Cyberpunk fiction isn’t about a hypothetical speculative future. It’s an critical allegory for the issues of the present. Of course reality aligns with it when left unchanged.
This is American shadowy plot erasure and I won’t stand for it. We have the best shadowy plots folks. No one has better shadowy plots than us.
There’s no shadow to our plots. They laid out the plans in project 2025 and they constantly brag about what they want to do. The only surprise is when Trump decides to give a shit about something and that’s not plotting, it’s just him being stupid
We have literally couped countless countries for control of their resources and tested drugs on our citizens without their knowledge or consent. Our CIA agents are regularly caught meddling in other peoples affairs. Amongst many other awful things. You are correct that the Trump administration is not so shadowy about their plots (as far as we know) but American has a long standing tradition of shadowy plots.
Which hardly stands for anything anymore when they’re doing their plans with tiki torches.
The tiki torches aren’t really part of the shadowy plots so much as they are secondhand effects of the staggering inequality. The top-heavy hierarchy of wealth demands its attendant true-believers, who also tend to have other inequitable feelings about how things ought to be.
Your shadowy plots are the most shadowy that the world has ever known. It’s never been seen before. One could say that they are unprecedented. Historic even.
“We’re gonna have so many shadowy plots you’re gonna get sick of shadowy plots, that’s how many shadowy plots we’re gonna have.”
Germany: print out documents, sign them with a pen and fax them.
Man, I wish. We’re currently mostly importing all the bullshit tech from the US. And the EU is still trying to make preinstalled government spyware on every phone happen.
"Where would we be if we didn’t have any rules?
France."
"Where would we be if we had too many rules?
Germany."
japan until a couple years ago: uses floppies and magnetic tape. thankfully they waged a “war” against them and won
Here’s a fun fact about Japan: Sony used the PlayStation 3 to push Blu-ray (at launch it was like half the cost of the cheapest standalone Blu-ray player, so you could reasonably buy a PS3 and just play Blu-rays on it, plus it also played games). They used the PS2 to support DVD. But, what about the PS1? In the US, it only played CDs. In Japan, it played VCDs, which were a failed format that never took off in the West. If you had a Pro Action Replay (most notable for cheating, and letting you play burned games), you could enable the VCD playback. VCD was just MPEG-1 on CD. 70 minutes of video. Lower quality than VHS, but no need to rewind! It wasn’t hard at all to make VCDs on a computer as long as you had the digital video. Easier said than done then! The first time I watched Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was on (burned) VCD! (I’ve since bought it on DVD and Blu-ray. Before JK Rowling went off the deep end. I am so sorry. We didn’t know she was crazy then!)
Actually, PSP also pushed a video format, the MiniDisc movie format, whatever that was. That did make its way to the US, but it didn’t do very well there. I don’t know how well it did in Japan.
Sony could have just made a good video game system — and they did. But they did not stop there. They pushed movies in a way that didn’t feel like they were piling on features and cheapening it all like Xbox does. I actually am an Xbox gamer, but I was a PlayStation guy first…
Lots of Windows 95 machines made a big todo about supporting VCD around that same time. But I never remember seeing any in person at a store. I do remember burning VCDs to watch in the DVD player in the living room before we had a DVD burner.
Sony also bought Columbia TriStar following the failure of Beta and their lesser known failed music format DAT (Digital Audio Tape, looked like a cassette acted like a CD that needed to be rewound, not to be confused with Phillips’ follow up to the cassette the DCC or Digital Compact Cassette). Sony really wanted to charge licensing fees for their formats and that is largely why Beta and DAT failed* compared to the freely available formats from Toshiba and Phillips (CD, VHS, and DVD). Sony flooding the market with Columbia’s back catalogue is what really defeated the HDDVD format being pushed by Toshiba. Toshiba was also working with Microsoft on the Zune at that time and created a HDDVD add-on for the Xbox 360. HDDVDs used a version of Silverlight which was made by MS where the Blu-ray stack was written in Java, a language that MS notoriously hates.
UMDs that PSPs used, though similar in appearance, are not minidiscs. They use a completely different method of reading and writing the information. Minidiscs are magneto-optical where UMDs are just optical like CD, DVDs, and Blu-ray’s. Magneto-optical discs use a laser to heat up a small area of the platter and then, in very laymen terms, flips a magnet in that spot to be either south down or north down. This creates a slight optical variation along the track that can be read back by a lower power laser in much the same way (but at a different angle and wavelength) to CDs. While they did have mastered minidiscs that you could buy in a store, you mostly bought blank ones to write yourself, and they were rewritable years before CD burners became ubiquitous.
* Failed at the consumer level; DATs were wildly popular in the radio and recording industry because its failure gave it a built in copy protection through obscurity. Betas had a higher quality than VHS and were heavily used in the local broadcast and syndicated TV industries. In fact the last blank Beta was made after the last blank VHS.
Em… I’m not sure where this is going nor coming from but thanks for sharing!
America: police state controlled by a handful of tech billionaires
The only thing from cyberpunk I actually want is being able to put my brain in a robot body that looks like my fursona. We have everything that makes cyberpunk cyberpunk except that!
