Religions act like governments - their first inherent preference is stability. SV ideology is explicitly anti-stability, exemplified by the phrase “move fast and break things”.
The social order was never on the table for breaking. SV depends on banking and state violence for enforcement just as any other wealthy businesspeople do.
A brief study of the history of SV will show you that it was actually the US military (and its money) that is in many ways responsible for creating the culture of groundbreaking that exists there to date.
The conventional media seems to have a huge axe to grind about social media, presumably because it's affected their own influence and prestige, which has warped people's perception of reality a tad. For example, there was a BBC article a while back that made it on to here aboutt how the UK was supposedly at risk of a measles outbreak because vaccination rates had dropped due to Facebook misinformation - except if you actually looked into the details, it turned out those childhood MMR vaccination rates were only down a fraction of a percent from the all-time high. The bigger danger that our medical experts were worried about was all the adults who hadn't gotten vaccinated as kids decades ago due to Wakefield, long before social media or most people had internet access, and the BBC was of course one of the main organisations that spread those claims.
I think that didn’t make much difference relative to the Influenza pandemic a century ago? Modulo what tools they had at the time, things like masking.
This is disingenuous for two reasons: (1) where else does proof come from if not from experts in their respective fields? and (2) various forms of crackpot denialism persisted long after proof was (repeatedly) given.
People were peddling horse dewormer as a COVID treatment even after multiple studies that demonstrated no benefit.
It's disingenuous to group one group of trust the experts as proof and the other as crackpot. Both groups blindly believed claims that a new treatment or repurposed drug would prevent covid. In neither case did it work.
I did the scientific way of not contracting coronavirus: isolation. Neither the dewormer or the mutiple experimental shots were as efficacious.
That's because we got all the bad bits of cyberpunk without any of the cool bits. Megacorporations running everything and owning everyone, but no badass cyber-enhancements and only rudimentary (by comparison) VR.
For what it’s worth, much of the cyberpunk skeleton is in place - good and bad - but it’s not clearly visible from a thematic perspective, because human life isn’t as cheap as in genuine cyberpunk environments.
We’re also, frankly, moving towards larger levels of human commoditization. Cyberpunk might make people disposable but it doesn’t make them totally irrelevant, certainly not the way the modern world does, because otherwise the story doesn’t have main characters anymore.
And yet social media is giving people a profound sense of entitlement that comes from believing you're the main character of some story -- colloquially called "main character syndrome".
Maybe that just speeds the personal commoditization? (Syndrome (Incredibles) voice) "When everyone's the main character... no one will be."
> Megacorporations running everything and owning everyone, but no badass cyber-enhancements and only rudimentary (by comparison) VR.
Did we get the same cyberpunk media? Because "megacorporations running everything" isn't a massive hyperbole in cyberpunk like it is in real life.
I'm not seeing corporate security with machine guns when I walk into Google. Cyberpunk 2077 starts with a brain-implants company straight-up murdering half the European council before a strategic vote.
There's an ocean-wide margin between "corporations can influence home politics" and "corporations rule the world".
And my neighbor who believes the construction noises she's hearing at night are from the pedophile ring (led by Biden and Hillary) digging tunnels to transport children they sell online with their names disguised as SKUs on regular-looking furniture websites
• A global health crisis forces a generation of children to socialize and be educated via primitive virtual reality, while corporate headquarters (and some cities) become ghost towns.
• Groups resist technology (vaccines, masks) because of conspiracy theories about origin, control, and autonomy. Resistance screeds and memes are spread by politicians and corpos built to profit from personal information and engagement uber alles.
• Countless deaths prevented by previously unheard-of biotech advancements created by global pharmaceutical companies in a suspiciously short timeframe. Fragile global systems like supply chains shatter like uncooked spaghetti. Surveillance technology deployed to people's personal devices. Etc.
It is a good set-up. We’re just perpetually in the “events leading up to the international cybercorp wars” stage.
I think the real world is not separated nicely into backstory and actual story, so we’ll kind of bumble along for better or worse instead of hitting some grand moment of change.
Near future fiction needs that dramatic moment to neatly jump from the present to the setting.
Well, corporate warfare is just warfare since the megacorporations have essentially purchased the governments of the Earth. Much of government regulation and market intervention is a result of regulatory capture, and voting effectively achieves very little other than keeping the people fighting each other while the megacorporations and ultra wealthy divide the spoils.
None of that is really cyberpunk, though. The second is the result of people believing they live in a post-apocalyptic dystopia when they don't, but in an actual cyberpunk story the conspiracy theories would have been correct. The health crisis would have been manufactured by black ops pharmaceutical companies working with the CIA, and COVID vaccines would have contained nanotech that let corporations insert AI code into people's minds through the screens that people were now forced to spend an inordinate amount of time in front of.
The protagonists would be a ragtag group of antivaxxers and anarcho-primitivists simply trying to survive outside without getting eaten by cyberzombies or sniped by Boston Dynamics killbots while the New World Order tries to force the populace into some kind of capitalist Instrumentality.
We're not there yet, but give it ten, maybe fifteen years. At least one (maybe two or three, to account for cultural osmosis from parenting) generation entirely raised in a world in which consensus reality and culture are entirely created and managed by AI, genetic engineering and cybernetics (particularly AR and brain-machine interfaces) become common, and the breakdown of large-scale and complex societal structures due to climate change really begins, leading to corporate micronations, crypto economies and autonomous government. When relationships between people and technology become primarily parasocial and psychosexual.
> The protagonists would be a ragtag group of antivaxxers and anarcho-primitivists simply trying to survive outside without getting eaten by cyberzombies or sniped by Boston Dynamics killbots while the New World Order tries to force the populace into some kind of capitalist Instrumentality.
The heroes always have to be the "ragtag group of outsiders and vigilantes" and the conspiracy always has to be true, otherwise it's just not an interesting fictional story.
I'd argue that our world is more and more cyberpunk, but the real life good guys aren't the fictional cyberpunk protagonists, nor are they the New World Order stormtroopers.
This framing shifts responsibility to an abstract virus, rather than the human response.
Early statistics showed the overwhelming majority of people would be fine if exposed to the virus, given that at least half of people were asymptomatic. Older people with comorbidities were at higher risk, though survival was still the order of 98%+. The overall mortality was on the order of the 1968 Hong Kong flu, which most people have forgotten. Children especially were never at significant risk. The choice to lock down and do Zoom schooling was at the cost of the youth, which have seen marked declines in academic performance and increases in mental illness. We can see that nations like Sweden which never locked down turned out fine.
The virus emerged from Wuhan, where there was the virology lab working on gain of function for coronaviruses. The NIH had funded such research while Fauci was leading the organization. A revolving door between pharmaceutical companies and the FDA helped lead to the suspiciously rushed vaccines, while restricting the release of Pfizer's trial data until 2096. The mandates did not make sense since the vaccines were shown to not limit transmission. Given how many boosters some people are on now, they are probably some of the least effective vaccines of all time, compared to the actual good ones for smallpox and polio.
Supply chains shattered, or in other words, the trade war that Trump initiated against China had escalated. The virus was the compelling justification to shut down factories, causing supply shocks across the world, demonstrating the foolishness Neoliberal globalist economic policy and just how dependent the West had become on manufacturing based in a hostile totalitarian state. Monetary policy in response to the supply shocks caused widespread inflation and reduced living standards for young Americans with little wealth.
Authoritarianism, surveillance, and censorship expanded, which was already the long term trend in the West as its elites seek to emulate the strengths of the Chinese state.
I can agree that the government's response in 2020 was horrible, and those people at the top should be held accountable for that awful response.
> Early statistics showed the overwhelming majority of people would be fine if exposed to the virus,
Hospitals were overwhelmed. That was the concern. The people who were "fine"? Many of them did so only because they were hospitalized. If we just exposed everyone to it all at once, it would have been a lot worse.
> We can see that nations like Sweden which never locked down turned out fine.
If by "turned out fine" you mean having significantly more deaths than neighboring countries and still suffering economic issues, sure.
> survival was still the order of 98%
Survival rate ignores long-term damage, which we are still learning about today, and is an ignorant statistic to use. It's why many disasters talk about casualties and not just deaths. It's like saying less than 1.5% of the children in Uvalde survived.
> The virus emerged from Wuhan, where there was the virology lab...
And not a single US Intelligence agency has come out strongly in favor of the Wuhan Lab theory, beyond one saying it's "plausible."
> Supply chains shattered, or in other words, the trade war that Trump initiated against China had escalated... Monetary policy in response to the supply shocks caused widespread inflation and reduced living standards for young Americans with little wealth.
The argument here being that it was Trump's trade war with China that increased inflation and reduced living standards...
If by "turned out fine" you mean having significantly more deaths than neighboring countries and still suffering economic issues, sure.
And significantly fewer deaths than countries that closed schools for years or arrested people for walking alone in parks.
Survival rate ignores long-term damage, which we are still learning about today, and is an ignorant statistic to use.
Ok, just also make sure to include the psychological and economic costs of NPIs, which we are also still learning about. Remember the teacher's unions saying that learning loss was a myth and kids are "resilient"?
And not a single US Intelligence agency has come out strongly in favor of the Wuhan Lab theory, beyond one saying it's "plausible."
Two agencies lean toward a lab leak, others toward natural origin, none with high confidence (https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/28/politics/wray-fbi-covid-origi...). A lab leak origin is perhaps less likely than the alternative, but it's a entirely reasonable hypothesis.
> And significantly fewer deaths than countries that closed schools for years or arrested people for walking alone in parks.
Which country had schools closed for years? Not the US.
> Ok, just also make sure to include the psychological and economic costs of NPIs, which we are also still learning about. Remember the teacher's unions saying that learning loss was a myth and kids are "resilient"?
Oh, the "I want to kill my parents to save the economy" argument. Gotcha. Just to be clear, which of your parents would you off to save your 401k?
I'll answer your question once I know where you land on that.
> Two agencies lean toward a lab leak, others toward natural origin, none with high confidence (https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/28/politics/wray-fbi-covid-origi...). A lab leak origin is perhaps less likely than the alternative, but it's a entirely reasonable hypothesis.
Plausible. The world you are looking for is plausible, and only one of the two, out of more than a dozen. Only one is plausible, not two. And plausible does not mean, in any way, "leaning toward." So no.
Would have been a pretty straightforward response with maybe less statistics.
Increase production of masks and provide temporary assistance for people who would otherwise spread it at work. The most we could say tech did was allocate just-in-time logistics outputs a little more efficiently, except that just-in-time logistics were only a result of the tech you're referring to. We would still have contract warehouses across the country and world that could store and distribute basic provisions with a little bit of planning.
Abundant visibility breeds a sense of abundant control, but when that sense goes beyond material reality we see technocrats fail.
Vaccines did help a lot, that's true, but that success doesn't really generalize across tech per se.
> The most we could say tech did was allocate just-in-time logistics outputs a little more efficiently
No, the most we could say is millions of families could stay in touch across high-bandwidth lines; online shopping was already a reality that needed a bit of a scale up; secured remote work was possible for many millions of people; etc etc. Try and imagine the same pandemic, but no one has a laptop, all shopping is done in person apart from what Amazon already stocks, and that's only in a few countries, most things are paper based, and every home has sub-1Mb internet and no way of doing a video call at the push of a button.
It would be the same only lockdowns would be rejected even more than they were. The only reason people complied with lockdowns as much as they did is because they had the warm glowing warming glow of a screen in front of them supplying endless entertainment, information, and distraction. Take that away and people wouldn't comply with lockdowns the way they did.
Amazing how the countries without all those amenities ever made it out alive... you're conflating dependence on those technologies with necessity of those technologies.
> Amazing how the countries without all those amenities ever made it out alive... you're conflating dependence on those technologies with necessity of those technologies
Can you say where in this sentence I said that they were necessary for existence?
> Imagine a pandemic without the comms and tech invented in the last 15 years.
> millions of families could stay in touch across high-bandwidth lines; online shopping was already a reality that needed a bit of a scale up; secured remote work was possible for many millions of people
Bringing these up in the discussion in this way implies that these outcomes were unachievable "without the comms and tech invented in the last 15 years". I'm not so interested in some pedantic retroactive interpretation of your comment when it's clear from the tone and presentation that you intended this to be some reach toward a techno-utopian narrative of progress. My point is that that narrative hides within it the absurd notion that we can't do without these things, when obviously we can and it is really quite easy to imagine a pandemic being addressed adequately without those things in place.
Indeed in many ways some aspects of the response would have been more robust. I brought up just-in-time because lack of inventory as a buffer (of masks in particular, but also basic necessities) was a huge driver of the virality in the early days. With such a buffer it's feasible, plausible even, that we could have weathered the early days easier and anxious people could have had less severe overreactions to mask mandates and the like, and the total death count could have been 10% or 1% what it was without adequate reserves in place.
I don't think it does. Imagine a pandemic without the comms and tech invented in the last 15 years.