future outcome.

Truly, macroeconomics is a bit dismal.

tl;dr Wagner is rather tougher than the Green Berets, since actual Green Berets seem to shy away from being bombed by Russian drones (and can't drive stick shift Ural trucks), while Wagner just throws bodies at Eastern European Verdun backed by the guns of Donetskites. Recruitment of prisoners is not much bearing on this, which itself is just common superpower reflexes when said superpower is getting clowned on by a third world state, as America was clowned on by Iran in Iraq and Pakistan in Afghanistan and suddenly found itself emptying prisons for tens of thousands of felony/moral waivers. Apparently the Four Policemen all think alike and thus all problems can be solved by throwing dudes at artillery shells.

Cyberpunk, especially the board game, was just describing the FSU's economic contractions mapped onto the USA, and pretty much entirely by accident. Not sure if that means Mike Pondsmith has an absolutely titanic brain, or is just a bog-standard Amero-pessismist that makes up about a third to half the US population, contingent entirely on current month's running average of gas and Jif peanut butter prices.
 
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One Cyberpunk Trope which featured prominently was that global megacorporations were more powerful than nation states and even fought one another.
Although Musk et al are major players they are not the EU or USA in military terms but there is sadly:

Note though that this is apparently turning into a battle royal of decomposing German speaking composers (and kudos to whoever gets that particular oblique reference) named organizations, behold: https://www.themozartgroup.com/.

Martin
 
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