a surprisingly good Atari 2600 demo by XAYAX, originally presented at Revision 2014

Netrunner is a collectible card game with a very long history. in short:

• its first edition was designed by the Magic: The Gathering guy (with about as many greed and scarcity mechanics as Magic) and took place in the same universe as Cyberpunk 2077
• the second edition was published by Fantasy Flight Games, replaced the scarcity mechanics with Living Card Game expansion packs (you get all the cards in the set with one purchase) and a sliding window for tournament play card validity, and switched universes and names to Android: Netrunner
• the game went entirely out of print once Fantasy Flight dropped it
• the current “edition” of the game and its rules are maintained by a non-profit cooperative named Nullsignal (formerly NISEI), who also continued the story started in Android: Netrunner.

because the game is maintained by a non-profit (and actually appropriately fairly anti-corporate) cooperative, playing Netrunner ranges from free to relatively cheap:

• any recognizable proxy is valid even in tournament play with the right (opaque-backed) sleeves. this means that you can print out Nullsignal’s cards at home and sleeve them with a little bit of card stock for rigidity and be ready for tournament play. this also means you can sleeve a post-it note for the same effect, so long as both players can recognize which card you’re supposed to be playing
• you can buy a boxed set from Nullsignal if you’d like high quality cards, and they’ve also got on-demand manufacturing set up through DriveThruCards and MakePlayingCards
• or you can forget physical cards entirely and play on jinteki.net, a free service that lets you play an online game of Netrunner using every card ever published by Fantasy Flight and Nullsignal. the designers at Nullsignal also use Jinteki to beta test and pre-release sets, so you may also get access to cards that don’t physically exist yet

the gameplay of Netrunner is fucking great: it’s an asymmetric card game where one player is a corporation (or their sysadmin at least) and the other is a runner trying to hack and bring down that corporation. the gameplay feels a lot like a mix between a shell game, the bluffing parts of poker, the better bits of Magic (most of the rules you need are on the cards), and an aggressive cat and mouse struggle, all at once. it’s actually one of my favorite ways that decking and ICE have been translated into gameplay mechanics.

Nullsignal also does a great job on the story, art, and aesthetic of their new cards. modern Netrunner has a distinctive feel to it, but it’s clear that the folks behind it understand how to make good cyberpunk.

Hypnospace Outlaw is that funny meme game with the pizza dance. it’s also a leftist parody of the California Ideology and some of the factors that led to the bursting of the dot com bubble. crucially, it’s also a whole lot of fun to play — it’s a very good point and click mystery adventure that takes place on a faithfully rendered and authentic-feeling version of a networked computer in the 90s, crafted by someone who absolutely knew what they were doing with the time period and aesthetic.

above all, it’s one of the better cyberpunk games I’ve played, though I can’t really explain why without spoiling the ending. Hypnospace Outlaw can be finished fairly quickly, so I encourage anyone who hasn’t to give it a play or at least watch a playthrough from a non-annoying YouTuber. ending spoilers follow:

Hypnospace Outlaw ending spoilers

it goes without saying that sleeptime computing in Hypnospace is a limited and janky but still revolutionary brain-computer interface, and in effect what you’re doing during the whole game is a precursor to netrunning. in fact, Hypnospace in general is a perfect prelude to a Gibsonian cyberpunk dystopia.

as demonstrated in the last chapter of the game, sleeptime computing tech is fatal when pushed beyond its limits, as Merchantsoft demonstrated like only a short-sighted and greedy startup in 1999 could. Dylan even spends 20 solid years blaming a hacker for the lives he took fucking with tech he barely understood. the tech behind sleeptime computing is most likely outlawed after 1999, or its use is at least heavily stigmatized.

at the same time, the promise behind Hypnospace remains alluring as fuck. in the last chapter of the game, you join up with a nostalgic effort to archive all of Hypnospace from the cache memory in your repaired moderator headband. the allure goes beyond nostalgia though: with the 90s ideas stripped away, even a janky BCI is incredibly useful. you can imagine high-frequency traders, drone pilots, and similar assholes being particularly interested in the illegal tech that replaces sleep with the ability to very efficiently do their jobs 24/7. cyberdeck tech being strictly regulated and only available to high-level corpos and obsessed hackers is a key component of classic cyberpunk.

and hey, while we’re on the topic of the worst people in the world adopting illegal tech, did you finish the (excellent) M1NX and Leaky Piping side plots? cause if you did, you’ll know that sleeptime computing doesn’t actually let you sleep — it severely limits the amount of time you spend in REM sleep, but users don’t realize that because they’re still physically resting. so those high-frequency traders, drone pilots, and other assholes who’ve adopted habitual sleeptime computing use are also slowly going insane from a lack of REM sleep, and chances are they don’t know it because all the evidence was released right before the Mindcrash

in short, these are all the precursor chemicals you need for a cyberpunk future.

the game’s author, Jay Tholen, is currently in progress on its sequel, Dreamsettler. I can’t wait for more good cyberpunk.

404media continues to do devastatingly good tech journalism

What Kaedim’s artificial intelligence produced was of such low quality that at one point in time “it would just be an unrecognizable blob or something instead of a tree for example,” one source familiar with its process said. 404 Media granted multiple sources in this article anonymity to avoid retaliation.

this is fucking amazing. the company tries to hide it as a QA check, but they’re really just paying 3d modelers $1-$4 a pop to churn out models in 15 minutes while they pretend the work’s being done by an AI, and now I’m wondering what other AI startups have also discovered this shitty dishonest growth hack

this is a computer that’s almost entirely without graphical capabilities, so here’s a demo featuring animations and sound someone did last year

A Brief Primer on Technofascism

Introduction

It has become increasingly obvious that some of the most prominent and monied people and projects in the tech industry intend to implement many of the same features and pursue the same goals that are described in Umberto Eco’s Ur-Fascism(4); that is, these people are fascists and their projects enable fascist goals. However, it has become equally obvious that those fascist goals are being pursued using a set of methods and pathways that are unique to the tech industry, and which appear to be uniquely crafted to force both Silicon Valley corporations and the venture capital sphere to embrace fascist values. The name that fits this particular strain of fascism the best is technofascism (with thanks to @future_synthetic), frequently shortened for convenience to techfash.

Some prime examples of technofascist methods in action exist in cryptocurrency projects, generative AI, large language models, and a particular early example of technofascism named Urbit. There are many more examples of technofascist methods, but these were picked because they clearly demonstrate what outwardly separates technofascism from ordinary hype and marketing.

The Unique Mechanisms of Technofascism

Disassociation with technological progress or success

Technofascist projects are almost always entirely unsuccessful at achieving their stated goals, and rarely involve any actual technological innovation. This is because the marketed goals of these projects are not their real, fascist aims.

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are frequently presented as innovative, but all blockchain-based technologies are, in fact, inefficient distributed database based on Merkle trees, a very old technology which blockchains add little practical value to. In fact, blockchains are so impractical that they have provably failed to achieve any of the marketed goals undertaken by cryptocurrency corporations since the public release of Bitcoin(6).

Statement of world-changing goals, to be achieved without consent

Technofascist goals are never small-scale. Successful tech projects are usually narrowly focused in order to limit their scope(9), but technofascist projects invariably have global ambitions (with no real attempt to establish a roadmap of humbler goals), and equally invariably attempt to achieve those goals without the consent of anyone outside of the project, usually via coercion.

This type of coercion and consent violation is best demonstrated by example. In cryptocurrency, a line of thought that has been called the Bitcoin Citadel(8) has become common in several communities centered around Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies. Generally speaking, this is the idea that in a near-future post-collapse society, the early adopters of the cryptocurrency at hand will rule, while late and non-adopters will be enslaved. In keeping with technofascism’s disdain for the success of its marketed goals, this monstrous idea ignores the fact that cryptocurrencies would be useless in a post-collapse environment with a fractured or non-existent global computer network.

AI and TESCREAL groups demonstrate this same pattern by simultaneously positioning large language models as an existential threat on the verge of becoming a hostile godlike sentience, as well as the key to unlocking a brighter (see: more profitable) future for the faithful of the TESCREAL in-group. In this case, the consent violation is exacerbated by large language models and generative AI necessarily being trained on mass volumes of textual and artistic work taken without permission(1).

Urbit positions itself as the inevitable future of networked computing, but its admitted goal is to technologically implement a neofeudal structure where early adopters get significant control over the network and how it executes code(3, 12).

Creation and furtherance of a death cult

In the fascist ideology described by Eco, fascism is described as “a life lived for struggle” where everyone is indoctrinated to believe in a cult of heroism that is closely linked with a cult of death(4). This same indoctrination is common in what I will refer to as a death cult, where a technofascist project is simultaneously positioned as both a world-ending problem, and the solution to that same problem (which would not exist without the efforts of technofascists) for a select, enlightened few.

The death cult of technofascism is demonstrated with perfect clarity by the closely-related ideologies surrounding Large Language Models (LLMs), Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and the bundle of ideas known as TESCREAL (Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singulartarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism)(5).

We can derive examples of this death cult from the examples given in the previous section. In the concept of the Bitcoin Citadel, cryptocurrencies are idealized as both the cause of the collapse and as the in-group’s source of power after that collapse(6). The TESCREAL belief that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will end the world unless it is “aligned with humanity” by members of the death cult, who handle the AGI with the proper religious fervor(11).

While Urbit does not technologically structure itself as a death cult, its community and network is structured to be a highly effective incubator for other death cults(2, 7, 10).

Severance of our relationship with truth and scientific research

Destruction and redefinition of historical records

This can be viewed as a furtherance of technofascism’s goal of destroying our ability to perceive the truth, but it must be called out that technofascist projects have a particular interest in distorting our remembrance of history; to make history effectively mutable in order to cover for technofascism’s failings.

Parasitization of existing terminology

As part of the process of generating false consensus and covering for the many failings of technofascist projects, existing terminology is often taken and repurposed to suit the goals of the fascists.

One obvious example is the popular term crypto, which until relatively recently referred to cryptography, an extremely important branch of mathematics. Cryptocurrency communities have now adopted the term, and have deliberately used the resulting confusion to falsely imply that cryptocurrencies, like cryptography, are an important tool in software architecture.

Weaponization of open source and the commons

One of the distinctive traits that separates ordinary capitalist exploitation from technofascism is the subversion and weaponization of the efforts of the open source community and the development commons.

One notable weapon used by many technofascist projects to achieve absolute control while maintaining the illusion that the work being undertaken is an open source community effort is what I will call forking hostility. This is a concerted effort to make forking the project infeasible, and it takes two forms.

Its technological form is accomplished via network effects; good examples are large cryptocurrency projects like Bitcoin and Ethereum, which cannot practically be forked because any blockchain without majority consensus is highly vulnerable to attacks, and in any case is much less valuable than the larger chain. Urbit maintains technological forking hostility via its aforementioned implementation of neofeudal network resource allocation.

The second form of forking hostility is social; technofascist open source communities are notably for extremely aggressively telling dissenters to “just for it, it’s open source” while just as aggressively punishing anyone attempting a fork with threats, hacking attempts (such as the aforementioned blockchain attacks), ostracization, and other severe social repercussions. These responses are very distinctive in the uniformity of their response, which is rarely seen even among the most toxic of regular open source communities.

Implementation of racist, biased, and prejudiced systems

References

[1] Bender, Emily M. and Hanna, Alex, Ai Causes Real Harm. Let’s Focus on That over the End-of-Humanity Hype, Scientific American, 2023.

[2] Broderick, Ryan, Inside Remilia Corporation, the Anti-Woke Dao behind the Doomed Milady Maker Nft, Fast Company, 2022.

[3] Duesterberg, James, Among the Reality Entrepreneurs, The Point Magazine, 2022.

[4] Eco, Umberto, Ur-Fascism, The Anarchist Library, 1995.

[5] Gebru, Timnit and Torres, Emile, Satml 2023 - Timnit Gebru - Eugenics and the Promise of Utopia through Agi, 2023.

[6] Gerard, David, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Etherium and Smart Contracts, {David Gerard}, 2017.

[7] Gottsegen, Will, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Miladys but Were Afraid to Ask, 2022.

[8] Munster, Decrypt / Ben, The Bizarre Rise of the ’Bitcoin Citadel’, Decrypt, 2021.

[9] , Scope Creep, Wikipedia, 2023.

[10] , How to Start a Secret Society, 2022.

[11] Torres, Emile P., The Acronym behind Our Wildest Ai Dreams and Nightmares, Truthdig, 2023.

[12] Yarvin, Curtis, 3-Intro.Txt, GitHub, 2010.

no excerpts yet cause work destroyed me, but this just got posted on the orange site. apparently a couple of urbit devs realized urbit sucks actually. interestingly they correctly call out some of urbit’s worst points (like its incredibly high degree of centralization), but I get the strong feeling that this whole thing is an attempt to launder urbit’s reputation while swapping out the fascists in charge

e: I also have to point out that this is written from the insane perspective that anyone uses urbit for anything at all other than an incredibly inefficient message board and a set of interlocking crypto scams

e2: I didn’t link it initially, but the orange site thread where I found this has heated up significantly since then

I defederated us from two lemmy instances:

• exploding-heads: transphobia
• basedcount: finally I get to ban most of r/PoliticalCompassMemes in one go

Bevy is a fun, cozy game engine to play with if you’re looking for something very flexible that implements some surprisingly advanced features. things I like:

• it’s all rust, which is an advantage for me and the chemical burns I have from handling the dialect of C++ a lot of older game engines used to be written in
• it implements a flexible entity component system, which I found pretty great for specifying game and rendering logic for things like roguelikes and simulations, where multiple game systems might interact in dynamic ways
• the API is very cozy and feels like querying an extremely fast database at times
• it’s a lot lower level than something like Unity or Godot, but you get some pretty advanced rendering features included
• the main developer seems to have a lot of industry experience and a solid roadmap

Nix is one of the few pieces of software I trust. I use it on just about every computer I work on — awful.systems is managed and deployed by just nixos-rebuild and a deployment flake, as are almost all the computers in my house (including a few embedded into the house itself). in general it makes both software development and configuring Linux a lot more fun compared with the traditional way of doing things

I often call Nix fucking incomprehensible, but it doesn’t need to be. Zero to Nix is one of the documentation projects that’s intended to be a more gentle goal-oriented introduction to Nix concepts, and it’s definitely worth following along if you’re curious about Nix and want to be able to do something useful with it right away

if you end up liking Nix and want more of it, NixOS is an entire Linux distro configured and managed by Nix, and it’s incredibly powerful and stable. I run it on a full-fat gaming PC as my primary OS and the experience of running it is surprisingly very good; feel free to ask and I’ll summarize how I run stuff like games on NixOS

see this lemmy-ansible github issue for the fix; basically, our web server now knows how to handle activitypub traffic in a more conforming way

to interact with us from mastodon:

• find the community you want to subscribe to here. note its real name -- that's the name in the sidebar after the !
• search for @communityname@awful.systems in mastodon
• follow that user and enjoy our posts over there! replying and boosting should work ok, no guarantees for anything else

as for interacting with mastodon from here, I think you can paste mastodon URLs into our search and it'll maybe work? someone try that