Internet

You can’t call yourself a cyberpunk if you accept that your every virtual and physical move is being watched, but you don’t take any steps to change that fact. Actually, you can call yourself what you like. I’m not the word police. I’m just some guy on the internet.

Welcome to CyberPunks.com, where we sold your data for cold hard cash and performed behavioral experiments on you to increase our earnings. Just kidding. We’re not technical enough to get up to those kind of underhanded shenanigans; we left that to our internet advertising partners.

Seraphine, a new “virtual influencer” and League of Legends character, seems like it could be based on someone else’s likeness. Imagine waking up one morning and finding a cartoonified version of yourself splashed all over the internet. It’s not a photograph, but it’s close enough that even your mother would take another glance and ask if you’ve taken a second job as a model.

Hacking is to the cyberpunk genre what axes are to movies set in isolated hotels nestled among the majestic Colorado Rockies. It’s an essential aspect of the plot, a much loved blade in the Swiss Army knife skill set of the protagonist, and provides a handy Deus Ex Machina get out clause when faced with an impossible situation.

The Public filibuster is a non-violent protest tactic detailed in Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for a Revolution. The idea is to disrupt official meetings such as local governmental council meetings or perhaps prevent a speaker at a college through what is termed pejoratively as ‘the heckler’s veto’.

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.

Does CyberPunks.com run adverts? I genuinely don’t know.

I, along with millions of other internet dwellers, use adblocking software to ensure that my eyeballs aren’t assaulted with exhortations to buy the latest piece of Apple or Sony crapware that’s only marginally different from the previous model of Apple or Sony crapware you already own.

Today we’ll be discussing anonymous internet & web browsing. First let’s get the low-hanging fruit out of the way. If all you want is for your girlfriend or roommate not to find all that furry porn in your browser history, that’s easy. Just delete both your history and your bookmarks, and call it a day.

These image-processing wonders are called deepfakes, and they are the end result of a process that starts with Generative Adversarial Networks. That is, two machine-learning neural networks that have been trained against each other in an escalating arms race. One, the generator network, does nothing but produce images. The other, the discriminator network, is fed a mix of images produced by the generator along with real images.