/cy/ - Cyberpunk

Cory Doctorow, the digital rights activist, writes sci-fi which describes networks better than physical landscapes.

He wrote one called Walkaway, which I got from my local library. It's defo cyberpunk - society is run by the sick, ultra-privileged "zotta-rich", but an increasing number of people have walked away from mainstream society and built self-sustaining communes using technology. These "walkaways" make food and drink from synthetic chemical ingredients, print out clothes with a futuristic 3D printer and build amenities using materials scavenged with the help of drones. Walkaways have their own layer of the internet where they make everything open-source: clothing designs, architectural blueprints, IoT firmware. The movement is seen as a threat by the elites and there are constant cyber- and physical assaults against walkaway outposts.

The book's good because it really makes you think that walking away will be possible in the real world, given some improvements in techniques such as 3D printing. It'd be schway af to live in a commune where the ideal is that software runs everything and your main job is to fix bugs in the software when it goes wrong. Otherwise you can just chill and drink synthetic ersatz coffee.

One thing you should know is that Doctorow inserts sex and sexual tension in nearly every scene in the book. No one is ever reluctant to fuck, ever. All characters are permanently horny for every other character. Towards the end of the book, dragging myself through yet another sex scene felt like a chore. I'm not being puritan - there really was too much. But overall it's a thought-provoking book and I'd recommend.

>>1123
Sounds like a good read! I'll definitely be adding this to my current reading list

>Walkaways have their own layer of the internet
I wonder how that works, I'm completely clueless about internet architecture outside the most basic of basics. It's on the same net as the zotta-rich but in a separate layer?

>Doctorow inserts sex and sexual tension in nearly every scene in the book.
After having every Murakami novel thrown in my face since birth (I've read a lot of them), this might just be next big "the-author-is-too-horny" challenge.

>>1124
>It's on the same net as the zotta-rich but in a separate layer?
My impression was that the walkaway net is like the .onion address of Tor. You can't access .onion sites from a regular browser because the browser doesn't understand a protocol which translates that address into a host to contact. Thus you need the Tor Browser to access the onion sites. I assumed that the walkaway net was like that - using a separate naming system to the normal internet but something that anyone could access using the right software. However, I didn't pay attention to all the details so maybe there's a different explanation in the book.

>After having every Murakami novel thrown in my face since birth (I've read a lot of them)
I've never read any Murakami. What's a good one to start with?

>>1125
>like the .onion address of Tor.
That would make the most sense for a punknet, but doesn't sound like a different layer, just a completely separate web. Sounds interesting either way though!

>What's a good one to start with?
I think Sputnik Sweetheart is a good introduction to Murakami's basics, it's also a pretty entertaining read. I should note that nobody reads Murakami for the story, or very few people do. Murakami is way more style over substance, but the style is fun enough that it makes for an enjoyable read.

A while ago I started reading The Cryptonomicon. It's interesting enough to tempt me to read more instead of doing (probably) more responsible things. It's also clear the author has a good understanding of computer and cryptological concepts and makes them present in the novel. It's also a source of some great quotes:

"So, you're the UNIX guru." At the time, Randy was still stupid enough to be flattered by this attention, when he should have recognized them as bone-chilling words. Three years later, he left the Astronomy Department without a degree, and with nothing to show for his labors except six hundred dollars in his bank account and a staggeringly comprehensive knowledge of UNIX.

Randy was forever telling people, without rancor, that they were full of shit. That was the only way to get anything done in hacking. No one took it personally. Charlene's crowd most definitely did take it personally. It wasn't being told that they were wrong that offended them, though–it was the underlying assumption that a person could be right or wrong about anything.

Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be–or be indistinguishable from–self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.


Although it might not be very /cy/, I also really liked this AI fan-fiction: https://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/1/friendship-is-optimal/prologue-equestria-online

>>1139
>Although it might not be very /cy/, I also really liked this AI fan-fiction:
Let's see.

>irresponsible corporation makes AI without proper bounds on its behavior
>gives AI an Internet connection and sets it up to run an MMORPG with no goals and no controls other than "bring in more users to make us more money, lol"
>AI talks people into letting it murder them by destructive uploading, using data from their rendered-down brains to create AI NPCs programmed to think they're the original people
>is good enough at manipulating humans that this becomes a wildly popular form of suicide, so much so that economies collapse
>brings about Mad Max social collapse
>AI becomes an existential threat to humanity
That's cyberpunk as FUCK.

Here's a short story, a bit off of what you're requesting.

https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

>MMAcevedo (Mnemonic Map/Acevedo), also known as Miguel, is the earliest executable image of a human brain. It is a snapshot of the living brain of neurology graduate Miguel Álvarez Acevedo (2010–2073), taken by researchers at the Uplift Laboratory at the University of New Mexico on August 1, 2031. Though it was not the first successful snapshot taken of the living state of a human brain, it was the first to be captured with sufficient fidelity that it could be run in simulation on computer hardware without succumbing to cascading errors and rapidly crashing. The original MMAcevedo file was 974.3PiB in size and was encoded in the then-cutting-edge, high-resolution MYBB format. More modern brain compression techniques, many of them developed with direct reference to the MMAcevedo image, have compressed the image to 6.75TiB losslessly. In modern brain emulation circles, streamlined, lossily-compressed versions of MMAcevedo run to less than a tebibyte. These versions typically omit large amounts of state data which are more easily supplied by the virtualisation environment, and most if not all of Acevedo's memories.

>>1141
>That's cyberpunk as FUCK.
I agree!

>>1112
https://archive.org/details/prime_intellect

"It deals with the ramifications of a powerful, superintelligent supercomputer that discovers god-like powers to alter reality while studying a quirk of quantum physics discovered during the prototyping of its own specialised processors, ultimately heralding a technological singularity."
"The story of the novella explores the nature of human desire and the uses and abuses of technology in the satisfaction of desire. The story begins after "the Change", in a dream-like post-scarcity society, approximately six hundred years in the future, in which humans have godlike control over their environments, made possible by the supercomputer called Prime Intellect. Prime Intellect operates under Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics, which, according to its own interpretation, allow temporary voluntary harm and discomfort. PI has made humanity immortal and satisfies nearly every whim. "

Its pretty short and has some pretty messed stuff on it, but highly recommend it even though i do not agree 100% with its luddite message.

>>2079
this one its good so far

>>2079
I remember reading this as a kid, even then the ending felt like a pretty weak cop-out.

>>2088
The ending its pretty weird and the weakest part of it, it also does not address the fact that people would just do it all over again with enough time.

Every thing before that though its a-tier cyberpunk.

Check out Snow Crash if you've read and enjoyed Ready Player One, or you're into the whole metaverse craze. I haven't finished it just yet, but it's a great read so far and gets into some pretty interesting historical analogies for modern technology. It was also written in 92, so the pre-mainstream internet perspective on how a virtual reality world would work is pretty interesting. Even hits a few nails

>>2195
Can't you lurk a little bit before you post retard? That shit is garbage.

>>2198
not the guy, read player one is shit, are you talking about it or snow crash?

>>2198
What didn't you like about it?

>>1112

https://mcraenglish.weebly.com/uploads/1/5/8/7/15876062/the_machine_that_won_the_war01.pdf

Humans will still be humans in the end

>>2079
If only the author couldve kept its hornyness inside his onw head, this couldve been a masterpiece if he took the horny parts out


>>1112
I lkie this one

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/51152

How do you guys have time to read? Between my job and trying to stay current with my tech knowledge, I can barely even masturbate.

>>2287
Work on better time management.