/cyber/ - Cyberpunk & Science Fiction

Singapore is a boring corporatist surveillance state. Everyone is extremely conformist there. People move there not because they are scientists, but because local middle class needs army of illiterate service workers from surrounding Malaysian villages. There is an article written by Gibson in 1995, and a documentary filmed around that time telling all you need to know about so-called city-states.

>Extremely low taxation

Do you know where Hong Kong government gets their brouzouf from? They lease land to corporations. There are no taxes, except the added cost of lease on every product you buy.

Le epic cyberpunk architecture you talk about is a mish-mash of art deco and postmodernist concept arts, it's not real, and doesn't really inspire anyone.

>>57157

I was more referring to that Singapore, HK are usually brought up as places that are often mentioned as having cyberpunk look to them (and they are city states). The hypothetical cyberpunk city state would be more geared to tech development.

> Architecture doesn't inspire anyone

What? Care to add anything positive? I know it's easy to point out the flaws in something but, unless you're completely opposed to a hypothetical cyberpunk city state, why not contribute something.

I see state entities growing and becoming more powerful in conjunction with corporations, kinda the opposite of what you're looking for.

If an already massive city broke off then that's another matter.

dont rely want to burst your bubble OP but we are already headed towards cyberpunk cities. By most official studies, the world will be cyberpunk around 2035-2045 because of a number of factors. I am not going to break them down tonight, but maybe tomorrow or the next day, but the tl:dr is that most large urban areas will become megacities, while rural areas will become heavily automated (as they already are) while also becoming destroyed by environmental changes.

Cities will be broken into their command and control structure, resource use, and reliance on technology to conduct day to day activities.

The cyberpunk ones are where cities will be run by cartels/gangs due to lack of police/para military forces, while the alternative is a police state where massive resources are put in place to create order (think like mirrors edge).

Other cities destroyed by natural disasters and overpopulation will have a mad max type structure, where scavenging and lawlessness will prevail.

Not sure if this works with your larp or not, I am not at my main computer today, so I cannot post references now.

>>57165

Yeh probably likely. Minarchism would probably only be temporary as the state rarely chooses to limit or reverse its power. Neocameralism, for-profit sovereign corporations owning the city state might make more sense. Perhaps thats what a cyberpunk city state would best operate under.

Songdo, a work in progress in S.Korea, could have the makings of a cyberpunk city. Unfortunately it doesn't have the appearance of one yet. It's part of S.Korea but is just a huge 'smart city' built by private investors.

>>57169

Yeh post links if you check this. Megacities seem to be the future I agree, that's where the concentration of wealth tends to accumulate and when land is scarce, new buildings tend to go vertical like in HK. Perhaps the next economic crash will drive this even more, even further concentration of wealth and power into megacorps and big gov.

>>57194

>Economic crash

Should I start panicking and invest into tangible goods like gold or silver?

Megacities Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity, Pentagon Video

>>57159

HK is schway but it's a shithole. Why would I want to pay over half my income to live in a cramped cage, packed in like a sardine? it's even worse than San Francisco.

I would love to live in a huge city because it would be schway but the reality is that it's just going to be a shithole and you're going to live like a bugman right smack in the center of a huge surveillance system.

>>57156

architecture-wise I like just standard late 20th century skyscraper design. glass, steel, and concrete boxes.

I really hate that new glass dildo looking building in San Francisco. what an ugly sight to behold. Personally some of my favorite skyscrapers were the World Trade Towers, very simple but also elegant IMO. The Sears tower and Hancock tower in Chicago, too. I also appreciate the Empire State building but that probably has to do more with it's history than it's looks. The Transam pyramid in SF, the Aon Tower and USBank building in LA. Oh, the Citi tower in NYC is neat,too. I guess I have boring taste.

I think HK looks schway due to the density but taken individually the buildings to me are uninspiring.

Also, at risk of sounding like an autist, I really love some of the cities presented in the Halo video games. In the ODST game, the city of New Mombasa is captivating with huge skyscrapers and most importantly interesting public features. I'm talking about lots of elevated walkways, concourses, etc.

The same goes for the city of New Alexandria in Halo Reach. Tall towers with an abundance of helipads, raised monorails and walkways.

I really like the idea of multiple strata in a city. I can imagine a city in which raised walkways and roads are situated above the actual ground level, so not only do you have the street level but you have, higher up, more public space and options for mass transit above ground.

In Chicago lots of buildings have underground access to the public. You can go underground where there are shops, restaurants, offices, etc. and keep walking. different buildings will connect to the same underground areas. Different levels is very interesting to me.

>>57205

>raised walkways

Absolutely. I was surprised at how much this added to the cyberpunk feel of a city. Especially when they are added to the sides of buildings and people can effectively walk across the city. I saw it on some city simulation and couldn't believe how much it added. I guess maybe because the upper elite classes are more likely to be above the city lower dwellers or something.

>>57156

Needs to be some regulation or will just be one giant corporation and one ceo, ie Amazon on steroids. If some drugs are legal, all should be legal. Thats keeping with anarchic principles. Personal responsibility and freedom, minimal government interference.

I like the idea of extreme vetting to immigrate, even to visit.

>>57157

>it's not real

dido

>>57204

Snap the fuck out of it dude!

I think we're already living in a dystopian super-tech future. It just doesn't look as schway as in the movies.

Most cyber-punk and future tech world SiFi everyone is poor. Check.

They all are true believers in what need to change to make the world prefect. Check: politics is new religion at least in US.

There are no new inventions in these worlds; it seems like every thing has already been invented. Check: but I think this has to do a lot with everyone being poor. Most products are that technology's minimum viable product because once a producer hits that point and the product becomes profitable there is no-longer any reason to continue to develop the product. Also, most business set up chock-points (situations where you can only get a certain product from them or only with certain features so you have to buy it from them) around existing products and if a new product were to be developed existing chock-points would no longer have tactical advantage (no one buys VHS because direct download is better) So why am I Company A gonna ruin my VHS racket by inventing the Internet. The answer is Company A never invents the Internet. It's common to call the Internet high-tech when the Internet or comparable technology has been available to Governments since the 1970s, general consumers since the 1990s, and over the past 20 years has become much more well-understood and standardized. So the Internet is old news. Truly new inventions are a thing of the past because the same entities with all the brouzouf are not going to fund their obsolescence.

The only think that's missing is the futuristic architecture which I would argue is bottle-necked for the same reason as point three. Then again, who's to say that future architecture should look like it dose in the movies. They can 3d print houses out of cement now. But no-one is going to install neon light fixtures into the walls. What if the next people who won the house don't like, it could mean not being able to shift the property when the time comes or discounting the property the value of the house.

>>57157

>art deco and postmodernist concept arts

Looks like the inside of a Hottopic store.

>>57169

25 years? Try 2 hecto. You have to account for people adopting the technology. People in their 60s think that the Internet is tech. which it's not. The Internet is just about as old a they are. (1970s for governments. 1990s for consumers. Computers have been consumer level since the 1950s, so if your in your 60s now you've had word perfect ever since you were in your 20s)

Most people won't live in cities because the internet will replace much of what people lived close to one another for. Most people use on-line retail so much that most states laws have change to charging sales tax on all e-purchases (look up economic nexus change in 2019).

Filthy mega-cities where lawlessness resigns subprime is Bio-shock not the future. People have to live there and presumably have options and could live other places because there is more than just one place on Earth that can support human life. That's just not realistic. Any technologically able society that could create a mega-city would also have the ability to clean it probably with robot labor. In Blade Runner the world's been ravaged by industrial parks, so it's always rainy and dark from the smog. Since you don't need to use petrol for anything more than plastics which don't require gas works (the smokestacks with flames at the tops) instead of electrical plants. Electricity will be switched to thorium reactors and the 1950s and 1960s reactors that were fonts to make atomic bomb payloads will be decommissioned.

>>57157

What's the point of your post exactly?

Saying that cyberpunk city-states don't exist currently?

Yeah, we know that, that's why the thread is about hypothetical cyberpunk city states.

Just make a city with an almost non-existent government, just an anarchy-capitalist territory, no laws, no taxes, no illegal things (You would just pay to a corporation for the security service you like the most); just corporations, product/services, private property, a giant market and lots of transactions. That would be the definitive cyber-punk society.

Given that there would be no moral or economic restrictions of any kind, tech companies would blast off, and given that it would be a total stinkhole full of degeneracy, ethically questionable behavior and that being fired is basically a death sentence, yeah, I think it would be very punky.

>>57205

>I think HK looks 水 due to the density

I remember looking up stats, and being surprised by how actually low HK's density is.

IIRC, not counting some indian and other south-asian literal shitholes, densest urban areas are actually historical center of Barcelona and one district in Paris that was built in Napoleon times, and the rest of the top of the chart is equally medieval.

(there's a lot of questions on how to measure density precisely though)