BT009: Cyberpunk, terrorism, normalcy
Analysis of two types of normal, two types of character, and one world, from leaky perspectives.
BT009
Cyberpunk, terrorism, normalcy
When cyberpunk fiction is written, it’s fairly common to see the actual environment itself, be that a city, or something similar, represented as a character. Society itself becomes a character, and this is probably one of the more enjoyable details of this sort of thing to write about.
This also matters in the sense that all too-often, people tend to confused the “two types of normal” when it comes to cyberpunk, and literature.
Example Cyberpunk Society: Gritty and harsh, brutal violence is common, and people are somewhat numb to it. The threshold for ‘too much chaos’ has gone up for most people.
Normalcy A: For you, the viewer looking in, you’ve observed this, and have made the conclusion that “this sucks, no sane and rational person would want to live in this” - that’s your understanding of the difference between your normal, and the fictional normal.
Normalcy B: Normalcy from the viewpoint of fictional objectivity. This is what normal life is in this fictional world. It may be hyper-violent - it’s still normal for everyone. It became that way.
So, then, we begin to develop the two major main-character archetypes:
Person who is not okay with all of this.
Person who is okay with all of this, because they benefit from it.
So, all-too often, we find that our point of view in a fictional cyberpunk world, is that we are viewing the good guy, person 1, subvert bad guy, person 2.
However, we have scope, and opinion:
Opinion: [CP2077 is not a well-written game.] Common opinion of some characters in this game, is that Johnny Silverhand is a terrorist, [for his actions in detonating a dirty bomb in the offices of the Arasaka Corporate Tower.]
This is true - in 2077, numerous characters do consider Johnny Silverhand to be a terrorist, by their standards. This doesn’t mean the writing is bad, or anything. By all standards, when you explore the modern-day site of Arasaka tower, and walk through the memorial that they crafted to commemorate the bombing, you get the vibe that this was actually extremely well-written. There is an abstract, smooth, clean, empty showcase of destruction that many people visit as a tourist attraction, daily. It invokes reminders of actual, real-life memorials commemorated to acts of destruction.
This goes to show how “normal” it is for people who live in a society where Arasaka is often a major, driving, violent point and entity, for them to still be humanized by the common person.
In 1977, in the USA, it was about the same for the opinion of police. In modern times, the opinion has since begun to wane.
The average person living in Night City considers Johnny Silverhand to be a terrorist, and they by default consider him to be an insurrectionist. Whether he’s a terrorist becomes a sociological question - what’s terrorism?
We won’t get into that, because it begs the question of justification of violence - are you a “state?” are you an “individual?” Violence is justice for one of these things, and crime for the other - that is all there is to be said about such a thing, and therefore the term “terrorist” becomes one of opinion - but we’re going to ignore that fact, primarily because we want to analyze something interesting - cyberpunk - not philosophies of violence and justice.
So, common opinion in 2077 Night City is that Johnny’s a terrorist, but that opinion varies between people, much in the sense that not everyone hates where they live.
2077 was written well in the sense that it was fiction written by RPG developers, which often-times starts as speculative detail-fiction. When I write Chromed Out, I like to start by writing about the sociological memetics and habits of people and things within my world. I like to create fictional analysis. BT008-I showcases how fashion trends led to omnipotent behaviors.
A lot of cyberpunk fiction loves to write a story, but often-times, the setting itself is set up in such a way where the viewer is in awe of the visuals, shocked culturally, and dysphoric in nature. The story is about a person who is not okay with any of this. They’re contrasted versus a person who is okay with all of this, and is materially benefitting from it, in some way.
When you bring class-contrast into the equation:
Bottom-up: Poor person fights the wealthy CEO.
Sporadic Bottom-up: Cyber-Kim Il-Sung
Top-down: Batman
Sporadic variant: Ghost In The Shell
Outwards-in: Ludditical terror-insurrection
Sporadic variant: Urban legend crashes the corporate party
Inwards-out: Scientists solve an existential threat / Halo
Sporadic variant: Apocalypse Now but written by Kurzweil / Also Halo
It seems that ‘better’(or, perhaps, more immersive) Cyberpunk fiction is written, when the setting is portrayed in such a way where the viewer is informed of it’s existence from a narration that is impartial to whether it is ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ - as if written from a more personable encyclopedia. Perhaps the narrator is someone objectively chronicling these events, while they themselves are someone who exists in this society.
This in turn creates characters that don’t simply look at their own very existence in this cyberpunk world of hypercapital realism and ultra-lethality as ‘you take the good with the bad’ - they have a proper opinion, things are either good, bad, or normal. And, at times, it feels as if it’s best to expand upon the idea of the average person having a much higher threshold for what is ‘meh’ versus what is ‘unacceptable.’
Priorities being different between individuals is what drives conflict during interaction, opinionation in settings such as these are oten-times derived from an individual person’s tolerance for violence which reveals a very great deal of information about who they are, their identity and characteristics, and flaws.
Within the context of 2077, on the flip-side of Johnny’s story at Arasaka, is Judy’s story at The Mox.
Through the decision-making process that drives this particular story forward, we’re shown that despite Judy’s existence in this world, and involvement in an industry that all too-often is wraught with abuse and sad backstories, that she herself is someone who is off-put by violent actions; in certain instances of deciding whether or not to interact with problematic actors in Judy’s life with outright violence, or tact, when violence is used where it wasn’t necessary, we find that Judy reacts negatively to this.
This in and of itself is evidence to consider in the bigger picture of things, that 2077 isn’t written badly, as much as it understanding that good writing shows the complex and paradoxical nature of people’s opinions - Judy, if she’d been around for and known Johnny personally, by all means could’ve considered Johnny’s actions at Arasaka ideologically sound, tracking, perhaps even in line with her own anti-corporate beliefs; but she could’ve still considered Johnny to be a ‘terrorist,’ or at the very least, an incorrigibly violent insurrectionist with bad self-direction.
One thing that 2077, I think, does get wrong however, is how they present the context of Johnny Silverhand to the player, specifically. There’s not enough understanding of modern-day cultural context of Johnny’s memory to the average person, beyond the one interaction with the old guy who sells Samurai merch.
The specific characters that you interact with in the story are one-of-a-kind people, and famous to some degree, among a massive population of people. 2077 doesn’t always do a good job of separating the idea that nobody really remembers or gives a shit about Johnny Silverhand or Samurai, anymore - but it’s immersive in the sense that one would think that he is, because he’s always there, and you’re always dealing with him, or people who knew him.
Players tend to be caught off-guard by the idea that characters that they interact with who they would consider to be “counter-cultural” in some sense, really only understand references to Johnny through the scope of what he is to them: A rockstar who went full Kaczynski on Amazon at the height of sociopolitical tensions, vanished, and now only exists culturally as a kino deep-lore rabbithole for 2077’s version of /mu/ readers.