NaNoWriMo Thoughts - Where Monopolies End

Yep, it's that time of year again - I am doing National Novel Writing Month once more, and this time, we're going cyberpunk, baby.

This will form part of a series of blogs about my NaNo project and about writing in general, each looking at themes I am exploring or generally find neat or awful respectively.

Now, with cyberpunk, we find ourselves in the corporate future.

Take this shot from the set of the original Blade Runner:

See how well-lit everything is? And can you see any actual streetlights? It's all shining down from logos and neons.

This is a theme that gets heavily picked up in cyberpunk and scifi. Neal Stephenson, in 1992's Snow Crash, labels the effect Loglo. Here it is demonstrated in the TV series of Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon:

Pretty but also a bit troubling, right?

For comparison, here is what I believe to be Tokyo, circa 90s:

I have gone on record before as saying that I believe the cyberpunk future to be the future we are heading into.

Picture this though. Picture the far future. Not the relative near, wherein we are still Earth-centric and our values are pretty similar to what they are today. Wherein the things that trouble us are also relevant to what they would be today.

Instead let us turn our eyes hundreds, if not thousands, of years into the future - a future based on the notion that, today, now, the corporations win. Massive business entities made out of hundreds of different individual corporations handling the exploration, colonisation and habitation of spheres beyond Earth. I hope that doesn't sound too out there, given that SpaceX exists. How big a jump is it, really, to go from SpaceX to something like...

So if one single company colonises a planetoid, builds all the homes there, makes it breathable, makes it habitable - is there still going to be a monopolies commission to make them let other corporate interests take root in the soil that they themselves made fertile?

Given how the world is going, I daresay that the law against monopolies will be left on Earth.

So this business ends up basically owning this entire planetoid, be it a moon, a large asteroid, an actual planet, whatever. And it can either let other businesses in, or it can just...do it its damn self.

Lets say that the company that ends up owning Titan is Nestle. I'm sure you have all seen this rather scary image.

Now this is just food and drink items, but it shows what a spread of products each of these individual large businesses has under their purview.

So lets say Titan needs places to live. Good news, one of the subdivided companies actually has a wing that deals entirely with housing. The people that live there need places to eat and shop, which is good, because another subdivision has both a chain of stores and a chain of bars and fast food restaurants.

These people need to work, though - and only so many of them are needed to actually "service" everyone else. Which is great, because Titan has plenty of natural resources to exploit, and there's plenty of business opportunities! ... for the processing and manufacture divisions of the company.

Who gets to tell them no? Who goes out into the solar system and rocks up to every single settled planetoid and demands that the company that literally built everything on it needs to let in competition?

The company gets to be the law, here. Gets to be the judge and jury. And one might assume that the way a business gets to be the one to settle, say, Titan is by a bidding system. That the colonisation rights would be put out to tender, and whoever can afford / make the best case for the rights, gets them.

So you, the normal person, some fifty generations after settling - you have grown up knowing nothing but the company. You've only ever lived, eaten, breathed, worked around company territory. You pay them rent out of the pay they give you for the work you put in. And whatever central government exists doesn't have to care about you, because you are the sole responsibility of the company that bought Titan.

Or Analog Incorporated, the company that bought the civic rights to Corpus VIII's second moon. Auroch, a moon with an atmosphere that is breathable and survivable but that has no magnetosphere and can't shield you from very rapid death from solar radiation. You can't go out by day - which is okay because a significant amount of time is spent in eclipse behind Corpus VIII, a gas giant.

The company doesn't have to pay for street lights. It has its own logos to light your way.

Welcome to the setting of my NaNo, 2018.

The Modern Neuromancer

I begin this blog with a definition of the term Cyberpunk:

"A genre of science fiction set in a lawless subculture of an oppressive society dominated by computer technology."

Interesting, no?

There was a lot of talk about how Back To The Future 2's future never happened, but then actually did happen. The only thing that hasn't shown up is the hoverboard - something I blogged about right here actually.

It's like we wished for the whimsical aspects of that future, and not the more gritty, more day-to-day, more prosaic elements. We were so looking forward to our hoverboard that we forgot to stop Biff Tannen becoming president. At least the two-tie thing never took off...

...but I digress.

It is very possible to sleepwalk into a situation, because in a world wherein information is actually very free and very quick to travel (and misinformation doubly true), people's chosen method to not be overwhelmed is to trim down what they pay attention to.

This can mean that some very big, very important things go unnoticed, because of unequal coverage.

My favourite book is Neuromancer, by William Gibson.

Highly acclaimed as being the inventor of the term and the genre, Gibson is the grandfather of cyberpunk, to the point of a supercomputer in the hokey-but-fun 1995 movie Hackers is named after him. He wasn't hugely on-point with technology and computing at the time of writing Neuromancer - 1984, when I was two years old - and so that made him free to imagine a future based on social aspects, rather than technological. Still, he framed the world in technological terms, because in his eyes, the social - the spiritual and emotional - aspects of the world would be slowly eroded away, like a crack in a tooth.

There are several tell-tale core concepts that are present in most (if not all) examples of cyberpunk. The biggest is simply summed up as High Tech, Low Life; wherein the world's capacity for technological marvels and genius is incredible, but those technologies aren't capable of elevating the majority of the populace from poverty and squalour. Sure, you may have your highly-advanced computer system, and your replacement left arm, but you still need to grind for fifty hours a week to afford food and crappy lodgings - and social and societal mobility is basically a myth, except within your own little clique.

There's more to it than that, obviously.

Privacy and information is a huge part of the world. Information is currency. More important than almost anything, information leads to rep, which gives you anything. Those who possess data guard it jealously. Rather than use it or open it up for other people's use, it is a thing to lock down. Conversely, those who do not possess other data are constantly pushing to acquire it. Contravening the basic privacy of normal people, while defending one's own. Hacker society is predicated on the notion of all information being free, and the idea of sousveillance is a very nice one (observation from below - the opposite of surveillance, observation from above). How that data is used after the fact? Well, that's up to the people harvesting it - harvesting it and dictating how much of it anyone has access to, including themselves.

Sometimes a legal framework is needed to facilitate this kind of thing. Like the Investigatory Powers Bill, let's say.

Part of cyberpunk is the attitude that is almost entirely prevalent in most of its characters. You have to do it for yourself because nobody is going to do it for you. Becoming enclosed, wrapping ourselves up in ourselves. How can we possibly give a shit about X, when we can just about eat OR pay this bill, but not both?

This applies to almost all echelons of society. Not just the most poor and downtrodden, having to threaten others for a bite to eat, but further up the ladder - the corporate and political entities, who can't care about the effect of their actions on a macro scale, because they need to keep up their rep and their bankroll. The life won't fund itself. Who has the time to help anyone else?

That ruthless, headlong drive toward ourselves. Does that sound familiar?

Another key aspect of cyberpunk is the overwhelming presence of corporation, even over politics. Businesses are simply more important. They set the agenda, they do the dance, and the bureaucrats and so-called rulers pretty much run to keep up. Taking a stand against the march of gain is almost suicidal to one's career, because the monoliths of industry are the real fixed points of the world. So the politicians have to buy in, because to do otherwise is to invite certain doom - and hey, we can probably make a tidy profit from it at the same time, right? Why bother putting so much effort into making things different and achieving nothing, when one can put less effort into making a man in a suit happy and retire before the age of sixty?

Again, does that sound familiar?

I suppose the point I am working toward is that, I don't think Nineteen Eighty-Four is the future we have been sleepwalking towards. Not yet, anyway. We're getting there but not yet. Where we are going first, is Neuromancer.

Think about it.

We all have a phone, because phones have been price-pointed to perfection. Put one in every pocket. Make luxury models for the wealthy, and make finance options available for those we can buy debt from. I speak only for "first world" societies of course, but owning a phone in this country in particular is considered the default. If you don't, it is a statement. It's not a lack of availability. Every one of us has access to a portable supercomputer, by Gibson's standards.

We even have access to these things when we are in relative poverty. Even when our social mobility is stifled, and our income goes up so much slower than the cost of living and our average productivity. Even when the cost of owning a house is becoming inescapable to those who actually need one, despite the constant societal pressure from those who already own one to "get on the ladder".

Corporate interests have far greater influence on our lives than any shade of democracy. They also tend to guide scientific development. We don't get what we want. We get what they want, and then we are brought to understand that we wanted it all along. We're also, frankly, not in touch with what they are doing. Nobody cares enough. Everyone is too busy trying to keep their shirts on their backs.

We might not be able to plug data cables into our necks to eperience a virtual world (we have regular old headsets). We might not have built-in endoskeletons that vastly increase our lifting power (we have ever-increasingly complex exoskeletal frames). But we are definitely getting there.

You know the thing about cyberpunk?

It's a dystopia.

But then, nobody cared enough to stop it, and nobody noticed enough to want to care. So I guess I had better get some cybernetic limbs and some mirrorshades.