It’s not the world we are heading to, its the world we were heading to in 1985. We’re already there. It’s just way more pernicious and theres less fetishization of japan.
Wasn’t the Japan stuff in 80s scifi primarily fear that their economy would overtake the US and Europe? It was the postwar economic miracle period for Japan.
I’d argue that the fear and orientalism are still here, just pointed at China instead of Japan.
Yeah there was a time in the 1970s if you had a Japanese car in a major urban area you could expect it to get vandalized. There was also that Micheal Crichton novel Rising Sun, and a bunch of Tom Clancy novels are about how a conspiracy of evil Japanese businessmen are gonna take over the world.
It was a weird moment where Japan was the designated enemy for a while. It really goes to show how easily propagandized the average American is, deciding who their enemies are based on whichever economic desire our capitalists have. Japan eventually lost this fight though, the Plaza accords and the Liberal Party trying to cut taxes ended up in the 1990s recession, which they never quite recovered from. Now Japan has a much less hostile and dominant role in their trade with the west
That was also when “J-slur Crap” started being used by car people, wasn’t it? My boomer parents always assumed stuff that was made in Japan was of poor quality - they are the same about China now, obviously.
People here are probably too young to remember, but by the late 1980s Nikkei 225 index had risen by more than 900% over 15 years, outperforming Nasdaq and S&P and every other market by miles.
Japan’s invasion of Hollywood, with Sony acquiring Columbia Pictures. Mitsubishi bought the Rockefeller Center. Japanese investors were buying up US properties left and right. For your ordinary Americans, it had looked like Japan would own America by the end of the century.
Japan already overtook US in worldwide semiconductor sales in the mid-1980s, with rumors of Fairchild, IBM and even Intel itself being acquired by Japanese firms. An internal Intel memo predicting that “Silicon Valley might become a wasteland” as it laid off 30% of its workers.
Then… it all came crashing down by Christmas day of 1989. The extraordinary growth of Japanese economy had been fueled by cheap credit, leading to asset price bubble that eventually bursted. Japan never recovered from that.
The US would also go on the experience a similar fate: with the financial deregulation of the Clinton era (started during Reagan) pumping out cheap credit that fueled the 1990s growth, everyone thought they would get richer simply by endlessly borrowing from the banks and going all in into real estate. This ultimately precipitated in the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008, and the global financial crisis of 2009. In many ways the US still hasn’t recovered from that crash.
Cheap credit was certainly a factor but I don’t think you can ignore the effect of the Plaza Accords, the forced appreciation of the Yen, and the forced transfer of semi-conductor technology from Toshiba to Intel and other US compamies.
Japan is not a fully independent state and was/is under effective US military occupation. That’s why they had to knuckle under and give the Americans what they wanted but when America tried the same against China, China told them to go eat shit.
Fun side story: at the height of the bubble, one property valuer estimated the land that the Imperial Palace in Tokyo sat on was worth more than all the real estate in California.
less fetishization of japan.
idk have you seen how many weebs there are now?
This could be debated but… sci fi dystopia is meant to highlight the horror we are in right now, not necessarily some prediction of the future. The use of an exaggerated fictional future is meant to shake off the intense normalization of existing in modernity.
I don’t think this holds entirely true for cyberpunk as a genre. Like take cyberpunk-esque augmentations, that’s just straight up a non-issue, even today. Right on the money as how that will go, if nothing else changes, but I don’t think that’s a horror applicable now. The underlying problem of how the system works, sure, but that’s more a cautionary tale as to how things play out, not how they currently are
The thing is that Cyberpunk 2077 exaggerates the evils of capitalism so far into absurdity that it stops being a critique of capitalism. Instead of the true mundane horrors of capitalism we have today, where companies basically knowingly stuff everything with microplastics and get away with it by greenwashing, and where single billionaires can inspired coups in foreign nations, Cyberpunk 2077 is a world where corporations feed you literal slop made of 100% artificial substances using the most crude and disgusting advertisements.
What CDPR does is basically make the most over the top faux capitalism where people do obviously evil shit and then gesture at it to go “haha wow glad we don’t live like that, huh gamers?” There’s absolutely zero meat to their critique, it’s a capitalist strawman.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a world where corporations feed you literal slop made of 100% artificial substances using the most crude and disgusting advertisements.
I agree with your overall point, but if news broke tomorrow that the Impossible Burger was 80% plastic by mass I would not be surprised at all. Given how evil irl corporations already are you really have to exaggerate to predict how evil they’ll get in 50 years. Otherwise you end up with shit like Quantum of Solace, where James Bond fought to prevent an evil corporation from privatizing all of Bolivia’s water… And raising prices less than an actual company did irl.
Even if it was 80% plastic, the advertising would still be positive advertising, trying to spin it as still a good thing.
Compared to Cyberpunk 2077 where their artificial slop is basically advertised as being the most disgusting slop ever, but people still accept that anyway
It’s also basically a post-apocalyptic setting. The rest of the world except for Canada, Sweden, and Japan is Fallout. Like despite all the evil capitalism, the main reason the world is a disaster is because there was a nuclear war, which for me really distracts from any sort of capitalist critique because I’d imagine any system dealing with those material conditions is gonna end up having horrors.
I didn’t remember anything about widespread nuclear war. The Arasaka-Militech Corporate war ended with both sides getting nationalized, not widespread nuclear devastation. The USSR still exists (though subsumed by Sov Oi), as does China (as evidenced by Kang Tao and you do a quest for someone implied to be a Chinese spy). Theres also lots of references to Europe being a haven for advanced Biotech (especially in the expansion) and there’s advertising for holiday packages in Somalia.
The Arasaka-Militech Corporate war ended with both sides getting nationalized
I thought it was supposed to be a dystopia
it also totally misses the mark in some aspects. in actual gameplay, you have the ability to work for the police and literally help them fight people around the city. there’s literally a whole copaganda mission glorifying some sexy detective. corps are evil, and capitalism has gone too far, but the police are your friends and you should help them shoot people on the street!
I wanted to like that section so bad too, because i’m a sucker for noir and bladerunner shit, but the glorification of the cops in this game was so gross, and immediately breaks immersion when the protag is continually shit talking them when they aren’t on screen.
the game even has some in-game cartoons that mock the police force in the game, animations put out by the NCPD that depict the police officers as buff cool dogs and civilians as stupid little dogs and do show the NCPD to be authoritarian and overly violent. so they put effort into making the NCPD seem that way, but in actual gameplay they are nothing but heroes just trying to protect the city from cyberpsychos and gangs, with the police fixer telling V to simply incapacitate cyberpsychos as if ACTUAL police wouldn’t be eager to slaughter someone (like capitalist police truly are like). this incongruence totally destroyed the message and immersion for me and made the actual game seem more pro-police.
My entire life I’ve wanted to make art or music or something, but I’ve always been scared because what if people get the wrong message from it? Posts like this confirm to me that’s gonna happen no matter how blatant and loudly you spell it out for people so you might as well do it.
Let’s be honest here CDPR’s Cyberpunk is very mild in its criticism of capitalism. It uses it more for the aesthetics than for any kind of critic of society.
There’s only one mission I remember where you engage with any sort of revolutionary rhetoric. It’s the one where you’re tracking down hidden messages calling for an overthrow of capitalism. Johnny’s there commenting, and despite how he’s supposed to be this militant revolutionary himself, he completely mocks the hidden messages. He goads you to find the rest and where they’re coming from, I think he says they’re probably written by some dumb angsty kid. I thought it seemed really out of tone, but now I realize the game’s writers completely missed the point of the setting.
Then again I’m losing faith in cyberpunk as a genre to begin with. William Gibson turned out to be the biggest liberal on Earth. Mike Pondsmith doesn’t seem much better.
Johnny also does this during Judy’s quest line to start a revolution at Clouds, a brothel.
Despite being portrayed as a revolutionary and a rebel, Johnny spends the entire time shitting on Judy and the other sex workers specifically because they’re sex workers - the plan isn’t good, but Johnny’s problems aren’t with the plan at any point.
All cyber, no punk.
The game does go out of its way to attenuate or neuter a revolutionary message every chance it gets. Hell, V recognizes the problems with unfettered capitalism (conversation with Takemura outside Arasaka warehouses), but defends the status quo every chance they get (convo between johnny and V in Pacifica after Placide). The game always defaults to implying the system is fine for most people.
Not like he is literally dying because of the system. I wish I could play V as a fledgling socialist, honestly.
I’ve never played it because I’m not sure if my computer could handle it, but also even though I’m not super knowledgeable about cyberpunk I think an entire world of it that you’re thrust into would be a little much. Outside of that though I’m still surprised how much content of any kind people consume but don’t really think about. I know art for arts sake is still valid, but I’ve always tried to look for meaning in any piece of art I’m experiencing and it’s just wild to me that other people not only don’t do that, but are almost proud that they don’t? Idk it’s just very foreign to me anytime I see it.
A lot of people really fail to pick up media literacy skills, even if they’ve been to university. I think a lot of focus on STEM being the most important thing leads people to look down on and not engage with lit and media studies classes in a way.
I know it took me an embarrassing amount of time into my young adult life to start engaging with the media I consume lol.
G@mers are the most oblivious and obnoxious people on the planet.
i once had a coworker tell me that Metal Gear Solid “isn’t political.” and I’m still trying to wrap my head around how few brain cells that kind of thought requires.
Wait Metal Gear Solid, the games that feature themes such as: the cold war, war economy, the military industrial complex, espionage, coups, PMCs etc. Are political? I thought it was just about cool stealth man getting hot babes and killing guys.
