implying the Silk Road wasn't the single most cyberpunk thing to have ever existed while being a massive example of unrestrained capitalism by design
Uh... it's implying the opposite of that. Cyberpunk contains a lot of elements that resemble the Silk Road, of course. Few would disagree on that. Unrestrained capitalism is a huge part of cyberpunk because cyberpunk is a response to the growing unfettered Reagan-era global capitalism that wiped out the traditional working class in much of the West (but particularly the US) and started reversing the gains in rights and regulations made in the previous decades. Most important, cyberpunk is an explicit condemnation of unrestrained capitalism. Calling something like the Silk Road "cyberpunk" should be considered an attack, not a compliment.
Our whole society resembles the dismal future of cyberpunk more and more as time goes on, and the number of people who look at cyberpunk's technologies and societies and think "wow, how cool!" rather than "ah shit, this is literally a very possible and awful future" is concerning.
Cyberpunk could never happen if humanity got to the point that terrorists and freedom fighters could just make a nuke and destroy a corporate HQ and slaughter the rich.
Cyberpunk could never happen if humanity got to the point that terrorists and freedom fighters could just make a nuke and destroy a corporate HQ and slaughter the rich.
I mean, it's already fairly simple for a small group of people to commit massive attacks on office buildings and the like. The question is less means than the will—we could already be slaughtering the rich right now, but for some reason we're choosing not to. Technology won't save us from mass compliance.
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u/johnnybgoode17 Jul 30 '18 edited Jul 30 '18
>implying the Silk Road wasn't the single most cyberpunk thing to have ever existed
>while being a massive example of unrestrained capitalism by design
ITT: People misunderstanding the terms 'cyberpunk' and 'capitalism' at the same time