guy recently linked this essay, its old, but i don’t think its significantly wrong (despite gpt evangelists) also read weizenbaum, libs, for the other side of the coin
guy recently linked this essay, its old, but i don’t think its significantly wrong (despite gpt evangelists) also read weizenbaum, libs, for the other side of the coin
Yeah. At least there’s been a movement in the genre towards “ok, it’s not cybernetic implants in general, it’s chronic pain from malfunctioning or poorly calibrated implants, it’s the trauma of a violent and alienated society intersecting with people who are both suffering and who have a massively increased material capacity to commit violence, etc” there. Like Mike Pondsmith himself has still got a bit of a galaxy brain take on it, but even he’s moved around to something like “cyberpsychosis is a confluence of trauma and machines that are actively causing pain, nervous system damage, etc and which need a cocktail of drugs to manage which also have their own health and psychiatric consequences.”
I don’t see that as an improvement or a recognition of what is wrong with “cyberpsychosis” and related concepts. People live with severe trauma, severe chronic pain, and severe psychiatric problems and manage to keep it together. Pondsmith is making up excuses to keep “wheelchairs make you evil” in his game instead of recognizing the notion for what it is and discarding it.
I think it’s a good example of ingrained, reflexive ableism. It’s a holdover from archaic 20th century beliefs about disabled people being less human, less intelligent, less capable. Cybernetics are not a good metaphor for capitalist alienation or any other kind of alienation. They are, no matter how you cut it, aids and accomodations for disability. You just cannot say that cyberware makes you evil without also saying that disabled people using aids in your setting are alienating themselves from humanity and becoming monsters. If you wanted to argue that getting wired reflexes, enhanced musculature, getting your brain altered so you can shut off empathy or fear, things that you do voluntarily to make yourself a better tool for capitalism, gradually resulted in alienation, go for it.
Ghost in the Shell does a good job with that. Kusanagi isn’t alienated from humanity because she’s a cyborg, but her alienation from humanity grows from questioning what it means for her to be a cyborg, a brain in a jar. She’s got super-human capabilities - she’s massively stronger and more resilient, she’s a wizard hacker augmented with cyberware that let’s her directly interface with the net in a manner most people simply don’t have the skills for. Her digestive and endocrine systems are under her conscious fine control. These things don’t make her an alien or a monster, they create questions in her mind about her identity, her personhood, and how she can even relate to normal humans as her perspective and understanding of the world moves further and further away from them.
And this isn’t a bad thing. It doesn’t lead her to self-destruction or a berserk rage. Instead it leads her to growth, change, and evolution. She ambiguously dies, but in dying brings forth new life. Her new form is not an enemy of humanity or a threat, but instead a new kind of being that is a child or inheritor of humanity, humanity growing past it’s limitations to seek new horizons of potential.
The key difference is Kusanagi has agency. The cybernetics don’t force her towards alienation. They don’t damage her mind and turn her in to a monster with no agency. Kusanagi’s alienation grows from her own lived experience, her own thoughts and learning. They grow from her interactions with the people in her life and her day to day experiences. Her cybernetics are an important part of that experience, but she is in control of her cyberbody. It is not controlling her and turning her in to a hapless victim.
Basically; the Cyberpunk paradigm says that using a wheelchair makes you violent and evil. The GitS paradigm says using a wheelchair makes you consider the world from a different perspective. In the former disability, both physical and mental (false dichotomy I know) is villainized and demonized. In the latter disability is a state that creates separation from “normal” people in a way that reflects the experiences of real disabled people, but is otherwise neutral.
At this point as I understand it his take is “alienation/isolation, trauma from a violent society, and denial of access to necessary medical care can eventually break someone, and someone who can bench press a car and has a bunch of reflex enhancers jacked directly into their spine is more likely to lash out in a dangerous way when their back’s to the wall, they think they’re going to die, and they panic,” with a whole lot of emphasizing social support networks as being important for surviving and enduring trauma like that.
It’s still not as good a take as “cyberpsychosis isn’t real, it’s just a bullshit diagnosis applied to people pushed past the brink by their material circumstances, acting in the way that a society that revolves around violence has ultimately taught them to act, who then just double down on it because they know they’re going to be summarily executed by the police who have no interest in deescalation or trying to take them alive, compounded with the fact that they can bench press a car and react to bullets fast enough to simply get out of the way, at least for a while” would be, but it’s earnest progress from someone who’s weirdly endearing despite being an absolute galaxy brained lib.
Weirdly, Cyberpunk 2077 seems to have had a better take on it than Pondsmith himself, with “cyberpsychos” mostly being just people with an increased capacity for violence dealing with intolerable material conditions until they fight back a little too hard against a real or perceived threat, with one who’s not even on a rampage and instead is just a heavily augmented vigilante hunting down members of a criminal syndicate that had murdered someone close to him. The police chatter also has the player branded a cyberpsycho when you get stars, reflecting the idea that it’s more a blanket term applied to anyone with augments who’s doing a violent crime than a real thing.
“It’s a bullshit diagnosis”, with “cyberpsychosis” being “excited delerium” for cyborgs, works for me.
This is one of the key things that has kept me away from Cyberpunk the game setting and one of my main problems with Shadowrun (not my only problem by any means).