Articles & Essays

Reddit is the dark cyberpunk future of social media. No corner of Reddit is more cyberpunky than the r/cyberpunk subreddit itself. Here are five threads that illustrate why.

I started this article with an open mind about Gab.com. I didn’t set out to find the worst of humanity, It was just… unavoidable. I had never directly experienced the people of Gab and knew nothing about the Dissenter browser beyond it being a really cool idea. I really really wanted to be able to say something positive about either. That’s impossible.  There really are no redeeming features.

We live in the age of information. Whether this is so because it is the most advanced material at our command, as in the naming rights to the Iron Age, or whether this is our primary scientific area of pursuit and exploration, as in the Space Age or Atomic Age, information is the currency. The very least reason is that information is everywhere, and there is always more information ready to invade our space. So how do we get the attention of the brooding masses to arouse them in pursuit of a worthy cause?

I took Introduction to Aeronautical Engineering offered by DelftX, and Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python from MITx. But I’m never going to build an aeroplane, and it’s very unlikely that the people auditing the online engineering courses will build a bridge. At least I really hope not.

Released in 1992, Sneakers flew (and continues to fly) under the radar cyberpunk fans. Cyberpunk 2020, the popular tabletop roleplaying game was published just one year prior to the movie’s release. Snow Crash, often regarded by fans as the point in which cyberpunk literature officially “died”, dropped the very same year as Sneakers.

Privacy may be dead, but in this series we’ll be examining various small ways to take back control of your life and secure your data, as well as how to generally subvert the organizations trying to control you. First step: anonymous mail.

The normalization of “virtual” body augmentation has been building for many years, in several subtle forms – the digital alteration of photos for magazine spreads, promotional ads, and album covers being an example. Younger generations have been exposed to these edited, idealistic pictures of people they commonly look up to for the majority of their adolescent lives, being visually exposed by movies, TV, magazines, and especially the internet.

Modern mass media has created an idealized image of what a hero must look like: usually male, white, skinny but buff, pearly white teeth, full head of hair. The list goes on, crafting such a high and unrealistic criteria of perfection in order for anyone to feel good about themselves. 

What pops into your mind whenever you think of cyberpunk? A futuristic metropolis? Body augmentations? Government surveillance? Underneath a lot of neon luster, Katana Zero has all this and more.