On that note, I still haven't found equivalents of many of my old reddit subs... Is there a good transhumanism community anyone can share?
This community is about the ethos of cyberpunk as a subculture as much as it is about the literal genre, and transhumanism is very much a part of that, so for now you could post about that here. You could also create a transhumanism community yourself!
Pixel 6 w GrapheneOS is what I use, its lovely
It's very, very high on my list, especially since I adore story heavt isometric cRPGs. I've just spent collectively two out of the last three years dealing with PPCS, so I haven't gotten around to it lol
is such an incredible list!
Incidentally, I'm currently working (very slowly due to my issues) on a sprawling gothic hyper-transhumanist cyberpunk interactive fiction game focused on creating a rich, novel-quality story, a fractally-detailed and heavily atmospheric world inspired both by regular cyberpunk and works like The Crow and Dark City, and naturalistic story-focused gameplay.
The gameplay will be focused around your dialogue choices with other characters and solving various obsticles designed to enhance your immersion in the world instead of pulling you out, realistic problems like figuring out who and how to talk to the right people at a night market to get illegal weapons, or how to get into your apartment to get your stuff back after you've been evicted. The problem solving gameplay (with usually more than one solution to every obsticle) is inspired by immersive sims like Deus Ex.
It'll deal with themes of positive transhumanism (so, modifying yourself, being an expression of your own identity ans values, makes you more yourself, even if it makes you less "human" — the opposite of the message cyberpsychosis is meant to carry) and questions of anarchist insurrectionism and nihilism.
Ghost in the Shell is a good one. I do like the less western/techno flairs. Actually, that's something I really like about Akira's soundtrack as well, now that I think about it. And yeah, I agree, having music to suit the mood and setting is always important!
CP2077's music for me honestly comes the closest across the board to being what I want, while still having a ton of variety. But it isn't music I can typically enjoy listening to out of game for some reason.
By far the most punk (cyber and otherwise) thing I have done in my life is become a public school teacher working in a low-income urban school district.
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That sounds excellent! I actually just finished reading an essay that made industrial music sound like the natural cyberpunk successor to punk rock, so this is perfect timing!
Their writing style tends to be too rambling and short on clarity and punch for me (compare my explanation of Cyberpunk in the sidebar with the essay of theirs I shared), but there's still a lot of interesting stuff on their site. Wish I could get their RSS feed to work.
Using GraphineOS on a Pixel 6. It's very nice! I haven't had any problems with it.
I personally prefer a self - hosted Revolt instance. It's not federated or anything, but it's fast and nearly identical to Discord with some extra nice features, and it has a first party docker container so it's extremely easy to set up. I didn't go with Matrix or anything like that because it's harder to set up a natural system where you have a server, but then that server has many channels, and that's very important to how my friend group communicates and hangs out.
In theory, I wouldn't hesitate one second to replace a substantial amount of my body with chrome — legs, arms, internal organs, eyes, etc — but I think actually going through with removing a healthy bodypart that I didn't hate and has served me well enough would be difficult. Nevertheless I don't think I'd really regret having gotten it done, so it'd just be like any other big scary surgery.
I don't think I'd want to do whole-body biotech upgrades like increasing muscle density or nervous system efficiency or whatever, because that effects a lot of things, so it's both more invasive and could have a lot more accidental unintended consequences. I'd probably start with replacing my left arm with a cybernetic one, since that's my off hand so I won't miss it as much if something goes wrong. Then use that as a platform to tinker and experiment and decide if I want to go further.
As for what kind of chrome I'd want to chip — I want the simplest, sturdiest, most robust thing that can possibly work, something I can understand as completely as possible, something that I can at least somewhat repair and upgrade myself, something that's well-known for reliability. Nothing super flashy with a lot of moving parts so its flimsy and unreliable, I want the PineTime or ThinkPad T420 of cyberware. And of course I'd flash it with open source firmware and remove all the corpo software and tracking I could!
I'd be a lot more careful about modifying my brain, for two reasons.
First of all, my theory of personal identity / consciousness is that the sense of coherent, singular identity doesn't come from a single, constant set of essential characteristics — whether physical or psychological — but from there being a sufficient resemblance between yourself prior to any given change and yourself after any given change, and a coherent self-narrative pathway from one to the other so that you can reconcile the two. Yourself at 20 and yourself at 35 can have completely different interests, beliefs, neural pathways, memories (our memories falsify over time, after all), and whatever else, but it's still you — how? Because you got there by a step by step process where you remained you between each change, and so by the transitive property, you're still you at the end, even if you're completely different now. If A ≈ B, and B ≈ C, and C ≈ D, then A ≈ D, even if A and D are completely different, because they've got this web of other things connecting them. Thus, if I'm going to maintain my sense of being myself, instead of accidentally killing myself off, I'm going to have to do any modifications of my brain slowly, step by step, and adjust to each one before getting the next one.
Which works out, because of my second point: if an implant in your brain goes wrong, its WAY, WAY, WAAAAAY worse than if something goes wrong with your body. Like, brain damage is no joke kids, I'm dealing with the fallout of it right now and it is not fun. And of course, as we all know, tech fails. A lot. It's buggy as shit. It's often pushed out the door before it's ready. It has vulnerabilities. So I'd want to keep the brain mods minimal if I did any at all — tried and true, tested, resiliant, as simple as possible, and not connected to the 'net.