SynAck

For me it was Ghost in the Shell and Shadowrun, which was the first pen & paper RPG I played when I was in college. I always played a rigger because that was the first time that I ever thought about "hacking" something other than a computer or network as a lifestyle. Combining the cultures of "petrol heads" and "tech nerds" clicked with me.

But the first "cyberpunk" movie that made the idea of technology as a sub-culture real to me was, ironically, (and I hate to admit this) seeing "Hackers" for the first time. Certainly not as a real vision of what "cyberpunk" was, but rather an extremely over-the-top and glamorized commentary both on how non-technical people view technophiles as well as how people who ate, slept, lived, and breathed a tech-centered ethos might live. Like, my parents legit believed that's how I acted with my friends when I wasn't around them.

I grew up in the era of The Legion of Doom and the Cult of the Dead Cow, and realized that this hyperbolic version of the archetypical "console cowboys" was how a lot of people saw the younger generation of computer kids. They had graduated from the long-haired, bearded, ex-hippies toiling away in a basement somewhere into stylish (albeit very weird) tech-savvy young hacktivists that were trying to buck the system solely because someone told them they couldn't.

Then, reading Neuromancer and Snow Crash introduced the idea of a virtual world parallel (beneath? alongside?) to the physical world and that was the gravity that brought it all together.

Enh, government and business are so deeply in bed together that they might as well be one and the same in this case. Seems like a fit to me.

One of the dangers I can see is that their instances become supernodes that carry a lot more sway over the underlying AP protocol. They could use Microsoft's old "embrace and extend" philosophy and start making special extensions that only their nodes have. Then their critical mass either forces changes to the underlying protocol or bifurcates the fediverse into "Meta-based" and "not Meta-based".

Another issue will be what data they can mine from their users as well as other instances, and what tools they will build to circumvent any protections to mine all the fedi data.

And let's not even talk about the moderation issues (or sure lack thereof) that will make the fediverse much less safe for everyone. We've already seen time and time again that Zuck & co. don't care about moderation and user safety, and actually would rather manipulate data to their own nefarious ends.

There are so many more reasons why this is a bad thing.

This is the angry, raw, user side of what @pluralistic@mamot.fr refers to as "enshittification". This is the user experience that I have had over and over again. This absolutely deserves a read, and will hopefully inspire lots of us to fight like hell to keep corpo interests out of our free exchange of ideas and fediverse.

I am not a product. I am not a program. I am a user.

A lot of my foundational impressions were based on movie soundtracks of the likes of “Johnny Mnemonic”, “Strange Days”, “The Matrix”, and “The Crow”. In my college days, I was really into the industrial genre and the likes of NiN (the Broken/Fixed era), Front 242, Sister Machine Gun, God Lives Underwater, and Machines of Loving Grace. Then I got into EDM for a while, as a lot of the software devs I lived and worked with were into that genre.

These days, I’ve been getting into darkwave and synthwave. I’m a big fan of our very own @revengeday@dataterm.digital, Dance With The Dead, Extra Terra, Neon Nox, Lazerpunk, and DreamReaper to name a few.

Yeah, and R.U. Sirius has an account on hackers.town on Mastodon. He occasionally posts some tidbits from these mags and some of his musical endeavors.

Glad you mentioned the hardening aspect, because that’s definitely something I would have to consider. My adoption of cyberware is based on the assumption that the systems have been hardened against run-of-the-mill hacking (although probably not immune to Netrunners), and they would have to be something that doesn’t require a warranty or ongoing “rental” fee. There would always be updates and new versions of course, but the original systems should work at the installed level until they are damaged or their owner dies. A “Repo Men” timeline (where organs are repossessed if you can’t pay for them) would make me very reticent to do cyberware.

It's pretty much spot-on for the millieu of this place. 😎