It’s not overt racism that’s the problem (in fact, I would say Gibson as a author is someone who is very careful to avoid racist caricature in his work, unlike say Neal Stephenson); rather, the orientalism comes from who is being written about, and who is left out. Like, this blog post puts it really succinctly:

But in a setting that draws so heavily on East Asian culture, why are all the characters white?

Here’s a polygon article that’ll do the topic more justice than I ever could, but to summarize the crux of the problem: that picture of “The Future” that’s “Cool Japan”… that was never real in the first place. That’s the tourist brochure version- reality is that the other side of the world’s covered in The Sprawl too.

And it’s hard to really blame Gibson- as far as he was concerned he’s just writing some silly sci-fi story, he didn’t ask to define an entire sub-genre- but the fact of the matter is that without really doing the necessary research to accurately portray things from the perspectives of those he’s accidentally othering with his aesthetics, he just left the doors open for a kinda “Yellow Peril 2.0” to remain embedded within.

The second last line about teaming up with other worker’s to “demonstrate that we understand the full value of our labor” gives it away. No chud would ever suggest anything close to unionization.

Edit: I just realized another point to that last bit, that when Cyberpunk as a genre was forming all the mixing in of Japanese aesthetics and language was meant to be alienating and reflected/played off American fears of Japanese tech industry surpassing American industry, whereas now it’s like just more comfy/pretty aesthetics for generations that have grown up consuming anime.

I mean, a lot of the visual identity of modern cyberpunk has been heavily influenced by anime (Akira, GiTS).

It’s sorta come full circle as a visual shorthand for the kind of cultural flattening effect neoliberalism has, although I’d wish they’d kinda move past some of the orientalist connotations into something more interesting.

Just think of it as enforced day

Based and Nausicaa pilled

Elon saying “Put your hand in the box” except the box is a tesla

Right? How the fuck Crichton wrote something as anti-capitalist as Jurassic Park is still a mystery to me

Being Open Source.

The software’s codebase is ideologically communist!

: “So are ya Chai-nese or Japanese?”

Latest indie darling blow up videogame fad that you’ll hear less of in a month or so. I say that somewhat derisively but I think it’s pretty normal, Lethal Company was the last one and that was a neat little horror co-op game imo.

I think the reason word of mouth is spreading so much can be attributed to two things:

1. It’s somewhat edgy, misanthropic and subversive take on Pokemon/Nintendo’s family friendly aesthetics. I can’t say much about this as I haven’t played the game myself to judge just exactly how much is being played straight and how much is satire (and I don’t plan to), but I’d guess people who grew up with Pokemon as a franchise have been looking for that edgy take and are reacting to that, and the resulting controversy is driving the engagement algorithms (I mean just look at hexbear lmao), and

2. it’s fulfilling a niche that Nintendo hasn’t by being an online multiplayer Pokemon-esque game that’s not turn-based; just judging based on some of the clips I’ve seen but working together with your friends to catch a high level Pokemon-alike actually does look kinda fun. This one’s really on Game Freak for allowing Pokemon to go stale by playing it safe and not innovating the game design at all, so Palworld coming in to steal Nintendo’s lunch money here’s pretty deserved, I think. (Although yeah, I guess Ark did it first but the cartoony character designs are doing a lot of heavy lifting in making the on-screen action legible).

Guy published a book titled “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” and hasn’t been arrested yet, idk maybe if I try and “Gotcha” him now in an interview it’ll work

If they read Malm’s fucking book they could have read between the lines of the examples of direct action he gave in it…

When I was a kid, I used to pick all the super outlandish dialogue options just to see how far the game would accommodate absolute incoherence.

But then they stopped making games like Fallout and started making games like Mass Effect.

Nowadays I don’t really have time to do novelty runs and I don’t find it fun to play as an asshole so yeah, it’s communism time in Disco Elysium Baay-beeeee!

(And my Baldur’s Gate 3 character is a goody-two-shoes so now Astarion won’t bang me, THERE ABSOLUTELY ARE BLOODY CONSEQUENCES )

I was gonna say, this is basically the plot of the original Gundam.

I didn’t expect Jeff Bezos to be that guy in the meme, but maybe I should’ve known better

Well see, if we don’t sell them chips to the gosh darned chai-neeeese they’ll never be able to figure it out

I was joking about the nationalization thing, she’s just threatening export controls on Nvidia.

Jensen Huang and Nvidia about to receive a firsthand taste of FREEDOM and DEMOCRACY

National Graphics Card Corporation mass produces affordable mid-range graphics cards and restricts sales to crypto and AI startups for “national security reasons”, causing graphics card prices to fall, but because Elon Musk doesn’t get 10 more fps when he upgrades to the 8090 Super Ti ™ the West has fallen and it’s time to end those commie democrats and their big government

Right, but as I understand it China still has some catching up to do in terms of the technology and manufacturing? It’s amazing what they’ve accomplished so far tho, and they’ll probably fully catch up to and surpass Taiwanese manufacturing soon enough

Damn. Finally.