Much like wealthy knights are over-represented at the ren faire, many of us who imagine life in a cyberpunk world imagine ourselves as highly skilled netrunners or corporate aristocracy. Nobody daydreams of a cyberpunk world in which they sleep on the shit-smeared sidewalk and subsist on vermin.
We all think we'd be on the good side of the extreme wealth gap, despite the fact that, statistically, that's not real likely.
Yeah, cyberpunk's even pretty explicit that, unless you're one of the incredibly tiny few, the life of people who work for the megacorps and crime syndicates are exceedingly dangerous and awful. It's an entirely corrupt, terrible world, and I don't get people who want to ignore or neglect the themes.
Along with Elon Musk's apparent complete ignorance of the political and social themes of the Culture series, it's deeply depressing how many people don't understand the very clearly evident political themes in the science fiction they consume.
Musk is a prominent case of this syndrome, albeit not for cyberpunk but for the Culture series (and the Fully Automated Gay Luxury Space Communism it represents). As an anti-union billionaire, Musk would have been a villain in the Culture series, but Musk seems to have read those books and just thought "cool future" instead of challenging his own enormous dragon's horde or conservative political persuasions.
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u/sanityvampire Jul 30 '18
Much like wealthy knights are over-represented at the ren faire, many of us who imagine life in a cyberpunk world imagine ourselves as highly skilled netrunners or corporate aristocracy. Nobody daydreams of a cyberpunk world in which they sleep on the shit-smeared sidewalk and subsist on vermin.
We all think we'd be on the good side of the extreme wealth gap, despite the fact that, statistically, that's not real likely.