I like Blade Runner (and 2049) a lot, but I always felt like they put much more emphasis on the 'cyber' part then the 'punk' part.

Not much commentary on socioeconomic issues, or engagement with themes of anti-athoritarianism and anti-capitalism, or the dystopian nature of the world, all of that is just background dressing to a much more standard science fiction exploration of "what it means to be human", which is something I could find better explored in classic golden age science fiction like Isaac Asimov's Robot and Foundation series, like Caves of Steel.

That's why, out of all visual media, it's really Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and Robocop that made the genre click for me, believe it nor. It's the former that made me finally go out and get all the cyberpunk literature I could and start reading it. That's probably informed by my queer, anarchist, and punk leanings outside of cyberpunk, you know?

What in the god damn

"Nova" means "awesome" or "amazing" kinda

[-] edgerunneralexis@dataterm.digital 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

This is an interesting idea!

Personally, from my study of it, I conceptualize the relationship between modernism and postmodernism a little differently — namely, modernism itself was concerned with questioning assumptions and critically analyzing dogmatic beliefs, trying to find justifications for them and discarding the ones that could not be justified. It was actually a response to the dogmatism and unquestioned assumptions and lack of proper justifications that was common in religiously-influenced philosophy and theology. It was also a revolution in epistemology, in trying to figure out how we could understand the world and justify our beliefs and know what is true in the first place. Postmodernism is thus, in my opinion, not a reversal of a key concept of modernism at all, but an acceleration of modernism — modernism taken to its natural conclusion, by applying modernism's own desire to critically analyze assumptions and remove unjustified ones to modernism's own assumptions about empiricism and objectivity and the existence of universal truths itself. And in many ways this was prefigured by Hume; in fact, Stirner, who is considered a proto-postmodernist by most scholars, explicitly cites Hume as a philosopher he respects — a rare thing indeed!

To the degree that postmodernism ends up inverting modernism, and having a completely different methodology than modernism, this is a result of the bringing of one of modernism's core ideas to its logical fruition. And this naturally results in something far more radical and interesting and capable of bearing new intellectual fruit then modernism itself, because postmodernism's benefit doesn't merely come from blindly reversing an aspect of a previous philosophy, but from what it chooses to continue and strengthen and what it reverses as a result.

I think this differs strongly from the relationship between cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk because while post-cyberpunk does invert one of the aspects of cyberpunk, it does not do this as a result of a deeper undercurrent of philosophy or logic or ideas from the cyberpunk ethos that motivates this reversal, and so this reversal doesn't really bear new fruit at all — it just undoes what cyberpunk did and returns to the science fiction world before cyberpunk came about. It doesn't take the cyberpunk project and move forward to even more radical and thus fruitful new worlds further on beyond what cyberpunk could discover, which is what postmodernism does to modernism, because there's no aspect or undercurrent of cyberpunk that it actually takes further. The reversal is actually just a reset.

This is why I have a lot less interest in postcyberpunk than cyberpunk — it feels like a genre created by those who have reached middle age and bought into the system, and so now, being comfortable and benefitting from the system, they willfully blind themselves to the need for radical critique and deconstruction and rage at it, and thus wish to return to a more reformist genre. Postmodernism would be more like postcyberpunk if it had looked at modernism and reversed the assumption that things need critique and critical analysis and decided to just return back to Catholic philosophy!

Yup, you're exactly right with your analysis. They're pulling typical tankie BS ironically.

I think one of the key things that will prevent the capture of the Fediverse by corporations is never ever allowing whitelists for instance defederation and blocking to happen.

If that ever does happen, it becomes trivially easy to break the decentralized network up into a few centralized silos that are all disconnected from the rest of the network completely, whereas, the way it stands now, you have to explicitly block anyone you don't want to be connected to, so it's a great way to deal with bad actors and nasty instances, but makes it extremely hard to wall off your instance completely, because if you block another instance it's trivially easy for the people that are unhappy with that to find or create a small new instance that flies under the radar and allows them to see the content on both the instance they left and the incense it blocked. It also makes it incredibly hard to capture people on your instance because they can always create a small instance and use that instance to see the content on the instance they left.

I think also limiting block list size for instances (but not users!) Could be a really good way of doing this too because then any instance I want to block a ton of other instances is going to have to fork lemmy to lift that band and then everyone will know they did that and know to get off it.

Also, to be fair, there's much less of a system to game in the first place, because you don't have an overall karma score, so there's not really any incentive to karma farm.

[-] edgerunneralexis@dataterm.digital 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Yup, that's honestly the history of the world — people giving their autonomy and independence and concern for what's really going on in the world away to authorities for ease, comfort, convenience and just out of habit, then being surprised when those authorities turn around and begin taking advantage of them. It's the eternal struggle against apathy.

[-] edgerunneralexis@dataterm.digital 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Here's the money part of the article for anyone who doesn't want to click through:

the most clear-cut example of this suppression is happening in Montana, where a drag ban was passed this year. Like most of this crop of drag bans, the Montana law was so broad and overly vague that the Dallas Symphony Orchestra could be considered “obscene” if its third clarinet player was transgender. Despite assurances from Montana Republicans that their drag ban had nothing to do with transgender people, the first application of the law was to ban a transgender person from speaking at a public library, based on the legal advice of county attorneys.

The event was not drag. It was a presentation on the history of trans and two-spirit people being given as part of Pride month. The speaker, Adria Jawort, was not presenting obscene material. She was not dressing or acting in a way meant to titillate. She was going to give a history lesson in a public library, and the government effectively said, “No, it is illegal for that person to do so because they are trans and dressing in a manner consistent with their gender identity, even if the way they dress is legal for other individuals.”

In other words, if a cisgender (non-transgender) person presented that same material, it would be legal. But for a transgender person to present it, they would have to detransition (i.e., erase themselves). When the government tells a class of people that they cannot speak in public and cannot express themselves in a way that everyone else can (with clothing that is perfectly acceptable in public for everyone else), this is a clear violation of the First Amendment. And yet there’s nary a peep from the people who promised to march with trans people or defend freedom of speech to the death, because they cared first and foremost about ensuring that they retained their own commercial platforms, while painting trans people as the villains.

...

When it comes to trans people, the right seemingly wants to go even further to curtail their constitutional rights. Presidential candidate Nikki Haley has been campaigning on the idea that transgender people are why teen girls attempt suicide. This is patent nonsense, of course: Teen suicide rates are lowest in states where trans people are protected by law and highest in the state (Idaho) that has led the charge to ban them from sports and locker rooms. Haley, however, singles out comedian and TikTok influencer Dylan Mulvaney in particular as a cause of teen girls contemplating suicide.

“Make no mistake. That is a guy, dressed up like a girl, making fun of women. Women don’t act like that. Yet everybody’s wondering why a third of our teenage girls seriously contemplated suicide last year?” Haley said of the TikTok celebrity. Most of Mulvaney’s videos are fluff—a video diary along with makeup, hair, and skin care tips: stuff that any cisgender social media influencer would have no trouble posting. But the implication by Haley is clear: Transgender people, and content, must be removed from anywhere that might be seen by people under 18, even if the content itself is innocuous.

Pause for a moment to consider: This is a serious GOP candidate for president strongly implying that the government should ensure that a class of people are denied access to social media and forbidden from putting content featuring themselves on the internet. It is hard not to draw comparisons to Germany’s banning Jews from writing for newspapers in 1933, then banning them from stage and screen in 1934.

On that last point, the literal Lemkin Institute, the organization founded in memory of the man who invented the term genocide, thinks today's anti-trans movements are possibly genocidal.

The thing is that there aren't significant direct production costs per user for technology services like there are for material items, just overall maintenance costs that only scale noticeably with a large increase of new users, so it would actually be possible to pay for infrastructure and salary costs and all of that with just a percentage of your overall userbase being subscribed and subsidizing the rest. This is actually a monetization strategy that's working out for some privacy focused services like ProtonMail. So it would be necessary to convince some users to sign up but not necessarily all of them.

That's a really good idea! If there's anything I feel I'm good at, it's communication, and selling people on ideas!

The last thing I need right now is more computers, especially since I can't even use them much right now, but god damn I am obsessed with DIY cyberdecks.

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edgerunneralexis

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