It is said that a society and its culture are driven by the fundamental underlying economics of it. Case in point - ancient Mesopotamian temple economics, where a city-state was ruled by a God-King, whose power was supported by the bureaucratic and religious apparatus of the priestly class, concentrated in the temple, from where all economic output was catalogued and centralized. Contrast this to the ‘free’ Greek city-states, some of which were ran by oligarchies, others by tyrants, some of which prized commerce and trade (like the Athenians) and others war and oppression (such as the Spartans). The city-states of old were situated amidst floodplains, often betwixt two rivers (such as Mesopotamia, literally land between two rivers), and so it was more effective to centralize and control agricultural output in order to produce surplus that was then redistributed back to the priestly classes. The Greeks, whose lands were rugged and poor, nonetheless were a coastal peoples who took to the sea - commerce and trade made them rich. And slavery. In fact, all ancient peoples practiced slavery, and it persisted in one form or another (such as indentured servitude) up until the industrial age, for the simple reason that most work was back-breaking and laborious, which made even the most liberal and merciful citizens think twice about emancipation - better a slave break their body on the fields rather than a citizen.
The industrial era saw the mass mobilization of man and matériel, culminating in the horrors of the world wars, where every extra unit of production, every additional pair of hands (either in the factories or on the front) were of some benefit. Humans were abstracted away, and thus lost most of their humanity; but so, too, did their power as a collective increase - alone, humans were just a cog in the machine, with no other choice than to submit to the leviathan or die in despair, but together they held collective power over the means of production, and forced capitalist concessions whose benefits persist even today.
The post-industrial or post-modernist era, or to put it plainly the age of technological accelerationism, brings with it a new dynamic, and thus a new social contract shall be written. No need to reinvent the wheel - Cyberpunk aesthetics do a pretty good job of approximating the coming age: “high tech, low life”. Some think that art imitates life, but I’ve come to think that life increasingly imitates art, and this has now been given a name - Hyperstition. We are quite literally bringing the CyberPunk dystopia into being, consciously or otherwise. It is memetic, and it has arguably already arrived.
I asked Grok 4.1 to define a Cyberpunk Dystopia. Here’s what it gave me:
Sound familiar? If I were to guesstimate, I’d say we’re 80% of the way there. Let me prove it to you.
Economists make use of a metric called the Gini Coefficient to measure inequality, a numerical representation of what’s called the Lorenz Curve, a graph plotting the incomes of each decile out of a total national population. A Gini Coefficient of 0 means true and total equality, and vice versa. While the USA Gini Coefficient has held steady at around 0.4, this figure cannot be taken at face value. First, it explicitly excludes capital gains, due to their irregular nature. Second, it accounts for wealth transfers, i.e. state redistribution of resources in the form of welfare.
Asset prices have risen massively relative to real incomes - about 450% for the S&P 500 since the year 2000, compared to a 25% increase in real incomes during the same time frame (2000-present). Welfare payments almost hit $5 trillion in the USA last year. If the entire welfare system and all its supporting bureaucracy were dismantled, the USA could likely afford to redistribute over $1000 to every citizen, every month - UBI is another hyperstition likely to manifest itself…
To be frank, most people are no longer net economic benefits. The average US citizen imposes a net fiscal cost of $250k+ over the course of their lifetimes. That is, they take out more than they put in. This is doubly true for direct welfare recipients. One could argue that the average person spends and thus contributes to our consumer economy, but recent figures show that the top decile of income earners make up approximately 50% of all consumer spending. Now you know why prices keep increasing.
This began long ago, with merchant republics like Venice or Genoa, through to the establishment of large corporations like the Dutch Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC, or the United East Indies Company), or the more well-known British East India Company (Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies), which came to dominate the entire Indian subcontinent and generate massive amounts of profits through the opium trade. Then we had the Japanese Zaibatsu, family-controlled industrial conglomerates that came to power during the Meiji restoration and were subsequently broken up under American occupation following Japan’s defeat in WWII. Or the South Korean Chaebols, coming to life after being liberated from Japanese occupation post-WWII, where they still dominate the economy even today - Samsung, Hyundai, LG; also family-owned, they enjoy massive government and political influence due to their symbiotic relationship, with the owners being pardoned for crimes that the average Korean would rot decades in prison for.
The West has had a more nuanced and subtle influence, up until relatively recently. Germany always enjoyed strong relationships with industrial conglomerates, particularly during WWII where Rheinmettal and Porsche, for example, received massive subsidies, making use of slave labour and stolen resources. Not to mention the USSR and its planned economy - communism is after all the pinnacle of capitalism: monopolizing the entire nation-state and everything in it. The USA’s President Eisenhower warned us of the dangers of the military industrial complex during his farewell speech in 1961, but cost-plus contracting continued and defense companies are stronger than ever before.
Massive amounts of lobbying and subtle favors - such as corporate dinners on the more benign end of the spectrum and the revolving door of industry/government on the more overt end - are hallmarks of not just the western, but the global corporate playbook. This shapes government policy on issues of taxation (corporate taxes are always favorable; and if public pressure demands more onerous taxation policies, then exemptions like tax credits can always be made), regulation, public-private partnerships i.e. government investments, and so on.
I wouldn’t say that we are there yet, that is we don’t have some deep conspiracy of shady suits issuing secret diktats to our political elites, but the beginnings are already there - nepotism, corruption, a sense of ambivalence and apathy towards higher ideals such as public virtue. We are well on our way to corporate capture of the branches of government. It seems that we are entering a new age of ‘Robber Barons’ - our champions of industry, who own and control massive companies, are heavily involved with politics. Control is power is wealth.
This isn’t exactly news to anyone that understands technology. Surveillance capitalism requires big data. Modern technology extracts thousands of data points per person and algorithms transform and categorize it. The greatest minds of our generation are employed in devising algorithms that track every thing and map our desires to products and services. This is so self-evident that there isn’t really much more to say, apart from highlighting that while fighting against this system is certainly theoretically possible (thousands of online schizophrenics obsessed with privacy and data sovereignty prove this point), in practice such efforts only mark one out as a person of interest, make one a non-participant in modern culture and civic society, and are still vulnerable to backdoored hardware or man-in-the-middle attacks that later decrypt data.
We’re not quite there yet. Much was promised, such as bionic eyes, artificial organs, and so on, but little was actually delivered. The human body tends to reject implants and fight against modifications. That’s not to say that body modification isn’t growing in popularity - looksmaxxing, gender reassignment, beautification are frequent topics. They say that in South Korea, parents gift their daughters nose/jaw/eye surgery as birthday presents once they turn 16. In a world of near-constant sexual competition, many people will do whatever it takes to look better. However, the more extreme forms of body modification, including cybernetic implants, are not yet as widespread or accepted. Outliers exist, but these are frequently disabled or maimed amputees/paraplegics or neurodivergent experimentalists. I do think that once something like Neuralink proves safe and effective, people will become more used to the idea of cybernetic implants, and it will pave the way for further innovations.
I think we can all relate to this in one way or another. Modern technology abstracts away connections behind a screen. It allows us to pick and choose how we interact with the world, which sounds great in theory, but in practice it makes us overly sensitive, self-conscious, and brittle. Mental asylums have padded walls, too. Social media uses complex enigmatic algorithms to curate our feeds, locking us in echo chambers of our own making. This feedback loop encourages extremist tendencies, and is IMO largely to blame for the current political climate, defined by polarization and amplification of radical voices. When I think of alienation I think not only of the young and insecure, wasting their best years on social media, but of the old and hopeless boomers, watching TV in a dark room and waiting to die. Algorithms dehumanize, people are commoditized, and our value is reduced to ledger entries in a database. This is the present day, and it seems this will continue, so the future does indeed look bleak. We are all lonely, in our own special way.
Rebels and miscreants are nothing new. Cypher Phunks, ‘crackers and hackers’, and cryptocurrency maximalists have been fighting the good fight for decades now. What’s changed recently is that being a rebel has gone mainstream. This is Capitalism writ large - Mark Fisher wrote about how any threat to our modern system is simply… absorbed. Kurt Cobain, 50 Cent - they raged against the machine, but they weren’t suppressed; they were rewarded. So it is with the bitcoin maximalists, who were meant to topple ‘TradFi’, yet came to be absorbed by the very system they sought to replace. Hacking isn’t cool either - all the best ones are recruited and retained by the government. There haven’t been any major hacktivists since ‘Anonymous’ aka LulzSec, at least none that have had much of an impact. Cyber Criminals have evolved significantly - Ransomware gang operations are highly sophisticated - yet they have little cultural impact. They are taken seriously, but with cyber insurance and dedicated blue team security teams, it’s more akin to compliance - an annoying necessity.
This kind of defines the entire Cyberpunk aesthetic, but it isn’t well represented in modern life. I think that the main reason for this is that most cities have rampant NIMBY-ism, with planning regulations strangling the ambitions of architects, health and safety/labour regulations forcing unnecessary features on to any new builds and inflating costs beyond all reason. In the lore, Cyberpunk cities are hierarchically structured, in that the lower levels are often dirty cheap and violent, with the higher levels clean corporate cubicles, with flying cars allowing the affluent and well-connected to avoid the masses entirely. Maybe if we did have flying cars the planning authorities would actually promote verticality. Another thing to consider is that many cities, Singapore being a prime example, artificially limit the amount of land permitted for new construction. Megacities like Tokyo or Jakarta are few and far between, but they do more closely resemble the Cyberpunk aesthetic. Others like Shenzhen which have an element of planning about them share in this aesthetic, while others like Rio, Manila, or New Delhi are overpopulated chaotic leviathans with pop-up slims that might indeed embody the ‘high-tech, low-life’ aesthetic in practice, but absolutely do not look it (it seems every third worlder who lives in a corrugated iron shack has a smart phone these days).
There is no shortage of detractors. Communists still exists. As do fascists. More modern cults include Accelerationists, but Neoliberals take the day. This despite popular movements such as MAGA in the states and general apathy in the rest of the West. Whatever your poison, it’s clear that people have lost faith in current systems. It is when we are most disenfranchised that we are the most vulnerable and it is there that we are the most ripe for exploitation by those that may shape our will. Humans are easily influenced - the Soviets pioneered this, Goebbels as Minister of Propaganda refined it, and the Americans perfected it. We now have engineered desires, and modern technology promises to engineer even our politics - Cambridge Analytica gave us a taste of what’s to come. Runaway capitalism and runaway technology go hand-in-hand. Accelerationism is the new futurism.
We are already living in a Cyberpunk Dystopia - “high tech, low life”. It’s like a slow poison, self-administered, romantic and aesthetic and tragic. Economic realities dictate what cards are in play, and hyperstitions arrange it to bring the best and the worst of our dreams into being.
Amor fati