ABetterOne

"Have a better one."

This line, a social expression from Blade Runner, is an example of the genius of the genre. In case you weren't around in the 80s, it had by then become the post-post-modern cliche to part company with the phrase "Have a Nice Day." Both sincere and meaningless in its over-use, easy off-the-cuff parting-shot. What literally appears as an intention to bid pleasantries upon person becomes a signifier that culture had slipped into dystopia. Optimism IS pessimism, the double-think of Orwell's 1984 (now in 2017 thanks to Trumps inauguration as President has rapidly become the American best selling book of all time). Everybody has ended up hating 'nice'. What exactly does that word mean anyway? While on the topic, how significant is the suffix '-ration' in augers?*

"Have a better one" sums up that we are now in the post-nicety world, retaining the original nicety of intention by admitting to the shit we live in daily. The general common understanding, 'the level' as Masons describe it,  is now the wry cynical irony which is not quite yet bitchy satire. Perhaps it is but even so we have shifted over: yesterdays bitch is today's common sense practicality simply because of Normalization. Nice and Normal. 

In the distraction of escapist fiction we identify with the dystopian situations of the Protagonist because it helps us to come to terms with our own. We find solace in familiarity and there is a bitter-sweet brutal-soft comfort in that. Because our generation had it hard. 

Technology was the stained glass window citadel promising A Better Tomorrow if we can only get through today. Better than facing up to the depression of futility. 

It changes, inevitably. In the 80s "cyberpunk" was all about integration with the machine through cosmetic consumer cyber-augmentation. In the 80s most people did not own what we now call 'computers'. The media told us we needed strap-on digital watches. People owned pocket calculators. A thing which can do what your desktop can do would occupy a whole floor of an office block. The word 'tablet' had not been invented yet. The memory size of desktop computers was measured in kilobytes. Virtual Reality was the promise of tomorrow.

It was about synthesis, replacement, although (outside of the pharmacology and petro-chemical industries which now monopolize lifestyle) that theme did not truly emerge as its own stronghold until the 90s. By the late 90s enough people had desktop computers that you knew someone who had one, or had one yourself. Their memory size was measured in megabytes. Most kids had game consoles the memory size of which measured in kilobytes. Augmented reality was the promise of tomorrow.

Linden Labs opened the worlds premier Virtual Reality platform SecondLife on June 23, 2003. By 2013 Second Life had approximately 1 million regular users.** It was 2015 before Virtual Reality Headsets became a viable consumer commodity. The Oculus Rift headsets sold out just 14 minutes after being made available.***

* https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/augur

** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life

***http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/ces/12085175/Oculus-Rift-to-go-on-sale-in-March-for-599.html

So here we are almost in the 2020s and it is a long way from Cyberpunk2020. What cyberpunk did not foresee is that enough thought, energy and finances would be invested into cleaning up the shit left by generations of 20th century industrial consumerism that despite the oil and nuclear spills, our energy needs will be provided by ecological sources. The transition out of 80s cyberpunk and into post-millennial solarpunk (eco-punk) is occurring. Elon Musk's cost effective solar-panel roof-tiles will guarantee this even if the drive toward free energy technology is not occurring on a corporate scale because humanity has not yet proved itself responsible enough to deal with that.

Are we yet at that stage? No not quite. The oceans are full of plastic which has irreparably destroyed large parts of aquatic ecologies. The oceans are contaminated with nuclear fallout from the Fukishima disaster which has still not been plugged and is worse now than when I began writing this blog. Technologies are being (slowly, too damn slowly) developed to fix radiation by genius scientists such as John Hutchinson and his pioneering work into Scalar physics. 

We are still living within "have a better one" because there is still a lot of work to do. Yet we can now see a light at the end of the tunnel, something which did not exist previously within the classic Cyberpunk milieu. The despair is lifting. We are aiming to achieve our grandkids regularly saying "Having a good one."

Cyberpunk as a genre is retro at its default setting. When it drops the dystopian outlook it becomes something else. Post-cyberpunk which is currently being described as Solarpunk due the focus on free energy technologies and ecological sustainability. The 1990s/2000s millennial rising awareness that permaculture is necessary for sustainability has two facets. That we are self responsible pioneers and do it for ourselves is made almost impossible because of state control, land ownership and poverty. That mass-produced consumerism is, because of the overriding rule of 'convenience culture' is mainstream Human lifestyle by default setting' going to be how it happens for most people. The new wave of eco-corporations will be instituting ecological sufficiency for us in such a way as to make it easy. It didn't happen overnight which "the hippies and crusties" have been trying to do since the 70s. Transition takes generations. The transition of attitude is no exception.

Cyberpunk Essays

Lectures On Cyberpunk

Analogue Shock

It's like Ice T / J Bone says, fresh every time you hit it on a re-run:

"Here it is, comin' at ya, lo-fi style." 

The brute 80s vision was retro-fitting the cool (matte black plastic) durable pioneering hardware with upgrades from the disposable (grey, cream or glossy plastic) miniaturized next-wave tech which had officially outmoded it. Chunky 16-bit synths with Gigabyte ram drives and plug-in nu-fx pods. By which time the gear has history, it has scratches and glue scuffs, stickers of logo's from movements that didn't even make it to the internet era. The plastic is full of love and experience, solder and gaffa tape. And the rigs can do what no hi-end manufacturer ever wants you to know about. 

The real life tragedy is most people who are on the cyberpunk bandwagon don't have a clue about electronics nor how to use them. There was a circuit-bending phase in electro-musiculture but all that did was break things. Euro-modules seem to have stepped in to fix it but all that is music industry, what we want and have always wanted is the dream-jack on a reliable pocket box. With ridiculous amounts of panels. 

Monkeyfunkin' touch-screen cellphones derailed  cyberpunk from what it was by taking out the fun of unknown potential and personal customization. It wasn't a product in a box, it was garage-made recombobulations of the video era going digital. The Victorian Gothic Revivalist approach to customizable electronic devices. 

So cyberpunk became about nostalgia instead of futurism. The kids born into it today are growing up on consoles you can't crack open without breaking and which do things that make the 80s mentality obsolete anyway. Our future became a museum piece before we even got there. Future Shock is something the next generations are going to have to become immune to. 

The legacy of a once powerful movement is that Life is better than the oldies love of dystopia. The deckers took over so much that street tribes are obsolete now. Except they ain't decks, they're desktops and pocket-portables. That beloved promised zone remains a gap in the market. 

BUILD YOUR OWN CYBERDECK

There really is only one thing that can illustrate this essay properly: The SQUID deck.
[superconducting quantum interference device]

"Originally designed for police surveillance, but its true purpose was soon realized - porn." 

Sid Mead's concept art

Strange Days prop by Stan Winston Studios / Eric Allard

80s Office Trash / Tech

Fax machines and photocopiers are part of corporate superiority games. One person can operate it at a time. That person operating it gets a buzz from using it. In psychology terms* a stroke. Anybody else involved has to await the operator. Thus it is a prestigious position of importance. This places the machine itself at the top of the chain. 

Where the machine keeps the operator waiting and the operator keeps the minions waiting. The underlings complain about how long it takes while the operator who is further caught up in the machines process is apologetic about it. This is the usual scenario however it can be short-cutted by a clever operator, one who thus proves their worthiness for the leadership role, by them complaining about the machine taking ages or simply, as often occurs, not working properly and doing what it is meant to.

Thus the minions have nothing to complain about. They may not be happier but technically that is the box you have to tick because their job has been done for them. If the machines worked better we could justify replacing half the staff who sit around doing nothing all day anyway.

Only an empath sits back and quietly amused by nobody recognizing the sensitivity of the machines circuits being overloaded and confused by the local chaos of invisible human energies interfering with its binary code and the irregularity of it being asked to do the simple task it was built for.

Clockwork mechanical devices are a step by step process of elimination to fix them: Zen just like Phaedron taught us in Motorcycle Maintenance. However even a programmer cannot access the OS of corporate mass-manufactured fax-machines and photocopiers**. For that you would need an engineer who simply replaces the broken part or more probably the office boss who replaces the entire machine and complains about it eating into the departmental budget. 

NB since the millennium departments typically receive zero budget and exist on competitive grants funding and corporate level charity. People who complain that things were not like this in the old days before computers took over everything and we used to have technologies which actually worked and did not break down all of the time, have by now died of old age. 

* from The Games People Play, a study of transactional analysis by Dr Eric Berne 

** Not to forget the dot-matrix printers.

Image used non-profit for educational purposes within international fair use policy. The only matte black 80s fax machine illustration available. Tomorrows world, yesterday. 

Bottles and Bones

"High tech and low life" its a cute and useful phrase to explain ‘what cyberpunk is about’ but it does not tell the whole story. While the genre is redefining itself to progress into a world which has outmoded yesterdays vision of tomorrow we have to accept that because the last generations understanding is very different from the next, the genre is writhing to encompass themes which were outside of yesterdays ideal.

Is ‘psychic' cyberpunk? It is transhuman after all, even if it requires no machines. Examples: the Butlerian jyhad of Dune ensured Bene Gesserit use a drug to achieve ESP as did Tetsuo and Akira, while Jedi use only the Force. Are any of that cyberpunk? Alfred Besters Demolished Man has natural Espers as does much PKD.

Fringe cyberpunk whereas a digitally augmented form of telepathy, the easily hackable iYou chip responsible for corrosion of personal responsibility in a remote control society, most certainly is cyberpunk.

Are the machines necessary when the topic expands beyond a machines ability to comprehend? If not then can cyberpunk still be cyberpunk without the context by which yesterdays generation defined it? In the future humans will outmode machines because of their help in spiritual development. This is not a dystopia. Are we ready to drop the dystopian element from the genre yet? Would it still be cyberpunk if we did?

We were told that quality fiction throws up a lot of questions. The next generation inhaling stale puke of yesterdays luxury banquet from a taxi cab floor will, having answered those questions, no longer need our generation of robotics. They stand upon the silver lining of our dreams which we could not reach despite our broken silver screens. How much of the 1980s heyday of the movement needs to be retained, this time of change where everyone has to be retrained.

iBoy screenshot

accredited images used non-profit within international fair use policy

tRust rpg (forthcoming)

promo banner by Postworldgames Jim Pinto

                the title says it all...





The Gamekeeper & Transcendental Dolphindark of

Ordo Octopia Ltd

asked me to do some concept art for a;

cyber-noir, kung-fu, horror storyteller game

set in a dystopic future world where...

a lot has happened.

"facing difficulty 

being succinct"

We all became over-experienced.

So now what we got to say;

has value.

To summarize;

wOrds aRe nOw sPelled wIth a cApitalised sUffix, nOt tHe iNitial lEtter. tHis iS sO yOu kNow wHere tHey aRe cOming fRom.

But there's more;

we have to swap every letter 'c' and 's' and 'sh' with an 'X' to do it properly.

Then it turns into Chinese.

Yeah. Sure. 

Now my kids going to be speaking gobbldigook. 

I overcame cynicism, put it to the test and it does seem to actually work now I have given it a go. But are the players likely to be doing this or is it all for atmospheric and dramatic effect? It's a narrative device to easily get an idea across; to suggest the game is set in a future time after things have moved on. The language has mutated; that's how far into the future it is. 

Welcome to Easternization process.

At once I recognized an emo culture game. There has been a  lot ofcomparison between emo and goth, since goth most certainly is a strong root of this late 20th / 21st century transitional youth culture, and there is an overlap.
Emo is stripes and purple added to goth black bat style to make it chavvy with bling. Emo is emotional blackmail. Emo is punk attitude and TIM BURTON CARTOONS YAY! Emo was generated as a consumer culture by the Black Coconut™ chainstore to sell stuff to bisexual and confused kids who hadn't heard of suicide girls. All this to give them a better outlet than ritual scarification and sacrifice to the blood god, cutting their arms for attention energy because its a sexual release and they aren't getting laid. This was britains mainstream alternate teen culture during the late 1990s and 2000s.

So; I am doing what I can to keep tRust proper and avoid unnecessary cheesiness.
After all, it has an 18 rate due to adult themes. tRust oozes BDSM.

tRust is a scarred world. It is planet Earth in the future, after it has been renamed tEra, from the old latin word for it; Terra. A global monocultural society has adapted to survive by become a feudal shoganate. It is modeled loosely on medieval Japan. What it is surviving from, is a space-virus; a biowarfare agent that caused a pandemic genetic mutation plague that turns people into;

half squid, half scorpion

no two are the same

This was not helped by loss of corporate governmental control of the global community thanks to the teleportal revolution. tRust is post-industrial, mainly due to the result of industrial technologies making things so much easier for techno-goths to take over the world.

Everything in the world of tRust is made of a material that is applied by spray canister like graffiti art. It swells up like wall cavity insulation into a foam, and then sets. It is plastic-rubber-latex and contains nano-p[articles which bond together during the drying/hardening process to turn into a computer. This stuff is dissolved by a chemical applied from another can, although the dissolvant has gotten into the water supply and is slowly corroding everything. The City is known by the Aztec word Itza, meaning 'urban' and 'ways of the people'; is several km high, covers the entire planet with home-made tunnels and caves that project holographic computer blah from the walls.

tHe cRacks aRe wHere tHe lIfe iS

Except most of it was broken when the planet unexpectedly swelled up, its diameter becoming significantly fatter. This has resulted in many deep canyons where the rubber has stretched to breaking point and snapped. Within these fracture crevasses are jungles providing a permanent layer of mist. and haven for the remaining of the planets wildlife. The jungles are inhabited by non-tech wild tribes who do voodoo magick, summon demons and ancestor spirits and probably have a better time than the surviving city folk.

Up above are the towers of the Arkatex, who know how to operate the fragmented computer well enough to discover what has happened and what is going on, and who trade with offworlders; the rest of the planet is under quarantine because of the hydra virus. Down below are mysterious ferrymen; boat people who look like Charon from Greek mythology. They operate a taxi service on the sunken sea and canal routes, the safest method of travel given that the surface world is owned by flying nightmares.

"mind is a virus"

There is a lot more to this game that has yet to be unveiled. It is originally intended to counsel abuse victims, to explore psionics and magick through quantum wave mechanics, and to analyze societies based around psychic vampirism. It is all based around an easy symbolism; the monsters who used to be your pervert friends are multi-tentacled leeches armed with scorpion claws chitin and sting.
You can see why I like it.

The designers at Ordo Octopia Ltd have released the key concepts but asked me to remain quiet about the rest of it. This blog is by way of excitement that my art and musical skills are being put to good use; an ambient soundtrack is expected to be released as part of the game.