Cyberpunk Dystopia Review

2 Likes

I really wonder about the validity of this. I went to the paper, but it was locked behind a paywall. The Engadget article doesn’t say how many subjects they tracked, how they were selected, exclusion criteria, statistics, etc. I’m sure there are some correlations, but I bet they’re not nearly as universal as implied.

And why are companies collecting accelerometer data? Wait, it’s data so it must be worth something.

4 Likes

all the old pseudosciences, but this time with smartphones

5 Likes
4 Likes

3 Likes

From the 1968 book – J.R. Pierce was an sf writer but are there any others?


If not that’s kind of a gap.

1 Like

Gah.

What’s with articles which make you read 3/4 of them before they even state their premise outright?

3 Likes
3 Likes

And it’s a utopia that may never happen. Jeff Speck reminds us that the predictions of full autonomy are decades away. “I would challenge anyone in the automated driving field to give a rational basis for when level 5 will be available,” says Dr Gill Pratt, head of the Toyota Research.

Meanwhile, we have light rail now that the billionaires behind this stupid shit don’t want because investment in light rail means there would be actual delivery of functioning vehicles in exchange for the investment. What’s the margin in that? It might be less than 30%. Horror.

6 Likes

That, and light rail means the privileged have to sit with the hoi polloi.

6 Likes

No, they sit in their cars, parked on the freeway, watching us pass them. THE UNMITIGATED GALL OF THE LITTLES!

7 Likes
3 Likes

I do disagree with the “normal Trump supporter” who “turned to white supremacy”.

A Trump supporter needs to make no turns.

7 Likes

Agreed, but I suspect a lot of them are in denial about that.

4 Likes

I’m convinced that bigotry has more to do with not being able to see oneself than it is about what particular idea is being fed to the person. That’s the disadvantage the rich have, having never felt utter rejection and a precarious existence just because, say, the financial system had-a-oopsie or a roommate turs unreliable about the rent. Bigotry is an embrace, sometimes temporary, of a kind of psychotic break that approaches the arrogance of a billionaire.

I think bigotry is the same kind of phenomenon as the arrogance of billionaires. The wealthy have thousands of years of history cloaking their nutty, unfriendly, uncreative greed in the wall hangings and traditons of their slaves then servants then legal representatives. They can always escape into their bubbles of yes-men and concubines, where their rejections are soothed and their every turd gets some kind of polish job.

5 Likes

I can see your point, and certainly it explains a lot of bigotry… except the bigotry of the wealthy themselves. Especially the kind held towards those of their own class, like princes treating female relatives like chattel even when examples of powerful, intelligent women are plentiful enough in history (step on up, Eleanor of Aquitaine and many more). Or bigotry against kings and princes from far-away lands (check out the conflicting descriptions the Spaniards made of Montezuma).

I remember seeing in a history documentary that Africans reached Britain with the Roman invasion at the latest, but didn’t really start to experience prejudice until Elizabethan times… when their numbers became large enough to set off alarms among the bigots of the day.

8 Likes
1 Like

I can see your point, and certainly it explains a lot of bigotry… except the bigotry of the wealthy themselves.

How do you figure? They start at a point of supreme arrogance and indulge it any way they wish.

1 Like

Remember, you don’t need computers to build your cyberpunk dystopia:

3 Likes

In other words, it’s not the SWATting that’s the problem, it’s lying to YouTube that’s the real crime.

10 Likes